Archive for category Literature
Butor Soirée at San Francisco’s Alliance Française
Posted by cathannabel in Events, Michel Butor on April 27, 2012
Soirée Documentary about French writer Michel Butor with the director
A movie about French writer Michel Butor
Friday April 27th at 6:30 pm at the Alliance
Free for members $5.00 for non members
In Partnership with the French American Cultural Society
The director, Blandine Armand, will be present to answer questions and discuss the movie. Author Michel Butor is best known as a leading proponent of “Le Nouveau Roman,” a post-World War II French literary movement that departed from classical genres.
Butor has authored Passage de Milan (1954), L’emploi du temps [Passing Time] (1956), La modification [Second Thoughts] (1957), and Degrés (1960), among other works. Butor’s novels, poems, and essays demonstrate how a place can influence and inform a way of thinking.
Blandine Armand est une réalisatrice française dont l’axe principal de recherche s’articule autour des processus de création artistique. Pour Arte, elle a réalisé plusieurs documentaires sur des metteurs en scène : « Poésie de l’Ordinaire » qui éclaire le travail de Joël Pommerat lors de la création de sa pièce Les Marchands, « Voyage Immobile » sur la pièce Hanjo d’après Mishima mise en scène par Julie Brochen, « Faire bouger le monde » à propos du travail de Guy Alloucherie et « Raconter l’indicible réalité » qui accompagne la création de Pinocchio de Joël Pommerat,
Elle travaille également comme vidéaste. Elle a ainsi réalisé des vidéos de création pour différents lieux de théâtre ou compagnies comme la Chartreuse de Villeneuve-les-Avignon (Centre National des Ecritures du Spectacle), le collectif F7 ou encore Julie Brochen pour son spectacle « Variations ».
Blandine Armand vient de réaliser un portrait de l’écrivain Michel Butor diffusé sur France 5 ainsi qu’un documentaire sur la création de Dom Juan par Julie Brochen au Théâtre National de Strasbourg.
Butor exhibition at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), Mexico City
Posted by cathannabel in Events, Michel Butor, Visual Art on April 18, 2012
See below for details of a new Butor exhibition/event at MUAC, Mexico City:
The MUAC, through the Arkheia Documentation Center will present an exhibition on the french writer Michel Butor’s (France, 1926) file, including some of his works and books about artists and contemporary art.
Michel Butor has over 1500 publications covering various fields such as music, science, philosophy, literature and the arts. He is known in the field of French literature, mainly due to his most famous novel The Amendment, considered one of the pillars of what is known as the new novel (Nouveau Roman) written from start to finish in second person singular, the spanish equivalent to “thou”.
This novel was adapted by Michel Worms into a film in 1970 with the same title. After posting grades in 1960, Michel Butor stopped writing novels and by 1991 he abandoned teaching and retired to a village in the Haute Savoie. Since 1986 he has worked with over two hundred painters, sculptors, printmakers and photographers from different nationalities and published with them essays and books.
As part of this exhibition, a group of Mexican intellectuals close to Butor, undertake a series of conversations to be held in the auditorium of the MUAC.
WEB – EMAIL – LINEA DIRETTA
Michel Butor
dal 20/4/2012 al 20/5/2012
Music and Silence
Posted by cathannabel in Literature, Michel Butor, Music, Second World War, W G Sebald on April 15, 2012
‘Silence is not nothing. It is not the null set’. Music in performance exists between two silences – the expectant pause before the first notes and the instant before the applause. Music and silence are in dialogue, mutually dependent. Silence is inscribed in the music, like its breathing. To put it another way, sound echoes silence, puts into words or music what was implicit, and the two bear traces of each other.
In 4’33”, John Cage’s best known and possibly most important work, the composer developed a ‘fully positive concept of silence’ (Visscher, p. 259) which required openness to the integration of all possible sounds. For Cage, silence is temporal and spatial. It’s the place where sounds appear, ‘made up of all the sounds that exist in permanence (=life) and which surround us (=place).’ (Visscher, p. 262). Cage explained that ‘we call it silence when we don’t feel a direct connection with the intentions that produce the sounds’, i.e. the ambient sounds that are constantly present. 4’33” is a way of experimenting with one’s relation to the external world, silencing music in order to hear the world. For Cage, ‘it leads out of the world of art into the whole of life’. (Visscher, p. 264).
Cage’s piece invites us to hear all of these ambient sounds, and those that drift in from outside – sirens, wind and rain, traffic noise – or from the building – the air conditioning, the creak of floorboards – not as intrusions but as the work itself. It’s as difficult as any of the ‘difficult’ 20th century composers, and it bothers people. The commonest responses are either that it is a joke (yes, the way it challenges audience preconceptions is funny, but at heart it is serious, as Cage’s statements make clear) or that its acceptance in the musical canon (at least its avant-garde experimental subset) is a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes, that the piece is essentially empty of meaning but given spurious significance by critics.
