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The Origin of the Text Author(s): Michel Butor Reviewed work(s): Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 56, No. 2, Michel Butor Issue (Spring, 1982), pp. 207-208, 210, 212-215 Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40137506 . Accessed: 26/10/2012 02:01
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The Origin of the Text

By MICHEL BUTOR First and last answers. Very often people ask you, when you write, where the things which are in your books come from; what is the origin of these things. It is as if, finding some lode inside, they would like to have a guide to lead them into the mine so that they might dig for themselves in that vein of ore. But it is of course a question which is very difficult to answer. I'll try this evening* to offer a few proposals. Most of the time when a writer is asked such a question, he gives unsatisfactory answers, replies which are at the same time almost unavoidable and to which, even if he wants to be as generous as possible, he has to return. His first answer is to say that he doesn't know where the text comes from, and this is quite natural, because if you want to write a text, it is because you have something to say which has not been said before. Or perhaps it is something that in some respects was not possible, or almost not possible, to say. With some work and some luck the writer is able to tell what he was not able to tell before. So when the thing is done, when at last he has said it, it is extremely difficult for him to go back to the preceding stage, to the way it was when it was still obscure. So he can answer: well, the origin of the text is what you can find in the text itself. When the thing is done, somebody else- a university professor, for instance- can take the result, and then he can say, well, this, which is quite clear here, comes from this or that in literature or elsewhere. But for the writer the textual "baby"has still with him the veil of darkness and obscurity from which he comes. When the text is there, it is something clear, even if it seems for many of us very obscure. So it is possible for the writer to have a more subtle answer and to say that the text comes from itself. And when you see this from the point of view of the student or the reader, it means something quite precise. When you compare, for instance, the first drafts, the intermediate sketches and the final product, it is then very easy to see how a particular sentence will go somewhere. We know where it has to go, and it is very easy to order the sketches and to see the steps in which the text is forming itself. So it is as if the words, the sentences, were attractedby the final product, by that form which now stands clear. It is the experience of many writers that the text exists before the actual writing takes place- much as with a sculptor who sometimes says that the statue is inside the block of marble and he has only to take it out, that everything is alreadythere. We very often have that experience, and many writers " have said, "Thetext was there before it was written. It is somewhere in the ether, in Eden, in paradise, with the gods, and you have only to copy it, or to obey what is called inspiration, or the dictation. But we have to go further than that. Sometimes the text gives the impression of arriving suddenly. We want to say something, we don't know exactly what; of course, when it is there we know what it is. Sometimes it is quite sudden. In only a moment what was obscure is now clear. Most of the time it takes some work, it takes time. You have these draftsand corrections, so it is evident that the structure which is already there will impose itself on new pieces, and at the end you generally don't write what you wanted to write in the beginning. Very often you try to please somebody- a publisher, for instance, or a teacher or the general public. But when it is good, this doesn't work, because the text itself is so imposing that you have to change your mind; and what is most interesting is that something really new occurs. You need to have, for example, in that whole something of a specific color or tone, and you go to look for it and attempt to insert it inside that extremely demanding structure. In poetry the consciousness of that structural demand is what is called prosody. Prosody, or the rules of versification of any literary genre, is the way some aspect of the structure of the work being done appears to the consciousness of the writer; and that is generally what he is able to speak of. When you ask a writer or a painter, "What did you ' want to convey? very often his response is: "I did it in " such-and-such a way. In order to make you under' " stand the "what, he will explain to you the "how, because it is how the task is done which is the most clear in the process of writing. So we have the three traditional answers: first, we don't know where it comes from, and anyway, even if we try, we will know only a part of it, and we have always to come back to that; second, the text comes from what it will be; third, the text comes from what is coming, what it comes to be now. But when you are at the same time a writer and a university professor, you can try to see the thing from both sides, from an internal and an external point of view; and any conscious writer is ambiguous in that respect. When I have finished a text, a university professor can study and compare it with others and be able to say that this thing comes from that; but I can also do it myself, with some difficulties, and do it even before the text is finished. In some sense, the text is never completely finished. When I publish a book, it is not that I consider it to be good; it is because I don't know how to work any more on it. I publish it by a kind of despair. It's not really finished, and it has for me to be continued by other people, by readers. It has to go on.

