Degrees

by Michel Butor, Richard Howard (Translator)

On Tuesday, October 12, 1954, Pierre Vernier, a teacher in a Paris lycee, begins setting down an account that is to be a complete record of the life lived by himself, his students, and his fellow teachers. He begins by meticulously recording what he already knows of his students, their relationships to one another, and the books they're studying. Then he's forced to enlist his nephew, who's in his class to report on the private lives of the other boys. To record all reality, he must know all that has passed, is passing, and will pass through his pupils' minds. Degrees is an extraordinary novel exposing one man's obsessive project, the impossibility of its completion, and the damaging effect this obsession has on both Vernier and those who surround him.

Genres: France, Novels, French Literature, Fiction

351 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul, a suburb of Lille. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt, Manchester, Thessaloniki, the United States, and Geneva. He has won many literary awards for his work, including the Prix Apollo, the Prix Fénéon; and the Prix Renaudot.

Journalists and critics have associated his novels with the nouveau roman, but Butor himself long resisted that association. The main point of similarity is a very general one, not much beyond that; like exponents of the nouveau roman, he can be described as an experimental writer. His best-known novel, La Modification, for instance, is written entirely in the second person. In his 1967 La critique et l'invention, he famously said that even the most literal quotation is already a kind of parody because of its "trans-contextualization."

For decades, he chose to work in other forms, from essays to poetry to artist's books to unclassifiable works like Mobile. Literature, painting and travel are subjects particularly dear to Butor. Part of the fascination of his writing is the way it combines the rigorous symmetries that led Roland Barthes to praise him as an epitome of structuralism (exemplified, for instance, by the architectural scheme of Passage de Milan or the calendrical structure of L'emploi du temps) with a lyrical sensibility more akin to Baudelaire than to Robbe-Grillet.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Degrees can be considered a highly experimental novel…
The lycée… Teachers and pupils… A hodgepodge of teaching and learning…

Back at the lycée, in that dark classroom overlooking a back alley so narrow the lights have to be on almost all the time, I told my ninth-graders about the conquest of America, the frauds Cortez practiced against Montezuma, Pizarro’s betrayal at Cuzco, the use of forced labor in the mines, the beginning of the slave trade, the flow of gold into Spain, the development of banks throughout Europe.

The geography and history teacher decides to write a book about his class and his colleagues… The book must be very detailed and it must contain just real facts and only truth…

I was trying to explain that it is impossible to represent the earth exactly without distorting it, just as it is impossible to represent reality in speech without using a certain kind of projection, a system of points of reference whose shape and organization depend on what you are trying to show, and, as a corollary, on what you need to know…

The degrees of distortion of reality while conveying it into narration… The degrees of relationship that unite pedagogues and students… The degrees on the thermometer…
He starts writing… But he can’t know everything… So he projects and invents… His narration is rather unfocused and tends to turn far-fetched… He engages his nephew, who is also his student, as his secret informer and assistant…
The second part of the story is presumably narrated by his nephew…

At that moment, I realized that I had acquired a power over you, that the role you were making me play somehow abolished the tremendous distance that usually exists between uncle and nephew, between teacher and pupil.

This double nature of relationship leads to the severe conflict between the uncle and his nephew… The uncle falls seriously ill…
Causes and effects… Was the teacher’s disintegration of health a result of writing a book? Was his decision to write a book a result of his yet unobvious deterioration of mentality?
The third part of the account is written by the teacher of French, Lain and Greek languages and it serves as a kind of conclusion…

Your Uncle Pierre will not write any more. Your Uncle Pierre is no longer in the room I rented him on the top floor in the Rue du Pré-aux-Clercs. Your Uncle Pierre is in the hospital, and Micheline Pavin has left her job to be with him. I am writing; I am taking up where he left off; I shall shore up this ruin a little.

Some learners are capable to absorb knowledge like a sponge and into some learners knowledge must be hammered like nails.

[Jim Elkins]

The Prehistory of Constrained Writing

Reading Muchel Butor's "Degrees" (1960, English by Richard Howard, 1961) after reading surrealism and Oulipo -- two movements that came before and after Butor -- is a disorienting experience. (Oulipo was started the year this book was published, but Butor was not a member.) The book is pervaded with self-awareness: the narrator sets out to chronicle what is taught in every classroom of a Lycee, and the grammar, prosody, and structure of the novel follow his self-imposed task. On the face of it, that is compatible with Oulipean constraints, but there is no authorial self-awareness here (the author does not appear), only narrative self-awareness. The result of the obsessive and hopeless attempt at chronicling every student and every classroom is endless juxtapositions of fragments of dialogue, which are in effect surreal; but the narrator (and the implied author) take no special pleasure in the unpredictable and meaningless sequences of unrelated facts, the way a surrealist might.

