Morality, Obscene
Pierre Guyotat’s Empire of Filth
Elena Comay Del Junco
Sophie Bassouls, Portrait of Pierre Guyotat, 1984
Shortly after being given a copy of Pierre Guyotat’s Eden, Eden, Eden (1970) by a friend aware of my fondness for obscene writing, I am called to the sickbed of a relative who’s recently had a stroke. I bring the book with me to read while watching over the patient in the ICU and it occurs to me that this repeats a pattern. I am reminded of earlier moments: read - ing Georges Bataille’s fiction on a subway car as a teenager and being, if not quite turned on, then amused and pleased with myself, wondering what the rest of the passengers would think if they knew what I was reading. Or, several years later, bringing the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom with me to the hospital for a minor procedure and reading, or at least leafing through the book, in the recovery room—though I admit that, even then, the principal satisfaction had more to do with the fact of my choice of book than with the content, having not rid myself of a distinctly teenaged notion of urbane sophistication. A third time makes a habit; I am both self-satisfied and slightly embarrassed.
The patient has just had a massive stroke and seems to have almost completely lost the ability to produce language, though not to make sounds. There is a constant stream of vocalization, patterned unmistakably as if it were speech, though it is entirely indecipherable. Its rhythm, cadence, and intonation have an uncanny quality, and soon I notice that the distribution of sounds is familiar, adhering to the regular phonological patterns of English. If one divides the stream of sounds into units drawn from the language’s phonemic inventory, is there a code that might be discovered by which this could be translated into meaningful speech? A little later, the stream shifts to a different set of sounds, a different phonemic inventory uttered in a different rhythm, and with different intonation. She is now speaking—or “speaking”—French, her first language, as well as that of the book open on my lap. The change is unmistakable, though the utterances are no more intelligible than they were earlier.
My grandmother goes to sleep and I read a bit. Guyotat’s language is limpid. The syntax, unconventional as it first seems, is crystalline, a series of participles clustered around a much smaller number of finite verbs, everything in the present tense. And, of course, there is the constant stream of obscenity and violence for which the book is known: by the end of the first page, we encounter soldiers, “cheeks stained with tears,” who “press their cocks into the sides of dusty tires” before “throwing themselves on women” and “crushing nursing infants beneath their weight.”[1]
The text continues for over 200 pages almost exactly as it started. Each act of violence and/or sex (the two are indistinguishable) succeeds the last, serially and inevitably. It is perfectly ordered and entirely without organization. A page before the book ends, Guyotat’s deliriously detailed description continues without pause. It is worth quoting at length to grasp the effects of his language:
scraps of flowery silk stuck by cum onto side of ass, onto pallid epidermis; the boy’s right eye throbs, cum expelled; the left veiled red, corner of eyelid oozes pink lachrymal sweat; the woman advances her curved thumb, gathers a thread of this salty sweat on nail, brings it to her lips; a thread dried in wind shakes on the downy hairs atop her cheek; her nail detaches it from the corner of her eye; the penis twitching in the cunt sheathing it up to the balls; the woman chews on the threads; her right breast swept by the fleece of the boy’s left armpit, hardens, retracted in wind; the left breast, the boy’s torso presses, rubs, twists, flattens it: the nipple oozes sweat of sour milk; the boy, sticky pubis rubbing woman’s viscous pubis, heaves afresh; fingers pull at locks on the back of her occiput ; the baby drools on the left forearm; he-goat bites left arm, while orgasm contracts muscles, nerves; fresh breath, exhaled from between woman’s dried lips, bathes his bloodshot forehead; the front foliage of twisted locks modulate breath ; the boy’s teeth nibble at the corner of the woman’s lips; the cunt ejects crumpled penis; with a thrust of her loins, the woman rolls the penis against her inner thigh ; the he-goat licks the chilled salty sweat from the right side of the boy’s face; the boy’s fingers, slipped into woman’s sticky hair, rub at perfumed scalp, nails scrape at crusts of dried milk, makeup, cum; foam seethes at corner of lips—creased by smile—of woman; on his pressed together elbows the boy supports his blackened head, heavy for muscles tired out by erection; the woman’s lips press, their middle ringed by a patch of smooth skin, on the raised neck’s vertebrae; the boy’s saliva, flowing over the side of his cheek, drips, over his overbite, onto his throat, mixes with the foam frothing at the corner of the woman’s lips; the boy’s torso, hollowed by his raised head, hovers over the breast; the woman rolls her head to one side; the boy pecks at, smooths out her eyelashes between his lips; tears bead darkened by kohl; the boy rubs his lips against the kohl trickling over her temples; his penis strikes, slimy, cold, inside the woman’s thigh; its glans tangles with curls crushed by the weight of the boy’s pelvis.