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WORLD LITERATURE TODAY ways. The raven called back to my mind different things, in different tiers of the library. I know that for the Indians of the Northwest Coast the raven was a very important person, and I know that there was in American literature a famous poem about the ravenfamous not only in American literature but in French literature as well, because it has been translated into French by two of the greatest French poets, once by Baudelaire and once by Mallarme. So I went to the libraryin quest of the translationof Poe's "The Raven" by Mallarme, and fortunately it was there. So I have used the Mallarmetranslation, with some very important alterations. You know that that bird in Poe's poem answers always "Nevermore"; that was not good for me, however, and I have changed it to have the raven tell an Indian tale. I made eighteen versions of that text, which is called "Reminiscences of the Raven," and to find enough Indian tales for that, I went to the library and dug in Franz Boas's ethnography, where I found plenty of marvelous ore in order to make my small metal. Something was dormant in the library, waiting to be awakened by somebody, and the structure of the text, which was already in Poe's poem and in Mallarme's translation, asked me to seek a certain number of texts. I have made eighteen different versions because in Poe's poem there are eighteen stanzas, and so it makes for me a nice symmetrical block. 3) It comesfrom travel. But even all the libraries of the world are insufficient, and that is why we write. We write because the books are at the same time too numerous and unsatisfactory.We have plenty of books but not the books we would like to have. There is a discrepancy between what is inside the libraryand the general conversation, and a bigger one between all human language and what I may call the language of things. We feel always that something remains not said. We see almost everything through language, but we see through language that language is inadequate. When we look at something which is very interesting, the first thing we say is that it is indescribable. Then the writer comes and tries to describe the indescribable, to augment the whole sphere of language from the want which comes from without and from within at the same time. II) Where does the difference comefrom? You start from words, but you make new combinationsof words. In the libraryyou read the unread. You travel in quest of different places. What is the origin of this difference? What is the origin of the originalityof the writer? (And of course these two words are quite closely related.)
* "The Origin of the Text" was delivered in English by Michel Butor on the evening of 12 November 1981 at the University of Oklahoma, concluding two weeks of seminars and lectures on his work by Butor for the Eighth Puterbaugh Conference on Writers of the French-Speaking and Hispanic World. An earlier version of the lecture was presented in September 1981 at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

I) Where does the material come from? I certainly am able in many cases to answer the question as to where the text comes from. But if I begin to think about it, I see that it may have several different meanings: 1) where the material comes from- the blocks with which you will build your construction; 2) where the difference comes from- you do things strangely, and how does it happen that you are not writing the same things as other people do; 3) what is the origin of the energy you exert in bringing out that difference. 1) It comesfrom the dictionary. For the first question there is an easy first answer. A text is always made with words. One of the great French painters of the impressionist era, Edgar Degas, said one day to much like to write Stephane Mallarme, "I would very " poems. I have plenty of ideas. Mallarme answered, "It's not with ideas that you make poems. It is with words." We write texts with words which are all around us. So when somebody asks where the text comes from, you can answer, "It comes from where you are." You are inside that mine. Even if you invent new words, as Joyce did in Finnegans Wake, they are made with old ones, and it is with the attention to these words that the text begins. It is quite easy to see this with the novel. A great novelist is somebody who is able to make his characters speak, to give them a voice, a recognizable voice. With a dramatistyou have the mediation of the actor. When you are all by yourself in your room reading a novel, you are yourself all the troupe, all the actors of the play. In order to convey the feeling that a characterhas a specific voice, it is absolutely necessary that the choice of the words be made in such a way that the combination of these words will lend itself to a specific pronunciation, a specific tone. For instance, one of the great achievements of Henry James is that in his novels he is able to give to each person a different, distinct voice. It is the same with Proust. This is possible because the writer does not start from a character imagined, asking afterwardwhat will be his words. It goes the other way around. A novelist is somebody who, in reading but especially in conversation, is able to pinpoint certain sentences, certain frequencies of words, which in writing will retain a personality. It is from the personality of speech, if you wish, that the personality of the character will bud. 2) It comes from the encyclopedia. But it is not of course only individual words. It is sentences, it is ensembles of words; and it is of course texts, the entire world of texts which are alreadywritten- which means that the big mine of literature is the library or the encyclopedia. Very often you have to find a word, or you have to find a whole paragraph, a quote, a story, and you go to the stacks, the shelves, the galleries in order to find that. Before coming to Oklahomafor this conference about some of my books, I wanted, during my stay here, to make a small gift for the participantsof this event; so I looked around in Victoria and saw plenty of ravens in the streets, and they were very interesting in many

