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Hellisotherpeople
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Lipogram-e

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paragraphs of print,
a void brings our story to its conclusion."
2 7 8
P O S T S C R I P T
On that ambition, conspicuous throughout this tiring book
which you will soon shut, having had your fill of it without,
I trust, skipping too much - on that ambition, so to say,
which lit its author's lamp
My ambition, as Author, my point, I would go so far as to say
my fixation, my constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an
artifact as original as it was illuminating, an artifact that would,
or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on notions of construc-
tion, of narration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word,
on fiction-writing today.
Whilst, in my first books, writing principally about my situ-
ation, my psychology, my social background, my capacity (or
incapacity) of adaptation, my mania for commodification (almost
tantamount, as is said on occasion, to what you might call "thing-
ification"), it was my wish, by drawing inspiration from a
(modish) linguistic dogma claiming primacy for what Saussurian
structuralists call a signifiant - it was my wish, I say, to polish
up this tool that I had at my disposal, a tool that until now I
would ply without pain or strain; not that it was my ambition
to diminish any contradiction intrinsic to such a constraint nor,
naturally, that I was wholly unconscious of it, but by contrast
that I thought I might fulfil such an ambition by fully assuming
that (as I say) modish structuralist dogma, which was, in my
writing of this book, not a handicap, not a constriction, but, all
in all, a spur to my imagination.
What was my purport in imposing this constraint? Offhand,
with hindsight, I can think of many factors bubbling about in
2 8 1
my brain, but I ought to admit right away that its origin was
totally haphazard, touch and go, a flip of a coin. It all got out
of hand with a companion calling my bluff (I said I could do it,
this companion said I could not); and I should admit, too, that
so inauspiciously shaky was that launching pad, I had no inkling
at all that, as an acorn contains an oak, anything solid would
grow out of it.
Initially I found such a constraint faintly amusing, if that; but
I stuck to my guns. At which point, finding that it took my
imagination down so many intriguing linguistic highways and
byways, I couldn't stop thinking about it, plunging into it again
and again, at last giving up all my ongoing work, much of which
I was actually about to finish.
So was born, word by word, and paragraph by paragraph, a
book caught within a formalist grid doubly arduous in that it
would risk striking as insignificant anybody ignorant of its sol-
ution, a book that, crankily idiosyncratic as it no doubt is, I
instantly found thoroughly satisfying: