Welcome to Utah by Michel Butor
"Welcome to Utah" is a chapter from Michel Butor's larger work, "Mobile: Study for a Representation of the United States," published in 1963. This text serves as an imaginative guide to the American states, structured as a series of fifty chapters, each detailing a state in a distinct, non-linear narrative format. The piece does not follow traditional storytelling elements like characters or plot; instead, it presents a collage of descriptions, historical references, and associative thoughts that evoke the essence of each state.
In "Welcome to Utah," the narrative is initiated in Wellington, Utah, highlighting the arrival of the Latter-Day Saints, before shifting to other locations like Wellington, Nevada, and Huntsville, Utah. The chapter intersperses factual snippets, conversations, and advertisements, creating a tapestry of American culture and history. It touches on themes of migration, the experiences of marginalized groups, and the enduring legacy of Mormon history. The travel through time and space culminates with reflections on various American cities, ultimately looping back to the East Coast. Readers are invited to engage with the text in a flexible manner, crafting their own journey through the layered realities of the United States.
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Welcome to Utah by Michel Butor
First published: "Bienvenue en Utah," 1962 (English translation, 1963)
Type of plot: Antistory
Time of work: The early 1960's
Locale: United States
Principal Character:
An anonymous traveler
The Story
"Welcome to Utah" is a chapter excerpted from Mobile: Étude pour une représentation des États-Unis (1962; Mobile: Study for a Representation of the United States, 1963), a larger work that attempts to render the essential quality of each American state. Like an imaginary guidebook to the United States, this work takes readers through all the states in the Union, in alphabetical order according to the alliance of place-names: From Lebanon, New Jersey, it switches to Lebanon, Ohio, and then to towns with the same name in Indiana and Illinois, for example. There are no characters or plot in the conventional sense; its fifty chapters—each devoted to one of the fifty states and covering a forty-eight-hour time span—provide an abundance of descriptive and interpretive material about the country.
The chapters are linked by the mere invocation of town names duplicated in several states as well as by the longer continuing text of the narrator's running commentary on American history, the history of American Indians, and African American history. Comments on the time in each place and secondary material (such as catalogs, advertisements, road signs, restaurant menus, and quotations from famous historical figures) are incorporated into the text.
There is no action in the story, merely the illusion of interstate travel. The reader is carried along by the chain of associations, both temporal and spatial, provided by the narrator and by his imaginative use of quotations. The reader gains an impression of the United States that is at once startling and accurate: startling because of the frequent reminders of the suffering of America's many disfranchised peoples at the hands of white colonists, and accurate in its history and quasi-statistical evocations.
Because the chain is continuous, the complete book can be read, beginning anywhere, and readers are free to plan their own tours of the United States. "Welcome to Utah" can thus be understood on its own as a series of associative mobilizations. The town of Wellington, Utah, at sundown is the starting point for the narrator's journey of associations that propel him forward. This eventually leads to a moment early on in the chapter when Utah is abandoned for points east. Beginning with Wellington and an accompanying quote that describes the arrival of the Latter-Day Saints to the basin of the Great Salt Lake, the narration abruptly shifts to the town of Wellington, Nevada, a small town identified briefly by the presence of the Summit Lake Indian Reservation. The narrative then makes a detour back to Utah to take up the town of Huntsville, justifying this deviation with a passage quoted from textbook American history citing Huntsville as Brigham Young's chosen spot for founding his new Mormon city.
The main narrative line is then punctuated by fragments of factual information, snippets of banal conversation, quotations from road signs, and advertisements in a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog for a schoolbag illustrated with a colored map of the United States. Next, the history of the Mormons and their missionary zeal remind readers that they are still in Utah.
Shortly thereafter, the narrative travels in time and place to New England, where an account from the trial of Susanna Martin, one of the women implicated in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, is presented. This account is less of a digression than a bridge leading back to the East Coast and eventually to New York City. Discussion of New York evokes a report on the numbers of European-language newspapers printed in this country, lures readers into restaurants serving French, Indonesian, Italian, and Irish cuisine, and evokes images of this city's architectural icons, the Empire State Building and the Seagram's Building. Readers are bombarded by big-city advertising, urging them to drink Coca-Cola, to fly Sabena and KLM, and to tune into WBNX for broadcasts in Ukrainian.
Eventually readers are transported back in time and space to the South by way of Danville, New Hampshire, and then to Danville, Virginia. The chapter closes with several brief descriptions of the interiors of Monticello, alternating with lengthy extracts from Thomas Jefferson elaborating his belief in the inequality of race. A final associative leap jumps from Vienna, Virginia, to 11:00 p.m. in Vienna, Maryland, near Chester in Maryland. After all these imaginative deviations and detours, the welcome to Utah ends with an arrival back on the East Coast.