Michel Butor

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Michel Butor (2002)

Michel Marie François Butor (born September 14, 1926 in Mons-en-Barœul near Lille ; † August 24, 2016 in Contamine-sur-Arve ) was a French writer , poet, art critic , essayist and translator.

Life

Michel Butor was involved in fine arts from childhood. His father, a senior railroad employee, drew and made woodblock prints in his spare time. Butor later stated that he wanted to be a painter first. He attended a Jesuit college, studied philosophy and philology at the Sorbonne in Paris and then worked as a French, Latin and philosophy lecturer at schools in Egypt , Manchester , Thessaloniki and Geneva . Butor was later an editor at the Gallimard publishing house in Paris. 1970–1975 he was a professor at the University of Nice , from 1975 to 1991 he taught French literature at the University of Geneva . In 1960 Butor was one of the signatories of the 121 Manifesto against French action in the Algerian war . From 1986 he lived in Lucinges in the Haute-Savoie department .

plant

Nouveau Roman

Michel Butor is considered an important representative of the Nouveau Roman , from which he said he had said goodbye in 1960. Claude Simon , Nathalie Sarraute , Robert Pinget , Alain Robbe-Grillet , Maurice Blanchot and Marguerite Duras belong to this narrative style with little action, in which the narrator disappears behind the characters . Travel, geographic space and time play an important role in Butor's novels.

In his novel L'emploi du temps , the hero tries to find his way around the labyrinth of a modern city by writing down his everyday experiences during a year, which are vaguely linked to a criminal case, sometimes retrospectively, but in chronological order. The report soon splits into two time levels, because the past is constantly changing in the author's mind. Butor himself compares the path of the protagonist with the labyrinth of King Minos .

In La modification , a key work of the Nouveau Roman, a Parisian businessman decides to go to Rome to tell his lover that he wants to give up his previous life with his wife, but returns without having visited his lover and decides to process this "modification" in the form of a novel. In Degrés , Butor uses the example of the attempt by three people to describe a history course on the Renaissance by the dilemma of a linear representation.

Experimental prose

After saying goodbye to the Nouveau Roman, he wrote several hundred books with essays and experimental texts, some together with painters and graphic artists, who often only appeared in the smallest collector's editions and who in some cases defy literary classification. Mobile, étudepour une représentazio des États-Unis , he combines travel impressions, everyday language clichés, snippets from catalogs and geographic data to form a complex but uniform ensemble. The impression of uniformity was reinforced by the repetition of identical place names in several states. Intervalle is a script for a 30-minute film about the chance meeting of two travelers at a train station in Lyon . Each minute of the film is shown in a three-column chapter dialogues, scraps of noise and notes by the author.

Art criticism

One focus of his art and artist analyzes are representatives of classical modernism such as Vincent van Gogh , Claude Monet , Piet Mondrian , Paul Cézanne , Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso . But he also dealt intensively with older art, for example with Hans Holbein the Younger , Caravaggio , Rembrandt and Jan Vermeer . Butor wrote mainly about works of art that he knew firsthand and studied during countless visits to museums or galleries. He also wrote texts on Japanese artists such as Katsushika Hokusai or Utagawa Hiroshige (he first traveled to Japan in 1967) and American artists of the 20th century such as Jasper Johns and Mark Rothko . The individualizing image viewing is in the foreground. Butor also analyzed works of architecture, e. B. St. Mark's Basilica in Venice.

Butor also examined the mutual influence of the visual arts and literature in Marcel Proust's A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs ("In the shadow of a young girl's blossom"). There Proust explains the use of metaphors in Impressionist painting, of which Monet's paintings are examples. The associative references and complex analogies are characteristic of Butor's work. B. the comparison of the meaning of the Eiffel Tower for the Parisians with that of the Fujijama for the Japanese considering the symbolic content of their respective geometry.

Butor attributed a protective role to literature: it tries to save things from oblivion, not to change society. He repeatedly criticized Sartre's political commitment to the French Communist Party.