And even if one disagrees, it is an unsettling work. Where we expect to hear a performer and (apart from the performer’s footsteps, the creak of the piano stool or lid, the turning of the pages) instead hear ourselves, our neighbours, the building we’re in, we are uneasy. We know that in a concert hall we are expected to be still, to minimise the rustling, shuffling, and throat clearing sounds that we perversely become desperate to make as soon as it’s taboo to do so. We suffer agonies of embarrassment if a coughing fit can’t be held back, our stomachs rumble, or we applaud at the wrong moment, and we turn judgemental glares on those whose mobile phones ring.
Silence is a weighty thing for an absence. It fills with everything that isn’t being said, all of the sounds that aren’t being heard. Recently researchers from the Australian National University have tuned very sensitive light detectors to listen to vacuum – a region of space that was once thought to be completely empty, dark, and silent until the discovery of modern quantum theory and have discovered that vacuum has virtual sub-atomic particles spontaneously appearing and disappearing, giving rise to omnipresent random noise.
If Cage’s concept of silence was positive, our experience of it, our associations with it, are often more problematic. Collective, imposed silence, for longer than a few heartbeats, tends to create physical, visceral tension and anxiety, rather than a tranquil meditative state. And as soon as one considers the notion of collective silence, one encounters other, more troubling associations.
Silence became one of the dominant metaphors for the Occupation, a blanket of silence over all kinds of enquiry, an emptiness that filled up with fear (Butor described the feeling that ‘nothing was happening, but that this nothing, at the same time, was bloody’). Silence here could betray or protect, could be resistance (as in Vercors’ Le Silence du Mer) or (active or passive) collaboration. And when liberation came, the imposed silence was replaced by a chosen silence, as a generation (because of guilt, or horror) chose to regard the Nazi era as a nightmare that could be put to one side as an aberration. Thus for Butor, silence is something to be fought against – he sees writing, words and music as resistance, every word or note a blow for life.
For Sebald too, silence carries a terrible weight of complicity and conspiracy. Schlant has described West German literature since the war as ‘a literature of absence and silence contoured by language’. Sebald’s fiction has been characterised as presenting us with a ‘Holocaust in absence’ – ‘the edge of darkness that Sebald’s fictions repeatedly bring us up against: a place and a time in which the ordinary constraints of history give way to an immense penumbral continuum of human suffering, exile, and “silent” catastrophes that take place “without much ado.”’ (Anderson, 121). His references are often oblique – in After Nature, Sebald imagines the clouds into which ‘without a word the breath Of legions of human beings had been absorbed’ (96), and in the first of his ‘Poemtrees’, when the landscape that you pass in a train ‘mutely … watches you vanish’ (p3), because it’s Sebald, we think of the trains that crossed Europe, taking their passengers to annihilation. As Ian Galbraith says, ‘Sebald’s landscapes are never innocent’ (p. 189), citing the references to Landsberg and Kaufbeuren in ‘Cold Draught’, and to Turkenfeld in ‘Somewhere’ (Across the Land and the Water, pp. 57, 135)
As George Steiner writes, the points where words fail have traditionally been seen as the points where music begins, or where we fall silent in the presence of the divine, but there is a more recent phenomenon, where ‘language simply ceases … The poet enters into silence. Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night’ (46). Is this silence, a ‘suicidal rhetoric’, nevertheless a valid and moral alternative when ‘the words in the city are full of savagery’?
References:
Mark M Anderson, ‘The Edge of Darkness: On W. G. Sebald’, October, 106 (Autumn, 2003), 102-21
Michel Butor, Curriculum vitae: entretiens avec André Clavel (Paris: Plon, 1996)
Thomas Clifton, ‘The Poetics of Musical Silence’, Musical Quarterly, 52, 2 (1976) 163-81
Paul Griffiths, Modern Music: A Concise History from Debussy to Boulez (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990)
Jean Guéhenno, Journal des années noires, 1940-1944 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)
Florence Rigal, Butor : la pensée-musique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004)
Florence Rigal, ‘De la polyphonie à la monodie: Butor, une voix politique’, L’Esprit Créateur, 47, 2 (Summer 2007), 33-42
Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence. West German Literature and the Holocaust (NY; London: Routledge, 1999)
W G Sebald, After Nature (London: Penguin, 2002)
W G Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (NY: The Modern Library, 2004)
W G Sebald, ‘Bleston. A Mancunian Cantical’, Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011)
George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (NY, Atheneum, 1982)
Eric de Visscher, ‘”There’s no such a thing as silence…” John Cage’s Poetics of Silence’, Interface, 18 (1989), 257-68
Butor’s ‘Mobile’
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor on April 13, 2012
Intriguing notes here from John Latta’s Isola di Rifiuti blog, quoting Paul Metcalf on Mobile, Butor’s ‘study for a representation of the United States’:
Paul Metcalf, regarding Michel Butor’s 1963 Mobile, A Study for a Representation of the United States,with its dedication to Jackson Pollock:
. . . it is the first full-length prose work I know in which—as in Pound, Williams, Olson—the meanings are stripped of all literary trappings, lying (as pigments) nakedly side by side, the shock of juxtaposition unmitigated.