(At one point Butor's own voice leaks into the text, when the narrator says that just as it's impossible to represent the Earth on a map without distorting it, "it is impossible to represent reality in speech without a certain kind of distortion." That isn't something the narrator (a geography and history teacher) would normally be expected to say, and he then adds, in parentheses: "(this latter, obviously, I didn't tell you in class, it's an idea that came to me as I was writing"). The "me" and "I" in that last clause are clearly the author, not the narrator. This is the sort of thing that Oulipeans would find obtrusive, because it breaks the fourth wall and in effect changes the novel's game: but it apparently didn't bother Butor. Maybe he thought he got away with it, that he didn't make his readers think of him.)

Here is a sample, which also shows the layout, in which paragraphs break in the middle of sentences:

" I had just drawn a diagram on the board to explain the time zones, how it is midnight a the antipodes when it is noon in Paris, and it was when I turned around that I saw the furtive movement of that hand, of that arm hiding itself behind Michel Daval's shoulder, which itself was half concealed by that of Francis Hutter in the first row, who was looking at his book open to an illustration on this same subject, comparing his diagram with mine, making an obvious effort to understand,
then looked at the face of the clock I was pointing at while explaining that an hour corresponded on the clock face to thirty degrees, but that if the twenty-four hours of the day were put there as sometimes happens, and not only half of them as is customary, then each one of them would occupy exactly fifteen degrees, like each of the zones on this great clock which is the earth.
And during the English class, Alain Mouron went on examining this diagram that had remained on the blackboard, the circle representing the terrstrial equator, another, smaller circle underneath, then the sun surrounded by its beams, one of them longer than the rest, ending in an arrow with the word noon, and at the top the word midnight almost at the edge of the board.
At his left, on the other side of the window, between two branches..." [pp. 38-9]

This sort of description, which leaps between subjects, times, and places, and keeps up a level of detail that continuously flaunts its boring endlessness, is at first like Perec's "Life: A User's Manual" or the opening of Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy." But this isn't systematic, plotted encyclopedism like Perec's, or psychologicaly inflected myopic inspection as in Robbe-Grillet. It's the narrator's "project," which he proposes as a gift to his nephew, who is also one of his students.

Reading "Degrees" is like seeing poststructuralism just at the moment it was born, fitfully conscious for the first time. The book is calculated in the sense that it's plotted -- I imagine Butor may have had hundreds of cards, and perhaps a cork board pinned with notes -- but not in the sense that it believes expressiveness comes only from disruptions in the expected narrative.

The narrator's attempt to list every student and every class in the eleventh grade doesn't work: naturally, because it would be many times the size of this book; but also unexpectedly, because the author is not fully in control of his own project. I will consider just three points: whether Butor expected readers to keep count of all the characters; what counted for him as a complete description; and how he describes the narrator's reasons for doing such an exhausting and unrewarding thing in the first place.


1. How closely did Butor expect his readers to follow his narrative?

In the first few pages it seems Butor toyed with the idea of what would soon become a sort of Oulipean extravagance: he makes nearly impossible demands on the reader's memory and attention. Here is part of a sentence whose subject is a student named Limours:

" Sitting in front of you, in the first row, Limours casually arranges on his desk his spiral-bound notebook... [skipping two lines]
he too a pupil, this year, of one of his uncles, Monsieur Bailly, who at this moment is making his seniors on the floor above read Keats's sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"
(Chapman: 1559-1634):
'Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez.'
(Cortez, or Cortes: 1485-1547),
'when with eagle eyes
'he star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.'
(Darien: southernmost part of the isthmus of Panama),
a first cousin of both Monsieur Mouron, father of Alain Mouron who is in this class, and of Madame Daval, mother of Michel Daval sitting to your right, who is leaning over to ask you for a blotter, because his ink bottle, badly corked, has begun to leak all over his hands." [p. 10]

I tried at first to keep notes, and I think Butor expected that response. It is not clear to me when he thought his more diligent readers would give up taking notes, because there is no clear division between the resolute ot optimistic systematicity of the opening fifty or hundred pages and the hopeless systematicity in the book's final hundred and fifty pages, when the narrator is broken by his impossible task. In later constrained writing it can be clearer when a reader is expected to pay close attention, and when it's best just to be carried along by the flow of facts that cannot ever be tallied.


