Michel Butor died in 2016 at age 89. Between 1954 and 1960 he published four novels, then abandoned the form, spending the next half-century writing in other modes. The final novel, Degrés, translated by Richard Howard as Degrees, was issued by Simon and Schuster in 1961.
"In Degrees the central character is broken down into articulations of characters since all takes place inside the secondary educational system in Paris," Butor explained in a 1985 interview. He had, in fact, taught in such schools during his novel-writing years. As Marianne Hirsch wrote in 1981, "The protagonist is diminished and displaced by an immense cultural framework. . . . The novel can be no more than the account of the failure of the individual's single vision, confronted with an overpowering setting." Butor also later claimed that, "I don't like the word "creation." The word means to create something from nothing. I am always making things from inside the world. I am "inside" the world. I am trying to be inside the world! I transform, I change, I do not "create."
from Degrees –
"You see, it's a little hard to explain; it's all still very obscure in my own mind, but I can tell you this much: if I begin (I still don't know if I'm going to begin; the more I talk about it with you, the more I feel obliged to, somehow, but I don't know, really, I don't know, it depends on . . .), anyway, if I begin, it will be Tuesday night, I'll begin with that class I want to teach about the discovery and the conquest of America, and I . . . Yes, what intrigues me, you see, what made me decide on that day is that it's my nephew's birthday, the one who's in that class, and so it's an occasion for me . . . It's too complicated; I'll tell you later how it goes, if it goes at all; but you see, I must teach the class well, it has to affect the students as an exceptional hour, and that's why I've done so much outside reading. I'll read them some passages from Marco Polo and also some pages from that essay of Montaigne's I told you about yesterday." (ellipses in original)
and he had made it very clear you were not to mention it to your parents, and above all not to mention it to your brothers; and you were the only one he had invited to dinner; maybe he would invite Denis for his birthday too, next month, but he had started with you;
and he had told you not to mention it to me, and that was why you had decided he must be telling you the truth, he really needed you, really needed you to work because of that, of being able to count on you;
and it was settled, you would learn his lessons, besides, he knew how to make things interesting and it was too bad he didn't read things to you more often, things like he read yesterday, those descriptions of China or about the conquest of America, you had almost wanted to ask him for those two books, but they were probably in old French with s's all over the place, and you already had a hard enough time now with that bastard Rabelais; maybe later on;
"I've managed to arrange the whole first part of my work by using family connections, but it isn't possible to use such a method for all the students that are left; I'm going slower and slower because of the effort demanded by the subjects my colleagues teach; few teachers, believe me, would be capable of going through the eleventh grade again; I wonder if from now on I'm not going to focus everything on my nephew Pierre, without telling him, of course."
so that a new awareness can be born in you, and so you will become able to grasp precisely this enormous mass of information in which, as in a muddy and tumultuous river, you move, ignorant, swept away,
that slides over you, wastes itself, loses itself, and contradicts itself,
that slides over us all, over all your schoolmates and all your teachers who are mutually ignorant of each other,
that slides between us and around us.
He took a sheet of paper and the various lists of textbooks for each of the classes at the lycée; the first thing was to get hold of all the textbooks his students used, and as soon as possible; he would have to buy them this morning;
Sixteenth Century French Authors, Seventeenth Century French Authors and why not Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century French Authors so he could follow my senior-year course as well,
Anthology of Latin Literature, Latin Grammar, Anthology of Greek Literature, Greek Grammar, Anthology of English Literature and the English Grammar Bailly used,
that was already ten volumes, enough for a first trip. For a second, eleventh-grade and senior Physics and Chemistry Texts, Italian, German, Spanish; it would take his whole morning, that was certain, and there would scarcely be time to prepare his own afternoon classes, what were they anyway?
Schedule: from two to three, history for the ninth grade or the eighth grade, this week, for the eighth grade:
textbook: second lesson: continuation of the Roman Empire, Justinian . . . ;
fine;
from three to four, history for the seventh grade, or geography for the eleventh grade, this week, for the eleventh grade, more serious:
textbook: third lesson: representation of the earth: longitude and latitude, projections, scale of a map, representation of relief;
fine;
he would ask them about the measurement of time, the hours, seasons, years; it would be amusing to call on you, but you'd probably be tired;
from four to five, history for seniors, thorniest:
triumph of materialism: the new economic factors, capitalism in full swing, the beginning of urban civilization;
of course all this would have to be looked into closely, but he could still rely on his experience as a teacher.
I awakened around four, and I couldn't fall back to sleep, thinking about the two of you, you and your uncle Pierre, wondering what had occurred at that dinner you had told me about, if your uncle had starting writing that book he had mentioned to us, if his invitation to you had been inspired by this project.
During 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, to imagine what I could know that you don't know, furnishing me the information which you possess and which would be out of my reach.
"No, I can't take my time, don't you see: there are thirty-one boys in this eleventh-grade class, and up to now I've only brought in seven, and brought in is all, since what I've written about them up to now doesn't constitute a portrait at all – seven students and nine teachers."
French test for the seniors: choose one:
"What are the reasons Racine says in his preface to Iphigénie that without the invention of the character of Eriphile he would never have dared write this tragedy?"
