Spotlight on … Pierre Guyotat Eden Eden Eden (1970) *

* (restored)

 

‘France’s most controversial living writer is virtually unknown in this country, thanks to difficulties in translating his extremist oeuvre – extreme in style and in content. Pierre Guyotat is the uncompromising heir of De Sade, Artaud and Genet. He writes violent and pornographic books in his own invented language. Edmund White has called him “the last great avant-garde visionary of our century.” Roland Barthes wrote an introduction to one of his books Eden Eden Eden – a work of which Michel Foucault remarked: “I have never read anything like it in any stream of literature”, praising its “startling innovation”. It has been labelled pornographic, a charge that Guyotat revels in. “Pornography is certainly more beautiful than eroticism,” he observes. “Eroticism is ugly. Eroticism is an ideology… there is nothing more boring than eroticism, it’s worse than poetry, even. I say three cheers for pornography.”

‘Born in 1940 in a small town in a mountainous area of France near Lyons, the son of a doctor, Guyotat joined the army while still a teenager and served in Algeria while that country fought France for independence. Guyotat instinctively found himself more sympathetic to the Algerians (one can see a similarity with Genet and Rimbaud here), and incited the Algerian conscripts to desert. After getting involved in brawls with officers, he was arrested by the military police and interrogated for 10 days before being thrown into an earth pit beneath the army kitchens where he lived in semi darkness for three months in constant fear of his life. “They threw me scraps of food, refuse,” he recalls, “not fit for a dog.” He managed to write on a piece of paper which he kept hidden from his captors. The link with De Sade, scribbling away in the Bastille, is unavoidable.

‘Drawing partly on his experiences as a soldier, Guyotat has set many of his celebrated avant-garde novels in hallucinatory north African war zones. Soldiers rape and pillage. Bereft of narrative, and using short rhythmic phrases, he detonates sex as bestial act of power, and piles on atrocity after atrocity. With all the eidetic and visionary power of Rimbaud’s illuminations, he burns images of war into the retina. War is a monstrously glorified exchange of fluids and solids.

‘”War is a situation in which one is totally insecure – sexually insecure as well as afraid for one’s life,” he has said. Imagine if De Sade had written about Vietnam after fighting in it, and you will get some idea of Guyotat’s cultural significance for the French – both reviled and adored in equal measure.

‘The British academic and biographer of Artaud, Stephen Barber, remarks of Eden Eden Eden: “It stinks of sperm and killing.” It’s a novel that has become legendary in its own time. Originally published in 1970, it was immediately banned by the French government until President Mitterrand personally intervened in 1981. That’s also the year Guyotat famously nearly wrote himself to death; he was so absorbed in the completion of an intractable work that he forgot to eat properly and ended up being rushed to hospital in a coma. “I was mad,” he says. “And at the same time I was living in a camper van. I was driving and hallucinating and getting into very extreme situations. Once I got into a fight on a road near Marseilles, and my attacker threw me off a cliff into the sea. I was covered in blood and so weak it took me a day to climb back up to my van.”

‘Guyotat has been described as a hermit. He has always lived in some poverty, at one time in a grim block of flats in the southern suburbs of Paris, living only on his small royalties and occasional fees from the Pompidou Centre where he goes every few years to deliver long extemporisations in the form of performance art (one photograph shows a naked man and piles of meat on a cart). Edmund White describes meeting him in his book Sketches from Memory. White says: “He has a powerful hieratic appearance and you feel you are in the presence of a priest of Baal – or perhaps he is Baal. He’s stark raving mad but a very gifted writer who staked out the extreme limits of how far you can go.”

‘Like many Anglo-Saxons, White betrays an amused and slightly baffled interest in the French passion for the avant-garde. He describes Guyotat as stealing food from his plate at a dinner party, and how he fell asleep in one of Guyotat’s two-hour improvisations. “In his language every other word sounded like `testicles’, for some reason.”

‘As a biographer of Genet, White was intrigued by the Guyotat phenomena. He recalls asking a doctorate student about Guyotat’s sexual proclivities. “She said his sexuality did not involve other living creatures.”

