Perec and Benabou

Georges Perec’s novel “A Void” has come to a close with an ironic insertion of a piece of writing in which he omitted not only the letter ‘e’ which he has done the entire book this far, but also the letter ‘a’ as well. Marcel Bénabou discusses placing such constraints on writing in his appropriately named essay “Rule and Constraint”. Perec states at the end of his novel that one of the main motivations for writing under such restriction was that a compatriot claimed he could not perform such an action, however Bénabou places his deed in more artful terms by claiming it is “the beginning of a new poetic art” (42).