Mangesh Hattikudur
SNEAK PEEK #2: Ridiculous Feats of Literature
by Mangesh Hattikudur - February 25, 2010 - 8:00 AM

mag sneak peek

Our ninth annual 10 Issue hits newsstands next Tuesday, and to celebrate we’ll be previewing it here all week. One piece that truly makes me smile is the “10 Ridiculous Feats of Literature” list by Mark Juddery. Instead of judging works based on their artistic merit, we had Mark rank them by degree of difficulty. Here’s just one of the entries he covered:

The Story That Will Never Be an E-Book: Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright

Screen shot 2010-02-24 at 3.03.18 AMSome might call Gadsby a “love” story. But Ernest Vincent Wright would avoid those words. Instead, he described his novel as a story of “strong liking” and “throbbing palpitation.” That’s because in 1939, the 67-year-old Bostonian writer gave himself one restriction while working on Gadsby: he promised to write without using the letter E.

Wright was motivated by the idea because he wanted to prove that a great writer could work around the restriction and still tell a gripping story. To prevent any stray E’s from entering the text as he typed, he tied down his typewriter’s E-key, and then put his expansive vocabulary to use. The result is an astounding feat of verbal gymnastics. In a vivid description of a wedding on page 93, Wright avoids using the words bride, priest, ceremony, and even the word wedding, which he calls “a grand church affair.” To explain away the verbosity of the language, Wright created a narrator with a poor command of English and someone whose circumlocution even irritates the story’s other characters.

When the book was announced, one skeptic attacked Wright in a letter, claiming the feat was impossible. “All right,” replied Wright. “The impossible has been accomplished.” Sadly, Wright didn’t live long enough to revel in his glory. He died as the book was being published, and before it drew critical acclaim.

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Looking for more great lit tales? From the paralyzed author who dictated his memoir by blinking to the swami who wrote 843 poems in 24 hours, we’ve got it all in the new issue. Pick it up on newsstands next week. Or better yet, make our editors happy and order a subscription right here.

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Comments (6)

  1. The operative word here is lipogram. Thirty years after Wright, Georges Perec wrote La Dispartition, another complete novel sans the letter &lsqu;e&rsqu;, this time in French. Perhaps even more astounding is Gilbert Adair’s 1994 English translation of that work (also eschewing that most common of letters), A Void.

    posted by pannonica on 2-25-2010 at 9:03 am

  2. (ugh. bad, bad html. That’d be ‘e’.)

    posted by pannonica on 2-25-2010 at 9:10 am

  3. Alas, there are three es in his name, which graces the front cover. Therefore, quod erat denonstrantum, the book has es.

    posted by Josiah on 2-25-2010 at 10:32 am

  4. Your argument is that the author’s name is contained within the narrative? Excessively metafictional. I guess the blurbs and copyright information should be expurgated as well! *smile*

    posted by pannonica on 2-25-2010 at 11:39 am

  5. This is 60% as bad-ass as “A Void”, an e-less French novel that was translated into an e-less English novel.

    (Strangely, it looks like your crossed-out-e picture came from the cover of “A Void”.)

    posted by Jonathan Harford on 2-25-2010 at 11:49 am

  6. Christian Bok, in his book/poem Eunoia, goes one better: he writes five long poems in which the only vowel he uses in the first one is ‘a’, the only vowel he uses in the second one is ‘e’, et cetera. It’s really good, too!

    posted by Matthew E on 2-25-2010 at 12:58 pm

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