2. Incomplete descriptions

The narrator interrupts his chronicle a dozen or so times in order to tell us how exhausting it was, and to describe his purpose and update us on his progress. In one such passage he says his notes are "a literal description, without any intervention on the part of my imagination, a simple account of precise facts..." (p. 46). Note that "literal" doesn't mean "complete," but it isn't clear what counts as adequate.

I was repeatedly struck, in a way that I think Butor did not anticipate, by lapses in the supposedly complete descriptions. The game as we're given it in the first dozen pages is more or less this: we'll be told the names and families of every student and teacher in the Lycee, and we'll be given samples of what is said in every classroom. The passage I transcribed at the beginning is an example of the upper limit of detail: the diagram in question is conjured well enough so a reader can picture it. The second passage, with the quotations from Keats, is normative throughout the book: we're given couplets or single lines, just enough to conjure the subjects of each class. This brief kind of evocation is consonant with the narrator's purpose--he intends to give his nephew a mnemonic that he can read in later years.

The problem is that Butor doesn't seem to have thought out exactly how these longer descriptions might work with the briefer ones. At one point the narrator draws a sextant on the board--and that's all we're told. We can't picture it, or imagine how he discussed it (p. 33). On the same page we get the commonplace about how the globe can't be projected onto a plane without distortion. Other times we get summaries of talking points:

"(the various stone ages, the invention of pottery, the discovery of metals, all those tremendous obscure migrations...)" [p. 36]

Apparently Butor didn't want to put Greek letters into his book, but that decision doesn't make sense, because Greek is the subject of one of the classes. As a result students are sometimes said to write "in Greek characters" (p. 42). The narrator skips things he knows, but he also skips things other teachers say when he doesn't know their subjects. He quotes Italian, but little German, and he has almost no interest in the science or gym teachers. Only one or two passages have any math, and it is the simplest algebra, without context (p. 100).

The result is a cross-section of the Lycee that is a portrait of the narrator's interests, exactly opposite to one of his stated purposes. (Later in the book there are two more narrators, but oddly their interests and expertises coincide with the principal narrator's.)


3. What is the narrator's purpose?

The account the narrator is building is therefore not "complete," but "literal." He says at one point that he has tried "to rely as much as possible on what I know with certainty" (p. 46). He wants to avoid "irremediable doubt" (p. 67) and be "serious" (p. 55). So the project is about facts and about the possibility of avoiding "imagination." (Although later the narrator admits he has needed to make "a great imaginative effort" to write his book, p. 104.)

It remains unclear why the narrator cares only for "facts." He notes that the families of students and teachers form three groups (p. 54): but why should he care about that? Why should just this collection of "facts," some abbreviated, and other less so, some entirely absent, constitute an adequate description? He says that in order for his book to make sense to his nephew, it needs to be written "in a certain order and according to certain forms and systems" (p. 72). One of those "systems," it turns out, is the "system of triads" (p. 101). But why should triads be a "system," and why are "systems" necessary at all? There are other "systems," and at one point the narrator ponders whether he'll have to adopt entirely different ones (pp. 101-2). But that doesn't explain the need for systematicity itself.

The narrator says events and people have to be "situated": but why? And why is the complex, run-on grammar and kaleidoscopic temporality of the book an optimal sort of "situating" (p. 78)? The narrator says his book is to help his nephew "realize what you yourself have been... where you come from, in other words where you are going," and in that sense "Degrees" is a compulsive biography in the line of Flaubert.

At one point the narrator proposes a wider purpose for his book: "I am writing up [these notes] in your behalf," he says, "and in behalf of your classmates too, less directly, and--through you and them--in behalf of all those who were or will have been eleventh-grade students and even--I think I have to go this far--in behalf of everyone who has any relation with people who have gone through eleventh grade..." [p. 87]

This hardly makes sense. If he'd ended by saying "in behalf of everyone who has tried to remember a day, or a year, of their life in full detail," that might have made sense. By implication he is also saying "in behalf of myself, to keep myself sane." As it stands this passage is anomalous, illogical (it contradicts the entire rest of the book, which is just for the nephew), and unconvincing. It is the book's most interesting line.

