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| Title: Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books
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| Author: Marcel Bénabou
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| Genre: Non-fiction
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| Written: 1986 (Eng. 1996)
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| Length: 114 pages
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| Original in: French ( Pourqoui je n'ai ecrit aucun de mes livres)
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| "Writing about writing about writing."
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| Marcel Bénabou was part of Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle [Workshop of Potential Literature]) a French group of writers and mathematicians with an interest in the problems of literary form.
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| The main aim of Marcel Bénabou is he wants to write the perfect book.
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| Within that desire he trows all his notes away and he lists all the things he will not do in this book.
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| Through his writing he reflects on how a (or The) book might have been written.
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| The book reads like a monologue on the inability to write and the ability to consider oneself a writer.
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| Each sentence, each word he writes reminds him that he is writing,
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| daunted by a conflict between being and doing.
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| Bénabou writes against literature, against the expectations of the reader.In this "nonbook" Bénabou is constantly trying to complete a sentence.
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| It is a book that's always beginning, where everything is introductory, from beginning to beginning, because wherever one finds oneself in this book, it always seems to be the beginning.
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| Bénabou activity can be conceived as being about beginnings, rather than endings.
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| So it goes throughout this book as one advances from threshold to threshold.
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| But the book finds its meaning in the context of the whole.
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| He stages this book as a game in which an author attempts to write an impossible book, where he invites the reader to play along with him.
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| We are not Readers, any more than Bénabou is a Writer. Or rather, we are Readers to the extent that Bénabou is a Writer. It is in this dynamic field, the play of book and Book, writer and Writer, reader and Reader, Bénabou’s writing takes on whatever meaning.
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| In the book he uses three types of discourse: narrative, dialogue, and borrowed language (quotation, allusion, pastiche).
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| By working in this sort of discourse he creates a highly constructed piece of work where he plays tradition and innovation against each other.
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| Quotations, allusions, and literary references (for example Pascal, Borges, Walter Benjamin, and Derrida. )can be found in Bénabou's writing on a level that may even surpass our commonly held notions of intertextuality.
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| But it makes us question as a reader, what in this book is truly “Bénabou"?
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| Did this the intertextual landscape serves him as a background or a foreground?
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| One thing can be concluded: those other writers said 'it' better. Besides that they are all man writer's writers,
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| He is therefore more like a intimidated postmodern echo in the realm of modernism and romanticism, than a real copyist.
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| But what are we reading? He tells the reader twice like an echo in the voice of Margritte.
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| Ceci n’est pas un livre.
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| This non-book is more like a blank piece of paper thats trying to find out his front and back side by turning over and over again like a möbius.
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| An ode to all the books he wanted to write in his entire live.
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