Did you know these novels were written entirely without using vowel 'e'?

When we discussed the rule of ablautreduplication, we talked about inviolable vowel order in compound words — I-A-O, as in mish-mash or King Kong. Some of you may have noticed that the letter “e” was missing from that rule, whereas it is often considered the most indispensable vowel in languages derived from Latin, like English and French. The brilliant if somewhat eccentric French writer Georges Perec took up the issue of the indispensability of the letter “e” by writing an entire novel without using that letter. His lipogrammatic novel titled La Disparition in French, was the literary sensation of 1969. Translating it wasn’t easy, since even the title means “The Disappearance”, which contains two “e”s, but Gilbert Adair pulled it off, and you can read Perec’s book in English, also without the letter “e” in it, under the title “A Void”. But it then turned out not to be an unprecedented feat, since the American author Ernest Vincent Wright had written a 1939 novel called Gadsby also without using the letter “e” — and what’s more, his book was 50,000 words long. (His feat fell short of Perec’s, however, because he allowed three “e”s to creep in, accidentally using the word “the” twice and “officers” once.)

Neither novel works terribly well as a story, because there is something contrived about the attempt to construct a narrative without the letter “e”. But the feat is not easy to accomplish, precisely because the letter “e” is so ubiquitous (in the 239 words in this column so far, there are several dozen “e”s already!) The issue came up in the Internet era when someone issued a challenge on Quora, “Can you make a sentence without using a single ‘E’?” The best answer came from Marcus Geduld, described as a “published author, lifelong reader” who wrote:

“I doubt I can. It’s a major part of many, many words. Omitting it is as hard as making muffins without flour. It’s as hard as spitting without saliva, napping without a pillow, driving a train without tracks, sailing to Russia without a boat, washing your hands without soap, or shitting without a butt. And, anyway, what would I gain? An award? A cash bonus? Bragging rights? Why should I strain my brain? It’s not worth doing. Now, a grammatical paragraph without commas: that would wow most folks on Quora, don’t you think? Could you do it? If so, I tip my hat to you — or I would if I had a hat. Or, how about a paragraph without punctuation? Or a paragraph without nouns? If you can do that, you’ll win my admiration. Go on. Try! I’m waiting…”