‘Nécessité de procéder obliquement’: Shaping Michel Butor's Image

Abstract

‘Difficile d'écrire sur soi ou sur ses écrits’ are the first words of a 2003 monograph that Michel Butor published about himself in Seghers's collection ‘Poètes d'aujourd'hui’. This series, like other collections of illustrated monographs, builds the writer's image through a combination of different types of discourse and several actors. Butor's volume on his own work tends to blur such distinctions and to challenge the collection's model, not only because of the intervention of the writer, but also because of Butor's interest in the processes through which his image is crafted. This paper examines a series of six monographs published on Michel Butor between 1964 and 2009, firstly, in order to shed light on the way the image of a high profile writer is carved in collections of illustrated monographs, and, secondly, to reach a better understanding of Michel Butor's relation to critical discourse and to his own image.