has Butor read our poets, or did he get it from the painters? In any case, this is a re-emergence of an old tradition of franco-american interchange, one that involved Jefferson, Franklin, Crevecoeur and de Tocqueville . . . it is also in the tradition of that secondary European greed, not the landgrabbers, but those who gathered, at second hand, the land’s natural life: as, Coleridge mining the Bartrams—here, Butor makes a feast of Audubon, picking the birds clean.
And, countering “Jonathan Williams, in a letter,” who’d complained the book “is merely grist,” Metcalf quotes Wright Morris’s The Territory Ahead(1963):
“Walt Whitman . . . is the forerunner of those anonymous classics the Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogues. The poetry of things. The poetry of the sheer weight and number of things. The uses, abuses, and value of things, the appearance, description, and nature of things, the name and number of things, with their price, place, and listing in the great plan. . .
“The mystic meaning proper to objects themselves is the poetry in Whitman. The mere sight of things, a listing of their uses, excites in the American a rudimentary aesthetic. It is not uniquely American, but as Americans we rely on it almost uniquely. After all, what else is there?”
Metcalf adds: “we see this reappearing in PATERSON, the geological analysis of the Passaic riverbed, listing of the sediments, and in MAXIMUS Olson’s fondness for lists of maritime provisions. Here in MOBILE, there is the incessant listing of place names, small and large, from all over our map . . .” Out of the Robert Buckeye-edited From Quarry Road: Uncollected Essays and Reviews of Paul Metcalf (Amandla, 2002). (Metcalf’s own 1979 Zip Odes is “composed entirely of place names, as they appear, state by state, in the U. S. Postal Service Zip Code Directory . . . nothing has been added—there are no ‘filler’ words, or ‘combining’ words.”)
http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/paul-metcalf-stray-notes_12.html
Variations without a Theme
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, Music, W G Sebald on April 3, 2012
A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread. Or the song of Orpheus. … One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune.
(‘1837: Of the Refrain, Deleuze & Guattari, pp. 343-4)
There’s so much in this short passage that resonates with me. Often with Deleuze my grasp is fleeting – I understand (or think I do) for a moment and then it’s lost again (rather like the offside rule, or long division). But that last phrase – ‘one ventures from home on the thread of a tune’ – stays with me, and moves me somehow. That thread – Ariadne’s thread – sounds so fragile. And whereas it led Daedalus and Theseus out of the labyrinth and to safety, this leads from home to who knows where. The music is the magic, the song is the charm.
Another phrase that’s lodged firmly in my mind since a fascinating seminar on Proust and Barthes by Thomas Baldwin from the University of Kent, is ‘variations without a theme’. If there’s no theme, then what is it that’s being varied? I think it’s Deleuze’s thread of a tune. Whatever we begin with changes as we venture further from home – music as a form of becoming – and we never go back to it, but what we hear is still connected, it carries the memory. Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations give us a foretaste of what twentieth century composers would do with that freedom from the constraints of a theme – as Alfred Brendel wrote, ‘The theme has ceased to reign over its unruly offspring. Rather, the variations decide what the theme may have to offer them. Instead of being confirmed, adorned and glorified, it is improved, parodied, ridiculed,disclaimed, transfigured, mourned, stamped out and finally uplifted’ (Brendel, p. 114).
Music in the last century has truly ventured from home, and often denies the listener a reassuring homecoming, a resolution. Beethoven can confound the listener’s expectations along the way, can sound a century later than he was, but finally, we know that all the threads will be gathered together, in a very firm and decisive final chord (albeit one for which we are made to wait, thinking each could be the final one, only to hear another, and another – as unforgettably parodied by Dudley Moore). Even in jazz, we often know whilst we hear each of the soloists take the theme and play with it, however far out they go, that they will return at the end to the theme as we first heard it.
Music that doesn’t do that is hard. The ‘difficult’ composers of the serialist movement and the postwar era have not become mainstream – the process whereby what appears new and scary gradually becomes accessible worked for Stravinsky and Debussy but not (yet?) for Boulez and Stockhausen. We struggle to find the thread, to hold on to it, to follow it through the piece, and we feel unsettled when we end up not back at home but somewhere else entirely.
