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A Conversation with Michel Butor
By Anna Otten
ANNA OTTEN: What makes you write a new book? MICHEL
BUTOR: I like to explore, everything interests me. Within each book I
explore something new, see various perspectives, consider certain
themes. Often I am reminded of something I have read or written
elsewhere. But within the framework of a certain book, the ensemble
acquires specific significance. Even when I quote another writer, the
quotation takes on a different meaning in the new context. In the final
analysis, what thought is really new? When I look back, I find in
ancient books answers to questions I have asked myself a hundred times. AO: But you give different answers. MB:
I cannot help transforming or at least modifying them. Each generation
has to find new answers. Cultures change and men change with them.
Nothing stands still. I am not the same from one moment to the next.
When Hokusai sketches his thirty-six and his ten additional views of
Mount Fuji, they all turn out to be different. Each time his point of
view changes. AO: You do not limit yourself to literature. MB:
No. I like to explore the arts as a whole and see world culture in the
form of a gigantic weaving, with a profusion of individual strands and
threads. There are spaces between them and tissue below the surface. AO:
You showed me one of your work sheets on which you had divided the page
into columns and sections by drawing lines that look like threads to
separate them. It looked like a grid or weaving. MB: Yes. In
print, I have different columns, typography or various colors of ink. I
plan how much space will be allotted to each section of the text.
Organization provides a certain rhythm, particularly in my plays
written for the radio. Various speakers convey verbal and tonal
elements that shape the play as a whole. AO: I felt that I had
listened to a play and, simultaneously, a piece of music, with
melodies, point, counterpoint, repetitions, harmonies, dissonances,
silences . . . MB: Silences are a powerful presence or
absence. They are a musical phenomenon and may cut or prolong the
impact of an actor’s recitation. In some plays, the sonorous quality of
language is so important that they can be seen as texts and musical
scores. AO: I also remember your "Faust." MB: Oh, yes, the "Faust." I wrote the libretto and Henri Pousseur the music. It is a collaboration. AO:
I noticed a great deal of verbal and musical interlacing of individual
components, almost too intricate. They are so intertwined that they
develop a chemistry of their own. References to other writers—Goethe,
Marlowe—are also interspersed. MB: I like to collaborate and
often quote many other writers—Mallarme, Chateaubriand. When I quote
someone in my books, it is a form of collaboration since the citation,
placed in a new context, becomes an integral part of my text. I use
language I have learned, and the musician uses notes that existed
before him. AO: You have written many essays on musicians. MB:
Yes, music interests me. I often improvise within certain textual
cells; this is akin to musical composition—jazz, for example. AO: You are interested in jazz? MB: But yes, but yes! Why are you so surprised? AO: You are a serious writer! MB:
One can be a serious writer, love jazz and write about it. Consider a
jam session. Individuals get together to contribute to the future of
performance. The band leader selects soloists he knows. He must
foresee. The writer must also anticipate how his components can form a
coherent whole. AO: You could say the same thing about painting. MB:
Painting is also a process toward organized composition, like music. It
is a matter of imaging a structure within which colors and shapes can
form an artistic whole. Writing, music and painting are three faces of
the same enterprise: formation of new tissue. Of course, there are many
other contributors to the cultural fabric, among them sculpture and
architecture. All artists work within this fabric to change it. There
simply is no truly individual work. The immense cultural weaving exists
at our birth and nourishes us. We become part of it, others follow us.
All works are collective! AP: Michel Butor, you have partially
answered my questions by your view of the writer as contributor to the
cultural heritage of humanity, his reinterpretation of inherited wisdom
for his time and the future. He has to look backward and forward at the
same time, like Janus. This is how you see Michel Butor, the writer. Is
there not another perspective, namely, Michel the man and his personal
modification through writing? MB: I find it hard to separate the two. AO:
There are rapid reflections, constant movements and a great array of
personifications as well as many versions of your events; your point of
view changes, which means, you change. Just as Hokusai does in his
different views of sacred Fuji. Beckett’s statement that the observer
infects the observed with his own mobility certainly applies to you.
