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, speaking figuratively (and often literally) in the conditional mode. 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. 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?

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