One always writes with a view to being read. This word I am writing is intended for a gaze, even if it is my own. The very act of writing implies an audience.

1. The addressee

A borderline (and extremely rare) case would be that of the author who truly works for themselves so that they can later take stock, and has no intention of giving what they write to anyone to read – an example would be Kafka and his Diaries.

In the majority of cases, “personal writings” are only intended for the author initially; they are written with potential publication in mind, whenever that may be. Sometimes, this secondary audience influences the text to a much greater extent than the primary readership. It was the case for Gide.

It is far more common to write for one person only: it is what we do in our letters. Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo were only destined to him.

Mme de Sévigné’s letters, however, were destined to her daughter only initially, and it was clearly understood that the daughter did not keep them for herself, but that she passed them around within a circle of friends who did not necessarily know the mother personally but still belonged to a very limited “milieu.”

We have to introduce all sorts of gradations. Let us take the example of the letter: sometimes I ask the addressee to burn it; I consider that in that letter I speak in a way only they can understand, and any other person would misunderstand it dangerously. Other times, I am still writing to my addressee personally, and had I addressed somebody else I would no doubt have spoken very differently, but if they show the letter to another person, I will not be concerned, because I know that the name of my addressee will be a point of reference that is well-known and reliable enough to allow other people to make the necessary adjustments.

If I write to the member of a family or a close-knit group, most of what I say to one is exactly what I would have said to another; only a few elements make what I write personal; the rest is, in reality, addressed to the collective.

An extreme development of that situation is that of the “open letter,” whose true addressee is an audience as wide as possible; the specified recipient is actually only a code, a semantic reference, like sharps in the key signature of a score. The name is there to signal what the allusions refer to, how a particular phrase is meant to be read.

The case of Mme de Sévigné shows that the writing stance can be open on a first level (in this case, that of the actual addressee of the letter, Mme de Grignan, who is tasked to give it to read), but closed at a second level (that of the circle in which she can pass it around). It would have been improper to leave such letters unattended and risk them being seen by certain individuals. But if that secondary readership is socially exclusive, there remains nonetheless a definite openness in that the members of that circle will constantly be renewed; there will always be newcomers to show the letters to. That is what we once called posterity.

2. Posterity

When Mme de Sévigné wrote primarily to her daughter, and secondarily to the circle to which the latter belonged, she had no idea the passing of years might change anything to the rules that separated this “elite” from other people; the posterity was “linear.”

Among the writers of the following century, the idea gained traction that one should write for a readership that the societal transformations and the erasure of certain prejudices in particular would gradually expand until it one day included everyone; this is an “expanding” posterity, even if the writer, as was the case with Mallarmé, deliberately writes first for a very limited audience: “I write difficult books,” he says, “which in the present circumstances can only be read by a few, but I hope that those circumstances, and through the influence, however minor, of those books, will change in such a way that, little by little, they will become accessible to everyone, in which case, even if they are relegated to the sidelines by shinier works, they will join the ranks of the essential references of that future age and will be building blocks in this new reality,” whereas, most of the time, the author who aims to write “for the people” confines them to their difference, their lack of culture and leisure, and, in fact, works against them.

3. The work in search of its addressee

A textbook writer writes for sixth formers, or for a specific entrance exam, according to syllabi; when those change, the writer will adapt the textbooks.

That is what happens with all “commercial” literature.

In some instances, story-makers, following a tried-and-tested recipe, assemble a product destined to a demographic they by no means belong to and do not want to belong to, one they on the contrary despise. They are the great advocates of exclusion: they do not like to see their books in the hands of the people they hold in high esteem. Hoping to distance themselves from that work, they often try to write “serious” books alongside their “commercial” novels, books aimed at the people they are friends with or dream of being friends with. But this attempt usually falls into ridicule and only furthers their ties to what they despised, meaning not their readers but what was despicable in that readership and which they exploited. Because they are incapable of conceiving this different readership in a dynamic manner, as otherwise they would have to destroy their own work and crush their vile prior self and would never cease to tear it down, they attempt to rise to the level of the people they believe to be their “peers” through a set of recipes and conventions just as archetypal, and, therefore, as they strive to show who they think they “really” are, they prove they are not. It thus becomes obvious that, as opposed to their illusion, they did not choose but let themselves be chosen by the despicable they now belong to.