Trivia

In his agent novel The Second Death of Ramón Mercader, Jorge Semprún lets the apolitical, caricatured French “educational traveler ” René-Pierre Boutor , who is interested in Vermeer's pictures in the Dutch museums, get into a dramatic situation that is existentially political for the other participants is.

Awards (selection)

In 1984 Butor received an honorary doctorate from the University of Mainz .

Works (selection)

Novels

  • Passage de Milan (1954, German 1967; Ex .: Helmut Scheffel )
  • L'emploi du temps (The Schedule) (1956, German 1960; Ex .: Helmut Scheffel)
  • La Modification (Paris, Rome 1957, German 1957 Die Modifikation ; ex .: Helmut Scheffel)
  • Le génie du lieu (1958, German 1962 Genius loci: cultural sites in the Mediterranean ; ex .: Helmut Scheffel)
  • Degrés (1960, German 1964 levels )
  • Mobile: étude pour une représentation des États-Unis (1962)
  • Portrait de l'artiste en jeune singe (1967, German 1986 Portrait of the artist as a young monkey , ex .: Helmut Scheffel)
  • Niagara (1969)
  • Fenêtres sur la passage intérieur (1986, German 1988 window on the inner passage , ex .: Helmut Scheffel)
  • Retour du boomerang (1988)
  • L'embarquement de la reine de Saba (1989)
  • Transit A, Transit B (1992)

Essays

  • Degrés (1960)
  • Repertoires [I à V] (1960–1982)
  • Les mots dans la peinture (1969, German 1992 The words in painting , ex .: Helmut Scheffel)
  • Matière de rêves (1975–1985)
  • Improvisations sur Rimbaud (Experiment about Rimbaud) (1989, German 1994)
  • L'utilité poétique (1995)

Radio plays

  • Airlines (1962; SDR / NDR)
  • 6,810,000 liters of water per second (1965; SDR / NDR)
  • Saint-Lazare station (1968; SDR / WDR)
  • Description of San Marco (1969; BR / WDR / SWF)

literature

  • Romain Leick: The writing nomad . In: Der Spiegel , H. 39, 2006 of September 25, p. 198
  • Jochen Mecke: Michel Butor, “La Modification” 1957; Claude Simon , “La Route des Flandres” 1960. In: Wolfgang Asholt (Ed.): Stauffenburg Interpretation. French literature, 20th century: novel. ISBN 978-3-86057-909-1
  • Erika Höhnisch: The captured self. Studies on the inner monologue in modern French novels. (= Contributions to the Modern History of Literature, NF 3, Volume 3). Winter, Heidelberg 1967 (in particular on Michel Butor's La Modification ; also on Édouard Dujardin and Valery Larbaud )
  • Pascal Antonietti, KMG: Butor, Michel. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  • Christof Weiand: In memoriam Michel Butor (1926–2016) , in: Romanische Studien , Vol. 2, No. 5 (2016), pp. 487–498, (online)

Web links

Commons : Michel Butor  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ L'écrivain Michel Butor, figure du Nouveau Roman, est mort , Le Monde , August 24, 2016, accessed on August 24, 2016
  2. ↑ Stéphane Gallon: Michel Butor: l'emploi du temps dans L'emploi du temps. Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes 2016.
  3. ^ Julia Franziska Klarmann: The illustrative discourse: Michel Butor and painting. Dissertation, Heidelberg 2013 , p. 3.
  4. ↑ Michel Butor: Oeuvres d'art imaginaires chez Proust. London 1964.
  5. ↑ Klarmann 2013, p. 88 f.
  6. ^ Gerhard Dörr: Memory of the French writer Michel Butor, who has just passed away. In: Wiesbaden Courier .
personal data
SURNAME Butor, Michel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Butor, Michel Marie François (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer of the nouveau roman
DATE OF BIRTH September 14, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Mons-en-Barœul
DATE OF DEATH August 24, 2016
Place of death Contamine-sur-Arve