Unlucky Pierres

DEGREES (351 pp.)--Michel Butor--Simon & Schuster ($5.50).

Today's most self-consciously revolutionary fiction is the aliterature (non-literature) written by the so-called "anti-novelists" of France. Man is no longer viewed as an actor on the stage of life but as a microorganism, or atom, reacting to obscure laws of physics and biochemistry. Leaders of this movement are Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras and Michel Butor, whose new book, Degrees, is perhaps the most complex anti-novel to date. For, by some mysterious aliterary law, the more schematic and mechanistic an author's view of life, the more complicated and device-ridden his style.

A page of Degrees may look like a page of the Bible with long run-on verses, or a surrealist prose poem, or highly idiosyncratic free verse, or a laundry list. There are parentheses within parentheses. A question asked on page 126 is answered on page 148. One sentence may refer to three different times, skip backward and forward to three or four unrelated events, be spoken or written down (one does not know which) by either of two characters impersonating another.

Total Record. The novel deals with a Paris high school teacher, Pierre Vernier, who keeps a minute-by-minute log of all that happens in his eleventh-grade geography class in which his nephew Pierre Eller is a student. Vernier is obsessed by the need to record the total experience: This drives him to include, first, accounts of other students and teachers, then of their families and friends, then of their past and future lives. Next, the compulsive Vernier must procure the manuals and textbooks for all the courses these students are taking, to bone up on them and to include parts of them in his chronicle. Hence at least half of Degrees is taken up with quotations from textbooks, classroom recitation, synopses of lectures, transcripts of homework, including mathematical problems complete with errors and corrections.

In order to explore his subjects' secret thoughts, dreams, and whispered classroom exchanges, Vernier extracts information from his colleagues and enrolls his nephew Pierre as a spy. In the first part of Degrees, Vernier writes from his own point of view: he is "I" and Pierre is "you." In the second part, it gradually emerges that things have been reversed: Vernier is "you" and Pierre is "I." But it is not Pierre writing--it is Vernier writing for and as Pierre.

Violence as Relief. In the third part, the real identity of the writer, or writers, cannot be determined. "During the evening, you began writing the text that I am continuing, or more precisely that you are continuing by using me, for actually, it's not I who is writing but you, you are speaking through me, trying to see things from my point of view, to imagine what I could know that you don't know, furnishing me the information which you possess and which would be out of my reach." When the three pages worth of story finally end on page 351, even violence and tragedy come as relief.

Some of the anti-novelists seem to be motivated by nothing more than a craving for the new and different; others, unable to deal with genuine human feelings, escape into atomizing and itemizing; still others think that a "scientific" approach is nowadays a guarantee of high seriousness. In Degrees, Butor attempts to en-capsule forever a chunk of reality, like a mouse enclosed in a glass globe. The mouse becomes magnified beyond its importance, and the revolving globe presents the rodent from angles irrelevant to human experience. Since it was a very small mouse to start with, it should be no surprise if, after all that manhandling, it proves to be dead.

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