Gadsby
Gadsby is a well-known book by the American writer Ernest Vincent Wright . It was released in 1939 .
The peculiarity of the novella is that the entire book does not contain the letter E , which is the most common letter in both German and English . Gadsby is therefore a lipogram . It contains a total of 50,100 words and is Wright's fourth book. To prevent him from accidentally typing an E, Wright, as he writes in the introduction to Gadsby , simply tied the type lever for the E to his typewriter so that it would no longer move, even if Wright did would have tapped the button.
Text example
The beginning of the book reads as follows:
If youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn't constantly run across folks today who claim that "a child don't know anything." A child's brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adult's act, and figuring out its purport.
Translated into German this would roughly mean:
If the youth in the whole of human history had had an advocate to show a doubting world that a child can think too and probably does so, one would no longer constantly come across people who claim: "A child knows nothing!" . A child's brain begins to work at birth and, in addition to its many childlike coils, has thousands of dormant atoms in which God has put the mysterious ability to recognize the actions of an adult and to find out his intentions.
The excessive use of punctuation marks continues throughout the work, as this is the only way Wright's lipogram could succeed.
Wright died on the day his work was published at the age of 66.
However, Gadsby is not to be seen as a mere curiosity, but, like most other lipograms, claims to cast a very specific view of language and thus also of reality.
literature
- Ernest V. Wright, Gadsby , Lightyear Press, 1997. ISBN 0-89968-445-9
