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Michel Marie François Butor (1926-) | |
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French novelist and essayist, leading figures among representatives of nouveau roman, with such names as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, and Nathalie Sarraute. Butor has also published books about dreams, several collections of poetry, and works on art, culture, and many other topics. "(...) pourtant dans ce livre, puisque c'est un roman puisque vous ne l'avez pas pris tout à fait au hasard, qu'il n'est pas absolument n'importe lequel parmi tous les livres qui se publient mais qu'il appertient, par la situation même qu'il occupait dans l'etalage de cette bibliothèque de gare, à une certaine catégorie, par son titre, par le nom de son auteur que vous avez oubliés indifférents mais qui, au moment de l'achat, vous rappelaient quelque chose (...)" (from La Modification, 1957) Michel Butor was born in Monsen-Baroeul, Nord. He studied at the Collège Saint-François-de-Sales, Evreux, and Lycée Louis-Le-Grand. In 1945 he entered the Sorbonne, receiving a diploma in philosophy in 1947. He was a teacher at lycées in Sens, El Minya, Egypt (1950-51), at the Universitry of Manchester, (1951-53), Salonika (1954-55), and Geneva (1956-57). He has also been a visiting professor of French at several American Universities and colleges. From 1958 he worked as an advisory editor in Gallimard publishers. In 1975 he was appointed "professor extraordinaire" at the University of Geneva, retiring in 1991. Butor 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. In his essays Butor has explored the inter-textual relationship between other artistic systems like music, painting, and literary discourse. Butor rejects historical and biographical factors as determinants for the novel. In his Essais sur 'Les Essais' (1968), a study on Montaigne, Butor draws parallels between literature and visual arts. As he points out, the architecture of Montaigne's essays corresponds to the composition of mannerist or baroque painting, stressing grotesque heterogeneity. In Passing Time (1959) Butor made an excursion into the word of mysteries, stating that "any detective story is constructed on two murders of which the first, committed by the criminal, is only the occasion of the second, in which he is the victim of the pure, unpunishable murderer, the detective, who kills him, not only by one of those despicable means he was himself reduced to using, poison, the knife, a silent shot or twist of a silk stocking, but by the explosion of truth." From 1964 Butor has published an ongoing 'journal intime', Illustrations. His literary Awards include Fénéon Prize (1956), Renaudot Prize (1957), Grand Prix de la Littéraire (1960), Grand Prix de romantisme Chateaubriand (1998), Prix Mallarmé (2006), and Grand Prix des Poètes (2007). He has also been active as a literary critic, producing a psychological study of the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Votre Faust (1962) was an opera written in collaboration with the Belgian composer Henri Pausser. The opera placed the audience within the context of the legend by making them participate in the action. In the 1970s Butor wrote a series of ironic pseudo-dreams entitled Matière de rêves (1975), Second sous-sol (1976), Troisième dessous (1977), Quadruple fond (1980).
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