[Joe Milazzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fragment of consciousness and a future music indeed... beneath the surface of Pierre Vernier's chronicle (the prose positively luminescent in Richard Howard's translation) be prepared to find a devastated ethics. (Or: the remains of the terrible sacrifice upon which all civilzation is erected.) The most emotionally appealing of all the nouveau roman I've yet read, and also the most surreptitiously "deconstructive." Of course Butor had to give up novels after writing this one: if novels were really to succeed, Butor seems to be arguing here, we would find ourselves in a completely uninhabitable world. It is only the failure of novels to become teleologies that allows us to endure reality's affronts with anything like grace.

[Hugh Dufour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind-blowing. Michel Butor is God.

[Alec · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probably, I am not the reader that Butor merits or desires. While I am confident that this book has much to offer, it failed to incite me to look for those things. I have read a number of books in which one could not readily understand where one was at a given moment, what exactly was happening and when, and there was always some magic coherence, some glue in the text that would hold me on page. With "Degrés", I just kept reading the ads that were pasted on the fence, never attempting to peek over it. I guess that the fence Butor built around his novel was too high for me.

It should also be added that - impenetrable academic refinement aside - the premise seemed to me ridiculous as formulated in the novel (an uncle trying to describe in its entirety one moment in the life of his nephew/student, as an ultimate love sacrifice or something), the constant attention given to uncle-nephew relationship generally annoying (although probably rationalized in some sophisticated way), scenes of domestic life that relieve descriptions of classroom activities absolutely vapid and uninteresting, and where psychological drama is involved, it draws interest only in opposition to the tedium of the rest (one teacher/uncle's wife is dying of some illness, another is incensed with jealousy mostly because he himself is adulterous, the narrator/uncle is having his creative work/engagement dilemma, etc.) When crisis occurs, it seems completely unwarranted: either the uncle's attempt had been conceived as heroic from the start, which seems to contradict the placidity and confidence of its beginnings, or it was unbelievably naïve if not outright stupid which somehow devalues the whole project of reading.

There is though a certain stylistic novelty which does work but seems to deteriorate toward the end of the novel, some narratological questions that do bother me still and some general exotic flavor of domestic France in the fifties that I enjoyed.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I

I drew up this schedule, this regimen, on Wednesday October 13, and I have kept to it since then without too many infractions; I don’t know if I will be able to do so for much longer; there’s no need to tell you that it is a terrible, oppressive burden. [88]

II

During the evening, you began writing that text I am continuing, or more precisely that you are continuing by using me, for actually it’s not I who is writing but you, you are speaking through me, trying to see things from my point of view, to imagine what I could know that you don’t know, furnishing me the information which you possess and which would be out of my reach. [131-2]

III

Your Uncle Pierre will not write any more. Your Uncle Pierre is no longer in the room I rented him on the top floor in the Rue du Pré-aux-Clercs. Your Uncle Pierre is in the hospital, and Micheline Pavin has left her job to be with him. I am writing; I am taking up where he left off; I shall shore up this ruin a little. [330]

[Michel Castagné · Rating 5 out of 5]

An entirely worthwhile excursion that points towards the experiments of Mobile, though probably not a great place to start with Butor.

[Michael Greer · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are three points I want to make regarding this reading. I know that there is now a wave of interest in Butor's work, sadly neglected as it is. But one reason readers are flocking to his texts is for the three reasons I provide, so consider this an "explanation" of his rising popularity.

1. "I walk into the classroom, and I step onto the platform."

Who has not experienced either sitting in class or running a class? Millions of people around the world are very familiar with the structure of this experience. In fact one could say that it's the determinative experience for all of us. School and family are the most likely spheres of influence in the lives of people. School is the dominant experience of our times and it reveals winners and losers immediately.

2. "I began writing up these notes on October 12, 1954..."

A decisive turning point in the narrative. The tone and effort have shifted to an account the main character will provide for his nephew Pierre when the project is complete. And the project is a complete account of all experience...

3. "Something collapsed that day...I have been sinking ever since..."

When a character is captivated by the desire to recount the totality of experience there is only one outcome: failure.

[Roger · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not finish the book lost interest