Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books

by Marcel Benabou, Warren Motte Jr. (Preface by), David Kornacker (Translator)

Overview

Marcel Bénabou is quick to acknowledge that his own difficulty in writing has plenty of company. Words stick and syntax is stubborn, meaning slips and synonyms cluster. A blank page taunts and a full one accuses. Bénabou knows the heroic joy of depriving critics of victims, the kindness of sparing publishers decisions, and the public charity of leaving more room in bookstore displays. Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books (Pourquoi je n'ai écrit aucun de mes livres) provides both a respectful litany of writers' fears and a dismissal of the alibis offered to excuse them.

The author (or not) of a dozen books, Marcel Bénabou is a professor of ancient history at the University of Paris VII and permanent provisional secretary of Oulipo. David Kornacker is a writer and translator living in New York City. Warren Motte is a professor of French at the University of Colorado.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803261396
Publisher:	UNP - Bison Books
Publication date:	03/01/1998
Series:	French Modernist Library
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	111
Product dimensions:	0.32(w) x 5.00(h) x 8.00(d)

About the Author

The author (or not) of a dozen books, Marcel Bénabou is a professor of ancient history at the University of Paris VII and permanent provisional secretary of Oulipo. David Kornacker is a writer and translator living in New York City. Warren Motte is a professor of French at the University of Colorado.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

In the beginning, a short sentence. Only half a dozen words; simplewords, the first to come along, or almost the first. Assignedabove all to mean that here ends a silence. But immediately after,without so much as a paragraph break, there would commence along sentence in the conditional one of those old-fashioned periodsin which everything would be combined and balanced withcare — the choice of the verbs, the logical framework, the numberof segments, the length and duration of each one — first to snarethen to keep awake the reader's curiosity, to make the reader gostep by step (like a child one is taking for a walk down the paths ofa garden he is visiting for the first time, like a guest one is takingon a tour of a house he has never entered before) around the entirecircle of successive propositions, distributed — in their highlystudied diversity — around a single axis, and finally to make thereader stumble, through a maze of interpolations and parentheticalremarks, over a last obstacle (perhaps the least expected at theend of such a journey), a clausula that concludes nothing.

    What followed would, of course, maintain this brilliant level.Each sentence would strike the reader. By virtue of its precision.By virtue of its force. And in their rapid succession, together theywould form a dazzlingly logical chain.

    Yet it would be upon the external appearance of the page thatthe eye would first glide, then linger, for the play of the whitespaces around the letters would give the text an unusual look:the carefully varied, skillfully scattered letters would constructadiaphanous architecture in which emptiness would seem to filleverything. The opaque body of each word would slip discreetlyoff to one side, as if ready to vanish into the whiteness besiegingit. And as one's gaze wandered among the characters, one wouldforget that these characters make up words, and that those wordsmight have a meaning.

    This would be the beginning of a work that would be strong (likea liqueur), and hard (like steel), multiple as well and burgeoning(like everything multiple and burgeoning one can possibly imagine):a nice piece of descriptive prose, one of those pages wherethere are found together several of the principal qualities extolledby the old masters: syntactical solidity, terminological precision,oratorical power. But above all, what would make this opening sequenceprecious would be its revealing in the brightest light thetrue relationship among meaning, images, and sounds, an almostperfect match between the movement outlined by the words andtheir inner charge. For the time of a page at least, rhetoric wouldhave slipped the bonds of serfdom.

    And only at the end of this page, insolent and beautiful as a manifesto,would there make itself heard, coming from who knowswhere (some place of exile or solitude, no doubt), a voice of imposingsonority. But no listener would be able to reproduce exactlywhat it had said. And it would be learned, much later, that thevoice was dealing with beginning, words, and silence.

    Thus (hey, why this thus here already, when it would be morein its place later, in the conclusion of some nice syllogism, forexample?), thus, there you have the way I see the first words (well,not really the first ones: before those there will have been a fewothers, those of the title, the preface — if there is one — and of theepigraphs, dedications, and so on and so forth) of what should be(if I manage to finish it one day, and I know that will not come topass without difficulty) my first work.

