Pity who, as typist, in 1969, had to turn a famous Parisian author’s fourth manuscript into book form: La Disparition (A Vanishing or A Void). Our typist sits at his contraption and, palms cast customarily downward, starts jabbing away; but rhythm is hard to find. Fit digits, usually busy, now look to him lazy or numb. Tsk-tsking this or that digit won’t do him any good, though. It’s all about using his hands unorthodoxly. It’s all about application, knuckling down. His right pinky works, his right thumb works. Clack, clack, clack… ding. Clack, clack, clack… ding. But application or no application, typos abound; a hand has its habits. So our struggling typist starts again, and again, until paragraphs, long and looping, catalogs of copious food and drink, slapstick situations, parodic imitations of Arthur Rimbaud and Victor Hugo, comic accounts of killings, sixty thousand–plus words total, finally all turn out without a slip—without so much as a whiff of français’s most common symbol twixt d and f.
A short illustration:
Anton Voyl n’arrivait pas à dormir. Il alluma. Son Jaz marquait minuit vingt. Il poussa un profond soupir, s’assit dans son lit, s’appuyant sur son polochon. Il prit un roman, il l’ouvrit, il lut; mais il n’y saisissait qu’un imbroglio confus, il butait à tout instant sur un mot dont il ignorait la signification.
(In my translation: “Anton Vowl couldn’t drift off. On had to go his lamp. His Jaz alarm clock told him it was past midnight. With much sighing Vowl sat up in his pajamas, his pillow for a prop. Took a book to dip into; but saw in it only an imbroglio of ink, fumbling to grasp this or that word’s signification.”)
La Disparition’s author was “Gargas Parac”* (an alias of his making). Born in 1936, an orphan at six (his papa and maman both victims of Nazism), Parac was a sociologist by training—working in public opinion polls and as an archivist/information coordinator until his skillful and ambitious writing paid off. A first book, Things, was brought out in 1965 and won him instant standing and a major prix. But it was his falling in with OuLiPo (an acronym that roughly stands for “workshop for writing within constraints”), a multinational group of avant-guard authors, that would prod his imagination to think about words and grammar in a surprisingly original fashion.
(Also in OuLiPo: Italo Calvino, writing in Italian, author of Cosmicomics (with, for narrator, Qfwfq), Mr. Palomar, and his Città Invisibili, in which Marco Polo and Kublai Khan discuss Polo’s distant and fantastic sojourns.)
Writing within constraints: for Parac, as for Calvino, it was an opportunity to pull back from linguistic norms and so avoid stock ways of using words. Parac’s boundary was lipogrammatic: truncating his ABCs by a most popular symbol, and sifting through his vocabulary to pick out all words containing it. Up to two thirds of quotidian français was thus out of bounds for his forthcoming book. Just thinking of writing within such limits might throw many of us into a panic. But for Parac it was a stimulant to lift him out of his chronic author’s block.
Lipograms had a long history, dating back to antiquity. Lasus of Argolis, writing around 500 BC, known primarily for his dithyrambs and for tutoring Pindar, was also an originator of hymns minus any sigma (s): its hissing sound grating on him. Lasus wasn’t a 1-off. At Romanticism’s high point, a Gottlob Burmann (1737–1805) of dainty constitution brought out an opus of soft-sounding lyrics that contain no harsh r: no Frau, no dürr (“thin”), no rann (“ran”).
In Paris, Parac’s lipogrammatic writing was a first. Its author had at his disposal a total of 25 ABC symbols, originating in Latin, not all individually so old. Copyist monks in Norman scriptoria had had no j or v: quills would put down iour for jour (“day”), auait for avait (“had”); it wasn’t until 1762 that j was always told apart from i, and u from v. W, though known to Walloons, did not gain a national dictionary’s sanction until 1964.
So Parac had w to put in writing (a joy to him, having a soft spot for it), j and v, s’s that Lasus did without, and r, which Burmann was always avoiding. But not what a schoolchild is normally taught to jot down—along with a, i, o, and u—whilst still small. Not what looks much as a mirror’s portrait of a 3. A most difficult taboo to work around: statistically it amounts to 1 in 7 ABC symbols in a Gallic book (by way of comparison, 1 in 8 in a Californian or British opus, 1 in 6 in Dutch). Our author had his work cut out for him.
As a backdrop to his writing, Parac had Paris’s May 1968 riots: a capital in turmoil, young anarchists occupying public buildings, shouting slogans, scrawling graffiti against an out-of-touch administration. Orthographic acts of fury. No to flics (cops)! No to intox—short for intoxication (propaganda)! Plays on words, on symbols. An infamous placard said all it had to say succinctly, in just a handful of symbols: CRS SS (CRS is an acronym standing for riot control units). Thus, a community’s a’s and s’s and x’s and so on could impart information in print, could signify, without always participating in a word. A word wasn’t simply a unitary transcription of sounds; its constituting symbols (f-l-i-c-s, i-n-t-o-x, groupings as familiar as “c-r-s—s-s”) also had things to say. This was Parac’s crucial insight—his bolt of brain lightning.
