The new ennui
Eunoia is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels – and it means “beautiful thinking”. It is also the title of Canadian poet Christian Bok’s book of fiction in which each chapter uses only one vowel. Here he reflects on his creation.
‘The tedium is the message.’
– Darren Wershler-Henry
‘Eunoia’ is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, and the word quite literally means ‘beautiful thinking’. Eunoia is a univocal lipogram, in which each chapter restricts itself to the use of a single vowel. Eunoia is directly inspired by the exploits of Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) – the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints. The text makes a Sisyphean spectacle of its labour, wilfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express an uncanny, if not sublime, thought.
Eunoia abides by many subsidiary rules. All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire (although a few words do go unused, despite efforts to include them: parallax, belvedere, gingivitis, monochord and tumulus). The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed.
‘Oiseau’ (the French word for ‘bird’) is the shortest word in French to contain all five vowels. Oiseau pays tribute to the French precedents for Eunoia. ‘And Sometimes’ itemizes every English word that contains only consonants. ‘Vowels’ is an anagrammatic text, permuting every letter in the title. ‘Voile’ is a homophonic translation of the sonnet ‘Voyelle’ by Arthur Rimbaud. ‘W’ is an elegy for the favourite letter of Georges Perec, who (like bp Nichol, an idolater of the letter H) admires one of the few consonants that can make a vowel sound. ‘Emended Excess’ exhausts vocabulary unsuitable for use in the retelling of the Iliad.
Eunoia has required seven years of daily perseverance for its consummation. I greatly appreciate the patient encouragement offered by friends who have awaited the outcome of this experiment: Bruce Andrews, Derek Beaulieu, Charles Bernstein, Stan Bevington, Stephen Cain, Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith, Neil Hennessy, Carl Johnston, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, Marjorie Perloff, Rick/Simon, Brian Kim Stefans, Alana Wilcox and Suzanne Zelazo. Special thanks to Darren Wershler-Henry (who drove the car while I read Perec), and special thanks to Natalee Caple (who let me work while she slept).
