SOURCE: Silk, Sally M. “When the Writer Comes Home: Narrative Failure in Butor's La Modification.” Style 26, no. 2 (summer 1992): 270–86.

In the following essay, Silk challenges Butor's critics who view La Modification as a narrative of self-emergence, arguing instead that the narrative voice remains disembodied—“beyond hope of being recuperated”—even at the end of the novel.

Look around you. Don’t we all have one foot in the air? We all look as though we are traveling. No one has a definite sphere of existence; no one has proper habits; there are no rules for anything; there is no home base.

(Pyotr Chaadaev, Letter on the Philosophy of History)

Narrative Voice: the Trouble with Representation

The relationship between art and life examined in Madame Bovary becomes an obsessive concern of the nouveau roman. While Flaubert's heroine reads her books all too literally, suffering from what Valéry would have...