My dear Hervé, I promised myself a long time to read The Change , this great book that won the Renaudot prize in 1957. It is read to. With pleasure. Michel Butor locks us twenty hours in a train compartment with Leon Delmont who travels from Paris to Rome. This is a regular line as it heads to Paris the French subsidiary of Scabelli company headquartered in Rome. He took a book he did not read, but which serves to mark his place when he leaves the car to smoke, go to the bathroom to the dining car and stretch your legs. He observes the other passengers, the fund itself and the passing scenery behind the windows, those on the right and those on the left. More importantly, it reflects.
By Laurent Jouannaud
He decided to leave his wife Henriette to live with his mistress, Cecilia, he will settle in Paris. This trip is also his first act of freedom: “This trip should be a liberation, a great cleansing your body and your head; should you not already feel the benefits and excitement? “It’s a secret trip: his wife to Paris believes that this is an ordinary business trip, his mistress who lives in Rome is not prejudiced because he wants to surprise her announcing her oral decision. But there are far from Paris to Rome from Friday to Saturday, and the desire to achieve the desire.
So this is a story of adultery. About as banal as there are men and women who hope to love forever. Here, a man between two women, legitimate and mistress. Extramarital affairs have a threshold beyond which everyone is discouraged (about three years). Leo feels he must choose, he knows Cécile for more than two years. This marked themed masterpieces again and again makes interesting variations. Butor introduced in several that give the novel an unexpected originality.
At first, everything seems to start at the end, since the decision to divorce is made. What then remains to tell? It remains to ruminate expected this decision and its consequences. But by dint of hard thinking about it while the long ride Paris-Rome without sleep because he did not take berth, Leon Delmont will change your mind. His decision comes undone: The Change tells the gradual modification of the initial project. There will be a decision, but another, which cancels the first. The status quo seem preferable
This first decision is also a virtual from Paris. He did not say anything either one or the other. This decision will be effective when he says Cecile: “That’s it. I break with Henriette. I found you a job and a room in Paris. Come. “This sentence, the he will deliver once arrived in Rome? Soon enough, doubt and suspense settled. Breaking with his wife, to separate the children, live with his mistress, it’s not so simple …
Leon Delmont is sitting in the train. It is this private session, which prevents distraction of himself and forces him to ruminate. It’s almost in spite of himself he will revisit and relive history. Indeed, he experienced his mistress on the train from Paris to Rome, the same train, and everything reminds her of their first meeting. But he still thinks about her last trip from Rome to Paris, just a few days, when Cecile at the station criticized him not to decide and Henriette return to Paris has been so unpleasant. And he returns to memory his honeymoon with his wife before the war, from Paris to Rome, when they loved each other. These trips due to it piecemeal, Butor and proceed to crossover between these extraordinary journeys of the past: the reader should not cling to derail. But Leo Delmont, or rather, Butor, is not confused: it was day or night, in the first, third, in the direction Paris-Rome-Paris or Rome, with Cécile or with Henriette, or alone.
The current trip is the present tense, the other trips are to the past. Leon Delmont evokes the future of upcoming trips, when Cécile will join him in Paris (a journey that will not happen), or its return journey Rome-Paris the following Tuesday, and even at the end when he amended the original decision, a project of a trip to Rome with Henriette, to start from scratch, “I promise you, Henriette, we will come back together in Rome, when the waves of this disturbance will have subsided, as soon as you have forgiven me; we will not be that old. “
Everything happens in the head of Leo Delmont. He’s in the train, he spoke to no one, it is a monologue. An interior monologue is a dialogue in which consciousness unfolds, questions itself, respond to recalls, is not critical outsider. This duplication of consciousness is usually written in the first person, or sometimes in the second person singular. In The Change , this “I” who observes and speak, instead of tu, says “you.” Leon Delmont is vous, the first line of the novel, when it enters the compartment: “You put your left foot on the copper groove, and your right shoulder you try in vain to push a little the sliding panel” at the last, when he leaves the train: “You look at the crowd on the platform. You leave the compartment. “This process, something cunning, gives the father hesitating unexpected authority. Leon Delmont is constituted itself into a character and think instead of just talking. This analysis describes, finally understand and know what he wants. It even comes to the idea of writing a novel that would tell the existential crisis it is experiencing.
Finally, another variant of the original novel, the two women are separated by four thousand hundred kilometers: it is a remote rivalry. This is a more geographical than personal rivalry. Indeed, Cécile lives in Rome, this is perhaps what makes its greatest charm. Delmont and now remembers another train journey, when Cecile had accompanied him to Paris. Once in Paris, the magic did not work, Cécile had defeat déromantisée. Delmont analyzes and understands why it would be wrong to bring Cecile: “It is now certain that you truly love Cecile only insofar as it is for you face in Rome, his voice and his invitation, as you do not like without Rome and outside Rome, that you do not like that because of Rome. ” He likes more a situation that a person, great psychological truth. On the last page is legitimate wins.