Part artistic, part political, our wordsmith’s goal was to show how important ABC layout is in how words in a book, a tract, a tabloid, a glossy, “talk” to us and “think” for us. Linguists call this visual iconicity: symbols composing a word mimic, up to a point, what it talks about. Iconicity, at its most basic, says that short words using an ABC’s most popular symbols—such as rash (r-a-s-h)—will, broadly, bring up day-to-day things; long words that consist of uncommon symbols or unusual combinations of symbols—such as psoriasis (p-s-o-r-i-a-s-i-s)—discuss knotty, atypical affairs. In addition, symbols’ forms in union can act as a visual aid, portraying a word’s topic. By way of illustration, think of locomotion. Its l is a pictorial fuming puff; its consonants, wagons; and its four o’s, what roll on rails. Similarly, Victor Hugo thought lys (“lily”) a right orthographic form and its rival lis wrong. For y to his mind was akin to a sprig with consonants as blossoms surrounding it.
Browsing La Disparition, taking in its paragraphs, a striking thing is its fair lack of diacritic marks. So far as “hats” on nouns go, only a small quantity show up: août (“August”), trouvât (“found”), chaînon (“link in a chain”). It turns out that as soon as you start amputating all words containing français’s fifth ABC symbol, you must also lock out much vocabulary that is put down diacritically. To purists, Parac’s book, its words’ physiognomy, is an optical shock. Almost an insult. A “hat” on a noun—an offshoot of Orthographia Gallica (composition around 1300)—boasts symbolic status today. It’s a bit posh. It’s why folk who want to climb a social rung will occasionally add a “hat” to nouns that don’t don it, putting down, say, ajoût (“addition”); on all occasions it is right to put ajout. It’s why a 1990 commission’s proposal to simplify orthography by dropping français’s surplus “hats” got swiftly told off by columnists and public outcry.
(Occasionally an ABC symbol can amount in authors’ minds not to a plus but to a stigma: in Russia, around 1900, writings by anti-tsar radicals would fashionably omit from nouns Cyrillic’s “hard sign,” [tvyordy znak]—a ъ that marks a word’s final consonant as non-palatal—associating it with backward-looking ritual.)
La Disparition is a zany whodunit, a curious story about abyss and oblivion, in which a man, Anton Voyl, fights awful insomnia. “Why amn’t I dozing?” Voyl asks. Doctors can only shrug. Psychopharmacologists’ pills do not work. Gradually, Voyl and a fair many of his pals drop out of sight, go missing, vanish into thin air. Victims of booby traps? Shootings? Stabbings? Falling pianos? A mafia’s hitlist? In hot pursuit, kith and kin toil to find a solution. Parac was a fan of Franz Kafka, and it shows. Mortality is a constant, as in Richard III:
I had a Richard too, and thou didst kill him;
I had a Rutland too, thou holp’st to kill him.
An odd mood draws you in, a combination of story and orthography. It’s a story told in 25 parts (jumping straight from Part Four to Part Six); a taboo symbol throughout, conspicuous in its omission. Parac, handling his biro with brio, pulls it all off.
I watch an old black-and-gray TV program on which Parac, chubby, a dark billow of curly hair atop his brow, is stating that his story is auto-organizing associations of ABC symbols. His book is its own author, a product of an “automatization of writing.” His collocutor and host, going off script, gasps quickly to his public watching, “I should add that this isn’t a canular [‘hoax’].”
Automatization of writing? But it is not only promotional tour talk. Think about it. By putting his mind primarily to symbols—not words or plot—Parac was following an original driving logic. Grammar is occasionally his own: a man’s brain hurts with “un fort migrain”; folks talk with “cordons vocaux” (“vocal ribbons”), not vocal cords. If a word such as lip is out of bounds in français—damn taboo’s fault!—our author puts down “pli labial” (“labial fold”). Lists push his story forward: “son minois rubicond, mafflu, lippu, joufflu, bouffi” (“his rubicund mug, ruddy, lippy, chubby, puffy”). Syntax also adjusts: a first paragraph, a following paragraph, a third, all start with, “oui, mais” (“oui, but”).
“Portons dix bons whiskys à l’avocat goujat qui fumait au zoo.” This postscript in Anton Voyl’s diary is also a pangram (a “Parac” pangram, that is, containing 25 ABC symbols out of 26). A variant in anglais might go, “a quick brainy fox jumps with a guava lizard.”
