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Constrained writing
Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern.Constraints are very common in poetry, which often requires the writer to use a particular verse form....
experiment by Walter Abish
Walter Abish
Walter Abish is an Austrian-American author of experimental novels and short stories.-Biography:Abish was born in Vienna, Austria to Adolph and Frieda . At a young age, his family fled from the Nazis, traveling first to Italy and Nice before settling in Shanghai from 1940 to 1949...
. It is written in the form of a novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
.
A paperback edition was issued in New York by New Directions Publishing Corporation in 1974 with ISBN 0-8112-0533-9. It was still in print in 2004.
The Constraint
The writing is restricted by an interesting pseudo-alliterativeAlliteration
In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of Three or more words or phrases. Alliteration has historically developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to...
rule: the first chapter contains only words starting with the letter a, the second chapter only words starting with a or b, etc.; each subsequent chapter adds the next letter in the alphabet to the set of allowed word beginnings. This continues for the first 25 chapters, until at last Abish is (briefly) allowed to write without constraint.
In the second half of the book, through chapter 52, letters are removed in the reverse order that they were added. Thus, z words disappear in chapter 28, y in chapter 29, etc...
Errors
Readers have noted that there are several places in the narrative where the constraint is violated. Most counts of these violations number them between four and six, however, up to 43 have been noted by astute readers. One point of dispute is whether the failures to meet the constraint are intentional, and therefore potentially meaningful, or are simply editing mistakes. It is said that when Abish was notified of the errors, he reacted with total surprise. Two of the errors were "I"'s found later in the book, situated next to the margins, most likely overlooked during editing. Similar mistakes of spelling and grammar occur in other Abish works, such as How German Is ItHow German Is It
How German Is It is a novel by Walter Abish, published in 1980. It received PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1981. It is most often classified as a Postmodern work of fiction.-Plot:The Hargenaus were once a noble and revered family...
(1980), where exact presentation is clearly a priority, and thus the mistakes come across as intentional.