Firstly, I’m having a very, very tough time at the moment (break-up!! Family illness!! Stressful job!! PhD admin!!) and so I thought that giving myself an unusual challenge would take my mind off things a bit. Historically, if I have something that I can kind of throw myself into, something relatively low stakes, I can sort of parse the bigger problems a bit better. Usually, I would sink my teeth back into my current big project, but that’s a retelling of the myth of Medea and one of the major plot points is the slow decline and eventual end of a relationship, so for obvious reasons I’m taking a bit of a break from that, just until it’s not too close to the bone.
So, knowing that I wanted to do something different, something that would be a challenge but in a fun way, I decided on doing a lipogram - I actually got the idea when my friend posted about their broken keyboard, meaning they couldn’t type the letter e! That led me to remember the existence of Georges Perec’s A Void and Ernest Vincent Wright’s Gadsby, which both omit the letter ‘e’. I remembered that in A Void, the absence of the ‘e’ was a plot point, with the plot of the novel itself revolving around the conspicuous absence of something, and so leading on from that I wanted to write a lipogram using a different letter, because ‘e’ has famously been done twice, and who can compete with that? Knowing that I wanted to make the absence of the letter stand for something within the narrative, I thought that the letter which stood for the most, outside of its function as a letter, was ‘i’. ‘I’ is not just a letter. ‘I’ is self. It’s found in the building blocks of how we refer to ourselves - I think, I do, I was - as well as in many of the most commonly used words in the language - in, it, is, -ing. I was interested in exploring what the complete absence of that letter would mean for a story. I knew that I wanted to retell a myth (because come on, I’m me) and I also knew that, in the vein of Here, the World Entire, I wanted to subvert the original story. In HtWE, the original heroic function of Perseus was darkened a bit, and I wanted to do something similar with another myth. So, I had a think about other mythical women, how their myths revolved around the notion of selfhood, and how I could turn them inside out to make the lack of ‘I’ relevant.My first thought was to do something with the myth of Ariadne, but I couldn’t think of a way of changing the angle that wasn’t too close to the way I’m handling the myth of Medea in my other story, so I set that one aside. I’m already half writing a retelling of the myth of Cassandra (on hold until Medea is finished!) so that one was out, too. Echo was another one I thought of, but I couldn’t think of a new angle that was interesting enough to really hold my attention. And then I thought of Eurydice. I thought of how her whole story is Orpheus. How all she does, essentially, is pop her clogs and then languish in the Underworld until Orpheus comes down with his lyre and sings her to freedom. When I first had the idea for Here, the World Entire, my root thought was ‘what if Medusa didn’t want to turn people to stone?’ That was what sparked the rest of the plot; questioning the most commonly accepted feature of the source narrative. With the Eurydice story, I had the thought ‘what if Eurydice didn’t want to go back with Orpheus?’ And from there, it kind of made sense. Knowing that I wanted to do something that incorporated the lack of the letter ‘i’, it sort of came to me that it would make sense to retell Eurydice’s story in the world of the living. In the source narrative, she’s a woman who dies and is brought back to life. That’s really all she is; something for Orpheus to save. Like Medusa, who functions as something for Perseus to overcome. Not really a character, but a plot point. I was interested to see how I could change that, give her more of a role, using the lack of ‘i’ as an asset and not a hindrance. So, the challenge became defining her in the absence of selfhood. Without 'I’, who was she?
And so, in order to incorporate the meaning of no ‘i’ and challenge the notion that she wanted to return with Orpheus, she became a woman who was suffering from a lack of agency in the world above. She had no mother, lived with her father, and was married off to Orpheus without having any say in the matter. She has no idea who she is, because she’s not allowed to be someone. She knows what she wants, which is freedom and control, but has no way to get it within the world in which she lives. The lack of the letter 'i’ represents the key idea of the story: I am not here. There is no me. I am not. And so when she finds herself in the Underworld, free from the constraints of the world above, that’s the moment at which she finds herself in my version. That’s the moment at which she can suddenly do as she likes.
There’s still no use of the letter 'i’ throughout, because she’s still not here; quite literally, as she’s dead. But her role within the story becomes a lot more active; she starts doing things, rather than having things done to her, and although the 'i’ might still not be there, she is.