Faced with a bare list of events, one is normally meant to resist the temptation to infer a causal sequence that isn’t there—post hoc ergo proper hoc names a so-called fallacy. When reading Eden, though, making such an inference is more like the opposite, a challenge. First, we have to keep track of each succeeding body part, animal, patch of filth, penetration, and then, deprived of even the most minimal of syntactic articulation (there is no “and,” let alone any other notation resembling hypotaxis), to determine what logic connects them besides the pure seriality of before and after. The opposite of glossolalia—the forms, cadences, and rhythms of spoken language or more ordinary writing are stripped away in favor of bare meaning, words piled on words, and obscene image following obscene image. There is no background to contour the scenery against which action takes place, only a single plane. This is why Guyotat’s restriction on syntax must not be mistaken for the roughly contemporaneous experiments of Oulipo, the literary movement organized around its authors’ willing submission to various forms of restriction— mandating the use of one and only one vowel, forbidding any reference to the characters’ gender—where prohibition or constraint is meant paradoxically to have a creative function.
“Each act of violence and/or sex (the two are indistinguishable) succeeds the last, serially and inevitably. It is perfectly ordered and entirely without organization.”
The experience of reading Guyotat is not pleasurable, not even in the way that reading Sade, for example, can offer a sort of self-satisfaction at enduring the endless series of tortures packaged into classically constructed sentences. It is, though, captivating. The Franco-Algerian psychoanalyst Karima Lazali describes bringing both Eden and Guyotat’s earlier novel Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers with her on holiday and finding herself simultaneously transfixed by the texts and constantly wanting to bury the books in the sand.
*
By the time Guyotat wrote Eden, Eden, Eden in the late 1960s, he was in his late 20s and had already published two novels; had been drafted into the French army and sent to Algeria, where he was imprisoned for subversion, for possessing forbidden materials (including his own journals), and for complicity in desertion; had forsaken his tight-knit bourgeois family in the provinces as a teenager and escaped to Paris where he worked as a delivery boy; had absorbed the canon of French literature and the catechism of the Catholic Church; and had lost his mother to cancer.
Guyotat’s life gave him the material for his writing—for his memoirs, of course, but also his fiction—but biography will take us only so far. One might begin instead with Sade. To write about Guyotat without at least invoking Sade and, if one wants, Sade’s heirs (Bataille, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, et al.), would appear to violate an unwritten canon of literary criticism. After all, who is Guyotat but the final and most brutal representative of the obscene tradition in French literature, the apotheosis of cruelty?
Indeed, when it was published in 1970, Eden, Eden, Eden —whose triply repeated title predicts the seriality, if not the obscenity, contained within its pages—caused a scandal that, in turn, cemented Guyotat’s position as a leading representative of the post-Sadean tradition. Full censorship was out of fashion by 1970, but the Ministry of the Interior imposed a ban on the book’s sale to minors, advertising, and public display. The ban became a small cause célèbre among the post1968 intellectual class. A petition against the ban was duly drafted, circulated, and signed by everyone who was anyone: Jean-Paul Sartre, Nathalie Sarraute, Jacques Derrida, Marguerite Duras, Roland Barthes, and Simone de Beauvoir were among the initial signatories, joined later by hundreds of others, including François Mitterand, who would lift the ban on Eden eleven years later, upon assuming the presidency. The full list of signatories is a family reunion of the intellectual and artistic scene of the early Fifth Republic.
