SOURCE: Mason, Barbara. “Whiteness and Writing in Michel Butor's Works: The Example of Christian Dotremont and Beyond.” Dalhousie French Studies 12 (spring–summer 1987): 37–53.

In the following essay, Mason discusses Butor's preoccupation with “whiteness,” how it manifests itself in his writing, and how Belgian artist Christian Dotremont influenced Butor's work.

“Toute page blanche est devenue pour moi le ciel de ton regard.”¹ Thus Michel Butor writes in a poem-homage, death-monument to the Belgian artist and head of the “COBRA” group, Christian Dotremont. Indeed, some of Butor's most significant pronouncements on the subject of whiteness and its relation to writing have been made in reference to that artist's work. Whiteness is, in fact, a central preoccupation of Butor's own work where it connects themes of calm and disruption, of amnesia and expression, and where it underlines key questions concerning the possibility and impossibility of writing, the nature of the sign and...