In the beginning and at the end was the word
Alberto Manguel
MAKING THE ALPHABET DANCE by Ross Eekler Macmillan, 118.99, pp.299, ISBN 033 39 03 34X Christopher Columbus, on one of his four voyages to the place he thought was India, saw a manatee swimming in the ocean and decided it was a mermaid. 'Alas.' he noted in his journal, 'mermaids are not as beautiful as we have been led to believe!' The intellectual process of granting reality to an invention and then applying to that invention the rigid rules of reality is nowhere more splendidly demonstrated than in our relationship to language. Long ago in a faraway desert, a man of whom we know nothing decided that the words he had scratched onto clay were not conventional accounting signs numbering legal decrees or heads of cattle, but the terrible manifestations of a wilful god. He concluded that therefore the very order of these words, the number of letters they contained, and even their physical appearance must have a sense and meaning, since the utterance of a god cannot hold anything superfluous or arbitrary. The Cabbalists took this faith in the literary act even further. Since (as the Book of Genesis recorded) God had said, 'Let there be light' and there was light, they argued that the very word light possessed creative powers, and that if they knew le mot juste and its true intonation, they too would be able to become as creative as their Creator. The history of literature is, in some sense, the history of this hope.
Less interested in imitating the Almighty, less confident in the magical powers of the word, but equally concerned with discovering the secret rules that govern a system of signs and symbols, wordplay enthusiasts, like the ancient Cabbalists, permute, count, rearrange, divide and reassemble letters for the sheer delight of drawing order out of chaos. Behind the passion of crosswordpuzzle solvers, punsters, anagrammatists, palindrome-makers, dictionary-scourers, Scrabble players and code-breakers lies a kind of mad faith in the ultimate rationality of language.
Ross Eckler, wordsmith extraordinaire, has compiled an impressive catalogue of the ways and means by which this rationality may be teased out. Among them are: texts that eschew one or several letters of the alphabet (such as Georges Perec's La Disparition, brilliantly translated into
English by Gilbert Adair, which excludes in both languages the letter 'e'); texts that avoid all vowels except one (I'm living nigh grim civic blight; 11 find its victims, sick with fright); tautonyms or words made up of two identical parts (such as murmur) which in turn develop into the highly sophisticated 'charade sentence' (`Flamingo pale, scenting a latent shark/ Flaming opalescent in gala tents — hark!'); transposal words obtained by rearranging the letters of another word (carol to coral); three-way homonyms, the scourge of foreigners learning English (idol, idle and idyll); `undominated' words in which an alphabetic succession can be found containing all the letters in that sequence, when no word exists with a longer sequence of those same letters (as in deft). The fact that many of these classifications are also hugely entertaining should not lead anyone to question their seriousness. Poets, for instance, have long used them, from Lasus of Hermione, who in the sixth century BC excluded sigma from his 'Ode to the Centaurs', to Cervantes, who included in his preface to Don Quixote a few 'truncated' sonnets (in which not the final but the penultimate syllable of each line carries the rhyme), and from Gerard Manley Hopkins and his fondness for charade sentences ('Resign them, sign them') to the anonymous bard who penned 'Time wounds all heels'. Poetry, in fact, is proof of our innate confidence in the meaningfulness of wordplay. That we should trust rhyme to lend meaning or alliteration to express a thought is not too far from the spirit of the Renaissance necromancers who believed that the secret name of Rome was Roma spelt backwards.
Martin Gardner, in his brief introduction to Eckler's book, notes that much of the new wordplay 'would not have been made without the help of computers' but adds that he does not want to 'give the impression that computers are required for making new discoveries'. Indeed. Though computers can tell us (for instance) that there are 3,276 ways in which three letters can be chosen from the alphabet with repetition allowed, such mechanical methods provide, I believe, scant entertainment to either seasoned lexicophiles or inveterate Cabbalists. At the dawn of the computer age, Arthur C. Clarke penned a warning. In a short story called 'The Nine Billion Names of God', a Tibetan lamasery engages the services of Western computer experts to run through all possible combinations of letters in order to come up with one that is the hidden name of God — a task which, these Tibetans believe, lends a reason to the existence of the universe. The experts install the computer and over several months it spews out countless jumbles of names. At last the final combination is produced. As the experts pack up to leave, one of them casually looks up at the sky. 'Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.'
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