Authorial Shadows in Marcel Benabou

“Quelle est cette aventure? Et qu’en puis-je augurer?”

— Molière

Marcel Bénabou’s writing is multi-referential, invoking history, religion and personal memories, and becoming what he calls a “proliferating memory” (Genèse, 100). The result, while homogeneous in appearance, is an assemblage of fragments from various sources, reworked to form one voice, and where one textual element may refer to several authors simultaneously, as Philippe Lejeune has shown. ¹ A closer look at Bénabou’s work, however, reveals an attitude towards literature and its past that distinguishes his work from the tradition of Lautréamont and the Surrealists and all of this century’s authors, artists and composers who have made recycling an important component of their practice. The past—literary and personal, historical and memorial—severely paralyzes Marcel Bénabou. Yet it is this very paralysis that allows him to write his first book, Pourquoi je n’ai écrit aucun de mes livres (Why I have not written any of my books).