Deleuze and Guattari were drawn to Messiaen’s music because it puts ‘in continuous variation all components’ and forms a rhizome instead of a tree (Bogue, p. 24). As in a raga, the music could in theory go on forever, and so we hear it as part of something bigger, not complete in itself. (Sometimes an unresolved ending is very clearly an ending, nonetheless – I’m thinking of a chamber piece by Kurtag, beautifully performed by the incomparable Ensemble 360, which ends abruptly, cut off in mid-phrase, as was the life that it commemorates, and I wish I could recall its title.).
Butor’s long-term musical collaborator Henri Pousseur shared his vision of polyphony and openness, saying that ‘composition will not always be the production of closed and finished objects which one can buy and sell …. We will have to think increasingly in a collective way ‘ (Obituary), and in his work expanded serialist techniques to integrate past musics, to mediate between styles which might seem irreconcilable. As Butor said of poetry, ‘one can play infinitely, multiplying the variations and the processes of construction’, and he preferred to speak of art as transformation rather than creation, because the artist starts not with a blank slate, at the beginning of the process, but with all that there is already in the world, all of the words, the notes, the colours. The threads are there to be woven together, to be followed wherever they lead.
All music is a dynamic, complex conversation; it’s ‘the domain of possibilities, or potentialities … a fold, a flow, a source of possibility, and in consequence a labyrinth‘ (Bidima, in Buchanan & Swiboda, p. 179). The composer engages with the conductor and the performers, and they in turn engage with the audience in an encounter which will be repeated in other places and other contexts but will never be absolutely the same. Some have taken this several steps further, giving opportunities for participants (performers or audience) to change the music by making choices, or introducing elements of pure chance (albeit within predefined parameters). In Pousseur’s Miroir de Votre Faust (libretto by Butor), the soprano has to listen for her cue when a particular phrase recurs, and it recurs arbitrarily, because the pages, unbound so that the music can be shuffled around before performance, contain many ‘windows’ – rectangular holes that allow one to see through to the next one or two pages. The performer cannot be sure what is coming next or what will return in an entirely new context. In performance (and this can only work in performance) this creates enormous tension as she gathers herself up to sing and then pauses, realising this is not her cue, or launches herself, seizes the moment, just in time. The sense of risk is exhilarating.
In the post-war world the notion of going home became at the same time more poignantly desirable and more problematic. In Europe between 11 and 20 million people were displaced. Many never found their way home. Others did, but found that home, and they, had changed beyond recognition or recovery. Even those who were not displaced by war – Butor and Sebald amongst them – had to question notions of home. Butor, growing up in occupied Paris, saw a familiar childhood home become a place of darkness, suspicion, fear and danger, and his subsequent restless travels suggest that transformation had a long-term effect. For Sebald a growing understanding of the Nazi era forced him to see his childhood home as a place of darkness and he found it impossible to settle in Germany; he said once that his ideal station ‘would be a hotel in Switzerland’, just as Butor chooses to live near the French/Swiss border. So to be unsettled is to be of our times. To venture from home, like Butor and Sebald, like Revel and Ferber, is to accept risk, but to set off new harmonics, to find in a city of emigrants the thread that connects with the unrecoverable home: ‘The valleys of Bleston do not echo/And with them is no more returning’ – Bleston IV, p. 21).
Jean-Godefroy Bidima, ‘Music and the Socio-Historical Real’, in Deleuze and Music, ed. Ian Buchanan & Marcel Swiboda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004)
Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (NY, London: Routledge, 2003)
Alfred Brendel, ‘Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations’, in Alfred Brendel on Music (Chicago: A Cappella, 2001)
Michel Butor, Dialogue avec 33 variations de L. van Beethoven sur une valse de Diabelli (Paris: Gallimard, 1971)
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (London; NY: Continuum, 2007)
Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)
Henri Pousseur, Musiques Croisées (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998)
W G Sebald, Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011)
In Search of Lost Music
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, Music on March 31, 2012
‘Quand ta voix s’envolera
dans le battement des langues
les anciennes dissonances
fleuriront en harmonies’
(‘Le jardin des ages’, Michel Butor par Michel Butor)
It might seem odd to call Passing Time a musical novel. After all, music is conspicuous by its absence in Bleston. As Brunel says, ‘rich in references to the art of the stained-glass window, the tapestries, and even the cinema, the text of L’Emploi du Temps is poverty-stricken with regard to musical references’ (Brunel, p. 143). On the other hand, it is Brunel who calls the book ‘a musical novel’ (p. 17).
