Michel Butor
Butor, Michel (b. 1926). French writer. His novels L' Emploi du temps and La Modification gave him a prominent position in the Parisian literary avantgrade of the 1950s and 1960s, and are still his bestknown works. But the novels—these two plus Passage de Milan (1954) and Degrés (1960)—constitute only a small fraction of his output. From Mobile in 1962 onwards, this extremely well-read, much-travelled and prolific writer has produced a series of texts which are not conventional fiction or conventional criticism or conventional travel writing but contain elements of all three.
Throughout the 1960s he was part of the politically committed Parisian intelligentsia, protesting against the Algerian War and participating in the events of May 1968. Since 1970 he has combined writing with university teaching, first at Nice, later at Geneva. He is one of the most intellectually sophisticated writers of the post-war period; his background in philosophy, especially the work of Hegel and Sartre, sets him apart from the other writers of the Nouveau Roman with whom he was initially associated. Like them, he saw the novel as a domain of structural experiment; unlike them, he insisted that its purpose was to enlarge the reader's understanding of social and historical reality.
Répertoire I (1960) contains the articles which first formulate his theory of the novel as a narrative which articulates our everyday reality, not via any authorial message but through its overall structure, which he sees as ‘a way of forcing the real to reveal itself’. It therefore has to be very carefully worked out in advance—but will inevitably be modified once the actual writing is under way. These same concerns are carried through to his later work, albeit in an increasingly fluid, fragmented, collage-like form; all Butor's texts are characterized by the methodical precision and subtlety of their construction, and the preliminary ‘schemas’ he describes are often intimidatingly complicated.
The structure of the text reflects, amplifies, and hence elucidates the largely unconscious cultural structures in which our existence is grounded. A central emphasis here is the relation between individual self-consciousness and collective historical situation: we cannot spontaneously discard our ideological matrix, but can liberate ourselves through a slow, painful process of conscious reappraisal of our historical and cultural determinants. Butor sees history as a series of collective representations of reality; the individual writer, therefore, is working not on raw objective reality, but on (and in) a preexisting complex of representations which he or she partially transforms through the ‘illumination’ of blind spots that had hitherto been repressed. Each new text situates itself inter-textually, modifying an existing literary corpus and leaving itself open to future modification. Cultural monuments, too, are represented not as fixed absolutes but as enmeshed in a historical and spatial ‘polyphony’—the Description de San Marco (1963) or the ‘liquid monument’ of Niagara Falls in 6, 810, 000 litres d'eau par seconde (1965).
He has an acute sense of cultural difference. For Butor, a product of European Catholic society, encounters with America, Egypt, Australia, and the Far East are a fascinating revelation of otherness. His evocations of foreign places, many of which appear in the four volumes of Le Génie du lieu (1958, 1971, 1978, 1988), challenge European notions of colonial dominance and embody in their own ‘stereophonic’ form the decentred heterogeneity of cultural reality. This, however, is just one of the series of volumes which Butor has produced. The five volumes of Répertoire are devoted to critical writings, as is a newer series based on his classes at Geneva: Improvisations sur Flaubert (1984), Improvisations sur Henri Michaux (1985), Improvisations sur Rimbaud (1989). In addition, he has written separately on Montaigne (Essais sur les Essais, 1968), Baudelaire (Histoire extraordinaire, 1969), and Fourier (La Rose des vents, 1970), among others. Illustrations (I, 1964; II, 1969; III, 1973; IV, 1976) form another sequence written in response to paintings, etchings, photographs, etc.
But perhaps the most productive and original series from the mid-1970s onwards is that of the five volumes of Matière de rêves (1975, 1976, 1977, 1981, 1985); these ‘dream narratives’ are not records of actual dreams, but texts which develop according to a non-realist, dream-like logic characterized by loss of identity, metamorphoses, polymorphous sexuality, and the fragmentary incorporation of paintings, music, and literature. Butor's later texts—too numerous to list exhuastively—are not widely read, but they confirm his position as one of the most rigorous and original writers of his period.
— Celia Britton
Bibliography
- J. Roudaut, Michel Butor ou le Livre futur (1964)
- A. Helbo, Michel Butor: vers une littérature du signe (1975)
