In the following essay, Jullien explores the idea of Racinian intertextuality in L’Emploi du temps.

In the following essay, Mason examines Butor's use of dreams and alchemical symbols in Portrait de l'artiste en jeune singe to interpret the artistic experience.

In the following essay, Mason discusses Butor's preoccupation with “whiteness,” how it manifests itself in his writing, and how Belgian artist Christian Dotremont influenced Butor's work.

In the following essay, Burton uses Mikhail Bakhtin's theories concerning narrative and language to explore the significance of travel and cultural difference in Butor's novels.

Butor's narratives characteristically begin with the isolation of his protagonist in one of two ways. The main character is most often cut off from his native milieu and set adrift in a foreign culture (L'Emploi du temps, La Modification, Portrait d'artiste en jeune singe, Mobile, 6.810.000 litres d'eau par seconde). In other instances, he is cut off within his own society by social stigma (Passage de Milan) or by the pressures of his work as a writer (Degrés). Separation ...

In the following essay, Oppenheim argues for the aesthetic of Butor's anaesthetic in L'Embarquement de la Reine de Saba, which she claims is “both post-modern and not” in its attempt to contextualize the artistic experience.

In the following interview, Butor discusses the compartmentalization of the arts and his writing process.

In the following essay, Kline explores manifestations of the metatextual and the metacultural in Degrés.

In the following essay, Miller analyzes Butor's representations of death and decay, arguing that—while our culture attempts to deny the process of physical decomposition that comes with death—Butor treats decay as a process of reunification between man and nature.

In the following essay, Chavadarian argues that Butor's Mobile, 6810000 Litres d'eau par seconde, and Ou begin with a sense of order, but progressively degenerate into narrative chaos.

Michel Butor occupies a paradoxical situation in what we may call the hierarchy of the nouveau roman. On the one hand, he has written four novels of unquestionable though uneven merit…. On the other hand, he has published a series of brilliant articles on the theory of the novel, to be found in his volumes of criticism, Répertoire and Répertoire II, which have made him at least as important an expounder of the newness of the New Novel as Alain Robbe-Grillet or Nathalie Sarraute; yet it ...

In the following essay, Robb addresses the bicentennial of Honore de Balzac's birth and reviews three works that either directly or peripherally address his La Comédie humaine, including Butor's Improvisations.

Michel Butor sees history as a dynamic force which plays a vital role in the shaping of the present. In his works he sets out to challenge the prevalent assumption of stasis and to teach us … how to recognize the patterns which render comprehensible the evolving body of complex material at our disposal…. [One] of the central motifs in Butor's world is that of the museum or art gallery. For Butor … a collection is not a body of petrified works from another age; it is, rather a pow...

In the following essay, Chavdarian interprets Butor's Ou as a discourse on the nature of representation and various forms of creative expression.

In the following review, Schenk praises Butor's compilation of essays focusing on Japan from a diverse group of French intellectuals, but judges Butor's commentary on the selections as “gratuitous and ultimately insignificant.”

Butor, as a writer and artist, finds himself in a somewhat awkward position. On the one hand, he subscribes to the theory that his ideal reader must be encouraged and/or coerced to participate actively in the work of art: the reader's effort must be commensurate with that of the author, and Butor finds himself open to accusations of literary elitism and hermeticism. On the other hand, Butor does not accept the human condition as it stands, socio-politically or intellectually. Echoing Rimbaud, Butor i...

Michel Butor's Passing Time is a story in which the detective hunts himself. In this circular, self-contained structure any connection with an external reality is tenuous. Is Bleston really so oppressive, or is Revel extremely paranoid? Did he actually commit any crime? The reader cannot be sure, for he perceives reality only as it is reflected in the narrative of which Revel is both writer and actor. Indeed, the only certain reality is Revel's consciousness where he plays criminal, detective ...

In his various novels, Butor explores the nature of reality and the part imagination plays in our perception—or creation—of it. In L'Emploi du Temps [Passing Time], many different elements of experience come together in Revel's narrative of his experience in Bleston. His affective experience, for instance, is intimately associated with his cultural experience—his response, among other things, to a detective novel, to various films, to the Theseus tapestry seen in Bleston T...

In the following review, Hoft-March assesses Improvisations as an autobiographical extrapolation of Butor's desire to test and play with man's mental boundaries.

Michel Butor's explicit re-working of dreams began with Matière de rêves. That has now become the general title, and Second sous-sol is Volume 2. But it is more than a matter of arithmetic. If there are, once again, five dreams with a common formal structure, and even deliberate echoes of the first collection, it is soon apparent that here we are to be plunged much deeper into the stuff of dreams. Where, before, there was an "I" to whom things occurred—adventures, m...

Michel Butor, in his skillfully written Matière de rêves III, carefully constructs content and form. But here, much more than [in the two previous volumes of the series], he proves himself the master of minute realism as well as of burgeoning fantasy. His work suggests qualities of painting and music. He composes a gigantic canvas on which distant horizons rapidly alternate with the tiniest of shapes, and analogies to reality succeed images of fantasy. In fuguelike counterpoint, philosophical ...

In the following positive review, De Julio praises A la frontière for pushing boundaries and reconsidering standard distinctions between the self and the other.

In the following review, Bishop praises Mais où sont les rouilles d'antan for its scope and levity.

[Butor's] journals stand in the same relationship to other works of this type as do his novels to the traditional novel, for in both he refuses to interpret. Instead, he solicits the participation of the reader whose collaboration becomes an essential part of the book…. Time plays an important part in Où. Le génie du lieu 2, as it does in all of the author's work. Past, present and future are mixed. Weather conditions also figure prominently and impressions predominate of ...