'All the maps you have are of no use, all this work of discovery and surveying; you have to start off at random, like the first men on earth; you risk dying of hunger a few miles from the richest stores.' -- Michel Butor, Degrees
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'Michel Butor (1926 - ) came to prominence in the 1950s with his novels Passage de Milan (1954) and La Modification (1957). Like Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Simon and other writers of the new novelists, he refused to follow traditional concepts of plot and characterization. Instead of describing reality these writers have questioned our usual way of seeing reality. In L'Emploi du temps (1959, Passing Time) the protagonist, Jacques Revel, tries to find sense of the streets and buildings of a strange city, but feels that he is imprisoned within a loom. He has come to work in an English town called Bleston. He wanders disorientated along rows of houses or passes on a bus the building he left just half an hour ago. "...little by little I came to feel that my bad luck was due to some malevolent will and that all these offers were so many lies, and I had to struggle increasingly against the impression that all my efforts were foredoomed to failure, that I was going round and round a blank wall, that the doors were sham doors and the people dummies, the whole thing a hoax."
'Butor's best-known novel, La Modification, is a story inside story, told throughout in the second person plural. The narrator talks to himself during a train journey from Paris to Rome, before eventually deciding that he will not leave his wife for his mistress. Instead, he elects to write a book that will become La Modification. Again in the following books, Le génie du lieu (1958), Degrés (1960), and Répertoire I (1960) the author attempts to exercise readers' perception of the world.' -- kirjasto.sci.fi
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Michel Butor @ Britannica Online
Michel Butor's books @ Powells.com
Michel Butor interviewed by Anna Otten
About Pierre Coulibeuf's film 'Michel Butor, mobile' (2000)
Barbara Mason's 'Michel Butor: A Checklist
Re: Michel Butor @ Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald
About Elinor S. Miller's 'Prisms and Rainbows: Michel Butor's Collaborations'
Richard Kostelanetz on Michel Butor's 'Mobile in America'
'On Tuesday, October 12, 1954, Pierre Vernier, a teacher in a Paris lycée, begins setting down an account that is to be a complete record of the life lived by himself, his students, and his fellow teachers. He begins by meticulously recording what he already knows of his students, their relationships to one another, and the books they're studying. Then he's forced to enlist his nephew—who's in his class—to report on the private lives of the other boys. To record all reality, he must know all that has passed, is passing, and will pass through his pupils' minds.
'Degrees is an extraordinary novel exposing one man's obsessive project, the impossibility of its completion, and the damaging effect this obsession has on both Vernier and those who surround him.' -- Dalkey Archive
Excerpt:
I walk into the classroom, and I step up onto the platform.
When the bell stops ringing, I take out a briefcase I have just laid on the desk the alphabetical list of students and the other sheet of white paper, on which they themselves have indicated their seats in this classroom.
Then I sit down, and when all the talking has stopped, I begin to call the roll:
“Abel, Aremelli, Baron . . .”,
trying to fix their faces in my memory, for I don’t know how to recognize them yet, except the ones who were with me last year, you in particular, Pierre,
who raise your brown eyes when I come up to your name,
after “. . . Daval, de Joigny, de Loups”,
before going on to “Estier, Fage Jean-Claude, Fage Henri . . .”,
giving me a smile I don’t want to answer, because it’s obviously better if as many of your classmates as possible were unaware for as long as possible that we’re related, so that in their eyes you’re the same to me as many of them.
Your uncle Henri Jouret, on the other side of the wall behind me, is coping with his senior French students, calling the role, trying to get their seats and faces straight before going to the questions and the analysis of a page of Saint-Simon.
I have already been in this classroom with you. It was our second geography lesson.
“Zola, what can you tell me about the atmosphere?”
“Wolf, what do you know about the internal structure of this planet?”
“And now, Voss, go to the blackboard and tell me about the history of the earth and its principal geological ages.”
