SOURCE: Kline, T. Jefferson. “Degrees of Play in Butor's Degrés.” L'Espirit Createur 31, no. 4 (winter 1991): 32–40.

In the following essay, Kline explores manifestations of the metatextual and the metacultural in Degrés.

Since its publication thirty years ago, Michel Butor's Degrés has been read primarily as a construction of networks, systems and quotations intended, as the narrator says, to “make reality enter language.” This “univers cité” as Jacques Leenhardt calls it,¹ including 135 allusions to 35 different texts as well as references to 86 works of art, would thus be constructed to allow (despite its dislocations and discontinuities) a cosmology of the knowledge at play in a typical French lycée. Yet despite the remarkable reconstructions of this mass of systems of information by such readers as Mary Lydon,² these fragments function less and less historiographically but appear increasingly to be compulsively repeated obsessional elements.

Indeed, Pierre Vernier's project is soon...