Did you not say at the colloquium at Royaumont that you "write to
obtain unity in your life" and that writing is for you "a spinal cord"? MB:
It is extremely important for my personal growth. I want to capture in
writing the most important things that I see, hear, read, and think. AO:
You have said that for the writer nothing is lost. It seems to me as if
you look around and record your perceptions of the world and by doing
this, you find out what you are at a given moment. What else can you
do, if you want to know who you are? The mind cannot look at itself,
you cannot see your self think, except in writing. I recall that the
questions "Who are you?" and "Where are you going?" come up in "La
Modification." MB: I cannot answer those questions, but I find
what I thought when I look at what I have written. I know why I write:
I have an indomitable urge, as if a voice dictated to me and then the
text engenders itself. I should like to know the center . . . the
voice. It may be God’s AO: You record its reflection. There
must be stillness at the center out of which "the voice" rises, as it
keeps exploring the periphery. MB: It is a succession of voices, just as we are a succession of individuals. AO:
Perhaps it is consciousness. But you work with, and in, language, and
form is of primary importance to you. You follow strict rules of
composition when you write. MB: They are the rules of musical and geometrical structures. AO:
And architecture. Words are for you building blocks. You construct
strings of connotations, place words into unexpected context or insert
incompatible comparisons. They become weapons to attack cherished
middle-class semantic, artistic, social and political beliefs. MB:
Those beliefs are sclerotized and must be changed. I look at words
closely and discover hidden meanings. I do not pretend that words are
univocal; it is much more complicated than that. Some words are charged
with problems and ambiguities. Rather than imitate acquired forms, I
seek personal exploration of contemporary reality and not that of
yesteryear. AO: A renaissance? MB: Yes, a kind of
renaissance, not a spiritual movement that is born, grows, and dies,
not a closed circle. You call it circle in space and cycle in time. I
aim to open the circle and continue the cycle to have a helix or a
spiral. AO: That means this renaissance has to be continuous. MB:
To cling to traditional ways was an illusion people had. That is no
longer possible. The idea of doing is important. And to write is action
par excellence. Some things have to be finished, the work
itself has to expand. The writer is a tenuous beginning, we cannot even
say a beginning—an articulation. He is situated midway between the
older and the newer reality. When he publishes his work and people read
and respond, he helps to shape the future that will in turn become a
past. When the writer dies, his work will survive. An
efficient work of literature will close some bad periods, but that
closing is not permanent. Even during unproductive cultural epochs,
something can be redeemed. We have never closed the Dark Ages. Our own
age is still dark and we hear voices rising out of it. We have to
change our past in order to change our future. We must turn back and
throw light on it to see it in a new way. What we need is archeology
around and in ourselves. There is a strong link between
inspiration and childhood. When Proust wanted to experience a new
childhood and become a writer, he had to go back to his first
childhood. Things forgotten wait in the library of your mind. It is a
question of having to look back ward and yet not go backward at the
same time. To free Euridyce from Hades, Orpheus was forbidden to look
back at her and when he did, he lost her. Almost the same legend can be
found in the Bible. It is the story of Lot’s wife, who, when fleeing
Sodom, looked back and was transformed into a pillar of salt. We have
to be able to look forward, but to bring back Euridyce you have to go
back to Hades. It was a very powerful memory, which was at the origin
of the journey to hell. We always have to descend into hell in order to
got out of it. It’s also an open cycle. AO: We have to get to
know the past without regressing into it. If we were tempted to go back
and stay, mental growth would be impossible. We would freeze in time
and space. You firmly believe in eternal movement in life and
literature? MB: Yes, yes. I believe that one’s work is never finished. AO: Nothing is finished that could not be formed differently. That, by the way, is what I learned at my alma mater. MB:
The university is not always an alma mater, but can be a tyrannical, a
castrating mother. It is necessary to change that mother, reveal what
she is and change her. AO: Evidently she represents two poles of motherhood, death-bearing Kali and birth-giving Parvati. MB:
You can also speak of the spiral of spirals. In the bildungsroman you
have one spiral and all events around one evolving character. This is
the case for some of my books, for instance "L’Emploi du temps," "La
Modification" and even "Degres." In "Degres" the central character is
broken down into articulations of characters since all takes place
inside the secondary educational system in Paris. My German
book, "Portrait de l’artiste en juene singe," is also an educational
novel. It is full of references to German writers of the eighteenth and
the beginning of the nineteenth century. But in most of my other books,
you have a multiplicity of characters. There certainly is "Bildung" in
many senses of the word in all of my works. There is education and
pedagogy, a way to teach; but even more, there is a way to learn, and
it is a way to form something: the reader, the writer, words give form
to reality. So, certainly, you can draw a comparison to the German
bildungsroman. AO: I can also see biographical elements in your books. MB:
In the last years, biographical elements have become more and more
evident in my writing. At the beginning, when I wrote my first novels,
I wanted to have characters as different as possible from myself.
