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Did not finish the book lost interest
The Prehistory of Constrained WritingReading Muchel Butor's "Degrees" (1960, English by Richard Howard, 1961) after reading surrealism and Oulipo -- two movements that came before and after Butor -- is a disorienting experience. (Oulipo was started the year this book was published, but Butor was not a member.) The book is pervaded with self-awareness: the narrator sets out to chronicle what is taught in every classroom of a Lycee, and the grammar, prosody, and structure of the novel follow his s...
There are three points I want to make regarding this reading. I know that there is now a wave of interest in Butor's work, sadly neglected as it is. But one reason readers are flocking to his texts is for the three reasons I provide, so consider this an "explanation" of his rising popularity. 1. "I walk into the classroom, and I step onto the platform." Who has not experienced either sitting in class or running a class? Millions of people around the world are very familiar with the structure of
Mind-blowing. Michel Butor is God.
A fragment of consciousness and a future music indeed... beneath the surface of Pierre Vernier's chronicle (the prose positively luminescent in Richard Howard's translation) be prepared to find a devastated ethics. (Or: the remains of the terrible sacrifice upon which all civilzation is erected.) The most emotionally appealing of all the nouveau roman I've yet read, and also the most surreptitiously "deconstructive." Of course Butor had to give up novels after writing this one: if novels were re...
II drew up this schedule, this regimen, on Wednesday October 13, and I have kept to it since then without too many infractions; I don’t know if I will be able to do so for much longer; there’s no need to tell you that it is a terrible, oppressive burden. [88]IIDuring the evening, you began writing that text I am continuing, or more precisely that you are continuing by using me, for actually it’s not I who is writing but you, you are speaking through me, trying to see things from my point of view...
Probably, I am not the reader that Butor merits or desires. While I am confident that this book has much to offer, it failed to incite me to look for those things. I have read a number of books in which one could not readily understand where one was at a given moment, what exactly was happening and when, and there was always some magic coherence, some glue in the text that would hold me on page. With "Degrés", I just kept reading the ads that were pasted on the fence, never attempting to peek ov...
