SubStance

Pierre Guyotat (b. 1940) is surely among the least discussed of the indisputably major literary talents of his generation. This is not to say that his work is entirely unknown, that his contribution to contemporary letters remains a secret of the cognoscenti. Indeed, no. For Guyotat's name regularly arises in passing, in reference to literary experimentation, to postcolonial writing or the politics of censorship. Yet despite the frequency of these references, even the cognoscenti – reviewers, critics, historians of literature and thought – rarely discuss the work in any real depth (Catherine Brun's Essai includes an exhaustive bibliography of both brief reviews and the rare substantial secondary pieces). Guyotat remains a shadowy figure, the sole persisting exemplar of the avant-garde trend in European arts and letters, arguably the only living writer whose works have a capacity to astonish their reader with the depth and shocking majesty of those of the Marquis de Sade, of Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Artaud, Bataille, or Genet.

Guyotat's reputation rests on a short shelf of publications: two early novels, Sur un Cheval (1961) and Ashby (1964), followed by five breathtakingly original contributions to the canon, Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats (1967), Éden, Éden, Éden (1970), Prostitution (1975), Le Livre (1984), and Progénitures (2000). Alongside the fictions, Guyotat also wrote and participated in three works for theater, Bond en avant (1973), Bivouac (1987), and Issê Timossé (1997), and gathered three collections of essays and interviews, Littérature interdite (1972), Vivre (1984), and Explications (2000). In 2003, Éditions Léo Scheer collaborated with France Culture radio to release Musiques, 12 CDs reproducing 25 hours of Guyotat's autobiographical and critical history of music. In the past year, coincident with Brun's critical biography, the Éditions de Seuil republished a new edition of Guyotat's first two novels, and Lignes Manifeste published the first volume in a series of Guyotat's Carnets de Bord, his notes and drafts, edited by Valérian Lallement. All told, and for a writer of near mythic renown, Guyotat's corpus, like that of James Joyce, is remarkably small. Sixteen years, for example, separate the publications of his last two novels. Nevertheless, the work stands as a kind of monument. Like most monuments, it strikes the casual spectator as impenetrable, and, again [End Page 136] like most monuments, it is a marker of both beauty and atrocity, of tenderness and terror.

The ambivalence at the heart of Guyotat's work recalls that of his most significant influences. An adolescent encounter with Rimbaud's language and life, with his provincial alienation, his specifically linguistic rebellion, and his exile, gave form to Guyotat's own words and ambitions. Later, Gilbert Lily's biography of the divine Marquis suggested an ideal relationship between literature and life, the possibility of deep mental and physical engagement, even under conditions of isolation and confinement, and the notion of an absolute submission to the demands not only of the individual work but of the oeuvre as a whole. Like Rimbaud's writings, those of Guyotat record in sensual detail a poisonously bitter beauty. Like Sade, Guyotat's vision is enormous, endless in its unfolding, but also insistent, obsessive, intricate. The energetic reach and power of Guyotat's literary and linguistic imagination distinguishes his work, despite its violence, from that of lesser writers.

Though associated with the Tel Quel group in its moment of renown and more enduringly with the avant-garde trend in literary activism and experimentation, Guyotat's other and principle progenitors are in fact classical, as Brun makes clear: Sophocles and Aeschylus, Seneca, the Roman poets, the epic tradition in general. Prostitution, in particular, draws language and incident directly from Seneca and Sophocles. More strongly stated, Guyotat does not write novels: he writes epic poems that must masquerade, however ineffectually, as novels in today's marketplace. Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats is subtitled "Sept chants"; Progénitures is set in versets, strophic records of breath.

Guyotat's writing is Homeric too in its rhythmic density and sweep; Homeric in its evidence that...