Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape: A Caprice

by Michel Butor, Dominic Di Bernardi (Translator)

Like James Joyce’s and Dylan Thomas’s similar titles, Butor’s novel is autobiographical in nature and explores the way a writer develops. Shortly after World War II a young man travels to a castle in Franconia housing the second largest private library in Germany. There he discovers a multitude of stimuli for his imagination: a castle once the site of celebrations and executions, the old library, mineral collections, rooms decorated in mythological themes, and an exiled count who has a passion for highly original games of solitaire. Days are spent in the library steeping himself in the literature of alchemy, whose great theme was transformation. At night, the young man dreams he is in an adventure that begins as a vampire story and ends as a tale from The Thousand and One Nights, in which a young man is transformed into an ape. Bordering between autobiography and elements of Gothic horror, this “caprice” shows the development as a young man of one of France’s most important contemporary novelists during and just after World War II. Though as readers we have as hard a time as Butor himself in separating fact from fantasy, we see the young Butor on the edges of the intellectual and artistic circles of his time (Martin Heidegger and Andre Breton make brief appearances), but we witness this in an ominous, sinister atmosphere where we expect Dracula to step from around the corner at any moment, accompanied by Abbott and Costello. In brief, this is autobiography as if invented by H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and Edgar Allan Poe, and then as reinvented by the French New Novelists, with one further layer supplied by Mel Brooks: just what autobiography should read like when recapturing the sense of life in Nazi-dominated Europe where history, fact, illusion, myth, dreams, legends, black magic, and memory become indistinguishable. First published in 1967, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape may well be one of the most captivating works about the growth of a writer’s imagination.

121 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul, a suburb of Lille. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt, Manchester, Thessaloniki, the United States, and Geneva. He has won many literary awards for his work, including the Prix Apollo, the Prix Fénéon; and the Prix Renaudot.

Journalists and critics have associated his novels with the nouveau roman, but Butor himself long resisted that association. The main point of similarity is a very general one, not much beyond that; like exponents of the nouveau roman, he can be described as an experimental writer. His best-known novel, La Modification, for instance, is written entirely in the second person. In his 1967 La critique et l'invention, he famously said that even the most literal quotation is already a kind of parody because of its "trans-contextualization."

For decades, he chose to work in other forms, from essays to poetry to artist's books to unclassifiable works like Mobile. Literature, painting and travel are subjects particularly dear to Butor. Part of the fascination of his writing is the way it combines the rigorous symmetries that led Roland Barthes to praise him as an epitome of structuralism (exemplified, for instance, by the architectural scheme of Passage de Milan or the calendrical structure of L'emploi du temps) with a lyrical sensibility more akin to Baudelaire than to Robbe-Grillet.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This proving to be an enjoyable one day read, it was especially enhanced this a.m. as the snow floated past, innocent and forgiving.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing waffle nowhere in league with Mobile or Degrees.

[Michael Jarvie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A French student (called Butor) visits a castle in Germany just after the end of World War Two, which boasts one of the largest private libraries in that country, and immerses himself in books on alchemy and the like. It made me think of Young Frankenstein, except that in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape Transylvania becomes Franconia.
Compared with James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Dylan Thomas's ten short stories that make up his book Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Butor's short first person novel felt like the raw material for a longer work. However, the alchemical transmutation this would have entailed never took place, and so we are left with this fragment.

[Tom Ghostly · Rating 3 out of 5]

seriously, read that synopsis for the english edition & tell me if it doesn't sound like a fantastic reading experience. heck, if butor's novel/caprice would be anything like it, it would be among my favorite novels. but it isn't.
three stars is probably a pretty generous rating.

[Chris Linehan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can respect and appreciate the experimental nature of this book. The technical work on this book is pretty impressive; but sort of impressive in the way that sewer systems are impressive. Unless you are a city planner you probably can't appreciate the beauty of the technical expertise of a well planned sewer system. Unless you are a literary professor or something like that you probably can't appreciate the technical beauty of this book.

I like the weaving nature of the story. The intersection of the dreams, reality and a weird obsession with solitaire would be good if there were any semblance of a story worth reading.

[Gabriel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminds me of Arno Schmidt: King of the Semi-Colon, only without the irascibility that makes Schmidt so funny.

I could be reading this one entirely wrong, but it seems to be an Oulipian exercise in story-telling as solitaire, with attendant puns (in particular, the interminable mineral cataloging). Not bad, but not what I was expecting, either, given its great description. I think I felt the same way about his Degrees.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]