With a view to rehabilitating hermeneutic stylistics, L’emploi du Temps dans L’Emploi du temps de Butor seeks to show how style not only offers glimpses of past and present world views, but also enhances understanding of the world, even providing ethical pointers to help get over crises and deadlocks. Since they constantly bring us back to the same “faiscsèmes” (“asemeblies” ?) (semes inherent to several stylemes, found at different levels of analysis), the stylemes of the architexts, enunciations, accounts, story and writing of L’emploi du Temps reveal that instead of the traditional linear Time that comes from the Judeo-Christian view, bourgeois thinking and the classical physics/mecanics, Butor proposes, not like some of his contemporaries an absurd, labyrinthine Time, but a stratified Time, a Time reflecting both the experiences of mythical thought and some of the philosophical conceptualisations of Kierkegaard, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Bachelard. Going further than these thinkers and doubly opposing Bergson, illustrating certain comments made by Heidegger on art, Butor even comes gradually to install a structured, spatial and musical Time through a complex interplay of stylemes combined into sembeams. This gives rise to a much less stressful and tyrannical use of time than has been imposedsince the industrial revolution, a use of time that helps us move from the unauthentic to the authentic, gives substance and weight to actions, is a source of unification and freedom, makes reality musical and poetic, in a word, brings us closer to a full grasp of world, being and eternity