‘I presumed Guyotat would reject labels about sexuality and I was right. At first he was evasive: “to be homosexual, to be anti-sex, pro-sex – “to be” something does not exist.” Yes, I asked, but do you prefer men or women? He laughed and finally relented. “I like both – it’s very clear – and it’s very difficult to like both sexes, it pulls you apart.”

‘He has very little time for sex; for Guyotat work is sex, and not just in the conventional “creation as sex”. Guyotat is notorious for his habit of masturbating while he writes. The resulting soiled manuscripts are then shown in galleries as works of art. “Sex is the most relentless and powerful force in the world: it is all life, it is reality. It is not obscene.” I asked him about scenes in Eden Eden Eden set in an Algerian boy brothel. Had he visited such a place? He seemed a little shocked. “No, no I ‘ate them,” he growled while admitting he had been to female seraglios in the desert zones.

‘Like Rimbaud, who ended up as a gun runner and coffee trader in Ethiopia and Somalia, Guyotat is drawn by the desert. He talks of the Saharan wastes with all the tenderness of a lover; he particularly likes the intermediate landscapes between desert and pasture, the mountainous areas “that look like moonscapes but with beautifully coloured rocks” given a chance, he would happily live in Algeria (he listens to Algerian popular music with a passion). “But it’s impossible.” He has watched with horror the rise of fundamentalism in Africa. For him fundamentalism is rooted in an attack on the writer (Guyotat has been vocal in supporting Salman Rushdie from the “great gestures of beard and robe”). “Asserting the divine character of a text is an insult to the human writer of it – it erases him, makes him disappear. Fundamentalism is an attack on writing itself and all writers should see this.”

‘The British may laugh at Guyotat or be shocked by him. But his dedication to the idea of “being a writer” makes British literary preoccupations with Martin Amis’ teeth and Julian Barnes’ pool game seem quite banal. Though Guyotat’s preoccupations with remodelling the French language and dwelling on French colonial atrocities may not have quite the same reactive effect in this country, his power as a writer, even in translation, is deadly and pure.’ — Roger Clarke, The Independent

 

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Further

Pierre Guyotat @ Semiotext(e)
The Multiplying Hells of Pierre Guyotat
Pierre Guyotat @ goodreads
Pierre Guyotat interviewed @ purple MAGAZINE
The Literary Revolution of Pierre Guyotat
COMA: THE ART OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS
Pierre Guyotat’s Coma
Eden and Atrocity: Pierre Guyotat’s Algeria
Pierre Guyotat’s Formation: Childhood, Awakening and Self-Writing
Pierre Guyotat / « Je suis un musicien, je suis un alphabétiseur. »
Pierre Guyotat et le corps charnel de la parole
Pierre Guyotat : “Quand j’écris, j’ai toute la langue française avec moi dans l’oreille”
L’ENTHOUSIASME DES CORPS DE PIERRE GUYOTAT
Pierre Guyotat, 
une affaire dans l’affaire Littérature
Écrire en langue : langue nouvelle et subversion du français chez Pierre Guyotat
L’aventure du muttum : étude de la langue de Pierre Guyotat
LES MOTS RAYÉS DE PIERRE GUYOTAT
VIVRE, PIERRE GUYOTAT
À propos de Pierre Guyotat
Pierre Guyotat, ovni littéraire ou pure provocation?
L’imaginaire historique : Pierre Guyotat / La Fabrique de l’Histoire
Buy ‘Eden Eden Eden’

 

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Manuscript pages

‘I wrote the first canto once I finished the book at the end of December 1965. I was certain of having “given it all”, but, as far as my literary survival was concerned, and the survival of my manuscripts, I did not pay that much attention to it. I have a deep rejection of suppression: one could think that I wanted to keep the crossed text readable. For any human work, we are to keep a trace, a shadow: that is the palimpsest. I also find that restful to write on something already written, to write on the old version; but without any notion of conserving the manuscript.’ — Pierre Guyotat

 

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Extras

Cours Pierre Guyotat

Cocktail Hour Reading: Pierre Guyotat

PIERRE GUYOTAT : Joyeux animaux de la misère

pierre guyotat interview

 

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Homage to Pierre Guyotat’s Eden, Eden, Eden on its 50th Anniversary
by Alexandre Stipanovich

