A short life of the author
Michel Butor (1926–2016) was one of the key figures of the nouveau roman — the French experimental novel movement of the 1950s and 1960s that, alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon, sought to reinvent fiction by stripping away the conventions of plot, character, and psychological realism. Butor’s contribution was distinctive: his experiments were warmer, more readable, and more philosophically engaged than those of his peers, and his masterpiece La Modification (1957) remains one of the few nouveau roman novels that general readers can not only finish but enjoy.
Life and Career
Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul in northern France and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He taught French literature at universities in Egypt, England, Greece, Switzerland, and the United States — his cosmopolitan career giving him a global perspective rare among his contemporaries.
His first novel, Passage de Milan (1954), was a formally conventional account of an evening in a Parisian apartment building, told from multiple perspectives. L’Emploi du temps (Passing Time, 1956) was more ambitious — a fractured, time-shifting account of a Frenchman’s year in a fictional English city (based on Manchester), in which the narrator attempts to reconstruct his experience through writing and discovers that the act of writing deforms memory.
La Modification (A Change of Heart or Second Thoughts, 1957) was his breakthrough and his most famous novel. Written entirely in the second person (“you”), it describes a train journey from Paris to Rome. The protagonist (addressed as “vous”) is traveling to meet his mistress, intending to leave his wife, but over the course of the journey his resolve shifts. The novel is a meditation on the relationship between physical travel and psychological transformation, and its second-person narration — unprecedented at the time — creates an uncanny intimacy between reader and character. It won the Prix Renaudot.
After the Novel
Degrés (Degrees, 1960) was Butor’s last conventional novel — a densely layered account of a single hour in a Paris lycée, told from three perspectives, which collapses under the weight of its own ambition (deliberately, as some critics argue). After Degrés, Butor abandoned the novel entirely. He spent the remaining fifty-six years of his life producing an enormous, increasingly unclassifiable body of work: Mobile (1962), a textual collage of the United States; 6 810 000 litres d’eau par seconde (1965), a verbal rendering of Niagara Falls; artist’s books; collaborative works with painters; poetry; and critical essays. He published over 1,500 works.
His critical writing — particularly Répertoire (5 volumes, 1960–1982), containing essays on Balzac, Baudelaire, Proust, and Joyce — is among the finest literary criticism of the twentieth century.
Key Works
- La Modification (1957)
- Passing Time (1956)
- Mobile (1962)
- Degrees (1960)
Collecting Butor
La Modification first edition (Editions de Minuit, 1957) is the key collectible — fine copies bring $100–$400. Editions de Minuit first editions of all four novels are sought by collectors of the nouveau roman. English translations — Faber (UK), Simon & Schuster (US) — are less collected but accessible. Mobile (Gallimard, 1962) is interesting for its unusual page design. Butor’s later artist’s books and collaborations — produced in very small editions — are collected by bibliophiles and art collectors. Signed copies exist from his long public career. The nouveau roman as a movement has a dedicated but small collector base, making prices relatively stable.