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WORLD LITERATURE TODAY good, but most of the time we have to ignore these instances. They are very dangerous ground. In American literature you have a very striking instance of the upturning of the iceberg of the word white. It is the famous chapter (seventeen) in Herman Melville's which is called "The Whiteness of the Moby Dick " Whale. As you know, Moby Dick is a white whale and is in many ways a symbol of evil. Melville, in this chapter, tries to explain this, to make this understandable. He takes from the library and from the encyclopedia greatly diverse instances of the link between white and good in order to make that link as universal as possible, and at the apex of a wonderful sentence he says, "Yet . . . ." This is the hinge.
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title "Lord of the White " Elephants above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snowy-white quadruped in the royal standard;and the Hanoverianflag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger;and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian,heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things- the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forkedflame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by farthe holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

1) It comesfrom childhood. The first answer to this second question is: the difference comes from the discrepancies which are already inherent in language, literature and landscape. Any word is already a world in itself because it has numerous attachments with other words and with other things, so numerous that they are extremely difficult to handle; and these connections among words are not the same for everybody. There are such complicated associations that it is absolutely necessary in ordinarylife to cross out the biggest part of the meaning of a word; otherwise life would not be able to go on. A word means many different things for different people, but these differences in most cases, for practical purposes, must be hidden. So we act as if words were univocal. They tend to be univocal in science but not at all in general language, and literature works upon the ambiguity of words, a dangerous ambiguity. When you begin to look properly at words, you are in a dangerous situation, because all the differences in our society are reflected inside the complications of vocabulary. We act as if it were easy to understand what somebody says, and in some situations it is easy. Within a given level of society it is quite easy to understand what is said, but if you go to another part of the city, the same word will have quite a different meaning. The fact is much more evident when you think about the plurality of languages: one word in French, even if it is the same spelling, or almost the same, does not have the same meaning as it has in English or in German, and so on. If you speak two languages, you are already upon a linguistic frontier where many conflicts arise, and you must keep these conflicts down in order to go on, in order not to have always a war within yourself or with other people. When a word is charged with problems and ambiguities, you need a kind of shield against that. Under the surface of that word you have a turmoil which goes on and on, an accumulation of problems, and the difference between interior and surface becomes stronger and stronger. The shield stiffens, and someday it will crack. It is the upturning of the word which will mark the appearance of the difference in the text, the origin of a new text. I will give you an instance of that. In traffic lights you need to have very simple symbols, and you know what they are: green is "go," red is - because in Western mythology red is associ"stop" ated with danger. During the Cultural Revolution in China some young Chinese petitioned Mao Tse-tung asking him to reverse the trafficlights because red had to mean "go," since it was the color of revolution, of progress and so on; but the surface of the symbols was so strong that still in China today red means "stop." A very importantword in our own society is white; it is related to almost everything. It has enormous impact in political science. It is related to racial problems, to morality, to cleanliness and so on. And in education and in everyday life we have generally the equation: white is right. White is good, elevated, et cetera. In some cases we know that white is not so

