SOURCE: Oppenheim, Lois. “Animation of the Work of Art: Michel Butor's L’Embarquement de la Reine de Saba.” MLN 109, no. 4 (September 1994): 741–52.

In the following essay, Oppenheim argues for the aesthetic of Butor's anaesthetic in L'Embarquement de la Reine de Saba, which she claims is “both post-modern and not” in its attempt to contextualize the artistic experience.

… ce quit me gêne, dans le mot ‘création,’ c'est qu'il est lié à une illusion soigneusement entretenue, l'illusion de la gratuité de l'oeuvre d’art.

—Michel Butor

Despite the benefits the interpretation of literature, as of all art, has derived from its turn toward other disciplines (anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, and so on), critics persist in focusing on those formal parameters of a work that allow not only for it to be situated in time, but according to aesthetic point of view. The aesthetic that defines our modern era is resolutely...