The open letter was printed in a volume put out by Gallimard in 1972 under the title Forbidden Literature with Guyotat’s name on the cover, which capitalized on the scandal and gathered the various press clippings, interviews, and prises de position that it generated. The letter claims, first, that no teenager would bother with such a piece of avant-garde writing, and, second, that if they did, these were not the sorts of juvenile delinquents that the censor need worry about. The drafters refer to an American study commissioned by the Johnson administration and claim that “if there really are young sadistic torturers in France, they are more likely reading comics than Eden, Eden, Eden.” Assuming for a moment that there were “certain exceptional adolescents who need the 120 Days of Sodom and Eden, Eden, Eden to fulfil their sexual needs,” the letter continues, then are we really under the illusion that depriving them of their reading will cure them? Why not ban detective novels, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky? All in all, this act of censorship would guarantee the Minister a place alongside the persecutors of Mme Bovary and the Fleurs du mal! It is easy enough to be charmed by these half-formed arguments piled up according to no particular logic except that of Freud’s kettle, amassed in the hope that at least one would provoke the censor’s sympathy.
What the letter does not mention at all is Algeria (Kateb Yacine was the lone Algerian, in fact the lone non-French, member of the initial group of signatories). Perhaps such an omission was tactically wise. Even more than now, France in 1970 was in no mood for a postcolonial reckoning. In the previous decade, Jean-Luc Godard’s The Little Soldier (Le petit soldat) was denied release, and Genet’s The Screens (Les paravents) was delayed for five years before it was staged in France in 1966, only to be the subject of intense protests and denunciations by nationalists mourning the loss of the colonial empire. But the open letter against Eden’s ban is not the only moment in the novel’s reception wherein Algeria is entirely missing. The first edition of the book included prefaces by Roland Barthes, Phillippe Sollers, and Michael Leiris, which all position Guyotat as Sade’s heir (“nothing like it has been risked since Sade,” wrote Sollers). None mention the colonial massacres that are the subject of the book.
In a short article in the Nouvel observateur, Foucault praised Guyotat for seeing sex through the ruses of sexuality, decentering the sovereign individual, and so on—that is, praising him for sounding very much like Foucault. More significant than that, perhaps, is the following: “They say that the book is about Algeria, about the West, while in fact it’s about the tramplings of every army and the infinite chaos [le brouhaha infini] of servitude . . .” This is true, of course. But Eden is explicitly about Algeria, as was Guyotat’s previous novel, Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, despite the use of quasi-mythical toponyms. The violence of colonial rule and the atrocities of the anti-independence counterinsurgency are the starting point and the constant object of the book’s relentless description. Algeria is the prism through which a universal picture of violence is refracted. The soldiers who rape, stab, shit, or vomit for the duration of the novel are introduced in the first ten lines as members of RIMA, the Régiment d’infanterie de marine, part of the core of the French colonial army, riding in American-made GMC trucks.[2]
Eden is not an exercise in obscenity for the sake of breaking the boundaries of what language can do. It breaks the boundaries of what language does in order to describe a reality that is already obscene. In other words, yes, it is about the infinite modes of servitude and the trampling of every army—since to write about the Algerian war is to write about the infinity of servitude and the trampling of every army.
