Emploi du temps, L'. Novel by Butor, published 1956. Presented as the diary of Jacques Revel, a young Frenchman spending a year in ‘Bleston’, an industrial city in the north of England inspired by Manchester, where the young Butor had spent two years, the novel charts his struggle to survive in an alienating environment. Realizing that the blind rage Bleston provokes in him is merely self-destructive, he turns instead to writing as a means of exploring, articulating, and hence mastering the city's malign powers. An increasingly complex contrapuntal system of time sequences develops as he goes over different sections of the past year, juxtaposing them in different patterns, while the present simultanously evolves as he writes. Understanding the past means sacrificing the present: he becomes so absorbed in the diary that he loses two potential fiancées. His representation of Bleston incorporates the city's own cultural signs, notably a cathedral window depicting Cain, a series of medieval tapestries illustrating Greek myths, and a detective story set in the town. He identifies with the Old Testament fratricide, Theseus confronting the Minotaur, and the detective seeking the truth. But he discovers the necessity of going beyond pre-existing representations which, though helpful, are inevitably distorted and incomplete: making sense of reality is an open-ended, constantly unfinished process, and his diary, too, will be unable to fill in all the gaps.
[Celia Britton]
