Synopsis

Title: Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books

Author: Marcel Bénabou

Genre: Non-fiction

Written: 1986 (Eng. 1996)

Length: 114 pages

Original in: French ( Pourqoui je n'ai ecrit aucun de mes livres)

"Writing about writing about writing."

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.

the impossibility-of-writing-a-book. He through his writing he reflects on how a book might have been written. The book reads like a monologue on the inability to write and the ability to consider oneself a writer. Each sentence, each word he writes reminds him that he is writing, daunted by a conflict between being and doing.

Bénabou writes against literature, against the expectations of the reader. From beginning to beginning, because wherever one finds oneself in this book, it always seems to be the beginning. So it goes throughout this book as one advances from threshold to threshold. But the book finds its meaning in the context of the whole.

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. 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.

In the book he uses three types of discourse: narrative, dialogue, and borrowed language (quotation, allusion, pastiche). By working in this sort of discourse he creates a highly constructed piece of work where he plays tradition and innovation against each other. Quotations, allusions, and literary references can be found in Bénabou's writing on a level that may even surpass our commonly held notions of intertextuality. But it makes us question as a reader, what in this book is truly “Bénabou"? Did this the intertextual landscape serves him as a background or a foreground? One thing can be concluded: those other writers said 'it' better. Besides that they are all man writer's writers, He is therefore more like a intimidated postmodernism echo in the realm of modernism, than a real copyist.

But what are we reading? He tells the reader twice like an echo in the voice of Margritte. Ceci n’est pas un livre.