After Eden, Guyotat’s prose continued to distend and depart from standard French to the extent that his next novel, Prostitution, included a 100-page appendix made up of a glossary; a “Grammar” that outlines the various transformations that are made to familiar French sound patterns, orthography, and syntax; and a list of translations of Arabic words and phrases, explicitly based on the dialect spoken in Eastern Algeria, near the Tunisian border. The new language, while it results in a forbidding book nearly incomprehensible to the reader at first glance, is not the result of experimentation for its own sake, but an attempt to capture, however impossibly, something of reality. To get a sense of the procedure, consider the opening three lines of Prostitution:
[debout, la bouch’!, j’a b’soin ! » ] [. . , te m’veux, m’sieur l’homm’ ? » — « j’vas t’trequer au bourrier ! » — « j’t’deslip’ m’sieur l’homm’? » — « oua. . , tir’-moi l’zob du jeans a j’vas t’triquer!
In standard French:
“Debout, la bouche! J’en ai besoin.”
“Tu me veux, monsieur?”
“Je vais te baiser à côté de la poubelle!”
“Je t’enlève le slip, monsieur?”
“Oua . . . tire-moi le zob du jean et je vais te baiser.”
In English:
“Get up! Mouth! I need it.”
“You want me, sir?”
“I’m going to fuck you next to the trash.”
“Should I take off your underwear?”
“Yeah, get out my cock from my jeans and I’m going to fuck you.”
Guyotat starts us off easy: once we learn (by consulting the appended Grammar) that vowels often tend to transform into their more open counterparts and that unstressed “e” vowels are omitted (je vais te triquer —> j’vas t’triquer; et —> a), and look up a handful of terms, the reading becomes surprisingly easy. Even the typographical variants are explained. Square brackets block off separate scenes or actions (the person who needs the mouth is not the person who wants to fuck near the garbage can). The two periods followed by a comma (“. . ,”) signal a shift in which body or what action is being discussed . . , We are even informed that the exclamation point “indicates that one should read or speak the preceding word or phrase more forcefully”! Bewildering as the experience of reading such a text is, its construction is systematic and meticulous. Every comma, square bracket, garbage heap, cock stained with shit, proper name, and historical referent is there because it is meant to be—because it is needed, essential.
The final “novel” from the first period of Guyotat’s career, The Book (Le Livre), almost killed him. In comparison with this, Prostitution is a perfectly readable, conventional narrative. Guyotat talked about the title of the novel as a reference to the Bible, and The Book as a rewriting of the Holy Book, but it may be more appropriate to say that it is not a title at all, but a placeholder denoting the only really knowable thing about the work, which is that it is, indeed, a book. Proper names and body parts, almost indecipherably spelled, pile up with no breaks. Sentences become paragraphs become two hundred pages. I do not know what effect reading the book all the way through would have, but writing The Book resulted in Guyotat slipping into a coma, so consumed by its creation that he was living in a camper van and eating almost nothing at all, freezing and baking at rest stops along the highway depending on the season, and nearly blinded from leaving his contact lenses in his eyes day or night.
*
The episode marked a break in his life and a pause in work. But the writing-induced coma was also incorporated into his mythology long before it was chronicled in the first of a suite of memoirs, Coma, which appeared in 2006. In Coma, as in the three others that followed, people have names, sentences have periods, pages have breaks in paragraphs, words are spelled according to the norms of the Academie française. These later autobiographical works have fared better in translation than the early novels.[3] Noura Wedell, who worked and consulted with Guyotat, published English translations of Coma and In the Deep (Arrière-fond), as well as a short section of Idiocy, with Semiotext(e). (Formation, published in 2007, has not been translated into English.) Idiocy, first published in French in 2018, two years before his death, was published in full this fall by New York Review Books, translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty.
“Pierre Guyotat writes obscenely because the world he writes about is obscene.”
