Click on the image above to refresh it and see the disappearing “e”.
Today’s Google Doodle – in France anyway – marks the 80th anniversary of the birth of Georges Perec (1936-1982). Here he is with a lovely cat.
Perec was a well-known French author who wrote in a very playful style – he loved word-games (he also wrote crosswords). His first published book was La Disparition in which the letter ‘e’ does not appear (this is a major feat in French!). According to legend, the reviewer in Le Monde did not notice… The significance of the missing ‘e’ goes back to Perec’s family, who were killed in the camps. ‘E’ in French sounds the same as ‘eux’ – ‘them’. The book has been superbly translated into English as A Void by Gilbert Adair. The blurb on Amazon begins thus:
Anton Vowl is missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, a group of his faithful companions trawl through his diary for any hint as to his location and, insidiously, a ghost, from Vowl’s past starts to cast its malignant shadow.
My favourite book of Perec’s is Life: A User’s Manual, though I also love his An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris – a series of descriptions of the ‘infraordinary’ in the Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris (based in turn on Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de Style), and his Je Me Souviens, a series of things he remembered, so beautifully written that you think you remember them, too. If you’ve never heard of Perec, try his writing – in French if possible, but the translations are all excellent.
All these works were part of what Perec called Oulipo – the workshop for potential literature, a group in which writers would set themselves an artificial framework and then write within it.
I sent the Doodle to Jean-François Ferveur, a friend who is also a good friend of Jerry’s, and a fellow Drosophilist. J-F (as he is known) wrote:
ah oui, Georges Perec… Je me souviens… au coin de la rue Vilin… l…La disparition.. la Vie mode.. que du très très bon. Merci de rapeller le souvenir de cet érudit chercheur du CNRS.
Perec was a librarian in the French research organisation the CNRS, where I used to work, where J-F still does. It was there that I first met PCC(E).
In 2012 Christophe Verdon made this enamel plaque, in the style of the Parisian street names:
Cummings is sad.
A famous English novel without an ‘e’ is Gadsby
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
Perec was inspired by Gadsby, as the Wiki article explains. Fascinating!
Whenever I think of Oulipo I think of the N+7 rule which renders, among other things,
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden imbeciles;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the imbeciles.
However, it’s subtitle is “50,000 word novel without the letter ‘e’.”
This should have been “a 50,000 word book without any fifth sign of our standard ABCs.”
That was meant to be a reply to my #2 comment above. Aack.
Perec also published a paper to mock the scientific litterature. Google “Experimental demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.)” and enjoy (the bibliography is especially tasty, even if Americans can miss some french references).
Rue Vilin is the street Perec grew up in, in his time entirely Jewish; he describes it building by building in Espèces d’espaces (Species of Spaces and Other Pieces)