Michel Butor: rencontre avec Roger-Michel Allemand (review)

Michel Butor has always been a generous interviewee and this is the most recent of several book-length collections of interviews, the first dating back to 1967 when he was a mere forty-one years old. Now that he’s eighty-three and sports a beard that gives him an air of a benign and sometimes slightly quizzical Victor Hugo, he is overseeing the publication of his complete works, whose eighth volume has recently appeared. The fourteenth and final volume is anticipated for 2011 and will include the 1967 interviews with Georges Charbonnier. Butor is a hugely prolific writer whose work, as Sartre shrewdly noted, was ‘une tentative préméditée, parfaitement insensée [. . .] pour s’emparer de tout’ (quoted on p. 218). On the face of it, then, this is the moment to take stock of the results of this impossible project, and in the person of Roger-Michel Allemand, Butor is fortunate to have an interlocutor with an impressively thorough knowledge of his work. Butor obligingly describes his beginnings (his Catholic childhood, his mother’s deafness, his father’s sketching habits), his travels, and his relations with a number of writers, from Breton and Sartre (whose encouragement he records with gratitude), Bachelard (his teacher), and Barthes (whom he replaced for a year in a teaching post in the mid-1950s), to Lyotard and Roger Laporte —all this well before the nouveau roman. The interviews cumulatively provide a sense of the aims of Butor’s writing, described at one point as emerging from a desire to create ‘fraternité’ (p. 175), and at another as being dependent on others for its existence, as well as offering a response to ‘des espèces de signes qui m’appellent dans le tissu historique’ (p. 188). From this it emerges that the writing, inserted into an almost infinite network of connections and associations, is itself a vast commentary on the signs and sights that solicit the writer’s attention, and this makes the interviews as much a continuation of Butor’s work as they are a comment on it. Commentary and connection are endless, and it is no wonder that the complete works run to fourteen volumes, with a possible fifteenth that would include these very interviews with Allemand. Sartre’s remark about Butor appears in a selection from the critical literature that forms part of the very complete apparatus contained in this book. In addition to biographical notes and a full bibliography (excluding only the livres d’artiste), the text of the interviews alternates with brief extracts from many of Butor’s works that are relevant to the topics being discussed. They have been well chosen and include a number of inédits. Although Butor’s involvement with the plastic arts does not feature much, the margins of almost every other page are filled with photos and illustrations that amplify the topics under discussion. Technology has evolved since 1967 in ways that make possible such a fulsome graphic accompaniment to the text, but, being mostly of postage-stamp size, the pictures are often hard to decipher. It’s a shame, too, that the print in this otherwise very handsome book is a little too faint to read with comfort.