Donatien Grau is faithful to his idols. Pierre Guyotat is one of them. In 2016, Donatien realized the exhibition “Pierre Guyotat: The Matter of Our Works” in collaboration with Galerie Azzedine Alaïa. Four years later, and following Guyotat’s death last February, his fascination is more alive than ever: because September 9, 2020, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the writer’s groundbreaking book Eden, Eden, Eden, Grau has organized fifty celebratory readings and performances in various locations around the world (Los Angeles, Paris, Tbilisi, Lusanga, Dakar, Chicago, etc.). For a book censored at birth, Grau’s challenge was to find a way to manifest Guyotat’s epic vision in a colossal way today, to restore the legacy of the book, and to break free from obscurantism.

Alexandre Stipanovich: What makes Pierre Guyotat’s Eden, Eden, Eden so important to you that you wanted to celebrate it with fifty readings in fifty different locations across the planet on September 9?
Donatien Grau: Eden, Eden, Eden is a visionary text. Pierre saw and gathered all the suffering, the oppression, and, at times, the joy of humankind. He did it fifty years ago, and Eden, Eden, Eden is as vibrant — arguably more vibrant now — than it was when it was published and then censored. Whether colonial oppression (Pierre was a soldier during the Algerian War, and he sided with the Algerians; a lot of Eden was first composed in Algeria), sexual fluidity, or the challenge of male domination, this text saw it all. It is a very extreme text, for sure, which marks extreme sexuality and brutality. It is one of the greatest epics ever written — perhaps one of the last ones. It is also a rich inspiration for artists. A couple of years ago, with Azzedine Alaïa, we organized the exhibition “Pierre Guyotat: The Matter of Our Works,” which provided the ground for the multiplicity of readings we are shaping today. Pierre changed art, and, as he passed away a few months ago, now is the time for art to manifest the life of Pierre Guyotat.
AS: Each location seems to propose a unique performance involving reading and dance, different translations and interpretations. How did you envision such a diverse celebration of a single text?
DG: As chairman of the Association Pierre Guyotat, I wanted every reading to be conceived by and with a partner. I and the board members of the Association Pierre Guyotat were present, but only as a resource: we provided information, background. With a few exceptions, in which I was personally involved alongside friends (in two cities dear to my heart, Paris for the full reading of the book, and LA, for the Instagram campaign at The Box), each partner conceived their own program with their own identity, their own ideas, their own politics as well. The diversity of the program reflects the diversity of Pierre’s impact in the world. Every venue was considered.
AS: What are the most breathtaking or surprising locations for this event and why: Los Angeles? Biskra? Dakar? Chicago?
DG: Every venue is a surprise. Tbilisi is extraordinary. So is Lusanga, in the Congo. But LA is too, or Saint-Julien-Molin-Molette, a mile away from where Pierre was born, where choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh will read and dance. It is quite amazing to have a partner in Biskra — really at the doors of the desert, in the location of the Touaregs, who speak Tamazig, the alphabet of the epigraph of the text, meaning “And now we are no longer slaves.” And then Rome, with a special sound display at Galleria Borghese. What can I say? More than the venue, it is the method of every partner that is exciting and unique.

Scholar Noura Wedell, philosopher Catherine Malabou, artist Paul McCarthy, and Donatien Grau discuss the life of writer Pierre Guyotat

 

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Interview
from BOMB

 

Noura Wedell You spoke about [your] practice in 1972, at the Artaud-Bataille conference organized by Philippe Sollers. (Your text, “Langage du corps,” was published in English in the Semiotext(e) Polysexuality issue of 1981.) In it, you explain how masturbation arose from the social fear of revealing your body as a producer of substances. The link between writing and masturbation had to do with understanding the embodied aspect of symbolic systems, the connection between body and language. It was a certain refusal of transcendence, as well as an experiment in the production of desire.