Parac also plays with words put in print by past virtuosos. Full lipogrammatic modifications of ballads, cantos, stanzas. To supply a notion of how this turns out, my adaptation of “Daffodils,” by William Wordsworth:
I, solitary as a cloud
That floats on high past coombs and hills,
Without a warning saw a crowd
A host, of brilliant daffodils;
Along a pool, among hawthorns
Flapping and dancing in mid-morn.
Continuous as bright stars that glow
And glint-glint on our Milky Way,
Ranging in an undying row
Along a margin of a bay:
Six thousand saw I in a flash
Tossing gold crowns in sprightly thrash.
Vivid pool, but my daffodils
Outdid its sparkling in spirit:
A rhymist could not but turn gay
In such a jocund company:
I rapt—so rapt—but hardly thought
What fund this show to us had brought:
For oft, if on my couch I sigh
In vacant or in gray humor,
Gold will flash on that inward mind
Bliss of my on-my-own hours;
And so my soul with passion fills
And frolics with my daffodils.
From paragraph to paragraph throughout his book, always omitting what is twixt d and f, Parac brings in words from many lands. Thus crop up words in Latin: oppidum civium romanorum and sic transit Gloria Mundi; words in Italian: Ah, Padron, siam tutti morti; USA words: It is not a gossipy yarn; nor is it a dry, monotonous account, full of such customary fill-ins as “romantic moonlight casting murky shadows down a long, winding country road”; and “Saarland patois”: man sagt dir, komm doch mal ins Landhaus. Man sagt dir, Stadtvolk muss aufs Land, muss zurück zut Natur. Man sagt dir, komm bald, möglichst am Sonntag. Truly, La Disparition is a multilingual work.
Today, translations of Parac’s book sit on racks all around our world: in a city such as Hamburg (Anton Voyls Forgang), in Italy (La Scomparsa), in Croatia, Holland, and Romania. In Spain it contains no a (a is Spanish’s most common ABC symbol); in Japan, no i; in Russia, no o. Translations in many lingos; who knows, a stalwart translator may soon put it into South India’s Malayalam.
Today, too, computational analysis of La Disparition’s prolixity throws up fascinating linguistic data. Word clouds highlight its most-occurring nontrivial vocabulary: sans (“without”); savoir (“to know”); grand (“big”)—most words for talking about small things contain Parac’s taboo symbol. Also common: mort (“dying”); mot (“word”); blanc (“blank”); noir (“black”); nuit (“night”); obscur (“dim”). Statistical analysis also shows that, for all its innovation, Parac’s book strictly follows Zipf’s law (found by a Harvard corpus linguist, G. K. Zipf—it was said that if you bought him a Floribunda, G. K. would promptly count all its thorns). Zipf, probing and tallying a library’s worth of words, found that in any book roughly half its total vocabulary will occur on only 1 occasion; a book’s bulk consists of a handful of its most common words. According to my back-of-a-napkin calculations, La Disparition has a vocabulary of around 8,000. A tiny fraction, its 100 most occurring words, crop up so continually as to fill about half of its manuscript; just 400 of its most common words occupy four fifths. Thousands of its words occur only sporadically, turning up on just two occasions throughout Parac’s publication; four thousand pop up on just 1.
Including:
Alunir (“to land on a moon”); axolotl (a Nahuatl word for a tropical amphibian); finlandais (“Finnish”); hot-dog; infarcti (plural of infarction), opoponax (a kind of myrrh—also, a 1964 story by “Monica” Wittig, told with unusual childish narration); pawlonias (“Paulownias”); roucoulant (“cooing”); taratata (a cry of doubt); uxorilocal (a social anthropological word for a man living in proximity to his missus’s clan).
(Warning: a quantity of Parac’s 1-off words, such as s’anudissant—“discarding all your clothing”—you won’t track down in any standard dictionary.)
And looking again at La Disparition, as if with a magnifying glass, past its words, to its individual ABC symbols, you find Zipf’s law is also at work. Most of its words contain a’s and i’s and n’s and u’s and s’s; not many contain w’s, z’s, k’s, x’s, or j’s. O, it turns out, gains most from Parac’s bold plan: o round as a nought, a fitting symbol for omission.
If Parac (d. 1982, at 45, of a lung tumor) was still with us, h’d b a fn of txt msging. Not paying a thought to alarmist spoilsports who call it “sad shorthand,” “dumbing down,” or a “digital virus.” No. To him, just gr8 2 play with ltrs in this way, making word drawings such as bisouXXXXX (a common nding to a Frnch txt msg, similar to kixx for “kiss kiss”) and wOw!, was^? (“what’s up?”), and “i’m off 2 bd zzzz.”
An ABC is a living, fluid, multivocal thing.