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.

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.

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?

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