Pierre Guyotat Yes, and at the time, it took on a very exasperated form, probably because I was very far from home. I was also writing poems and prose without any carnal stimulation. Being in a foreign country increased the clandestine aspect of my practice; I was surrounded by people whom I barely knew. This raised both the stakes and risks of the game. It was also a time when I was torn between my desire for girls and my desire for boys, both desires full of adolescent tension and playful detachment. This was truly an internal rupture for me. I believe we all work with a fundamental rupture within ourselves. What is important is to dare to know, to accept and address it through artistic means. I did this fairly early on, and the north of England was one of the small theaters of my budding consciousness. There were still borders at the time in Europe, not to mention the great border between the Communist East and the so-called free West. It was probably fundamental that I be surrounded by a language other than the one I was used to in France, British English, which has very much changed since the war and postwar periods.

NW Language hadn’t yet become impoverished as purely communicational.

PG Yes, this is especially true of the language of television. At the time, the language on both sides of the English Channel was quite salacious and evocative. There was still a proletariat and a peasantry, and a very material language with regional distinctions. The language that was spoken in the north of England was very different from what was spoken in London, or in Kent. Even in France, in the north, people did not speak the same way as they did in Paris or in the south. There were different accents, different words and expressions.

The family I was living with had been friends of my family since the Resistance. We were staying along the North Sea, in a coastal village beneath a towering, powerful maritime fort, à la Walter Scott. I fell in love with a young French girl from Brittany who was living with a family from the neighborhood. At the same time, I was resisting the incessant solicitations of the son of my parents’ friends, a young blond boy, exhausted and exhausting, with whom I had a lot of fun. With the girl things were different, and I’ve never forgotten that young love. This book testifies to that, as it narrates and tries to explain that love.

France and England were also still empires with colonies. Both countries had just emerged from the war and were quite impoverished. The north of France had already been very impacted by the Great War, and the northeast of France had just been destroyed again. English cities had been heavily bombed. These are things we shouldn’t forget. And there were important social struggles, anti-colonial struggles, “rebellions” beginning or already underway in Kenya against England and in Algeria against France, among other places.

In addition to narrating this month spent in England, the book covers my return to France, to too-familial places. My internal split resumed there, and I began to translate it into writing. The text also describes other periods of my life through flashbacks; for example, the birth of my masturbation habit in a small rural boarding school just after World War II, and my first conflicts with my father, whom I greatly admired.

NW This moment in your adolescence was also a time in which you began to acknowledge your class situation.

PG Yes, and with it came the intensification of an awareness of social disparity that marks my entire work, from all points of view, on all levels. Since childhood I’ve always been more attracted to “the people,” as they were called at the time, than to my own class. For me, the people represented freedom, metaphysically and physically, in terms of the body. My own family’s cultural status prohibited such freedom and this caused another real rupture for me; it was not simply the luxury of a privileged kid. Although my father was a country doctor, my family was not rich; we lived at home as I did in boarding school, in a very rudimentary way.

My internal sexual rupture was an effect of my belief in Christ, triggered by the notion that he is both man and God. When you have faith, you experience this duality intensely. My family was very religious, if not overly pious. The Bible’s Christian imagery, both in the New and Old Testaments, preceded all other imagery for me. When I was young, I believed in an entity that was at once human and divine, and I also believed in the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost combined in a single God—an invisible divinity, an entity without a body, without beginning or end. At the same time, I was very strongly possessed by the imagery of the crucifiction, which is unbelievably carnal and sexual. It’s rather hard to top: the almost naked body, members spread wide, arms outstretched, and thighs squeezed tight. This was a concrete, finite, and limited imagery, whereas the other was abstract and infinite.

In addition, I was taught that before being my parents’ son, and my father’s son in particular, I was the son of God. That was my belief, and it was strongly anchored in me, through prayer especially. At home and in boarding school we prayed quite often: before eating, when we woke up in the morning, at night. They told us that prayer was the most beautiful thing in the world, which is not untrue. It gives dignity to humanity. As a child, I took all of this in very physically, in the flesh, especially since Catholicism is so physical. This is perhaps why it has endured for so long. The Church wasn’t a constraint for me. I was very content in what I felt to be a protective, poetic, intellectual, and metaphysical atmosphere. The seminary instilled in us the difference between matter and spirit, framing them as different entities that were necessarily combined. Flesh was an element of knowledge, but its temptation weakened the strength of spirit and of mind. In that very Cartesian education, both the flesh and the spirit existed, and the idea was to find some kind of balance between them—which, of course, I did not want. This must have corresponded to the internal rupture that I’d later experience. But there was a great gentleness in all of this, and I was certainly well disposed toward it. I placed my revolt elsewhere. But as the son of God I did exactly what I did with my own flesh father: I provoked him, and went farther, into sin so to speak.

