Degrés Reading Order

Degrés (Degrees, 1960) by Michel Butor is his most formally ambitious and demanding work — the novel that took the Nouveau Roman to its conceptual extreme and that Butor has described as the most difficult task he ever set himself as a writer. A teacher named Pierre Vernier decides to write an exhaustive description of a single hour of school: one class, in one form, at one moment in October 1954. He begins by describing what he himself sees from the front of the classroom; then he tries to include what his nephew Henri, sitting in the class, sees; then the perspectives of the other students, their families, their lives outside the school. The attempt grows beyond any single consciousness: Vernier recruits another teacher, his nephew's uncle Michelet, to help carry the project, and the narrative voice shifts between them as the task of complete description expands to include the history of everything the students have learned, everything Vernier has taught, the entire intellectual formation of a generation. The novel's formal argument is that a genuinely complete description of any moment in time is impossible — that as you try to include more and more context, the context expands without limit, and the project destroys both itself and (in the novel) its author. Degrés is deeply demanding, but it is also the purest and most consequential statement of the Nouveau Roman's argument about what it would mean to describe reality completely.