As well as chronicling Guyotat’s life, these memoirs fold back on the experience of writing the novels of the 1960s and ’70s. They chronicle their composition and context and revisit and rework their concerns: the indistinguishable border between sex and violence, commerce and servitude, the obscene function of language, the challenge and demand to narrate the twin crimes of fascism and colonialism. The adoption of a more conventional style in these later works must not, however, be mistaken for an abandonment of principles, a failure of nerve, or a concession to readerly demands for intelligibility. That would be to misread Guyotat’s writing as an exercise in provocation, whether in content (obscenity) or form (incomprehensibility). The doubling of the memoirs and novels is essential because it prevents a lazy classification of the earlier books as “extreme literature” that revels in producing shock, upsetting public morals, or pushing boundaries for their own sake. Guyotat’s project, including the remaking of the French language (“When I write,” he once told an interviewer, “I hear the whole of the French language in my ears”), is above all a moral one. I do not mean this in the vague transvaluation-of-all-values way, reveling in taboo in order to dismantle the empire of bourgeois moralism. Guyotat explicitly abjured what he termed “the cult of marginality.”
Pierre Guyotat writes obscenely because the world he writes about is obscene.
His written life is a constellation of self-produced myths, begun well before his series of late-life memoirs. Most famous and most consonant with his assimilation to the canon of extreme literature and high obscenity is his adolescent practice of writing while masturbating, keeping one phallic object in each hand, chronicled at length in In the Deep. Equally, if not more significant, is his imprisonment in a makeshift dungeon under the kitchen of the military base in Algeria, where he was sent as a conscript and soon accused of sympathizing with the FLN rebels, of insubordination, of attempted desertion, and of inciting fellow soldiers to do the same. Guyotat’s three-month-long confinement, during which he was held in secret and incommunicado, is the center of Idiocy. The physical environment provides a point of contact between the densely arranged world of Eden and the “real” world. Not just the world of his biography—though of course that, too—but the larger world of colonial warfare, the streets of Paris, and the small town in central France where Guyotat was born and raised.
*
Toward the beginning of the memoir, before his conscription, Guyotat describes working as a delivery boy in Paris and looking through an open window to see a man and woman having sex. What initially appears to be a simple report of voyeurism soon becomes another kind of activity. The man and woman are across the street at the back of the room. There is no way, in other words, that the young man leaning against his moped on the sidewalk could see the dust on the woman’s ankles, let alone the smells emitted by the residual shit left after wiping. From outside, he hears “whimpers, choked panting, moans, muffled laughter, open laughter” but is unsure “which one of them softly farts.” Guyotat’s violation of the rules of perception, his x-ray visioning, is not motivated by some deep-set paranoia, nor does it reflect the speech of an obsessive neurotic who sees filth everywhere and germs on every surface, who cannot let go of the belief that every body, no matter how recently washed, is caked with shit.
There is, ultimately, no difference in kind between such a microscopically observed scene and the narration of his imprisonment—when, for instance, the mud floor of his dungeon turns to slick when the basement is flooded with winter rain, and he is surrounded by swimming rats. Filth is everywhere. Guyotat has simply developed a preternatural skill at detecting it. The world is filthy—this is the most basic, axiomatic assumption of his writing. But there is no celebration of this fact, no reveling in abjection, no satisfaction in being able to see clearly and face up to what others would prefer to ignore. And once again there is no time, either, to transgress for transgression’s sake.
Not that the filth does not have ethical significance. Prior to his arrest, Guyotat gets carsick on the road to Algiers, where he is to meet with an unnamed author. (He says only that he was introduced to this character by their publisher, the Editions du Seuil, who published Frantz Fanon and Kateb Yacine, among others.) Standing against the side of the minibus, the narrator throws up and thinks to himself that “[I] [n]ot only occupy this land that belongs to others, but add my vomit to it too . . .” It is a pathetic gesture, little more than a self-absorbed attempt to absolve himself of complicity in a violence of a wholly incommensurable scale with one conscript’s emesis. Guyotat’s actions, too—his attempts at rebellion, at resistance to the military into which he was conscripted—are threatened by a similar impotence. Sympathy (and in fact solidarity) with the Algerian political cause is real, but in the narrative, it appears secondary to an empathy whose basic quality is its disarming simplicity. Guyotat writes to capture the motivation for any one of his actions (or inactions) simply: “I want independence for Algeria, happiness for its people.”