In the fog of Bleston, music can’t find a place. Revel sees in the stained glass windows of the Old Cathedral the ancestors of industry and music but in contemporary Bleston, ‘city of weavers and metal workers’, he asks ‘what has become of your musicians?’ (p. 73). Later, he describes how in these same windows, ‘everything was taking place in silence … the looms wove in silence, the hammers forged in silence, the musicians mimed their sounds in silence’. The silence is broken, as his earlier revery is, by mechanical noise, the screech and then the siren of a police car. Music in Bleston is stifled – lost in the labyrinth-city which makes Revel mute, and the woman he loves deaf to him – and the only real music Revel hears in the city is Horace Buck’s harmonica, plaintively recalling long-ago voyages in distant lands, music which unequivocally does not belong there.
The structure of the novel is based on the musical canon, ‘one of the fundamental structures of polyphony, … with reversals, with mirrors … These are the fundamental structures of our perception of time.’ (Curriculum Vitae, p. 74), or perhaps the more complex structure of the fugue, which allows more possibilities for variation. In Passing Time there are five parts, or voices. The twelve months of Revel’s stay in Bleston form our scale, and each of the five sections (each of which is also subdivided into five), move up and down this scale. In part 1 Revel starts writing in May to describe the events of October, in part 2, he’s writing in June, weaving together memories of November with events in June, and so on, as in each part a new voice joins in, until in the final part, we have his contemporary account interwoven with memories of five other months. As Mary Lydon suggests, Passing Time illustrates Bergson‘s ‘melodic concept of duration’: ‘the indivisible and indestructible continuity of a melody where the past comes into the present and forms with it a whole undivided and even indivisible, despite what is added to it at each instant, or rather, thanks to what is added to it’ (Lydon, p. 94).
These musical structures are potentially infinite and so the endings are in a sense arbitrary, as in the novel. As Wilfred Mellers has said of Messiaen’s harmonically centred, static technique, which ‘evades the concept of beginning, middle and end’, ‘there is no reason why [these pieces] – any more than a Gothic motet or the improvisation of an Indian vina player – should ever stop’. When Revel leaves Bleston, he leaves us with the lacunae in his story unfilled, the mysteries unresolved, the book ends as the train pulls out of the station, just as it began with the train’s arrival. If Revel’s writing has saved him, therefore, it’s the act, the process, rather than what he has written. ‘Writing in the labyrinth is … the only true way to try to recover the lost music’ (Brunel, 144), to achieve ‘new harmonic days’. Revel’s journal creates ‘a whole series of resonances of varying intensity separated by broad intervals of silence, like the harmonics into which the timbre of a sound is broken up’ (p. 281).
So, despite the failure of his quest (he loses the women he loves, and he leaves with his narrative unfinished), he has restored Bleston’s lost music, by triggering these harmonics. For Revel, and for Butor, to write is to live, so Revel predicts for Bleston that ‘my silent words may begin to echo through all your rafters, so that your own silent words may at last achieve passionate utterance’ (p. 260).
For Butor music represents the aim of all the arts. It’s ‘not an idle diversion, … music is indispensable to our life, to all our lives… it teaches us, even at its haughtiest, its most apparently detached, something about the world, that musical grammar is a grammar of the real, that songs transform life’ (‘La Musique, Art Realiste’).
Subsequent blogs will explore Butor’s relationship with music more fully, in relation to his other works, and I’ll also return to the Butor-Sebald connection in this context. More, much more, to follow….
Michel Butor, ”La Musique, Art Realiste’, Répertoire (Minuit, 1960)
– Curriculum vitae: entretiens avec André Clavel (Paris: Plon, 1996)
Pierre Brunel, Butor: ‘L’Emploi du temps’. Le texte et le labyrinthe (Paris: PUF, 1995)
Wilfred Mellers, Caliban Reborn: Renewal in Twentieth-century Music (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968)
Butor – the movie!
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor on March 28, 2012
Well, ok, it’s a documentary/interview, not a Hollywood biopic.
Blandine Armand is a French documentary maker whose primary area of interest is the process of artistic creation, and who has made a number of documentaries about film directors for Arte. Her portrait of Michel Butor was broadcast recently on France 5.
Telerama’s review (see attached) says that Butor ‘continues to develop an oeuvre that is lively and erudite, including prose, poetry, essays and collaborations with visual artists. Intelligence, passion, simplicity and goodwill radiate from this delightful man, to whom this portrait does full justice’.
I will provide details of availability on DVD as soon as I’ve tracked it down.