"Montesquieu makes Usbek, in the eighty-fifth Persian Letter, write: 'Since all religions contain precepts useful to society, it is good that they be zealously observed; now what is more capable of animating such zeal than multiplicity?' What do you think of this statement?"
"Imagine a performance of Antigone in ancient Greece, and describe it in a letter to one of your friends."
On Wednesday, September 14, 1955, your Uncle Pierre, in bed, was thinking about the letter he had just received from me. Yes, no doubt, it would be best to adopt this solution, staying at his sister's was no longer feasible on account of you, on account of that terrible conversation that had taken place between the two of you, about which your parents had not been able to obtain any explanations from you or from him.
On Sunday, you stayed in the Rue du Canivet, in the room that had been your Uncle Pierre's the year before and which you had now moved into because, since that obscure business which everyone preferred not to discuss with you, you had become quite nervous and obviously needed peace and quiet.
and it's been a long time since I renounced all collaboration in that work which you continue, more and more deceptively, fraudulently, to designate me in the first person, which cannot go on much longer because . . .
Uncle Henri, who certainly would from now on be much better qualified than I to be designated by the first person in the continuation of this work in which I so greatly, so dangerously participated last year, and from which I have recoiled with a horror which will only gradually disappear, so that if you want me to read you, if you want me not to be repelled by the very first pages, you will have to put the phrases in another mouth besides mine, so that they will reach me and convince me, slowly and cunningly overthrow this whole rampart I have raised, which has been raised against you, against this whole enterprise, much better qualified than I since he has shown so much interest in it, since he has begun helping you with such solicitude,
On Friday night, since Michel Daval had asked you during the afternoon to give him back the issue of Fiction the next day, you quickly read through:
Mrs. Hinck, by Miriam Allen de Ford,
One Fine Sunday in Spring, by Jacques Sternberg,
Enemy of the Fire, by Robert Abernathy,
letters from our readers,
advertisement: a new work of topical interest: Was Louis XVII Guillotined?
How Sub Rosa, a clandestine film, was made,
You are What you Know . . . exciting illustrated free booklet No. 1428 by request from the French Cultural Institute . . . (enclose two stamps to cover cost of mailing)
Your Uncle Pierre will not write any more. Your Uncle Pierre is no longer in the room I rented him on the top floor in the Rue du Pré-aux-Clercs. Your Uncle Pierre is in the hospital, and Micheline Pavin has left her job to be with him. I am writing; I am taking up where he left off; I shall shore up this ruin a little.
Your took out of your pocket a ball of paper which you flattened out; it was uniformly covered with ink; slowly you tore it into tiny fragments which you put in an empty matchbox and carried around with you for a long time before showing it to me and telling me the story.
Your Uncle Pierre will not write any more. How long will it be before you read the ruin of his book? You go into his hospital room; Micheline Pavin is sitting beside him; he opens his eyes, he recognizes you, you tell him that I'm on my way. You don't know that the book is for you and that he is dying because of it, and yet you have forgiven him. You put beside his head, as though it were an offering, the matchbox full of tiny pieces of inky paper.
*
The copy of Degrees that I recently obtained (after reading praise of it by Lydia Davis, in the present, and by Susan Sontag, in the past) was advertised by the bookseller as a novel by a "once-important French writer." The low price for a mint copy of this 60-year-old volume – which the great Richard Howard brought to his publishers and was eager enough to translate that the English edition followed the French by only one year – reflected the bookseller's evident opinion that the fiction of Michel Butor is no longer read. Yet when it appeared, Lydia Davis reports that her young self found it "enthralling." Sontag valorized Butor, among other New Wave writers, because they "reject the idea of the "novel" whose task is to to tell a story and delineate characters according to the conventions of 19th century realism, and all they abjure is summed up in the notion of "psychology."
Degrees sometimes frustrated me exactly with this absence of psychological curiosity – why must Pierre Vernier erect his toppling towers of tiny facts? and why choose to fixate on his nephew, while treating his girlfriend with indifference? Sontag would have called those the wrong questions – "Readers must be made to see," she wrote in 1963, "by a new generation of critics, who may well have to force this ungainly period of the novel down their throats by all sorts of seductive and partly fraudulent rhetoric, the necessity of this move." "Of course," she says, "one can treat the novel as the successor to the epic and the picaresque tale. But everyone knows that this inheritance is superficial. What animates the novel is something wholly missing from these older narrative forms: the discovery of psychology, the transposition of motives into "experiences." This passion for the documentation of "experience," for facts, made the novel the most open of all art forms. Every art form works with some implicit standard of what is elevated and what is vulgar – except the novel. It could accommodate any level of language, any plot, any ideas, any information. And this, of course, was its eventual undoing as a serious art form. Sooner or later discriminating readers could no longer be expected to become interested in one more leisurely "story," in half a dozen more private lives laid open for their inspection."
*
"Perhaps this explains our impotence to produce a realistic literature today: it is no longer possible to rewrite either Balzac, or Zola, or Proust, or even the bad socialist-realist novels, though their descriptions are based on a social division which still applies. Realism is always timid, and there is too much surprise in a world which mass media and the generalization of politics have made so profuse that it is no longer possible to figure it projectively: the world, as literary object, escapes; knowledge deserts literature . . ."
– from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (Hill & Wang, 1977)