The reason is that, so long as that “addressing,” that aiming, that intending does not involve a lie or deception, so long as the author endeavours to speak “truthfully,” one needs to face the fact that the addressee can never be wholly known in advance, that the text itself will reveal their identity. One might say the writer of a sixth-form textbook can only consider the textbook as a work of art if it is not intended only for sixth-form pupils, if the writer feels they contribute “something” that might be of interest to somebody else.

In his Diaries, Kafka knows he is addressing himself, but it is obvious how that future self is, at the time of writing, a stranger. He writes in order to know what this might later tell him; if he already knew that because, precisely, he did not imagine another readership, what need would he have to write?

He asks this distant brother: “Who am I?”, meaning, “Who are you?”, so incredibly distant, of whom he can say almost nothing except that he will probably be as lost as he is, and that this trace he leaves on paper might help him recognise himself, recognise himself in himself.

If I give a lecture in front of an audience or a group of students, I am talking to them first and foremost, and my words at that time will be different from the words I speak in front of another group. And yet, before I start speaking, what do I know of these people? A few general indications given to me by the organisers, the place, the spectacle of these faces, these clothes, which I first perceive as a crowd. But as I speak, I take “the pulse” of the group, if you will. I can see if a word works, if it carries, if it is understood, and, depending on the situation, I provide the necessary explanations or stress a certain point until my lecture has clicked, until, as I would on the phone or when communicating by radio, I have received the response signal.

Often, among this audience, there, in front of me, I see the formation of movements, divisions; I can feel that I will not be able to reach some of these listeners, at least not this time, and, naturally, I choose (but can we really speak of choice?) to speak to the others, who are my only chance of bridging the gap between myself and the former.

I could not have predicted which individuals would secede; they themselves did not know what separated them from the rest; my very words have exposed this split.

4. Inevitable determinations

A text in a bottle, in search of its audience – but let us note that this intoxicating indeterminacy can only occur within a certain historical context, open to the future, with a very precise point of origin: the date of publication or composition. Part of Balzac’s readership is forever inaccessible to me, dead. Provided I consider that important events have taken place in any field since Balzac’s era, my target audience can never be the same as his. Whether I am aware of it or not, something inside me knows my readers have access to an augmented history compared to the readership of my predecessors.

Moreover, I work in one language, and I will only be able to reach the people of today and tomorrow who do not speak it through interpreters. The person who writes in French probably hopes to be translated; they might even sometimes think one of their books will be best suited to a foreign readership, but they can only speak to that audience through their own language, and thus through their own people.

In that language, the various registers correspond to different kinds of education, and therefore to different classes or social strata. We can hope to see these distinctions disappear one day – at the moment, they are considerable. I write, in the first place, for people who understand if not all the words I use (there will always be words whose meaning eludes me in a rich vocabulary, on first reading in any case) at least enough of them.

Another kind of origin-based determination is the place of publication, which is a fundamental factor we tend to forget, in France, due to the predominance of Paris in that respect.

Finally, there is the question of age. I won’t address the issue of children’s literature. Within the adult readership, I am aware that reactions will vary across generations, and since the new generation can only define itself in relation to the previous one by defining what is passed and what remains current in the latter’s legacy, indeterminacy cannot be absolute, since to claim that it does not matter to me if people under thirty do not read me is precisely to choose against them.

It is easy to show the way a readership is determined in spite of the author by the nature of the references the author uses. If I allude too often to musicians or painters most sixty-year-olds do not like and will never like (it is too late for them to start taking an interest in those artists), it goes without saying that I deny myself their attention. I inevitably speak first and foremost to those for whom that reference makes or can make sense. The inverse is not true: if I refer to authors who are currently known almost exclusively by sixty-year-olds, it is possible for me to imagine that people under thirty or their descendants will come to those authors little by little as they get older.

To use one reference or another is to place a bet on posterity. The more audacious the bets, the stronger the preference, within the “current” audience, for the younger demographic. The targeting remains indeterminate in one dimension but is thus clearly oriented, steered in another.