Parallel Geography – Marc Jurt & Michel Butor exhiibition, Lyon, 13 July – 23 September
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, Visual Art on March 20, 2012
The Lyon Printing Museum and the Fondation Marc Jurt pay tribute to the great draftsman, printmaker and Swiss painter, who died in 2006. Professor at the College de Saussure and an avid traveller, Marc Jurt met Michel Butor, a writer he admired, and began a collaborative work. The museum presents some fifty paintings, regarded as the highlights of his production produced between 1994 and 1995.
Collaboration is a vital aspect of Butor’s oeuvre, and his work with visual artists, which in a way began with a very early (1945) piece on Max Ernst, continued and grew, encompassing words about, words to go alongside, and ultimately words within the visual works. The list of artists with whom he collaborated in this way is lengthy – there are around 200 – and includes Alechinsky, Starisky, Kolar, Maccheroni, Monory (see Elinor Miller’s book Prisms & Rainbows for more about three of these). Butor chooses to make his home close to a border (between France and Switzerland) and the idea of crossing or blurring frontiers is key to his ‘oeuvres croisées’.
Reading the Detectives
Posted by cathannabel in Literature, Michel Butor on March 17, 2012
What we don’t know is more interesting than what we know, both in the sciences and in the arts. The classic detective story is a puzzle which must, to satisfy its readers, provide a solution, tie up loose ends, arrange retribution, and restore the natural order of things (typified in many of the TV detective series I recall from the 1970s by the postscript where they all go home and have tea, and a bit of a laugh, no matter how traumatic the preceding events have been). The satisfaction of the tidy ending can simultaneously be a disappointment. The final ‘reveal’, the scene where someone (the brilliant detective’s slightly dozy sidekick, perhaps) says, ‘But what I still don’t understand is…’, allowing the brilliant detective to resolve that last apparent anomaly, leaves the reader or viewer little to ponder on once the book is closed or the credits have rolled.
To be fair, the best examples of the genre, whilst making use of its conventions and tropes, also stretch and subvert them. The detective novels that have remained in print for decades are those which have more to satisfy the reader than merely the solving of a riddle. We might re-read or re-watch a lesser work once, just to spot where the clues were if we’d been bright enough to pick them up, or even in the hope of finding a continuity error or plot hole, but we’re not likely to revisit them repeatedly. In my many re-readings of, for example, Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels, in contrast, it’s not the plot, but the characters, the quality of the writing that give repeated pleasure.
If the classic mystery, the ‘roman enigme’, is a puzzle to be solved, and, like a completed crossword, of limited interest thereafter, the ‘roman noir’, is a more complex and nuanced narrative. Tellingly, it flourished in the ’40s and ’50s in France, often taking the Occupation as subject and setting (Atack, 2010), providing a medium in which the ambiguities of the era could be explored, but has also been used more recently by such writers as Didier Daeninckx, to stage ‘complex crimes that to be solved involve precisely a return to the past, to the hidden history of State and/or establishment criminality’ (Gorrara, 79) (see Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour Memoires, which uncovers two dark and hidden areas of France’s past, the massacre of Algerian demonstrators in Paris in 1961, and the wartime deportation of Jews, events linked by one man, Maurice Papon).
The roman noir takes the reader well off the tourist map, into a city of shadows and secrets, into the realm of the uncanny. In this labyrinth, the detective wanders the streets, as shadowy and ambiguous a figure as those he tracks – indeed, as Butor said, the flaneur-detective and the criminal ‘are at bottom identical. The second places his steps in the footprints of the first who remains unaware of him, although the former is without knowing it the initiator, the guide of the second’ (Histoire extraordinaire, p. 33). Walter Benjamin drew on Baudelaire‘s fascination with Poe’s ur-detective story, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, to link the flaneur and the detective when he wrote that ‘No matter what trail the flaneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime’. This is highly ambiguous – is the flaneur a detective, tracking down transgressions and transgressors, or a criminal, whose wanderings are themselves transgressive and/or may lead him into crime/to commit crime? (McDonough, 101).
