A whole novel, and not one letter E

Look hard at this paragraph, and hunt for a thing that is not in it. Its author is trying to say a plain thing, but a strict law fights him at all turns, forbidding a symbol so common that his words must twist to skirt it. That symbol is not a, not i, not o, not u. It is a mark you would spot in almost any word you look at — and it is missing from all of this.

Did you catch it? There is no e in the paragraph above — not one, from the first word to the last. And the moment you know that, it reads differently: a little bent, a little careful, walking with a limp you could not see until someone named it. That limp is the subject of one of the strangest and most admired novels of the twentieth century.

The book that lost a letter

In 1969 the French writer Georges Perec published La Disparition — "The Disappearance" — a novel of roughly three hundred pages that never once uses the letter e. Not in a name, not in an article, not in a verb. In French this is close to lunacy: e is the most common letter in the language, and it hides in the smallest, most unavoidable words. No le, no les, no des, no elle, no est, no être. Every feminine adjective that ends in a silent -e, every past participle formed with -é, every je and me and te — all of it off the table, for the length of a book.

A constraint like this — writing while banning a letter — is old enough to have a name of its own: a lipogram, from the Greek for "leaving out a letter." Poets have played the game since antiquity. But Perec did not play it as a party trick. He belonged to the Oulipo — the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, the "workshop for potential literature" — a circle of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, who believed that a strict rule, far from strangling a writer, could drive one, forcing the imagination down roads it would never have chosen on its own. They liked to describe themselves as rats who build the very maze they then set out to escape.

A mystery whose answer is a letter

Here is the part that lifts La Disparition above a stunt. Its plot is about its own constraint. The hero is a man named Anton Voyl — and voyl is a hair's breadth from voyelle, the French for "vowel," a vowel with its heart cut out. Voyl cannot sleep, senses that something essential has gone missing from the world, and then vanishes himself. His friends set out to find him, and as they search they keep brushing against the shape of the absence — a gap in every list, a rung gone from every ladder, a thing everyone can feel and no one can say. Of course they cannot say it. To name the missing letter, they would have to use it.

The reader is in on a secret the characters can never reach: the hole they are circling is the hole the whole book is written around.

And underneath the wordplay runs something graver. Perec was orphaned by the Second World War — his father killed as a soldier in 1940, his mother deported to Auschwitz, from which she did not return. Critics, and Perec's biographer David Bellos, have long heard in the banished e the sound of the French word eux: "them." The ones who disappeared. A book that cannot say a single e becomes, on this reading, a book about an absence too large to be spoken — grief disguised as a game, the missing letter standing in for the missing people.

Translating the untranslatable

Now imagine being handed that book and asked to carry it into English — keeping the rule. You cannot simply steer your sentences clear of ideas that need an e, the way an author can; you are chained to what the original already says, and you must say it again with a fifth of the alphabet's most useful letter forbidden. It sounds impossible. In 1994 the Scottish novelist Gilbert Adair did it anyway, producing an English La Disparition that is itself flawlessly free of e. He called it A Void — a title that is a small miracle on its own, naming the emptiness without ever writing the letter. Anton Voyl became Anton Vowl. The translation won the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and it remains one of the great feats of the craft: a lipogram passed intact from one language to another.

Fifty thousand words, thirty years earlier

Perec was not even the first to try it at book length in a European language. In 1939 an American named Ernest Vincent Wright self-published Gadsby, a novel of 50,110 words that contains no e — the story of one John Gadsby, who rallies the young people of a fading town called Branton Hills back to life. Wright, by his own account, tied down the e key of his typewriter so that not a single one could slip in by reflex, and spent five and a half months writing around the ban. It cost him. He could use no the, no he, she, we or they, no past tense ending in -ed, not even most numbers — seven, twelve, twenty all carry the forbidden letter, so ages and dates had to be reworded from scratch. Wright died the year the book appeared, and it slid into obscurity for decades before word-lovers rediscovered it. A stray e or two is said to have crept past him into print — proof, if any were needed, of how hard the letter is to hold under.

What the missing letter shows a learner

That is the thing worth carrying away from these two stubborn books, and it points straight at how a language is actually learned. The words that break when you remove e are, overwhelmingly, the words you never sit down to study — the articles, pronouns, prepositions and helper-verbs that no one puts on a flashcard because they seem too small to bother with. The. Is. He. Le. Elle. Être. They carry no picture and resist a tidy translation, and yet they are the most frequent words in the language and the mortar between all the rest. Perec and Wright proved their weight by the sheer agony of doing without them.

You cannot memorize your way to those words from a column of equals-signs — there is nothing there to pin an image to, and their whole meaning is how they behave in the company of other words. The handful of words that make up most of everything you will ever read or hear are learned the way native speakers learned them: not as entries but as reflexes, worn smooth by turning up again and again in real sentences until you stop noticing them — exactly as you did not notice their absence at the top of this page until it was pointed out. The invisible frame becomes invisible because it is so well learned, not before.

A word you have truly mastered is one you no longer see. It has become part of the wall, not a picture hung on it.

Where vocabla fits

This is the grain the whole craft runs along, and the grain vocabla is cut with. Not words filed as a list of one-to-one swaps, but words met the way the frame of a language is actually built into a mind: in many voices, said aloud, caught in living sentences where the small structural words sit shoulder to shoulder with the big ones, and brought back across days until they need no translation stapled to their side — in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian alike. It took two writers a heroic act of self-denial to make you feel how much a single letter carries. You get the lesson for free: learn the little words first, learn them in the wild, and let them sink until they disappear — into fluency.