Michel Butor, a French novelist whose experiments with narrative and structure in the late 1950s and early ’60s put him at the forefront of the literary trend known as le nouveau roman (“the new novel”), died on Aug. 24 in Contamine-sur-Arve, in the Rhône-Alpes region of southeastern France. He was 89.
Family members reported his death to the newspaper Le Monde, which announced it.
Mr. Butor objected to being characterized as a member of the nouveau roman movement, although he shared a publisher, Les Éditions de Minuit, with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon, leading figures in the school. His novels shared certain characteristics with theirs — a cameralike detachment, an indifference to psychology, a preoccupation with physical details and the instability of human perception — but he took a more philosophical and political approach.
“One of the most important ways of affecting reality is to reach it through language,” he told Le Monde in July.
His novel “La Modification” (1957), published in English as “A Change of Heart” in 1959, told the story of a married man traveling from Paris to Rome to face his mistress and force a resolution to their affair, only to abandon the idea. Written, disorientingly, in the second person, with the reader addressed as “you,” it won the prestigious Prix Renaudot, ratifying Mr. Butor’s reputation as a writer to watch.
“You, sir, who wanted literature, here you have it,” the critic Dominique Aury wrote in The New York Times in 1958. “Here is a new form, a strange romantic tone, an accent you have never heard before.”
After “Degrees” (1960), which used three narrators to give varying accounts of a lecture on Christopher Columbus delivered at a high school, Mr. Butor broke with the novel form, pursuing literature in myriad other guises: essays, poetry, artists’ books, texts set to music, and free-form meditations on writers, places and ideas, epitomized by “Matière de Rêves” (“Dream Stuff”), published in five volumes between 1975 and 1985.
In a statement, President François Hollande of France called Mr. Butor “a great literary explorer” who was “always engaged in a dialogue with the other arts, always in the same spirit of freedom and discovery.”
Michel Marie François Butor was born on Sept. 14, 1926, in Mons-en-Baroeul, near Lille, in northern France, to Emile Butor, a railroad inspector, and the former Anne Brajeux. When he was 3 years old his family moved to Paris, where he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne under the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, writing a thesis on mathematics and the idea of necessity. After failing the exam that would have allowed him to teach philosophy at the college level, he began a wandering career as a teacher of French language and literature in Egypt, Greece and Britain.
In 1954, Les Éditions de Minuit published his first novel, “Passage de Milan,” a seemingly documentary account of the residents of a Paris apartment building that takes a strange turn to fantasy when a murder occurs.
For his second novel, “L’Emploi du Temps” (1956), published in English as “Passing Time,” he drew on his time experience teaching in Manchester to evoke a fictional city in the north of England where his central character, a Frenchman, works as a clerk for a year, keeping a bizarre diary.
In 1958 he married Marie-Josèph Mas, known as Marie-Jo. She died in 2010. He is survived by their daughters, Cécile, Agnès, Irène and Mathilde Butor, and five grandchildren. He lived in the village of Lucinges, near Geneva.
Mr. Butor’s excursions into uncharted literary territory after 1960 left many readers behind, and he occasionally referred to himself as an “unknown celebrity.” He was prolific but difficult.
“I do realize that my books can be daunting,” he told the newspaper Libération in 1996. “People are afraid to enter an ever-expanding labyrinth. I myself have a hard time keeping things straight, and I do not always manage to find my bearings.”
Others followed his unpredictable path with a thrilling sense of exploration. In “Mobile: Study for a Representation of the United States” (1962), he made use of collage and fragmentation, incorporating newspaper clippings, advertising slogans, road signs and typographical distortions to convey the confusion and variety he encountered on a trip across the United States. In his preface to “Nomadic Anthology,” a collection of Mr. Butor’s poems published in 2004, the novelist Frédéric-Yves Jeannet called “Mobile” “a kind of disjointed spatial symphony, an homage to Calder.”
Mr. Butor wrote a number of travel essays, intended to disrupt conventional, and especially colonialist, points of view. They were packaged in four volumes as “The Spirit of Place,” published between 1950 and 1988.
In the 1980s, he embarked on a series of encounters with classic writers that he titled “Improvisations.” Based on his lecture at the University of Geneva, where he taught from the 1970s until his retirement in 1991, they were collected in three volumes, dealing with Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud and Henri Michaux, to which he added the three-volume “Improvisations on Balzac” in the 1990s.
In 2013 the Académie Française awarded Mr. Butor its Grand Prix for his life’s work.
Explaining his philosophy in an interview with the critic and television producer Georges Charbonnier in 1965, Mr. Butor said, “Every written word is a victory over death.”
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