NW There is another fundamental rupture that informs your work. It is within the realm of art, and it has to do with the problematic link between human creation and horror, following from a critique of humanism. I’m thinking of the relation between slavery and the development of modernism in Europe or the problem of the extreme rationality of the death camps of the Second World War.

PG I’ve always been revolted by existence, by the very fact of being human. There are reasons for this. As a child I knew what was going on in the adult world. A large portion of my family fought in the Resistance, and suffered very much for that. We were physically and biographically touched by the war’s horror. Through what I saw in photographs and through the testimony of those who had survived, I was well positioned to feel the affront against humanity that the war enacted. Luckily, I never smelled the odor of death, the way the children in the camps or elsewhere had to smell it. Smells are fundamental. But as early as five-and-a-half or six years old I did see photographs from a book produced by two of my uncles who had fought in the Resistance. They were images of a degraded man, of a degraded body, degraded despite what a somewhat strained humanism would have you believe: that man, in all circumstances, always retains some form of dignity. The image of human grandeur disappears in a body that is reduced to itself. This made a deep impression on me.

NW You can see it in the importance attributed to the body in your work. In fact, you have often been called a “writer of the body.”

PG This question of the body has been brought up very often in regard to my work; it has been explained and re-explained. I have myself added fuel to the fire, since I have even used the term to describe myself. I am a bit removed from all of that now, and more and more so as I get older. The body is self-evident; you can’t get away from it. You live through the body, think through it, feel through it. A body is inevitable, whatever it is. But—how can I say this?—I am not at all the auteur or poet of the body, as has so often been said. I find this too restrictive; my work extends beyond that question.

What I write, what I’ve been able to do and to experience, is a question of being. Much more than the body, being is what torments me, if I can use the word torment for this. I mean quite simply the fact that we exist. We make art not to prove to ourselves that we exist, but in order to place ourselves on the border of the circle of being. It is a circle into which we can fall, as if into nothingness. I’m interested in being and in the circle. The body is what allows and at the same time interferes with being. It impedes, torments, and even negates being. But of course I’m happy to speak about the body. My body wasn’t any more affected than were the bodies of others, those of my generation who were deeply harmed by the war. You know, it is not insignificant to have been born in 1940. I always felt that I belonged very strongly to my generation. Children have a specific way of feeling solidarity with other children. Even as a child I felt very close to the children whom I saw in photographs of the war—persecuted, debased, and deprived of their childhood, as they said at the time.

The question of how we feel solidarity, and of the feeling of solidarity itself, becomes greater with age. What is it, morally, that requires solidarity? It doesn’t seem to be as vital a need as eating, drinking, sleeping, finding shelter, or being taken care of when sick. Solidarity is not an irrefutable given. Art helps us ask ourselves these questions. I like to go beyond what I think are somewhat self-evident questions, dig beneath them and debunk them, to understand what they truly imply. Too many massacres, murders, and attacks on liberty have been committed throughout history in the name of so-called subversion for artists to claim to be blissful subversives. I am not a blissful subversive, and if I am one, it is despite myself.

 

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Book

Pierre Guyotat Eden Eden Eden
Creation Books

‘This, Pierre Guyotat’s second novel, caused a huge scandal upon publication in France in 1970, and was later censored. Nowadays, he is regarded as one of the greatest French novelists of all time and his writing has been endorsed by Edmund White, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Extreme and obscene, Eden Eden Eden is set in a polluted zone of the Algerian desert during the civil war.’ — Creation Books

 

