Word: butors
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Dates: during 1962-1962
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...must deal with things-i.e., objects-and Robbe-Grillet has brought out four books that pretend to do just that. Grouped more or less willingly around him are about a dozen writers, of whom the most celebrated are Nathalie Sarraute (Portrait of a Man Unknown) and Michel Butor (A Change of Heart...
From "He" to "You." In the interests of fictional reform, Michel Butor, 35, has rather expansively declared that an author should create a new technique for each new subject. Butor's latest technique produced Mobile, an indescribably dull account of 50 U.S. states, presented as weird collections of lists, and typographical eccentricities which owe something to both John Dos Passos and E.E. Cummings. One of his earliest books, Passing Time, was a Robbe-Grilletesque effort to scramble time sequences. The hero keeps a double-entry diary in which accounts of what happened as far back as seven months...
...Mauriac is perhaps the most appealing and most readily understandable (if not the most profound) of the French group variously called the Anti-Novelists, the New Realists or merely the New Novelists. These tags are not very illuminating, and none could be satisfactory, because the writings of Mauriac, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute do not much resemble one another; the authors are a movement only in that each rejects the conventional psychological novel...
...called "anti-novelists" of France. Man is no longer viewed as an actor on the stage of life but as a microorganism, or atom, reacting to obscure laws of physics and biochemistry. Leaders of this movement are Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras and Michel Butor, whose new book, Degrees, is perhaps the most complex anti-novel to date. For, by some mysterious aliterary law, the more schematic and mechanistic an author's view of life, the more complicated and device-ridden his style...
Some of the anti-novelists seem to be motivated by nothing more than a craving for the new and different; others, unable to deal with genuine human feelings, escape into atomizing and itemizing; still others think that a "scientific" approach is nowadays a guarantee of high seriousness. In Degrees, Butor attempts to en-capsule forever a chunk of reality, like a mouse enclosed in a glass globe. The mouse becomes magnified beyond its importance, and the revolving globe presents the rodent from angles irrelevant to human experience. Since it was a very small mouse to start with, it should...