    You are surely going to tell me that there are all kinds of worksand that you do not see yet to which category this one belongs. Alittle patience! Why want to be told everything right away? Wouldyour one and only concern be adding one more entry to the list

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from WHY I HAVE NOT WRITTEN ANY OF MY BOOKS by MARCEL BÉNABOU. Copyright © 1986 by Hachette.
Translation copyright © 1996 David Kornacker.Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Why I Have Not Prefaced Any of Marcel Bénabou's Books	vii
Translator's Note	xvii
To the Reader	7
Title	11
First Page	19
Reconsolidation	29
Momentary Pause Number One	39
Proper Usage	41
The Single Book	51
Word Order	67
Momentary Pause Number Two	83
Heroes	85
Lacuna	95
Last Word	99
Farewell to the Reader	107
The Author	111

Editorial Reviews

Of course Bnabou has written his books, 10 of them aside from this one. But this is the kind of playful treatment of constraints, certainty and language that one might expect of a longstanding member (and Provisional Definitive Secretary) of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littrature Potentielle). Bnabou details the anguished writing process and describes what The Book, if it could be written, would be like. "There would commence a long sentence in the conditional,'' he says at the beginning of a long sentence in the conditional, that ends after the promised twists and turns in "a clausula that concludes nothing." In very few pages, Benabou, addresses conflicting impulses between writing and reading, writing and living, following great models and being original. And he has a great deal of gentle self-deprecating fun while doing it. But this isn't just about the wordplay beloved of French modernists. At base it is a lovely book about the love of books and of language and all that goes into making them, be it paper or words. "Most of the words I used were already almost entirely detached from their natural ties to things, and for this reason I found them intoxicatingly light. The ones I loved the most (bergamot, nacelle, botargo, galoubet, caillebotis) were attached to nothing I had before my eyes. They were beautiful, shimmering, iridescent bubbles, and their emptiness made them all the more precious to me." (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A professor of ancient history at the University of Paris VII and the author of numerous works, Benabou reflects deeply and with sharp humor on the elusive nature of writing and writer's block in this work, originally published in France in 1986. Benabou's problem with writing comes from the way he defines "writing." He thinks of his predicament as applicable to quite a few people and makes no excuses for them; instead, he gives diverse critical reasons why he has not written any of the books he had conceived. Whenever he compares his writings to classical and contemporary authors, for example, he discovers only his own shortcomings despite his arduous efforts. But this book he did indeed write. Recommended for comprehensive public and academic collections.-Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.

Library Journal

"Ceci n'est pas un livre," declares the author of this mercurially playful paradox of confessional literature, authorial awakening, and creative endeavor.

The French Bénabou has, of course, written many books, including Throw Away This Book Before It's Too Late (1992), and is the Definitively Provisional Secretary of surrealist Raymond Queneau's Oulipo (Workshop for Potential Literature), an experimental collective that has included Marcel Duchamp, Italo Calvino, and Bénabou's friend Georges Perec. The first section of this peculiarly circular work has (following a series of tongue-in- cheek introductions) as its opening sentence the line "In the beginning, a short sentence." This turns out to be, in fact, the book's conclusion. How Bénabou got to this conclusion is another story, which he obliquely recounts in the rest of "this (quite real) nonbook." It involves an early love for secondhand books and blank notebooks, progresses with uncertainty toward an inchoate life as a writer, and stalls. After such metaliterary hijinks and post-Romantic self-consciousness, Bénabou restarts himself, focusing on his family history (his ancestors were Sephardic Jews resident in Morocco) and in particular on the occasion when his great-grandfather appeared in a travelogue about Morocco by Pierre Loti (the origin of his family's francophilia). Bénabou's inheritance is thus split several ways, among an "exotic" Arabic background, Jewish heritage, and French acculturation, an identity crisis further complicated by the influence-anxiety he catches from numerous actual books. Before he's finished with his search for the ideal, or potential, book, Bénabou has juggled with the ideas of Pascal, Borges, Walter Benjamin, and Derrida.

A hyperaware and erudite product of Gallic postmodernism, Bénabou's ludic essay dodges giddily among romantic notions of writing and Parnassian ideals of literature.

Kirkus Reviews

"This is the 'madness of art.'"—Review of Contemporary Fiction

Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Wrapped in hilarious self-ironizing waffle, [Bénabou’s book] is a serious, largely autobiographical account . . . of how difficult it is to write a book. . . . Unfailingly amusing."–Times Literary Supplement

Times Literary Supplement

"A witty catalog of all the vanities, attitudes and delusions that writers employ to escape their work."—Laura Miller, New York Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review

"As this deft translation in Nebraska’s excellent French Modernist Library series confirms, Bénabou can cartwheel with the best of them. Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books makes mischief with treasured literary clichés and will amuse and provoke the scoundrel in every writer’s soul."—Philadelphia Inquirer

Philadelphia Inquirer