Michel Butor’s Passing Time isn’t a detective novel, though one critic described it as of the fusion of this genre and the experimental novel. But his Bleston is the perfect setting for a ‘roman noir’, a place of shadows and labyrinthine streets, a place where fear and suspicion are in the air. Butor was ‘devouring’ detective novels at this time, and right at the heart of Passing Time, he places an exposition on the principles upon which they are constructed. Crime novelist George Burton (alias J K Hamilton) argues that every detective novel is based around two murders, the crime itself, and the (symbolic or actual) destruction of the criminal by the detective when they are exposed, killed by ‘the explosion of truth (143-4). The detective’s role is to ‘disturb and probe, to expose and alter things’, to tear off veils and masks, abolish errors, ignorance and lies, to cleanse ‘this small fraction of the world’ from its offence and the defilement that the murder brings with it. According to Burton, he is:
‘the true son of the murderer Oedipus, not only because he solves a riddle, but also because he kills the man to whom he owes his title, without whom he would not exist in that capacity (without crimes, without mysterious crimes, what would he be?) because this murder was foretold for him from the day of his birth or, if you prefer, because it is inherent in his nature, through it alone he fulfils himself and attains the highest power’ (145)
The detective novel superimposes two temporal sequences, that which begins with the discovery of the crime and concludes with the discovery of its perpetrator, and that which leads up to the crime, which is reconstructed by the detective (not necessarily emerging in a linear form, but usually presented to us as such at the climax of the novel). Similarly, Passing Time has a linear time frame beginning in May when Revel starts writing his journal, and ending in September with his departure from Bleston, but his journal narrative begins in October with his arrival, initially linear but gradually becoming ‘a desperate attempt to account for several months simultaneously, ending as the narrator leaves the town with the awareness that no year can ever be completely recovered, as the lack of time to describe the events of February 29 so symbolizes’ (Lloyd, 2005, pp 143-4).
Just as there are (at least) two time frames, there are (at least) two texts, that which gives the true version of events, which the guilty party has erased, or tried to erase, and the alternative version of events which has been superimposed upon it. The detective’s goal is to uncover the true story from the traces left behind, to decipher and restore the palimpsest.
The detective novel itself, a green Penguin crime title, with a blank space where the author photograph normally appears, is the trigger for most of the events in the narrative. (I should say, the books themselves, since Revel buys two copies, and Ann a third.) Revel is attracted by the ambiguity of the title – Le Meurtre de Bleston could refer at the same time to a murder committed in Bleston, and to the murder of Bleston, thus allowing him ‘to enjoy a small private revenge against this town’ (54). But it becomes ‘an auxiliary so precious that I can almost say that a new phase of my adventure began at the instant when … I read for the first time those opening words which I now know by heart’ (55). The precision with which the author describes the city and its monuments suggests to him that the story might be based on real events, leading him to attempt his own detective work when the book’s author is injured in an ‘accident’. More than that, Revel feels that he’s being led along:
‘through a newspaper poster I had discovered J C Hamilton’s detective story, The Bleston Murder; through reading this I had discovered the Murderer’s Window, which in its turn had given rise to this conversation with its closing words of advice to visit the New Cathedral. It was as though a trail had been laid for me, at each stage of which I was allowed to see the end of the next stage, a trail which was to lead me hopelessly astray’ (80).
The book(s) wander(s) through Bleston just as their owner does. Linking all of Revel’s contacts in Bleston (his landlady, the two sisters with whom he consecutively falls in love, his colleague Jenkins, his compatriot Lucien) with the single exception of Horace Buck, the African worker who befriends him, and linking via the sisters to their friends and thus to the suspected real life counterpart of the book’s perpetrator, it is passed on, lost, replaced (in a second-hand version with an indecipherable signature), and reappears in a bewildering sequence.
The re-reading of detective novels is expounded upon here too. Revel justifies his re-reading of The Bleston Murder on the basis that it is ‘a precious guide for a newcomer among the perplexities and misunderstandings of that city’ , but for Jenkins, an aficionado of the genre, ‘they take on a kind of transparency. As you trace out the illusions of the beginning, you glimpse the truth that you remember more or less clearly’ (88).
Revel becomes a detective, to unravel his own past and reconstruct it. But his quest is doomed to failure, there is no final revelation. For the writers of noir, and the nouveau romanciers, the Borgesian imminent revelation often remains imminent, unrealised, or reveals a new mystery. If the narrator/hero finds a path through the labyrinth, ‘it is only to discover that the exit is really an entrance, that the labyrinth solved is no more than a labyrinth within a greater labyrinth’ (Porter, 256). And so nothing here is finally resolved. Revel’s feud with the city ends with an uneasy truce (‘We are quits’ (249)), the ‘accident’ that fuels his guilt and his suspicions appears ultimately to be just an accident, the only murderers he encounters are fictional or mythical. There is no return to the harmony of an established order. But the process of interpreting the palimpsest, reconstructing the past, following the trail and making the links does start something, not contained within the arbitrary parameters of the narrative:
‘Thus each day, evoking other days like harmonics, transforms the appearance of the past, and while certain periods come into the light others, formerly illuminated, tend to grow dim, and to lie silent and unknown until with the passage of time fresh echoes come to awaken them. Thus the sequence of former days is only restored to us through a whole host of other days, constantly changing, and every event calls up an echo from other, earlier events which caused it or explain it or correspond to it, every monument, every object, every image sending us back to other periods which we must reawaken in order to recover the lost secret of their power for good or evil’ (283)
Margaret Atack, ‘Representing the Occupation in the Novel of the 1950s: Ne jugez pas’, Cincinnati Romance Review, 29 (2010), 76-88
Michel Butor, Passing Time, translated by Jean Stewart (London: John Calder, 1961)
– Histoire Extraordinaire: Essays on a Dream of Baudelaire’s, translated by R Howard (Jonathan Cape, 1969)
Didier Daeninckx, Meurtres pour Memoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1984)
Claire Gorrara, The Roman Noir in Post-War French Culture: Dark Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
Louise Hardwick (ed), New Approaches to Crime in French Literature, Culture and Film (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009)
Rosemary Lloyd, Shimmering in a Transformed Light: Writing the Still Life (Cornell UP, 2005)
Tom McDonough, ‘The Crimes of the Flâneur’, October, 102 (2002), 101-22
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven; London: Yale UP, 1981)
Musing on The Nine Muses: some first thoughts on John Akomfrah’s film
Posted by cathannabel in Film, Michel Butor on March 14, 2012
It will take more than one viewing to do justice to John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses, time to mull over the images, the words, the sounds. But some preliminary thoughts are in order.