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WORLD LITERATURE TODAY 2) It comes from the night. The text comes, then, from a special connection between the writer and his past, through language and through some types of experience. That agitation of the material in order to bring out the differences needs some leisure, and the deepest leisure we can have in our life is the one we find in sleep, deepest sleep, in that profound level of sleep where the great dreams appear. In dream you have a kind of wholesale agitationof material, as if your memory, your experiences, were transformed into dice and these dice were thrown and formed new combinations. In these new combinations your feelings- and especially the repressed feelings- will find a way to express themselves. In dream, things can be turned around much more than in the wakefulness of day, because in that profound recess, that dungeon of sleep, all the other levels of sleep are like guards to protect you. In that deep dungeon of sleep your brain experiences a special kind of freedom. When what occurs can pass through the awakening, you very often have new works of art. The classicalinstance in English " literature is of course Coleridge's "Kubla Khan, which was written entirely in a dream state. 3) It comesfrom silence. The origin is in childhood and in dream; and of course you know that in dream many forgotten aspects of our childhood come back, and many repressed aspects of our affective life and of our language can return. It is then very importantto be able to preserve or to establish a link between the dream and the writing and to make the writing a kind of awakened dream. Prosody, of which I have already spoken, is extremely useful in that respect. There is a physical element in writing which is almost forgotten today but which was well recognized in other literatures- in classical Greek and Roman literature, for instance. There is a kind of dancing in writing, and much more manualwork than is generally believed. In order to establish that link between dream and writing and to maintain that interplay during the day, a sufficient amount of silence is necessary. You have to work, you have to find things here and there, you have to try this and try that, but you also have to wait. You need to wipe your mind clean, make it a blank, establish a certain quality of silence, obliterate some references. You have to go through a kind of ordeal. You have to be able to go into uncharted waters, and that is one of the reasons why I give lectures which are not readings. I never read a lecture, because I want to take advantage of the stage fright. I always have stage fright, and I know it can be very useful. When I begin, I find myself facing a kind of white fog; I have to plunge into it, and in this trespassing, things occur. The stage fright will engender agitation in the silence before and during the lecture, and so things will happen. Of course I have made hundreds and hundreds of lectures, so I know that it works;but I still get stage fright. When I give several lectures about the same subject, each time I try to do something different; but after ten times the lecture is permanently fixed. At that point I feel like a tape recorder, and I simply wait until the

Then he makes another visit to the library and takes some strikinginstances of bad whitenesses, thus being able to make the word white and its associations turn upon itself and reveal to us its own other side, and also the other side of many other words and of all history. It is of course the other side of our own society, the other side of not only the word white but of whiteness itself and what we mean by that. Such an inversion of meaning in a word or in a story will provoke extensive reorganizationof the libraryand the emergence of new texts. This is possible when you become free from the urgency of everyday life. You have to take a look from a distance. You have first to dissolve the ordinary associations. You have to unbind the chains and play with the words and the structures. You must agitate them. If a painter has asked me for a text to go with a catalogue for an exhibition, I am always flattered and generally say yes; and I'm interested, I see a few things. But at the beginning I don't know at all what I'll do. The day of the exhibition comes nearer and nearer, so I have to find something. Then I go out and walk. When the weather is fair, that is very good for me because I can go outside, and there things occur. Walking provokes a sweet agitation of the landscape and with it a movement inside the vocabulary, the ideas; and then at some turning, well, it occurs, it's there, I know how it will be. I had some problems when I began draftingthis lecture, for example. I had a few ideas but didn't know exactly how to put them together. So I went into the woods, and the things began to organize themselves into a neat structure. That link between inspiration and play points to a very strong link between inspiration and childhood. It's quite understandable. You had these difficulties with words. You knew that a word was linked with this or that, but after some time you had to act as if it were not. You knew before that "white" was not always ' "good, but in order to be an adult, you had to act as if it were. When you look on the other side of the word, you go back to something which you had forgotten. Things forgotten wait in the library, and you have plenty of things waiting in the library of your mind. The moment when inspiration occurs, when things begin to take form, is very generally linked with the coming back of some forgotten experience. Very often when people speak to me about one of my books, I have forgotten what I have written in that book. They know much better than I do, because I have to forget it in order to make new things. When they speak with some precision, it comes back like a thunderstorm. And with it come many other things. It is a kind of memory cyclone, and it can be very unsettling; but it is fascinating. It is a new "myself which appears at that time. You know of course the famous opening of A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust describes a memory storm coming from the dipping of a small French cake called a madeleine in a cup of tea. With the taste of it a whole forgotten portion of his childhood comes flooding back.

BUTOR tape is finished. That is boring for me, and it becomes boring for the audience. It is then that I know I must not give that lecture any more, that it is time to write it and publish it; the text is there. If one day I should no longer have stage fright, well, I would stop giving lectures, because it would not be useful- it would not be useful for me, nor would it be useful for anybody. Ill) Where does the energy come from? The use of stage fright is the use of silence, of shock, and of course it is the use of a kind of anguish. It is a reversal of anguish in the same way that the use of dream is a reversal of nightmares. And here we arrive at the most difficult part of the lecture; but unfortunately time flies, so I will just give you a few very rapid hints about where the energy comes from. 1) It is misery becoming wealth . It is not enough to have different things appearing to you. You need also to struggle in order to make them appear, be published and so on; and it takes an enormous amount of energy, because when you turn upside down a very important word, a very important element of society, you generally get a very angry reaction. It is a struggle, and you have to keep struggling. We are very surprised, when we look at the works of great writers or musicians or painters, to see the amount of work they were able to do. No one works as much as did Beethoven, or Schubert in his very short life, or Mozart.

