Mobile by Michel Butor
"Mobile" by Michel Butor is an innovative and experimental work of literature that eschews traditional narrative structure, focusing instead on the diverse landscape of the United States through a series of fifty chapters, each dedicated to a different state in alphabetical order. Rather than telling a cohesive story, the novel presents disjointed details reminiscent of historical texts, encyclopedias, and tourist brochures, highlighting small-town America and its varied cultural elements. Each chapter evokes a sense of repetition, illustrating the vast yet often overlooked expanse of the United States, with themes that include the significance of automobiles, regional ice cream preferences, and the treatment of Indigenous peoples throughout history.
Butor employs a unique format that merges factual listings and brief observations, celebrating the melting-pot quality of American society while also critiquing its shortcomings, including racial prejudice and the often glorified historical narratives. The absence of character development and sequential storytelling invites readers to engage actively with the text, making sense of its fragmented nature. Ultimately, "Mobile" serves as a complex portrait of America, reflecting both its pride and its darker historical realities, challenging readers to reconsider their perceptions of the nation.
Subject Terms
Mobile by Michel Butor
First published:Mobile: Etude pour une representation des Etats-Unis, 1962 (English translation, 1963)
Type of work: Antinovel
Time of work: From the pre-colonial period to the early 1960’s
Locale: The United States
Principal Character:
The United States , its land and its people
The Novel
Mobile: Study for the Representation of the United States has fifty chapters, and each chapter is more or less devoted to a different state, in alphabetical order, of the United States. The novel does not tell a story or relate a sequence of events. Instead, the disjointed details, mostly about small-town America, consist of information usually found in history books, atlases, encyclopedias, tourist brochures, and Howard Johnson menus. Some continuity is provided by a series of repetitions which are designed to illustrate the scope and diversity of the United States. For example, the first chapter is entitled “pitch dark in CORDOVA, ALABAMA, the Deep South” and that is all. The first word is not capitalized, nor is there a period at the end. The second chapter reads “pitch dark in CORDOVA, ALASKA, the Far North” and continues with a brief, nightmarish description of the land around Cordova. With no apparent connection, the book next lists Douglas, a small town near Juneau, Alaska. The third chapter begins “pitch dark in DOUGLAS, Mountain Time, ARIZONA, the Far West.” Running through the entire book is a seemingly endless catalog of tiny towns whose names are repeated in state after state. For example, there is Concord, California; Concord, North Carolina; Concord, Georgia; and Concord, Florida. Interestingly, Concord, Massachusetts, a town of great importance to both American history and American literature, is omitted.
Nevertheless, there are a number of linking devices. Each of the fifty chapters has the name of a different state, in alphabetical order from Alabama through Wyoming. Twenty-six chapters begin with “WELCOME TO” and end with the name of a state. The first of the twenty-six is entitled “WELCOME TO NORTH CAROLINA,” which would be alphabetized as “Carolina, North” in French. The chapter on North Carolina, however, is almost equally divided between lists of doves, cuckoos, conchs, clams, rivers, and mountains which the narrator places in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia, as well as in North Carolina. There is no apparent reason for omitting the “WELCOME TO” for the remaining twenty-four states, although each state does appear in the chapter title, somewhere on the first page of each new chapter. Despite the quirks of North Carolina’s chapter, in most chapters the discussion is limited to the state listed in the heading.
Another pattern that runs throughout the book alludes to both the importance that Americans attach to their automobiles and the melting-pot quality of the United States. Periodically in the text, fragmentary sentences appear describing the color and make of a particular car, followed by a brief, unflattering description of its driver and a record of how fast it is going. Here is a sample: “A tomato-colored Buick driven by a fat young Japanese in a green shirt (65 miles).”
Another motif concerns the American love for ice cream and the Howard Johnson restaurant chain’s catering to that taste with the company’s famous thirty-two exotic flavors, beginning with apricot ice cream in Concord, North Carolina. In Bristol, Connecticut, the preferred ice cream flavor is pineapple.It is raspberry ice cream at the Howard Johnson’s in Manchester, New Hampshire, and gooseberry ice cream at the Howard Johnson’s in Manchester, Connecticut.
Another recurring theme is established by a series of brief descriptions of various Indian tribes and the various ways in which the Indians have been mistreated. Michael Butor notes that English missionaries had difficulty teaching the ways of civilization to the Cherokee because the missionaries believed that the Cherokee language could not be given written form. The fate of the Calusas and Seminoles was to be driven from their Florida lands and sent to “Indian Territory” in what is now Oklahoma. The Choctaw indians who lived along the Gulf of Mexico were also forced to emigrate to Indian Territory. Then, the narrator reveals that after the Indians were all gathered in Oklahoma, the federal government declared that Oklahoma was no longer Indian Territory. In addition, the Delaware Indians never had a chance to emigrate. In spite of their treaty of friendship with William Penn in 1682, they were exterminated one hundred years later by new settlers who probably had never even heard of the Penn treaty.
