Degrees of Play in Butor’s Degrés

Degrees of Play in Butor’s Degrés T. Jefferson Kline S INCE ITS PUBLICATION thirty years ago, Michel Butor’s Degrés has been read primarily as a construction of networks, systems and quotations intended, as the narrator says, to “ make reality enter language.” This “ univers cité” as Jacques Leenhardt calls it,1including 135 allusions to 35 different texts as well as references to 86 works of art, would thus be constructed to allow (despite its dislocations and discontinuities) a cosmology of the knowledge at play in a typical French lycée. Yet despite the remarkable reconstructions of this mass of systems of information by such readers as Mary Lydon,2these fragments function less and less historiographically but appear increasingly to be compulsively repeated obsessional elements. Indeed, Pierre Vernier’s project is soon beset (and ultimately over­ whelmed) by a series of conflicts, first among them the very problematics of representation itself, for, as he says, “ il est impossible de représenter la terre avec précision sans la déformer, de même qu’il est impossible de faire passer la réalité dans le discours sans employer un certain type de projection.” 3 In this admission of “ un certain type de projection” Vernier suggests an unconscious con-textualization of desire, voyeurism and control at the heart of his purpose.4 Seized with panic by the increasingly uncon­ trollable play of écriture, Vernier admits that, “ Au milieu de ces quel­ ques points bien solides, s’introduit immédiatement un élément d’irrémédiable incertitude qu’il n’est possible d’atténuer qu’en multipliant les références” (D 55). Vernier’s “ irrémédiable incertitude” is staved off by the myriad of systems of information in the text, and might be entirely submerged beneath these systems were it not for a purely marginal element, the jeu de Kim: Dans le local de la patrouille des bisons. . . tu t’exerçais avec tes camarades au jeu de Kim: sur un foulard violet avec deux bandes rouges tout autour, tu avais disposé vingt objets différents.. . . Tout cela recouvert par un autre foulard au moment où tu as ouvert la porte pour permettre d’entrer à tes six camarades qui attendaient silencieusement dans le cor­ ridor, qui ont eu droit de considérer cette collection pendant trois minutes, montre en main, puis, les objets à nouveau cachés, ayant sorti chacun de leur poche un petit carnet, et un crayon ou stylo à bille, se sont efforcés d ’en dresser la liste. (D 59) 32 W in t e r 1991 K lin e In the light of the work of Huizinga and Winnicott, it is unlikely that such a game should not signal “ a contestfo r something and a representa­ tion o f something.” * Indeed, the game of Kim serves as a springboard for a vertiginous play of supplementary meanings and figures that in­ creasingly undermine the narrator’s purpose. The metonymic meaning of the game derives from Pierre Eller’s doubling of the pedagogical activities of his uncle, the geography teacher. Before his “ students” Eller uncovers a system of diverse signs which the students must carefully observe, commit to memory and then represent as faithfully as possible on an “ exam.” Consistent with this metonymic aspect, the nephew reviews “ les résultats plutôt dé­ courageants” of his students, and consequently begins the “prépara­ tion des épreuves” for the next session while assessing the need to decorate the scouts’ meeting place with “ un grand plan de Paris et aussi une carte de la région parisienne” (£) 107-08). This preoccupation with lists, memorization, geography and maps (the subject of Vernier’s classes at the Lycée) thus figures a kind of displacement of the uncle by the nephew, yet is imagined by the unde himself. By means of this metonymic game the hierarchy narrator/subject has been prophetically thrown into “ disorder.” This particular function of the game of Kim an­ ticipates Pierre Vernier’s decision to have Eller replace him as narrator of the novel, a move that violates his nephew’s autonomic space for obscure but increasingly disturbing reasons and ironically ends up “ faisant basculer...