Mobile Reading Order

Mobile: étude pour une représentation des États-Unis (Mobile: Study for a Representation of the United States, 1962) by Michel Butor is the most radical of his works and the one that most completely breaks with the conventions of the novel form. It is not, in any conventional sense, a novel: it is a montage of fragments — quotations from mail-order catalogues, road signs, menus, advertising slogans, passages from William Blake and other poets, descriptions of each of the American states, accounts of Native American religions, lists of ice cream flavours — arranged on the page in varying typefaces and sizes to evoke the texture of American consumer culture and the experience of driving across the United States. Butor organised the fragments alphabetically by state, then alphabetically again within each state's section, creating a structure that is both arbitrary (alphabetical order is not a meaningful sequence) and exhaustive (all fifty states are covered). Mobile is one of the most significant works of what the French call littérature combinatoire — fiction organised by combinatory or structural principles rather than narrative — and it has had an enormous influence on subsequent experimental writing. It is also, for readers willing to enter its method, an extraordinary sensory experience: the fragments accumulate into something that feels genuinely like the United States as a cultural and material phenomenon — vast, various, mass-produced, historically violent, beautiful, and overwhelming.