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Excerpts

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ha ha, no, I didn’t wave. I just stood there absorbing the weirdly sweet nationalism all around me. Oh, shit, about your blood stained eye. Do you think you’d look cool with a pirate’s eyepatch? Favorites? I thought Gillian Wearing putting her eyes in Mapplethorpe’s near death face was pretty haunting. And I like the McCarthys. To wear, I’d probably be boring and old fashioned and sport that ugly Chucky mask. Ha ha, nice love. My brain is scrambling itself trying to picture that. Love making people understand that “thanks but no thanks” is the same as saying “no”, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Particularly spooky Bacon, thanks. Excellent because Xmas is shockingly mere days away. Same with me with my LA pals. ** CAUTIVOS, Well, thank you kindly. I don’t remember which Vila-Matas that would have been either. I love Paris and being here. I don’t really miss LA, or rather living there, but when I visit I remember why I liked living there. Me too: unread books staring me in the face from everywhere. I don’t have any association with the term ‘best seller’. It doesn’t repel or attract me, and I don’t associate Zweig or Hamsun with that, no. I grew up in LA where it was kind of impossible not to know Bukowski. I’m not a huge fan. I saw him read twice, and he was very entertaining. I actually have a Bukowski poem in the post coming up tomorrow strangely. Your English is totally good and understandable, no worries. I hope your holidays are being better than your average days. ** Misanthrope, I kind of know our Sypha. He is a complex and mysterious being, however. I’m wearing a white shirt, but I’m wearing another shirt on top of it, so I’m probably safe. ** Bill, Yes, one wouldn’t want to wake up in the morning to find one of those McCarthy masks next to one on one’s pillow. That Vespers thing is cool. Thanks, I’m going to dig into it and its context imminently. ** Nick Rombes, Hi, Nick. Welcome, and good to meet you. Oh, right, yes, that bit in ‘Gerry’. The Minute 9 project is really interesting. The problem is I’m kind of swamped at the moment getting ready to make a film. Let me see if I can clear some space. Thank you for asking me in any case. I want to read your novel. I’ll get it. And, wow, you wrote the 33 1/3 book on the first Ramones album. I’ve been known to pontificate that that album is the most perfect album of all time. Must read. Anyway, thanks a lot! ** Dynomoose, Hi, buddy! Merry Xmas! And I hope you make some masks! And that I get to see if not even wear them! ** David, Hi, David! How really nice of you to come in/back. Thank you, I will try to have a very solid Xmas, and you too, yeah? How are you? How have you been? xoxo ** Meg Gluth, Hi, Meg. I’m going to listen to your and Steven’s sounds today! Excellent if you guys can come down! I’ll be offblog during that period, so we can figure things out via email or text or FB. Big up, my friend! ** malcolm, Hi! Yeah, I was wondering how a bunch of those masks could possibly fit over a normal human head. My memory agrees with you about those songs’ spookiness. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about the extreme expense of using songs that well known in a film. Zac and I wanted to use this very early, obscure Fleetwood Mac song from their pre-fame, blues days in our new film, and the amount of money the rights holders wanted would have made Marvel think twice. Yes, yes, yes! Belated sweet dreams! ** jade or e, Hi. My apologies on behalf of my blog for its weird entrance protocols. It gets overly protective sometimes, and I have no idea why. Thank you so, so, so much! My ability to be articulate, which is always dodgy when I don’t have ages available to refine each sentence I’m writing, fails me, but thank you! That’s super heartening, and, again, you wrote amazingly about my wordage. Being rando is totally legit. I admire randos, as you can tell by my work and its population. Great luck with the BA. What are you having to do in that regard? Don’t worry if others don’t seem to take you seriously. They’re probably intimidated. People can be very easily intimidated by creative fireballs, and they feign disinterest as a cover story. Nice that you and Kenji are mind-melding. He’s great, obviously. I’m friends with him on Facebook, and we like each other’s posts, but that’s as far as our relationship goes. Thanks for the link and clueing me in about the tag I can hunt. I will. Great, excited! I did read Cam Scott’s essay on my gif fiction. I was really honored and thrilled about it. Not that many people have written about my gif fiction, and I take the gif fiction really seriously, so when someone treats it seriously like he did, it’s a great boost for me. Don’t worry, you didn’t say even one syllable more than I was pleasured and grateful to read. So thank you for being and generous with me! xoxo, Dennis. ** Right. Someone recently asked me to restore this post about the great, great ‘Eden Eden Eden’, and I was, you know, happy to do that, and I even enhanced it just a little. See you tomorrow.