What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book in praise of soaring over limits,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Have you ever felt limited by language? I’m sure you have. A common instance would be when you’re speaking with someone and you want to convey an idea, but you’ve momentarily forgotten the word, it remains on the proverbial tip of your tongue, and you struggle to explain what you mean to say in a roundabout way. Another common occurrence of language limiting expression is when one is speaking in a foreign language. You, for example, have made admirable efforts to learn French, but it remains a language with which you’re not fully comfortable. When you give a speech in French, I’m sure you prefer to speak from a written text vetted by a native speaker, and when you have to ad-lib, I imagine you seek safety in the set phrases and expressions that you’ve learned; otherwise, you must struggle, trying to express your meaning in the limited knowledge you have of the language. In English, on the other hand, you must feel no sense of limitations. I imagine you feel, like most native speakers of a language feel, that what you think, you express, effortlessly and without any delay or searching.

Of course, this sense of freedom, this perfect match between thought and expression, is an illusion born of comfort and familiarity. Faced with an utterly new experience, whether beatific or horrific, we often lose the capacity to speak, we are rendered speechless. And expression is more than simply a question of vocabulary. Experiences that are not emotionally overwhelming but intellectually complex can also have us struggling to speak meaningfully. In such situations, it is not necessarily words that fail us, but the preliminary understanding that leads to the choice of words. All this to say that sometimes we are tongue-tied—and we don’t like it. We value expression. So, humming, hawing, non-sequituring, we struggle until we manage to put idea or experience into words.

The book I am sending you this time—the poetry collection Eunoia, by the Canadian writer Christian Bök (pronounced Book), both the book and the CD (effectively read by the author)—is all about limitations and the soaring over-passing of them. Bök, a fervent admirer of Oulipo, the French experimental writers’ collective, has taken one of their favourite techniques, the lipogram, to a very high level. A lipogram is a composition in which a letter is missing throughout. A fine example of a lipogram is George Perec’s novel La disparition, written entirely without the most used vowel in French, the letter e. If you think a lipogram sounds like a gimmick, think again. In the case of the Perec novel, the letter e in French is pronounced the same as the word eux, them. La disparition refers not only to the disappearance of a letter, but of them. Them who? Well, to start with, Perec’s parents, who were Jewish and who were swallowed up by the Holocaust. La disparition is a metaphor on the wiping out of a good part of Jewish civilization in Europe, something very much equivalent to an alphabet losing one of its key letters. No gimmickry there, I don’t think.

Bök has taken the challenge even further. With Eunoia, he has written a series of poems that omit not  just one letter, but several, and not consonants, of which there are many, but vowels, and not just one, two or three vowels per poem, but four vowels. That leaves just one vowel per poem. The opening lines of the collection gives you right away the treat you’re in for:

Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art…

The hero of the vowel A is the Arab Hassan Abd al-Hassad, while E features Greek Helen, who

Restless, she deserts her fleece bed where, detested, her wedded regent sleeps. When she remembers Greece, her seceded demesne, she feels wretched, left here, bereft, her needs never met.

Who would have thought that Homer’s Iliad could be retold using just one vowel? The vowel I allows the author to speak about his project and defend it:

I dismiss nitpicking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz—griping whilst criticizing dimwits, sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplistic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.

In O we read that

Porno shows folks lots of sordor—zoom-shots of Björn Borg’s bottom or Snoop Dogg’s crotch. Johns who don condoms for blowjobs go downtown to Soho to look for pornshops known to stock lots of lowbrow schlock—off-color porn for old boors who long to drool onto color photos of cocks, boobs, dorks or dongs.

With O, we also get a wink at Clockwork Orange, the novel by Anthony Burgess I sent you a while ago:

Crowds of droogs, who don workboots to stomp on downtrod hobos, go on to rob old folks, most of whom own posh co-op condos.

Even U, that vowel the sight of which makes a Scrabble player’s heart sink, manages to speak on its own:

Kultur spurns Ubu—thus Ubu pulls stunts.

So it goes, the wit and inventiveness dancing across the pages, the stock of single-vowel words of the English language expended to discuss a surprising range of topics, from the bawdy to the lyrical, from the pastoral to the historical.

And the purpose of it all? It may seem to you to be a mere game, with the lack of seriousness that one might associate with playing. To that, two responses: first, in playing, in toying, comes discoveries, the result of chance juxtapositions; and second, language is never just about itself. This language playing that Bök delights us with comments on the world because every word, whether invested with one vowel or five, connects eventually to a concrete reality. So speaking in mono-vowels though he is, Bök is also speaking volumes. Eunoia, which means “beautiful thinking” and is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, is a narrow but perfect work. It is a gambol through language, and it would be a sad mistake to dismiss it as merely facetious, which word—lo!—contains all five vowels in order. After such wordplay, the tongue is better fixed in the mouth and expression comes more easily.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

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