Why Oulipo Constraints Have to Be Consistent

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.

Writing about writing. Writing about writing about writing. There might have even been some writing about writing about writing about writing. A clever, neurotic monologue on the inability to write and the ability to consider oneself a writer. There are some really stunning thoughts in this ("I have lived for a number of years on childhood memories the way others in days gone by lived on the income from their investments" p. 71). I did find the structuring of the book (e.g., the way everything was in 3s) distracting at times. Distracting isn't really the right word - I'm not sure what it was distracting me from, anyway. It got a little, "Look what I can do, maman!", I guess. But the structure actually is pretty cool, the writing is witty and funny and it satisfied my desire to get inside someone else's head (and to find the overlap with my own), the allusions to things I'd never heard of made me feel just the right amount of dumb, &c., and the whole thing was short enough that it didn't have time to lose its charm. ( )

Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books is one of those PoMo gimmicky books about books, the impossibility of writing, and the precarious place of the author within his or her own work. People like me, who enjoy self-identification as writers without actually writing, will ruefully find their own justifications mirrored in Benabou's; he writes that he thought himself simply born a writer, and his first novel would spring forth at an appointed time just like a first tooth.

As the previous reviewer noted, Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence also complements the thrust of the book: new authors must negotiate the opposing forces of knowing their predecessors and not wanting to be stifled by them, therefore any adaptation is a misunderstanding of the previous work. To this Benabou indignantly says that it's not his fault that he is one untimely born, after a thousand other works like his have already been written; nevertheless this knowledge impedes creativity, knowing "there is nothing new under the sun." Or maybe there is, as this book and other experimental texts reach for the boundaries of literature and the written word. ( )

Very postmodern, and very amusing. Benabou talks about all the reasons that stop him from creating his masterpiece of literature. Becomes more meaningful if you read about Bloom's(?) notion that every writer must intentionally misread his predecessors in order to find his own voice. It's almost as if the better you are at understanding what has come before you, the more it will paralyze your creative faculties. It seems to suggest to me that the secret to writing is to refrain from thinking about it. :-) ( )