Mobile

by Michel Butor

Mobile is the result of the six months Michel Buton spent traveling across America. The text is composed from a wide range of materials, including city names, road signs, advertising slogans, catalog listings, newspaper accounts of the 1893 World's Fair, Native American writings, and the history of the "Freedomland" theme park. Butor weaves bits and pieces from these diverse sources into a collage resembling an abstract painting (the book is dedicated to Jackson Pollack) or a patchwork quilt, by turns humorous and quite disturbing. This "travelogue" captures - in both a textual and visual way - the energy and contradictions of American life and history.

Genres: France, Fiction, Poetry, Novels, French Literature

319 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1962

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

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exasperating caffeine rush of a novel, predating the Beats in their attempts to capture the mescaline cyclone of a trip around America. In 1959, leading French avant-garde writer Michel Butor brummed around the States (one hopes in an open-top Cadillac), collecting titbits of information for use in this freewheeling collage novel. Butor stitches state names, trivia, long Thomas Jefferson passages, and all manner of inscrutable arcana to capture an America before the most miraculous decade in its history. One recurring topic is black segregation—reports from historical accounts of slavery, mixed with Jefferson’s unreliable views, and repeated accounts of fifties ingrained racism evoke the storm that would erupt with Martin Luther King. A marvellously engaging and eccentric novel, completely batty, strangely affecting and weirdly funny. There goes my stock of adverbs for the week. Read me!

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're really really really on a David Markson jag and want to stretch it out, this'll do. Blinkered America as seen through the nouveau roman eyes of a driving Frog in all its trashy, neon glory. May she rise again.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

How eerie to read the fruits of this avant-garde French writer's 1959 road trip across America, the salvaged American words and documents, in light of the present atmosphere in the US. As a Canadian I found it endlessly fascinating and insightful—not to mention disturbing at times. My review can be found at: https://roughghosts.com/2017/02/07/ex...

[Ezgi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alain Robbe-Grillet ile Nouveau Romanın en ünlü isimlerinden Butor. Haliyle hiçbir tutarlılık kaygısı olmayan bir tür anti roman Mobil. Amerika için bir tur rehberi denmiş reviewlerde. Çok doğru bir tanım. Ama kaybolacağınız bir rehber.

[Hugues Dufour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disturbing and way ahead of its time.
For my money, Butor beats Robbe-Grillet hands down at the Nouveau Roman game of Russian roulette.

[Curt Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Mobile in the sixties, in French, and in spite of a failing memory for the language, re-read it recently. And now in English. Written in the era of Rauschenberg and Pop collage, the book is a pastiche, alternating between short, dry notes seemingly made as the writer travels across America, and excerpts, sometimes fascinating, sometimes damning, always revealing, from our own documents. Audubon's diaries, Sears catalogs, treaties with Indian tribes, billboards, all kinds of quotations are included to create a portrait of the country. Butor seems to be arguing that only thereby can a likeness be created that is true to our nature. Mo-BEEL, or mobile: fragmentary, disjointed, contradictory, hypnotic, always on the move.

This wry inventory, although (as is true of all books that quote pop culture) somewhat dated, deserves to be more widely known here. We Americans are notoriously self-involved; ever since de Toqueville we have been fascinated not only with questions of our own identity but the way foreigners see us, and Butor fulfills that promise with a fascinating interpretation, not sociology but art. His entries definitely stack the deck--the 60s counterculture flourished in France as well as the U.S., after all-- but this is no easy hatchet job. The author seems as fascinated by American excesses, lapses and foibles as he is judgmental.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

perhaps the baby brother of stein's "making of americans". it isn't really a fiction. it isn't quite a history. it is what it calls itself: a "representation" of the united states. so here it is then, on paper.

[stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

lovely.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the French edition.