Passing Time by Michel Butor

First published:L’Emploi du temps, 1956 (English translation, 1960)

Type of work: Detective

Time of work: 1951-1952

Locale: Bleston, an industrial city in the north of England

Principal Characters:

• Jacques Revel, a French diarist working in England for a year
• George Burton, a mystery writer under the pseudonym
• J. C. Hamilton, who is nearly killed
• Lucien Blaise, Revel’s countryman who becomes engaged to Rose Bailey
• Ann Bailey, to whom Revel is first attracted until he meets Rose
• Rose Bailey, Ann’s attractive sister, whom Revel loses to Blaise
• James Jenkins, Revel’s co-worker who becomes Ann’s fiance
• Horace Buck, a black pyromaniac who befriends Revel

The Novel

The principal action of the novel is Jacques Revel’s physical and mental journey through the labyrinthine ways of Bleston, an industrial town in the north of England, where he has come to do translation work for a year. From his arrival in the early hours of October 2, 1951, through his departure on September 30, 1952, the major events of his story are recorded in his diary. This record of events begins ominously, with a missed train, a post-midnight arrival in rainy Bleston, the first of many confused wanderings in the city’s streets, and, to add to his inauspicious arrival, the necessity of sleeping in a railway station. The oppressive gloom of the city, the omnipresent falling of fine soot and ash, the limitations of its inhabitants, and the confusion of places and streets conspire to give Bleston such an atmosphere of hostility that the city itself becomes a sinister character seeking to overcome Revel and suffocate him.

Revel’s encounters with the city’s inhabitants range in significance from habitual misunderstandings with merchants, shopkeepers, and bus drivers to important meetings with the few who befriend him, chief among them James Jenkins, the Bailey sisters, Lucien Blaise, Horace Buck, and George Burton. His chance meeting with Burton, who, as J.C. Hamilton, wrote a mystery novel, The Murder of Bleston, leads him into an odd sequence of events. He comes to suspect a cover-up of an actual fratricide and the attempted murder of Burton by Jenkins, to whom Revel reveals Burton’s true identity. At the same time, Revel is also trying to fathom the mystery of the city and its inhabitants’ obsession with the fratricidal Cain depicted in the stained glass of the Old Cathedral. A series of fires of mysterious origin, perhaps set by Horace Buck, perhaps even set by Revel, who engages in four ritual incinerations, adds to the aura of fear, anxiety, and uneasiness that overshadows the city and Revel.

Revel first seeks to escape Bleston and the oppressive confinement that both repels and attracts him by trying to walk beyond its precincts into the countryside; this, however, proves impossible. His escapes to the oases of amusement parks that move from one section of the city to another are short-lived and unsatisfactory. His refuge in the cinema, which screens travelogues of distant countries, is necessarily temporary and reinforces his sense of imprisonment. He partially succeeds in escaping the present by exploring Bleston’s past and encountering representations of the mythic detective problem solvers Oedipus and Theseus. His most successful escape, apart from his departure on September 30, comes when he begins his diary and seeks refuge in the act of writing. This is ironic, since he can escape his physical and temporal confines only by immersing himself in them to record them.

His immersion in Bleston’s events, monuments, and people involves his probing maps, examining buildings, such as the cathedrals, and following Burton’s fictional guide to Bleston, The Murder of Bleston. In all these explorations, Revel is conscious that he is wandering through his internal wasteland, and on a quest for the meaning of his own life, as well. Although he probes the original Bleston murder in this City of Cain, he does not solve it. Nor does he solve the attempted murder of Burton. He remains a mystified, suspicious outsider, changed and overcome by Bleston.