Nevertheless, I see in my first books similarities between characters
and myself. It was important for me to have mirror structures, "mise en
abyme" and the like. After some time the name of Michel Butor appears
in my text and it becomes in some way autobiographical. But I have
never written a continuous autobiography and I do not think that I ever
will. But there are more and more autobiographical moments. The
first book where this is evident is the first "Genie du lieu." It was a
book about places, and it was not possible for me to speak about places
without speaking about myself and giving indications of the point of
view. How can one speak about the situation without saying anything
about the person who looks at it? After that work, you very often have
autobiographical references. At some point my family came into
my writing; I needed to speak about my four daughters. I think that
this period is finished now, but I am not sure. At any rate,
in "Boomerang" I mentioned my whole family, my daughters and my wife.
It is interesting to see how the consciousness changes and how
biographical elements intervene. This is related to biography itself.
Perhaps one of these days I shall write something for my grandchildren.
Maybe the time will come; so far it has not. Marie Jo plays a
very important role in "Boomerang" and so do the four daughters. In my
writing, they have always appeared together. My daughters had already
erupted into my writing when they were five years old. That’s strange. AO: You placed them in all sorts of geographical regions, surely because they were part of whatever you were doing. MB:
Yes. In all three volumes of "Genie du lieu" autobiographical elements
are present. I wanted to be as faithfully autobiographical as possible.
I tried to give the historical elements, not to tell any lie, and avoid
errors. In "Portrait de l’artiste," the first part is as faithful to my
autobiography as I could be, but the second part contains inventions
and transformations. Some day historians will demonstrate that I made
mistakes, but that day has not come so far. AO: What about "Matiere de reves"? MB: That is different. I dream about dreams. AO: We already know that you are multiple and have many identities. What are your two main strands? Author/critic? MB:
I don’t know. There can, of course, be Michel Butor judge of Michel. In
these last years I have given seminars and lectures about my work. It
is difficult to do. I had to reread some of my books that I had
forgotten. When I write something new, I have to push back the old one,
erase the blackboard to make something different. Some critics or
translators begin to know some of my books much better than I. I reread
some works, not to judge them but to comment on what I have done, and
so do for myself what I have done for other writers. And I prefer to
comment on other writers, but I am sufficiently different from my
earlier work so that I can speak about my own work from time to time. In
my own work, I try to give explanations, theories, and criticism. I
know when I write about other writers, I also reveal myself; when I
discover other, I also discover myself. It is not so different, it is a
matter of degree. AO: If you had to create a work of art that
would symbolize your creation, in which art would it be? A musical
composition or a painting? Or would you rather be an architect than a
painter? MB: I should like to be everything: musician,
painter, horseback rider, pilot . . . and writing is a way to be
several people at the same time. I don’t like the word
"creation." The word means to create something of 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"! When I was young, I hesitated between music and painting, so I chose literature. No! I did not choose. I was "chosen." AO: Is it not a free choice? MB: Oh, no, it is not free at all. AO: Let me congratulate you. You are the happiest prisoner I have ever seen. |
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