Michel Butor
- In full:
- Michel-Marie-François Butor
- Born:
- September 14, 1926, Mons-en-Baroeul, France
- Died:
- August 24, 2016, Contamine-sur-Arve (aged 89)
- Notable Works:
- “A Change of Heart”
- “Degrees”
- “Mobile”
Michel Butor (born September 14, 1926, Mons-en-Baroeul, France—died August 24, 2016, Contamine-sur-Arve) was a French novelist and essayist who was awarded the Grand Prix by the Académie Française (2013) for his work as one of the leading exponents of the nouveau roman (“new novel”), the avant-garde literary movement that emerged in France in the 1950s.
Butor studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and from 1951 to 1953 was a lecturer at the University of Manchester. He subsequently taught in Thessaloníki, Greece (1954–55); Geneva, Switzerland (1956–57 and 1975–91); and numerous cities in the United States and France. After an early experimental novel, Passage de Milan (1954; “Milan Passage”), Butor won critical acclaim with L’Emploi du temps (1956; Passing Time), a complex evocation of his gloomy season in Manchester. With his third novel, La Modification (1957; Second Thoughts, or A Change of Heart), Butor perfected his experimental technique and was considered to have arrived at his full powers. The work won the Prix Renaudot.
Butor, who regarded the novel as a blend of philosophy and poetry, owed much in his fiction to the influence of James Joyce. A feature common to all his novels is a rigid structure. Passage de Milan takes place over a single 12-hour period in a tenement building, and La Modification is set in a compartment of the Paris-Rome express. Degrés (1960; Degrees), his fourth novel, imposes on the action the rigid pattern of a college timetable.
Butor’s subsequent fiction includes Portrait de l’artiste en jeune singe (1967; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape), Intervalle (1973), and Explorations (1981; with verse). Outstanding among his nonfiction works are Mobile (1962; Eng. trans. Mobile), a prose-rhapsody aiming to capture the spirit of the United States, and Description de San Marco (1963; Description of San Marco). He also published several collections of poetry and critical essays, including Répertoire, 5 vol. (1960–82), Improvisations sur Flaubert (1984), L’Utilité poétique (1995), and Octogénaire (2006). Other works include the novel Boomerang (1978) and the long essay Improvisations sur Rimbaud (1989).