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What made them able to do that? What was the urge? Of course, behind all that is a kind of suffering. It is a want, a misery, and in art you have a transformationof misery into wealth. It is not only an overflow of life. No. It must come from a deep urge, one which is not only an individual urge. It is a want in society. It is the contradiction in society which becomes embodied in some part of this society and sometimes in one individual in particular.What other people can stand, that individual is not able to tolerate. He is crushed by it, or he finds in it the energy to change it- generally with the help of some other people. Very often at the origin of a work of art you have an expressed order. Someone commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. That means there was something lacking in that building, a sense of absence which was becoming worse and worse for someone. And there was a possibility to fill that want, a possibility which could then be expressed in the language of money. Money for us is a very important kind of language with its contradictions, and when you have too many contradictions in the monetary language, you have a revolution somewhere. And you have not only contradictionsinside monetary language but plenty of contradictions as well between monetary language and other languages. In order to make a work of art, the artist has to survive; so there must be, somewhere in the monetary flux, a kind of pool wHere some leisure can be found.

BUTOR AUTOGRAPHING BOOKS FOLLOWING NORMAN SEMINAR (Photo: William Riggan)

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WORLD LITERATURE TODAY comes a reserve of energy that you can upturn, that you can use in a completely different way. 3) It is sickness becoming health . And it is not only the hospital of the mind or the hospital of society, but also the hospital of the body, because all these contradictions are embodied in that very strange personality that we call an artist. I have said it is extraordinarythat people like Mozart, Schubert and others have done such an enormous amount of work, and it is especially extraordinarybecause all of them seem to have had problems with their health, often culminating in early death. The contradictionsoccur inside the body, and it is in the fever, if you wish, that the energies gathering around are accumulating inside the writer. Here we can really speak of "expression," because you have a pressure inside and then the explosion of that pressure to make an issue. In art illness is transmuted in a new health. Last and first questions . Inspiration comes from misery. It comes from the madhouse, from segregation, frustration, and it comes from sickness. If you take all that together, if you go all the way along that path, you will find that there is a strong relation between literature and death. You can say the text comes from the dead. It is a way the dead may speak. When I write, it is not only I who am writing. I write with you, with your words, and I write for you, I write with your help, I speak with your help. If you were not here, there would not be such a lecture. I read my lecture in your eyes. The lecture I give depends upon the way you are listening; but something else comes through, namely the voices of the dead. Because in the library are many dead writers, and in our society the dead are very efficient. Words are a legacy from the dead, and the biggest contradictionis that between the living and the dead. The dead are not only dead; they are still here. They knew things that we have forgotten and must find again. We do not go back only to our childhood; we go also to our parents and grandparents. There is something very comforting in the thought that when we write or paint we accomplish in many ways the design of the dead. What these dead people wanted, we begin to make. But it is at the same time a very nagging thought because, if we begin to accomplish their desire, they will not have enjoyed it. There will always be a gap in that realization, and that means there will always be new texts, because there will always be these contradictions between the dead and ourselves, who are not yet dead but who will die someday and are dying every day. Plato says that "philosophy is a preparationto death," and Montaigne made that line the title of one of his essays ("Que philosopher, c'est apprendre a mourir"). Writing is also a contemplation of death. It is a changing of death will never be finished, into life; but that transformation and in a way that is nice. We will never finish writing. The great abstractpainter Mondriansaid that when he had succeeded in doing what he wanted, then there would be no more art. Art would no longer be neces-