Juxtaposed to the unfair treatment of Indians is an account of the absurd accusations against Susanna Martin, who was tried for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Portions of the transcript show that Martin was accused of changing into a cat, of causing rain to fall at inconvenient moments, and of causing a puppy to fly.
The narrator also quotes extensively from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, two of America’s most respected men of letters. The excerpts focus on Franklin’s and Jefferson’s unenlightened views of blacks, in which they equate blacks with horses, oxen, and other beasts of burden.
In addition to the major motifs, there are many minor ones. State birds, state flowers, state flags, service stations, foreign-language newspapers, time zones, and department stores which were designed to serve rural America are only some of the many types of lists. The culminating effect is that of a country of vast but repetitious proportions.
The Characters
Since there is no story or sequential narrative in Mobile, there is no character or single person around whom the story revolves. Butor is, in a sense, characterizing the huge expanse of the United States from its beginnings to the 1960’s, when the novel was published. Written in French by a native Frenchman, it is a rather unflattering portrait of the United States and its inhabitants. The United States is noted for its great cultural and business centers, such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans, yet Butor concentrates on the country’s endless supply of forgotten and for the most part forgettable small towns scattered across five time zones. The references to New York focus on a tawdry theme park called “Freedomland” rather than on the internationally famous Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building.
Another characteristic to which the citizens of the United States point with pride is the large number of national monuments. The narrator observes, however, that what Americans like to call a national monument is nothing more than an “archaeological curiosity,” one of the worst examples being Mount Rushmore, which he describes as having “enormous, clumsily carved faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.”
National pride in early leaders is another facet of the American character that Butor ridicules. Blasphemous reverence for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln turns them into the “three divinities,” and the chief “god [Washington] is represented in the form of an enormous obelisk.” On the other hand, Benjamin Franklin’s “principle temple” is located in Philadelphia rather than in “the sacred city of Washington.”
Having debunked elements of the United States of which its residents are proud, Butor devotes even more space to an aspect of which they are not proud: racial prejudice. Interspersed with letters from William Penn to the Indians in which Penn promised unending love and peace are accounts of Indians from all over the country being forced off their ancestral lands and being controlled by addiction to peyote, a stimulant drug extracted from cactus plants. Although less space is devoted to prejudice against blacks, Butor selects Thomas Jefferson as the main spokesman on the issue. As the chief framer of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson is considered the champion of freedom. Excerpts from other writings by Jefferson make it clear, however, that he does not see those freedoms being extended to blacks. Also appearing throughout the novel is a list of towns and counties where blacks are not welcome.
Critical Context
Butor is a widely respected French writer who is best known for his experimentation with the novel form. His novels are, for the most part, not novels at all but antinovels. The antinovel, essentially a French form, aims to destroy narrative structure by fragmenting events and non-events and by dislocating logical time frames. This technique makes enormous demands on the reader to make sense of the words by mentally constructing some kind of order. Reading such a novel, then, becomes an active rather than a passive exercise. Butor brings to his theories about the role and purpose of fiction a love and knowledge of art. The result is an innovative work in which the content of writing is fused with the form of visual art.
Degres (1960; Degrees, 1963), L’Emploi du temps (1956; Passing Time, 1960), and La Modification (1957; A Change of Heart, 1959), all novels which are set in Europe, have elicited more critical attention than Mobile, Butor’s first novel set in the United States. His most experimental work, Mobile completely does away with characterization and narrative in the traditional sense, as it sets out to capture in one novel the essence of the history, geography, and people of the United States. As a result, Butor creates 319 pages of seemingly endless lists, which give the book a kind of epic quality. One is reminded of John Milton’s famous catalog of bad angels in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). While the list takes the better part of one of the epic’s twelve books, each angel is portrayed with a separate and distinct personality in vignette form. Milton’s range and genius enabled him to create new interest with every line. Butor, however, is not Milton, and his experiments with form seem to contradict rather than enhance content and thereby make his lists seem merely interminable.
Bibliography
Alberes, R. Michel Butor, 1964.
McWilliams, Dean. The Narratives of Michel Butor: The Writer as Janus, 1978.
O’Donnell, Thomas D. “Michel Butor and the Tradition of Alchemy,” in The International Fiction Review. 1975, pp. 150-153.
Roudiez, Leon S. Michel Butor, 1965.
Sturrock, John. The French New Novel: Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1969.