Double Oblivion of the OurangOutang
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2013
Number of pages: 172
ISBN-13: 9780745653914
Description: In 2009, the writer-narrator finds a Box. Within it lie the pages of her very first manuscript, pages she thought she had long since thrown away. Le Prénom de Dieu was the text that marked the start of her prodigious career, and yet for the narrator it is also the Nameless Book, the-Book-that-could-never-be-read, the book written by someone other than her. Now, once again, it heralds a beginning, as its discovery is the start of a journey into the past. The title, with its reference to the murderous Ourang-Outang of Edgar Allan Poeʹs The Murders in the Rue Morgue, sets the scene: this is a detective story haunted by literary ghosts. At the very heart of literature lies the fascination with the enigma, the search for something that has been lost. Cixous illustrates this as she leads her reader on a hunt for the ultimate hidden treasure, in the company of an array of venerable predecessors from Saint-Simon, Proust and Stendhal to Shackleton, Poe and Jacques Derrida. -- Publisher description.