However much one must admire the willingness to confront authority, it is hard to position Guyotat, as he narrates himself, as an anticolonial hero, a virtuous traitor to his corrupt nation. Even as he describes his sympathy for the independence movement and his punishment by the military authorities, there is always a sense of self-effacement, of impotence. Is this an ostentatious humility, or perhaps the expression of paralyzing guilt? It might be either, but it may also simply be the apprehension of reality. In transit from his solitary dungeon to a camp for court-martialed soldiers accused of both political and petty crimes, Guyotat considers absconding into the maquis while the officer transporting him is peeing by the roadside (that is, further defiling an occupied land). He does not: “Of what use would I be to the other side?” A fair question. What goes unmentioned is the fact that, by this point, the ceasefire of March 1962 is in effect and the war is over. The French army is still an occupying force, but the rebels have won and the transfer of power to the FLN is imminent. The movement of history, as much as his own lack of anything to contribute to “the other side,” has rendered him useless.
Having missed the chance at revolutionary action, he continues writing, reshaping language to the point of unintelligibility in the service of describing the world as it was and is: filthy and sutured by violence. In his memoirs, he reaches backward and forward: from the Holocaust, images of which marked his childhood memories, through Algeria, to the present, where the France of Charles de Gaulle’s Les Trentes Glorieuses vanishes when attention turns to the introduction of the banlieue and the emergence of a new, permanent underclass of hyperexploited immigrant workers. He didn’t withdraw entirely from political activity, though: in the early 1970s, Guyotat threw himself into the public defense of Mohamed Laïd Moussa, a young teacher he’d met while visiting Algeria in the late ’60s. While subsequently studying in Marseille, Moussa killed a neighbor in self-defense during a dispute and was subject to a racist press campaign. (On being released from prison, Moussa was shot by an anonymous vigilante outside a celebration held by his friends and supporters.)
The moralism never fades, never disappears from view. Not despite the obscenity of Guyotat’s novels, but because of it. The accumulation of body parts (severed, penetrated, penetrating, excreting fluids, covered in excreta) accounts for what the world is like in order to preserve a record of atrocity. Sex and sexual violence are not excessive, but mundane and omnipresent, not the unexpected irruption of a repressed extremity, but regular, organized, and choreographed. (Likewise, Guyotat’s most extreme departures from normative syntax, orthography, etc., follow a rule-based order.) Lazali, the psychoanalyst whose vacation was ruined by his novels, writes that in Guyotat’s work, “the erotic is a privation, and not a surplus of enjoyment (plus de jouir), as in Sade or Bataille.” Guyotat is the most anti-sex pornographer there is. “Writing is the only living plane in which one can love without committing rape,” as he once explained his work’s motivation. Having failed at becoming a revolutionary but still looking for love, what remained was to write the record of a violent and filthy world in need of redemption.
[1] The translations quoted here are based on Graham Fox’s, modified in a few key respects: (i) the finite verbs of the original have been restored (each phrase between semicolons contains at least one finite verb and one or more participial absolute clauses); (ii) the articles and possessive pronouns have been restored where appropriate in English; (iii) various instances of faux-amis translated literally have been corrected. Fox’s English translation, grammatically incomplete and lacking articles, has a genuine efficacy, but it is not that of Guyotat’s writing.
[2] Guyotat is precise with his terminology: between 1958 and 1961, with increasingly few colonies to occupy, the various divisions of the historic Troupes Coloniales were rebranded as divisions of RIMA. In other words, we find ourselves very specifically within the brutal final years of the Algerian War.
[3] While a section of Prostitution has been translated into English by Bruce Benderson, I do not know of any attempts to translate Le Livre.