Let’s add a bourgeois couple, with four children, a nice apartment, a management position which hardly allows the scandal would be a divorce, yes, a bourgeois couple, it holds. It stood in 1957. Butor severely analyzes the society of his time: the life of Leo Delmont is a failure, a “sea of boredom, resignation, usantes ennuageantes and routines,” he has “work to which he is chained” he sold his soul to succeed. Social and moral pot began to boil, but the lid still held. There is therefore no change. Henriette in Paris, Cécile for Rome, after a brilliant deliberation that lasted all night.
It was classified at the time The Change in the New Roman. Butor has been told, but that was a misunderstanding. The resemblance (long sentences, interior monologue, ice description of items) was only surface. The New Novel 1960s sought blurring of characters, blurring the action, the geographical focus. This vagueness already corresponded to the thinning of the world that the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman speaks: uncertain dates, names reduced to initials, moving sets, ambiguous dialogue, non-existent action. The literary image of the world, that is to say its reflection in literature, was as difficult to decipher as the world itself. The emblem remains the film by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last year at Marienbad : do you? is it me? have we loved? was it last year? Was it even at Marienbad? But the novel shows Butor not blur but the complexity of reality. This is not the same, although the fuzzy and complex as destabilize the drive.
The Change , which is we know that (the husband, the wife, mistress), what it is (separation) and where it is located (on the train Paris-Rome, 1956). But Butor unfold this surface. Complex patterns, complexity of memory, complexity of reality, even when the packaging looks so smooth [1]. This complexity is not the uncertainty that the New Roman wanted to describe. [2] At the end of the novel, Leo Delmont remains master of his fate, the two women destiny and knows what train it take to go.
After The Change , Butor still publish a novel, Degrees (1960), then give up the literary form. With Mobile (1962), he now writes something and otherwise. It is often said: “After the novels, I started to write some very strange things. The novel is an exciting shape that depth is exceeded. [3] “Bittern is a kind of Rimbaud: a more romantic line, and he kept his word! Never again “The Marquise went out at five o’clock”! But instead of silence, a vertiginous multiplication (and disturbing to my eyes!) Of the verb. He still publish many: 2,000 titles, 350 volumes! Butor wants poet. But poetry is it not also exceeded?
Michel Butor still lives and writes. His blog, updated every month, continues to proliferate. Nulla dies sine linea. Born in 1926, he will be ninety this year.
PS
This novel deliciously aged with me, my dear Hervé. It describes things I have known and which are not. I knew the pictures of French cities and regions in black and white above each seat in the train compartments. I knew the restaurant cars, with two services, and real meals, real coffee. I knew the kind and talkative controllers. I have known border controls, documenti, Ausweis, papeles! I experienced the Rome Catholic and even prudish, where Leo poses as a cousin Cecilia to keep up appearances. I have known movie ushers, such as which place Léon and Cécile side by side at the beginning of their relationship. I knew typewriters, similar to what the house sells for Delmont Scabelli. I knew the time when smoking was considered a civilized act. [4] Delmont has cigarettes, there are more. He lit one, he turned off or she died. It offers Cecile. French or Italian brand. He has a way to keep it and put in the mouth: “You start by sucking the little white paper tube filled with strands of dry leaves.” Other passengers smoke. His hand looking for the new packet or crumples the empty package. The ash falls and crushes the butt in the ashtray. Hygiene and censorship have now scratched which was a kind of punctuation of the narrative, film and life. Finally, my dear Hervé, I met Michel Butor, beardless and all in white, in Nice, at the time he was teaching in college and when I was a student.
[1] “These are not books that are complicated. This is what we live. My books are a simplification effort gigantic compared to our daily lives. It is because of this extraordinary complexity that we fail to understand is because of this that we are unable to adequately improve our society. “( Active schizophrenia Second trip with Michel Butor , Madeleine Santschi, The manhood, 1993, p. 51). And:” I do not complicate, but I see that things are complicated. (Pp. 128) “
[2] Roland Barthes did not make a mistake:” The last novel Butor, The Change , the point seems to point away from the work of Robe-Grillet. “(” There is no Robbe-Grillet school “, 1958 included in Critical Essays , Le Seuil, 1964)
[4] Smoking meant to be quiet. Smoking obliged to slow down the tempo. Smoking favors the exchange and complicity. Smoking gave countenance. Smoking was thin. Smoking was written. Smoking was fun.
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