While he was standing there thinking up his answers, his hands behind his back, I was watching you out of one eye. The sun fell on your black hair, and on your hands with their bitten nails; your shadow spread over the book you were looking at, you spent a long time over a rather blurred photograph of the Grand Canyon that had a black spot in the middle, so heavy and irregular it looked as if you had made it yourself;
and your Uncle Henri was already on the other side of the wall behind me, with his senior French students, asking one of pupils to begin with the death of Monseigneur, Dauphin of France:
“I found all Versailles gathered there . . .”
frowning when he corrected mistakes, tapping his pencil point on the yellow wood of the desk that like my own was already pitted with little dents, the same way he corrected your mistakes last hour, after collecting your first French compositions on this ultraclassical subject:
“Describe the one day of your vacation that has left the strongest impression in your memory; try to explain why it was this day that seems most memorable.”
He questioned some of you about Rabelais’ life and works, asked for a volunteer to explain Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel, and selected you from among those who raised their hands, saying in a tone of voice he wanted to sound particularly severe, without looking at you:
“All right, Eller, show us what you know.”
You wondered if you were supposed to read the paragraph in small type, where the editor provided some information about the nature and content of the selection:
asterisk, “having become a student, Pantagruel attends the various French universities . . .”,
or else:
triangle, “Most of the chapters devoted to Pantagruel’s studies. . .”,
or else:
circle, “A more elaborate program will be found in Gargantua; here is the wit itself. . .”,
but suddenly, just as you were going to ask your question, you found yourself facing this uncle, and you stopped, disturbed, no longer sure how to address him, realizing you would have to say “Monsieur” and not be able to, blushing, looking down, rushing through your reading most wildly, pronouncing the words indistinctly, disregarding the punctuation:
“Now it is the minds of men are qualified with all manner of discipline, and the old sciences revised, which for many ages were extinct: now it is that the learned languages are to their Sistine purity restored . . .”
“Eller, please pay attention to the text; start that sentence over again.”
“Now it is that the minds of men . . .”
“That’s better.”
“Are qualified with all manner of discipline, and the old sciences revived, which for many ages were extinct: now it is that the learned languages are to their pristine purity restored . . .”
“Go on.”
“Viz., Greek, without which a man may be ashamed to fall . . .”
“To what?”
“To call himself a scholar, Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean and Latin. Printing likewise is now abused . . .”
“Careful!”
“Is now in use, so elegant, and so correct . . .”
In the classroom directly underneath, I was explaining to your seventh-grade schoolmates, in front of the map of ancient Egypt that one of them had brought in from the superintendent’s office,
that we knew the ancient civilization of this country from the monuments it had left, pyramids, hypogea, mastabas, obelisks like the one in the Place de la Concorde,
how Champollion had managed to decipher the hieroglyphics thanks to the Rosetta Stone (Rosetta was a city), now in the British Museum in London, immediately extending our history several thousand years back into time,
how the pharaoh of the first dynasty, Menes, had combined the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, of the valley and the delta, the red and the white, the vulture and the kite,
how this long series of kings and conversions was divided into three chief periods, the Old, the Middle and the New Kingdom,
before coming upstairs to meet your class here,
where I continue calling the roll:
“Jourdan? Absent too? Oh, no, there you are. Speak up! What were you dreaming about? Knorr?”
(he was absent yesterday too),
“He hasn’t come back? All right. Limours?”
“Here.”
“Mouron?”
Sitting in front of you in the first row, Limours casually arranges on his desk his spiral-bound notebook and his second hand history book, on the first page of which he carefully crosses out the former owner’s name with his ballpoint pen, in order to write his own,
he too a pupil, this year, of one of his uncles, Monsieur Bailly, who at this moment is making his seniors on the floor above read Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
(Chapman: 1559-1634):
“ . . . Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like a stout Cortez”
(Cortez, or Cortes: 1485-1547),
“when with eagle eyes
he star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
(Darien: southernmost part of the isthmus of Panama),
a first cousin of both Monsieur Mouron, father of Alain Mouron who is in this class, and of Madame Daval siting to your right, who is leaning over to ask you for a blotter, because his ink bottle, badly corked, has begun to leak all over his hands.
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