The first constraint is obvious to the general reader: in each of the sections of the book, Bök limits himself to just one vowel. For example, the A Section only uses words where A is the only vowel. Likewise for E through U. That in itself is an impressive enough feat, but the book’s true magnitude only becomes obvious when reading Bök’s notes on the text:
“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 [...] The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once)” (103-104).
It is impressive enough that each section restricts itself to the use of one vowel, but to use 98% of the words that meet the criteria is just incredible, all the more so because of how cohesive each of the sections is. While reading, I noticed the motif of the “culinary banquet” emerging (which, before knowing the 98% rule, seemed a bit of a cheat for populating the poems with a lengthy blazon), some of the other motifs are less clear on an initial read-through but shine more brightly on reflection.
Eunoia, the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, means “beautiful thinking” (103), and the book is written as a “univocal lipogram” that is “inspired by the exploits of Oulipo [...] the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints” (103). The risk of such experimentation is that the ‘heart’ of the poems will be lost in the name of its self-imposed higher authority. While that is sometimes the case, it’s impressive just how well Bök is able to craft narratives through each section of the work.
If you’re familiar with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Eunoia may inspire some resonance. In Chapter A, Hassan Abd al-Hassad goes through an entire rise and fall in just 18 pages. By contrast, Chapter E focuses on Helen and the Greeks. Surprisingly, “I” is a mere 8 pages, though “I” elsewhere seems to offer so many poetic possibilities. The “O” chapter is the zenith, I’d argue, of the “prurient debauch” that emerges in other forms in earlier works. Taking on the the challenge is admirable, though I have to admit that Ubu and the “U” chapter is the least compelling of the bunch.
All said, I am truly impressed by Bök’s seven year project. It’s hard to take a sampling of the work and do it justice, but here is an excerpt from the “E” chapter, chosen at random, to illustrate how clearly the narrative progresses, despite the constraints:
“Helen remembers Crete – the Eden where senescent shepherds (les bergers des betes) herd bellwether sheep; there, Helen sees the pebbled steppes (the eskers where chert screen bestrews the ledges). Helen treks wherever herdsmen trek. She sees the veldts where ewes, when fleeced, chew the sedges. She sees the glens, then the dells, where elk herds chew the vetch. She helps the herders erect fenced pens where hens peck feed; then she helps the shepherdesses sell the eggs. The sheep-herders mend fences; the sheeptenders tend hedges. The sheepbreeders even breed steer, then geld them” (47).
Who needs other vowels, anyway?
Returning briefly to Bök’s notes on what each chapter must include, he lists the following:
Allusions to the art of writing
A culinary banquet
A prurient debauch
A pastoral tableau
A nautical voyage
Each chapter opens with #1, and I find that he effectively captures the spirit of writing, if not the individual letter, in a way made all the more impressive since it’s comprised entirely of that letter. The combination of words for the start of “Chapter A” is particularly incantatory and illuminates the project as a whole. Bök writes the following:
“Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh – a handstamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a mark that sparks an ars magna (an abstract art that charts a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark saga (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and Kafka, Marx and Marat. A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark” (12).
Honestly, at a certain point the craftsmanship is just showing off. From the very first sentence condemning “awkward grammar”, Bök anticipates critics of his work before meditating on the connection his avant-garde process shares with art movements like Dada. Describing the A itself as a “slapdash arc and a backward zag” seems to capture its spirit in a cheeky self-referential approach. Outlining his constraints with the constraint (“a law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark”) is that perfect touch of rebelliousness and showmanship that makes the project work.
In less capable hands, Eunoia is a text at which people would balk. Bök, though, handles it with such care that the entire collection weaves into a complete image, a well-achieved machine.
Admittedly, the personal resonances may be less frequent than in a collection that sticks to free-verse lyrics, but in imposing these additional rules of language upon himself, Bök seems to strike at the core of a hidden network of connections that continually underlie our language. Whether or not there’s a complete logic to language, Bök certainly gives the impression of one, characterizing the vowels in their own particular ways. (We do call letters characters, after all.) In some ways, it reminds me of some of Jan Zwicky’s work in Thirty-Seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences, where her poems characterize the letters on a musical scale. It’s a reason for optimism that all is connected, all can be explained.
Overall, Bök’s Eunoia is a worthwhile experiment that pushes language to its limits. It’s an incredible statement on the possibility for meaning—even when it’s confined to such harsh limitations. Not all avant-garde projects “work”, but I can safely say that Bök’s ought not be ignored, if for no other reason than to revel in the possibilities that defy all constraints.
Happy reading!
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