Correlative horizontal orientations may latch onto that essential vertical orientation. These could be political, for example: the preferred audience will be people who lean one way rather than the other. In that case, it is assumed that among people of a certain age, between twenty and thirty, or twenty and forty, one established group will gradually become the representative for everyone else, that their references will become the references of all, that this group is ahead of the others.

But the most original works, whose importance will later on appear as having been the most decisive, are those which, within one rising generation, the current one or a subsequent one, will act as touchstones to determine what is dynamic and what is not, and will uncover a new rupture.

The course of events is at times so glaringly obvious that we can only hope to provoke such a rupture by departing deliberately, expressly, from this foul direction.

5. The critic’s situation

The professor of literature needs to have their students communicate with a text and to help them understand it; what the professor says can only be useful to other people through the mediation of the students.

Professional criticism, in newspapers, is an example of marked predetermination, as the journalist knows rather precisely what distinguishes their readers from the readers of competing newspapers. 

Of course, the editor-in-chief usually makes a point not to influence their critic, but they do not even need to. Because the role of the critic is to guide that fraction of the population through the multitude of books available, and since the criteria to belong to that fraction are sometimes very simple and strict, and its code of conduct and norms of judgment specific, the critic will, without fear of refutation, be able to say: this is for you; this is not.

We might go as far as to say that this kind of criticism is the exact corollary of “commercial” literature. Its process includes monitoring the recipe or the formula in the same manner as regulatory bodies for dairy products or pharmaceuticals. The serialised novel reads like a chemical analysis: too much of this, not enough of that, these norms are outdated, those markers constitute a refusal to be categorised. That is all often summed up in the frequent following condemnation: “This is a product I do not know,” which, for a freer examiner, should actually be the ultimate praise.

For true criticism is open as well. It is not a customs office forbidding the entry of suspect goods after a quick inspection; it is the relay that allows them to reach their destination. That is not to say that competent inspectors or customs officers do not exist; too many poisons go around that need to be identified and reported. But what we need first and foremost are foods and ores, and therefore we need prospectors.

The true writer is the person who cannot stand to have certain aspects of reality be talked about so little or so poorly, who feels obligated to draw attention to some of these aspects in a manner they hope definitive. Not that the writer imagines in the least that once they have addressed these aspects there will no longer be any need to talk about them – on the contrary. What the writer wants is for the mind to be forever alert. In the same way, the most useful critic is the person who cannot stand to have certain books, paintings or pieces of music be talked about so little or so poorly, and the sense of obligation is as pressing in the area of criticism as in any other.

The critic is outraged: “How can you not see, not love, not feel the difference, not understand how much this is what might help you?”

Until they had spoken about a certain thing, the poet could not truly live anymore; the critic feels the same way as long as those words have not reached other ears. The poet aimed for an expanding posterity; that expansion is, precisely, what the critic has the power to speed up considerably.

The readership targeted is therefore none other than the one they bring to the writer who caught their attention. The critic is only heard and understood insofar as they ensure the author is read, and they are quiet, at the end of their piece of criticism, before the person they have attempted to draw closer.

If the critic has succeeded, their work is not erased by that silence; it does not sink into oblivion. What allows the inexhaustible work to be reached retains an inexhaustible power of connection; it is a work of art in itself, and is added to the original one as a necessary complement. It becomes a constituent reference in a new state of affairs alongside that work of art, while the most admirable texts remain forever incomplete and unknown.

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Selected Essays by Michel Butor (tr. Mathilde Merouani) is now available from Vanguard Editions. You can order a copy here.

Michel Butor (1926-2016) was a French poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, art critic, and translator. He was the author of four novels, including L’Emploi du temps (1956; Passing Time), which won the Prix Fénéon, and La Modification (1957; Changing Track), which won the Prix Renaudot. He also wrote several books of nonfiction, including the essays Répertoires [I–V] (1960–1982), from which this excerpt is taken.

Mathilde Merouani is a teacher from Toulouse, France. She holds the Agrégation in English and has recently finished her postgraduate studies at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where she wrote a master’s dissertation on otherness and the relationship to the other in the work of Kazuo Ishiguro. Twitter: @MathildeMerwani.