A Tribute to Michel Butor
Michel Butor passed away on Wednesday 24 August, aged 89. The Book Office would like to pay tribute to one of the great writers of post-war French literature, a relentless explorer of countries and of forms of art, and a profoundly influential author.
As a young man studying at the Sorbonne, Butor was apparently intent on pursuing a teaching career in philosophy. However, he did not do well enough in the agrégation, the prestigious and fiercely competitive French civil service examination for would-be teachers in secondary or higher education. Nevertheless, he began a career as a philosophy or foreign languages (and later in his life literature) professor abroad, notably in Egypt, in the United States, and in Geneva. This lifelong passion for teaching, in fact, was something to which Butor was very attached; it was also, in fact, part of what distinguished him from the other celebrated French writers of his time.
Michel Butor first started to publish novels in the 1950s, and it is on this specific period that much of his popular recognition rests. These three novels (Passage de Milan, L’Emploi du Temps, La Modification) were all published at the Editions de Minuit, which at that time were emerging as the publisher for the leading figures of the Nouveau Roman movement : Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon… It was La Modification, especially, that threw Butor into the spotlight, having won him the Prix Renaudot. In it the writer follows the 21-hour train journey of a man travelling from Paris to Rome, in order to announce to his mistress that he is ready to live his wife and family in order to live with her. What made La Modification an instant classic was how masterfully Butor “told the story”: the narration is entirely written in the 2nd person plural (the French “vous”), forcing the reader to confront the voyage from the protagonist’s point of view.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute.
La Modification was the kind of commercial and critical success that writers dream of. Butor achieved widespread recognition as the man whose innovative use of the vouvoiement in narration would influence many other writers. Yet if one looks at the entirety of his literary career, the label “Nouveau Roman novelist” or “writer of the école du regard” quickly reveals itself to be of limited use. The Michel Butor of the 1950s produced works which justify grouping him with the rest of the Editions de Minuit avant-garde. However, what Michel Butor wrote during that decade was quite unlike what he would later publish: Degrés (1960) was to be his last novel. His biographical note in Jérôme Garcin’s Dictionnaire des écrivains, which Butor wrote himself, states that “these texts do not seem to be his any more than those of others he studies in his classes”.
And so it was that, despite being best known as a groundbreaking novelist, Michel Butor abandoned the conventional novel after just a decade. Poetry, unlike his erstwhile école du regard fellows, became one of his main forms of literary expression. Amongst his many poetic works stand out a series of five weighty volumes, the Illustrations, which And by no means did he neglect the study of literature: aside from teaching at Nice then Genève he proved himself to be passionate about his field, the study of literature. His in-depth analyses of Flaubert, Balzac, and Rimbaud were published in the Improvisations series. The Répertoires were critical studies, which had often first been attempted in the form of conferences.
Butor was a man who always felt an urgent need to travel; movement was a constant fixture of his life, whether it was part of his academic career or, more often, a result of his insatiable curiosity and desire to open himself up to the new and the unknown. Travelling can not be dissociated from his literary output: it was his trip to Egypt that pushed him to become a novelist, and it was a trip to the United States (and especially New York, whose discovery he says was for a French intellectual the 1960s equivalent of a sixteenth-century voyage to Rome) that made him forgo made him forgo the Nouveau Roman. In the New World, Butor was confronted with an environment quite unlike his native Europe, one that countless other writers had tried to describe in ways which felt unsatisfactory to him. So he produced Mobile, a book that is difficult to classify - perhaps one could say it is a typographical poem, recounting his adventures in America. There were also five Génie du lieu texts, “voyaging autobiographies or geographical meditations”. In fact many of Butor’s works were part of series of five books, for he was constantly demanding of himself that he change the form of his writing, which required him to rethink his approach.
Mobile, and Gyroscope (from the Génie du lieu series)
He also directly translated open-mindedness and curiosity in regards to art in the form of publications. The Illustrations series of poems have already been mentioned; there were also studies of many different painters like Giacometti, Mondrian, Rothko, Delacroix, Rembrandt… He worked closely with artist and critic Michel Sicard on a series of conversations and essays on Pierre Alechinsky. In a more concrete form, his constant engagement with the visual arts resulted in a catalogue of all his artists’ books numbering more than 1,500 different titles, many of them only published in several copies. Dialogues with other writers and academics and the unusually high (for a writer) number of published interviews showed a profound love of conversation.
Michel Butor first made a name himself as part of a coterie of trailblazing novelists. None could have resented him for continuing to write novels, especially since he had shown such talent for it. He was, however, a man of limitless curiosity - and ambition. The literature professor and great traveller was never content with what he had achieved, for there were so many more beautiful places, texts, and paintings on which he wanted to put words. Out of his restless mind grew a body of work that is rich and proteiform, and which defies comparisons. Despite winning the Grand Prix de l’Académie Française in 2013, the appreciation of his fellow writers never translated into the flamboyant sort of public recognition some of them enjoyed. Little did it matter to him, however; on his travels and his artistic voyages, or comfortably nestled in the Swiss Alps, Michel Butor found so much to gaze at in wonder. To his readers, he bequeathed a poetics of exploration.