The Characters

Jacques Revel is Michel Butor’s masterfully produced central character,the diarist-narrator of the work, who records his impressions, meetings, and journeys in Bleston. Self-absorbed, he cannot go beyond himself to join in either a deep or a permanent way with any of the characters who befriend him during his yearlong confinement in the unreal city. Revel’s attempts at closeness, first with Ann Bailey and then with Rose Bailey, are awkward and superficial crushes he can communicate only imperfectly. His acquaintance with Horace Buck and with George and Harriet Burton never becomes real friendship. His companionship with Lucien Blaise, the only other Frenchman to arrive in Bleston, becomes strained when Lucien and Rose announce their engagement. His friendship with James Jenkins, uneasy from the first, cools when James begins courting Ann and breaks off when he suspects James of attempting to kill Burton in a fit of hatred for the writer. Revel himself remains enigmatic, largely because of his inability to overcome Bleston and his own isolation.

Jenkins is also enigmatic in his alternations between guardedness and openness with Revel. A self-described Blestonian who has never left the city, he both analyzes the superstitious nature of the inhabitants and shares that trait. He comments that detective writers avoid setting their novels in Bleston for fear that their make-believe may turn into grim reality. Jenkins is Revel’s chief suspect in Burton’s attempted murder. He realizes and accepts as his heritage the darker and more primitive origins of Bleston and appears intent on both protecting and preserving them in his own life.

Burton, whose discourses on the nature of murder and detection and on the role of the writer/detective reflect Butor’s own activity as a writer, creates multiple masks to shield his identity out of a justifiable fear for his life. Burton reveals his identity to Revel, an outsider who carries his book, with the stipulation that he tell no one; Revel betrays his confidence to the Bailey girls and to Jenkins, whose family was linked to building the New Cathedral Burton had derided in The Murder of Bleston. A successful popular novelist using one pseudonym for his best-sellers and another for novels written in collaboration with his wife, he chooses a third for The Murder of Bleston, in which a detective sets out to find a murderer, just as Burton himself may be writing to flush out a murderer.

Horace Buck, a stranger like Revel, lives at the fringes of Bleston and embodies the burning hatred of an outsider doomed to remain there. He seeks Revel’s companionship but also frightens him with his intensity. Their meetings usually happen by chance, but also with some consistency, as they become drinking companions united by their common hatred of the city. Buck, one suspects, is the pyromaniac responsible for the Bleston fires.

The Bailey girls, Ann and Rose, are not fully realized characters. They are presented vaguely through the eyes of Revel. In one sense, Ann is Revel’s Ariadne, who guides him through the maze of Bleston, and Rose is his Phaedra. The sisters attract Revel, but he is incapable of forming more than a casual relationship with either of them, unable to express the affection he feels.

Critical Context

Passing Time, his second novel, gained for Butor national recognition in France in the form of the Fenelon Prize in 1957. During the same year, he published and won the Theophraste-Renaudot Prize for La Modification (1957; A Change of Heart, 1959). Firmly established in the avant-garde as an advocate for and writer of the “New Novel” of the 1950’s and 1960’s, Butor experimented with the structure of the novel as well as the presentation of characters and the interiorizing of action. Like his first novel, Passage de Milan (1954), Passing Time is a work of extraordinary technical virtuosity that foreshadows his later and bolder experiments with form in Reseau aerien: Texte radiophonique (1962) and in the long narratives variously called postnovels or novels, Mobile: Etude pour une representation des Etats-Unis (1962; Mobile: Study for the Representation of the United States, 1963), 6,810,000 Litres d’eau par seconde: Etude stereophonique (1965; Niagara: A Stereophonic Novel, 1969), and Boomerang (1978).

Passing Time, experimental though it is, falls recognizably within the category of the novel. Butor’s later writings seek to transcend the form in such a way as to become “open” works, susceptible to a variety of readings, not confined to the printed page but aspiring to the condition of music. His diverse poetry, his operatic work with Henri Pousseur in producing Votre Faust: Fantaisie variable genre Opera (1962), his travelogues as novels, his essays, and his continuing work as a writer and lecturer place him among the few great literary figures of the last half of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Grant, Marian. Michel Butor: L’Emploi du temps, 1973.

McWilliams, Dean. The Narratives of Michel Butor: The Writer as Janus, 1978.

Spencer, Michael. Michel Butor, 1974.

World Literature Today. LVI (Spring, 1982). Special Butor issue.