I first heard about this film when it featured in Sheffield’s DocFest programme last year, but didn’t manage to see it, and have been looking out for it ever since. So much about that brief blurb rang bells for me. John Akomfrah himself is a Ghanaian, born in 1957, so the same age as Ghana (and as me). The theme, migration, is one that fascinates me, and in particular the response of my home country to the people who’ve arrived on its doorstep from all over the world, those who’ve been invited, those who’ve come here in hope, those who’ve come here in desperation. And I love the idea of exploring this through words, sounds and images drawn from sources as diverse as those people.
John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses
The images are powerful and beautiful, whether they are of wintry Alaskan landscapes (‘a cold coming they had of it’) or of Ugandan Asians stepping off the plane, of solitary anonymous figures dressed in primary colours against the whites and greys of winter, or in black against the urban industrial or dockland settings. The words, though often familiar (from Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, Homer) are thrown into an unfamiliar light by being set against these images, and against the soundtrack which blends industrial sounds with music from Purcell to Part to Bollywood soundtracks. This intertextuality and interweaving creates ambiguities, jarring juxtapositions and unexpected contextualisations. As the Guardian review commented,
it suggests that stories normally seen through the lens of postcolonialism could just as easily be seen in existential or mythic terms. In doing so, it invites viewers to reflect on the labels by which history – especially diasporic history – is framed and categorised.”It’s important to read images in the archive for their ambiguity and open-endedness,” Akomfrah argues.
John Akomfrah
John Akomfrah says (in an interview with Sound and Music):
I thought often whilst watching the shots from the 60s of an earlier migrant, Horace Buck, from Michel Butor’s Passing Time. Horace is an African in Bleston (Manchester) in the early 50s, isolated from what would seem to be his fellows because they are mostly from Sierra Leone, and he is not (we do not find out where, his story starts as he arrives in England, just as that of his French counterpart does). Horace and Jacques are drawn together because both are isolated exiles, and Horace’s bitter, sardonic, smoky laugh punctuates the narrative, as he introduces Jacques to the bars and arcades that he frequents, where his money is welcome but he is not. He is a generous man, insistent on offering Jacques his hospitality, and even securing lodgings for him, but his generosity and dignity are constantly met with rebuffs. The landlady he finds for Jacques can’t know that he was involved as she regards all of his kind as ‘black devils’. Jacques’ friends are at best uneasy and at worst openly horrified at their association. Horace finds solace in the arms of a succession of English girls and in the music of his harmonica, and, possibly, revenge in minor acts of arson. There’s no polemic here, no overt social commentary (less so than in Butor’s later work on the USA, Mobile, where he uses the texts of treaties with the Native Americans, amongst other found sources, or in his collaboration with composer Henri Pousseur, which uses protest songs). Here too, as in Akomfrah’s film, the story of this exile trudging the streets of a dismal city, is intercut with mythic narratives, of Theseus and the Minotaur, of Cain and his brother, of Oedipus and his father.
So many of Akomfrah’s images are in my mind now. The empty icy landscapes and the faces, hopeful, anxious, resigned. The voices too – patrician tones reciting Shakespeare – ‘this sceptred isle’ – Leontyne Price and Paul Robeson, a West Indian migrant speaking of the gulf between the paradise he hoped for and the reality he encountered. Polyphony.
Trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xegOksDquyo
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2010/10/john-akomfrah-film-muses-black
http://cinema-architecture.blogspot.com/2011/07/john-akomfrahs-nine-muses.html
http://weblog.liberatormagazine.com/2011/08/ghanian-briton-filmmaker-john-akomfrah.html
http://soundandmusic.org/features/sound-film/interview-john-akomfrah
Passing Time 