Benabou’s Family Epic: A Story in Perpetual Labor

Between Writing and Memory

Postmodernist conceptions of literature have laid claim to the inability of the text to come to terms with its own narrative objects. Thus, the text has come to be apprehended no more as a synthetic totality, as was presupposed by the Realist ideological configuration, but as an indefinite process of incompleteness, in that the narrative cannot see its own end, given that it consists of an endless productive activity. The writings of Marcel Bénabou, “the definitively temporary secretary of the OULIPO” (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), ¹ pose from the start the question of their generic affiliation. There is no doubt that given their Oulipian literary dimension, they reinscribe the textual practices inherent in the post-modern text, to wit, fragmentation, deconstruction and suspension—the basic strategies so characteristic to the post-modern novel in general. Indeed, Pourquoi je n’ai écrit aucun de mes livres and Jette ce livre avant qu’il soit trop tard, as well as his Epopée familiale —though in a less marked manner, ² seem to be pure products of the Oulipian laboratory. They constitute, on the whole, metatextual elaborations on the activity of writing itself and its varied complex significations.