This need is related to all the complications, complexities and contradictions of the monetary system and of all the economic systems. And of course it is related also to the basic urges of human nature, or animal nature. It comes from hunger, thirst, sexuality, the wish to move and the wish to see and know. From these sources the energy will come. But there will be sufficient energy only when the contradictions in society will have matured to such a point that it becomes possible to use the contradictions against themselves, to make the differences work against themselves, to make the hatred of novelty itself work against itself in order to produce something really new. After some time the accumulations and the waste become such that the abscess bursts, and then you have that turmoil, thunderstorm and revolution instigated by writing or painting or anything else. 2) It is madness becoming reason. But it is not only words which must be turned upside down, or transformed into much more complex figures. It is also the person himself. In order to have that energy, you have to be the center of a kind of cyclone of energy, of latent energy working inside society. You are yourself an embodiment of contradictions. In the classicalliterature of the seventeenth century, for instance, any writer was always between two languages. He or she had the classical languages- Latin and Greek- and his or her own language. These were like two poles in an electric arc, and sparkswere continually occurring between them. These conflicting languages led, in turn, to conflicting personalities. And you have conflicting parts in society. Even in a single individual you may have conflicting behavior:we all have split personalities because we all think both that white is good and that white is also something else. There is always a hidden face of ourselves which communicates with hidden faces of society, the dark waters of society which are sometimes so dangerous that a boundary has to be placed around them, that they must be removed to a reservation. The text comes from the reservation. It comes from any kind of jail, and it comes from any kind of hospital. The text comes from the madhouse. And the writer, or the painter, is a madman who has succeeded. We are all madmen, and some of us are so mad that we have to be put inside an enclosure. That enclosure is something extremely active. It is burning. A writer or a painter is somebody who is able to be at the same time mad and reasonable. He is able to manage the reservation inside himself. Your dreams are the madhouse in yourself. But you have plenty of other reservations, and that is why I go to the special collections in libraries. There are reservations in the library, and in French we have the same word reserve for special collections of a library and for an Indian reservation. Both are gold mines, mines of something much more precious than gold. In working seriously with art you are always touching madness, and from all the forces that are linked in order to make that madness quiet

CHRONOLOGY sary because society and the world would be entirely beautiful. But there will always be some kind of art, perhaps completely different from what we know today; and there will always be something like writing, because the dead will never be satisfied. The link between death and literature is a very traditional one, and one of the prosodical urges in writing is the fact that the text has to finish somewhere, even if the matter is infinite. You have very often the comparisonbetween a text and the life of a man: it has a

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birth and a progress, and it ends. This text which I am delivering is nearing its end. It will not be completely dead, I hope. I hope that it will live in your mind. It is recorded, embalmed, and it will be written, and I'll revise it, and it will be printed. Then it will be truly a text. You will know where the text conies from. It comes from here. Now the time is finished, and there is no more text. (First Publication)

Chronology
1926 Michel Butor born 14 September in Monsen-Baroeul, the fourth of eight children of Emile Butor, a railway official and also an amateur artist and engraver. The Butor family moves to Paris. Butor enters the Jesuit-run College SaintFrancois-de-Sales, as his family resettles in Evreux at the start of the war. His interests in art and literature become evident. Returns to Paris. Secondary studies at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand. Philosophy class under Cuvillier. Participates in the hypokhdgne, a special preparatory course for the Ecole Normale Superieure. Enrolls at the Sorbonne in letters but soon changes to philosophy. Publishes first text, "Hommage partiel a Max Ernst," in Vrille. Presents his diplome thesis on "Les mathe" matiques et Tidee de necessite under the direction of Gaston Bachelard. Works as a portier and then as a secretaire in the College Philosophique while continuing his studies, meeting writers and artists and attending his first international conferences. Fails agregation or comprehensive state examination. 1955 1951 1950 Named professeur at the lyeee in Sens. Accepts position with the government's Cultural Relations office as a French teacher in the town of El Minya, 250 km south of Cairo. Begins drafting Passage de Milan, greatly influenced by this encounter with an alien culture. Obtains two-year appointment with French Department at the University of Manchester. Completes Passage de Milan. Travels to Tunisia and Algeria. First visit to Italy. Resettles in Paris. Supports himself through translations. Passage de Milan is published by Minuit and receives favorable commentary but does not sell. Butor is assigned by the Cultural Relations office to the French lycee in Salonika, Greece. Works on second novel, Vemploi du temps. Visits Crete, Delphi, Istanbul and Smyrna. Returns to Paris in October and takes over Roland Barthes's post at the Ecole Superieure preparing French teachers for service abroad. Publishes Vemploi du temps, which attracts much attention and later wins the Prix Feneon. Takes post at Genevas Ecole Interna-

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1956