Marcel Benabou
Teoksen Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books tekijä
Tietoja tekijästä
Marcel Benabou is a professor of ancient history at the University of Paris.
Tekijän teokset
Altitude et Profondeur (B.O. 103) 1 kappale
Locutions Introuvables (B.O. 25) 1 kappale
Perhaps (in McSweeney's 22 - EGGERS) 1 kappale
Der Verschlag 1 kappale
What a man ! 1 kappale
Associated Works
Merkitty avainsanalla
Yleistieto
- Syntymäaika
- 1939_06-29
- Sukupuoli
- male
- Kansalaisuus
- Morocco (birth)
France (citizenship) - Syntymäpaikka
- Meknes, Morocco
- Asuinpaikat
- Meknes, Morocco
Paris, France - Koulutus
- École normale supérieure (Paris)
- Ammatit
- Professor of Roman History
- Organisaatiot
- Oulipo
Paris Diderot University
Jäseniä
Kirja-arvosteluja
Palkinnot
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Associated Authors
Tilastot
- Teokset
- 20
- Also by
- 2
- Jäseniä
- 243
- Suosituimmuussija
- #93,557
- Arvio (tähdet)
- 3.7
- Kirja-arvosteluja
- 5
- ISBN:t
- 30
- Kielet
- 5
Marcel Bénabou's "Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books" promises to be a pure example of Oulipean practice, especially because Bénabou has been an active member in Oulipo for decades, and was a close friend of Georges Perec's. But it's not, because it often fails to follow its own logic. Inconsistency is suggested in the list of Bénabou's books at the end. Most of them do not exist, but some do: one is a scholarly text, and another is a collaboraive project with Perec. So it's advertised in the book itself that the title is not accurate.
The sort of inconsistency I have in mind is not the same as Roussel's (apparently!) intentional misdirection in "How I Wrote Certain of My Books," which doesn't actually make good on the promise of its titles. And it's not the kind of inconsistency that results in an incompete project, as in Perec's exhausted "Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris," or the common, perhaps inevitable, kind of inconsistency that comes from making mistakes in the application of one's own self-imposed constraints. Those three kinds of inconsistency are consistent with the Oulipean project, because they do not affect the writing's fundamental disaffection.
What happens in this book is different. Bénabou begins and ends with ideas about why fiction should avoid any number of normal practices. He notes that at one point he "set out to turn a treatise on rhetoric into an adventure story and a very well known anthology for students into a love story," and he even toyed with other categories—"dictionaries, encyclopedias, chronologies, even... the white and yellow pages" (p. 103). He sometimes talks like a doctor who would like to cure people of literature: he wanted to "raise a bit of anxiety," he says, "provide a bit of uneasiness—if mild, if fleeting—in those who... gave themselves over in all tranquility to literary activity" (p. 98).
He is also clear, sometimes, on the ontological claims implicit in his title. "Thus, writing that one would like to write is already writing," he says, "so I knew what was left to me to do: a kind of tour de force by which I would have to manage to give fictive existence to books that don't really exist." (p. 105). The result is that in the end—on the book's penultimate page—he concludes that the book "could claim to be a very classic novel" (p. 107). But the reason it could claim such a thing springs from the inconsistency in the book, because he's thinking that he's actually told "the story of an ever deferred meeting, of a frustrated love strewn with obstacles"—referring to the book's main narrative, which is about how he spent his early years dreaming of writing a single book that would encompass all of his life and all of literature.
That story is essentially a memoir. He dreams of writing a perfect book, but he can't bring himself to start. He chides himself for being lazy, he recounts his family's expectations (p. 63), he wonders if his Jewish milieu made his anxiety and ambition inevitable (p. 75). He was ecstatic when he discovered the pleasure of blank sheets of paper (p. 79), and he collected blank notebooks. He was full of "dreaminess" and "illusions." He observes the literary world from a safe distance (p. 55). He never thought to question his own "taste for preparations, preiminaries, and preludes" (of which the book is full), his "mania for analysis" (p. 59). All this seems self-reflective, but it's a standard narrative, a Bildungsroman. It doesn't have to do with doubting literature, as Oulipo does. It has to do with the narrator doubting himself, struggling with his ambition and inability to write. Eventually, Bénabou turns that back into an Oulipean skepticism about writing, by means of a further narrative of discovery.
He continues with his biography for about a third of the book, then, as if he's recovering from the belief in the exact kind of narrative he's been providing (supposedly under cover of irony, in the name of explaining why he ended up not writing any of his books), he tells us how he began to doubt autobiography and memoir (there would be no more "gushing over my childhood," p. 89), and realism itself ("I scorned the idea of describing my house with its wrought-iron doors," p. 88), and decided to turn to fiction (p. 91), before doubting that, too, and emerging into the position he currently holds.
There is a difference between not writing any of your books because you want to show "writing that one would like to write is already writing," or because you don't want to repeat conventional forms like memoirs or realist novels, and not writing any of your books because you are overwhelmed by the difficulty of literature, swamped by your own unformed ambition, hypnotized by paper or by the ideal of the single perfect book. It's in the spirit of Oulipo to take a diffident, metaphysical stand against literature, and to come by that stand after considering the many "traps" (as Bénabou says) of conventional forms. It is not in the spirit of Oulipo to tell a story about your ambition to write and how it failed. And it's not in the logic of Oulipo to move from one mode to the other through a narrative of self-discovery.… (lisätietoja)