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Reviewed by:
  • Michel Butor: rencontre avec Roger-Michel Allemand
  • Ben Stoltzfus
Roger-Michel Allemand, Michel Butor: rencontre avec Roger-Michel Allemand. Paris: Argol, 2009, 240 pp.

This book is an extended series of interviews with Michel Butor by Roger-Michel Allemand, a professor and nouveau roman scholar. The two men spent time together in Lucinges, a small town near Geneva, Switzerland, which is Butor’s home. The format of the book is an ingenious arrangement of questions and answers on one page, with excerpts from Butor’s works on the adjoining page—excerpts that correspond to the topics that the two men are exploring. A discussion of James Joyce on page 57 will elicit a quotation from Répertoire I on page 56 concerning Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. In the right-hand margin there is a picture of Joyce on the cover of the French translation of Ulysses. A discussion of Butor’s La Modification and L’Emploi du temps features quotations from both novels on adjoining pages, with corresponding photographs of the books’ covers. A discussion of nouveau roman authors generates photographs of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute as a very young girl on the cover of her book, L’Enfance, Claude Simon, and Claude Ollier, and, appropriately, a photograph of the cover of Allemand’s book, Le Nouveau roman.

Questions about Butor’s life elicit not only answers about his boyhood, family, siblings, education, travels, and career, but also quotations from his books about [End Page 198] these events in his life. There are photographs of people, Lucinges, Butor’s house, his office, the countryside, the church, and his dogs—dogs that echo Dylan Thomas’ Portrait de l’artiste en jeune chien (book and photo of both), and Butor’s own book, Portrait de l’artiste en jeune singe, not to mention Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A lovely poem to Butor’s mother, “Une rose pour ma mère,” accompanies these pages and illustrations (28). Poetry is featured in this book because, for Butor, the creative process feeds on “la réconciliation de la philosophie et de la poésie qui s’accomplit à l’intérieur du roman” (128). This quotation from “Intervention à Royaumont” (“Répertoire I,” Oeuvres complètes II 255) accompanies a discussion of the topic. Although Butor failed his exams for the Agrégation, his grounding in philosophy was extensive, and his success as a novelist and essayist melds both poetry and philosophy into a writing career that parallels his teaching career and his extensive travels. In terms of travel, his book, Génie du lieu, is perhaps the first exploratory essay of “critical geography” as a topic, a work that is both criticism and art, and which, according to Butor, is worthy of serious attention by literary critics (101).

A discussion of the role of the artist in society is accompanied by a one-page quotation from “Vanité au miroir,” a “livre d’artiste” that Butor composed in collaboration with Didier Grasiewics, and it is an essay on death, vanity, and art. The word “crane” (skull) in the quotation (repeated several times) echoes a photograph of Butor on the adjacent page by Maxime Godard. Butor’s bald head—his cranium—reflects the light prominently, thus calling attention to the text. They both reflect each other in a specular exchange. The questions, answers, quotations, and sidebar illustrations generate a “mise-en-abîme” mosaic whose quadruple effects resonate throughout the text. This four-dimensional strategy amplifies the discussion of writers, artists, musicians, and literary movements from Homer to the present, thereby highlighting not only Butor’s erudition, but Allemand’s as well, because Allemand is the person asking the questions. Theirs is a symbiotic relationship that contributes enormously to the pleasure of the text.

Butor’s collaboration with painters and musicians generates visual texts and an occasional score by Henri Pousseur for the Petit mausolée volant (108), with, of course, Pousseur’s photo on the adjacent page. This emphasis on music stresses Butor’s desire to write for the ear (“j’écris pour l’oreille” 109) as well as for the eye. In “L’espace du roman...

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