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Michel Butor's Mobile in America (1964)

Before writing Mobile (1962), Michel Butor must have posed this problem to his imagination: How can I depict the entirety of America between a single set of covers? His answer is to describe our land as it would be seen through a binocular kaleidoscope, traveling suspended high above America. The eye of the instrument shifts from one side of America to the other, picking up details and suggestively juxtaposing them against other details. This technique is announced in the opening phrases: “pitch dark in/CORDOVA, ALABAMA, the Deep South,/pitch dark in//CORDOVA, ALASKA, the Far North closest to the dreadful, the abominable, the unimaginable country where it is already Monday when it is still Sunday here....” The kaleidoscope’s details, as well as the author’s attitude toward them, weave a coherent mosaic that represents Butor’s vision of America today.

The way Butor reveals his vision and attitudes are shrewd and interesting. First, he selects factual details carefully, dwelling particularly on America’s passion for the superfluous (the incomparable variety of automobiles and the incredible plethora of spare parts), our insane need for inessential possessions, the vivid irrevocable history of exploitation of both Negroes and Amerindians, and the incessant advertising that corrodes the sense of taste, among other native horrors. In these pages the only fount of sweetness is the exotically flavored ice creams at the local Howard Johnsons.

Against these facts of America, Butor juxtaposes paragraphs of quotation from our idealistic sages—Jefferson, William Penn, Ben Franklin, Louis Sullivan—to show that American dreams, so innocently espoused, have been betrayed by ghastly realities. For instance, in “discussing” American religion, Butor in alternate paragraphs reprints the blurbs from a Trappist travel folder with a narrative of the Salem witch trials. The tone of Butor’s report, so heavily rooted in details, suggests that he wants less to accuse America of hypocrisy than to reveal the tragedy of American experience. For this reason, when he expresses anger, it is aimed at our refusal to accept that we have failed our aspirations—a refusal exemplified in the gall that prompts us to name a town “Eden.” Although Mobile suffers from Butor’s reluctance to confront many aspects of contemporary America—bureaucratic life and academia are two—no recent essay I know by a foreigner, imaginative or otherwise, so successfully comes to terms with the whole of contemporary America.

In picking up Mobile, one is immediately faced with the problem of how to read this 319-page collection of fragments. In my experience, one need not read it straight through, as one would a traditional narrative. As in all books of vision, the effects here are repetitious. Second, since the book’s structure is thoroughly spatial (rather than linear-narrative), neither Butor’s technique nor his basic attitude develop in the course of the book; his points are proved by example, not by developed argument. Therefore, Mobile should be dipped into from time to time. As one learns to assimilate the travelogue’s technique, he finds himself reading more of it at each snatch.

Incidentally, it is lamentable that this most difficult of contemporary books was shamefully mistreated by the media of review. In a decision that betrayed its disinterestedly highbrow pretensions, The New York Review assigned Mobile to Truman Capote, who has declared in print (Paris Review Interviews No. I) that he can spare no more than two hours to read a book. Capote, discovering that Mobile, of course, required more effort than his quota, snidely reported what his editors could have surely expected—that the book to him was unreadable. Since each of Butor’s several works has been more difficult than its predecessor, the expectation is that the next ones will be even more complex. Must we similarly expect that they will just as surely get mishandled by the American reviewing press?