Catherine Brun
PIERRE GUYOTAT
Essai biographique
509pp. Paris: Léo Sheer. 30 euros.
2 915280 76 2
Pierre Guyotat
CARNETS DE BORD
Volume one – 1962–1969
640pp. Paris: Lignes et Manifestes. 27.50 euros.
2 84938 034 2
MUSIQUES
144pp. Paris: France Culture / Léo Sheer. 85 euros.
2 914172 73 7
The French novelist Pierre Guyotat, who was born in 1940, raises disturbing questions about violence, lasciviousness, intellectual liberty and the future of human society. Especially since the publication of Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats (1967) and Éden, Éden, Éden (1970), what leaps to the eye in his novels astonishes, stuns, shocks and often disgusts: emotionless sexual intercourse, methodical military torture, cruel relationships based on slavery or prostitution, not to mention the strange spellings, displaced accents, eccentric punctuation, “Guyotatized” foreign terms, barbarisms, onomatopoeic coinings and other bizarre neologisms that characterize subsequent novels such as Prostitution (1975; revised edition, 1987), Le Livre (1984) and Progénitures (2000). This novelist, who was nicknamed “Doudou” in childhood because of his gentleness, has provoked scandals with nearly every book (Éden, Éden, Éden was banned between 1970 and 1981 in a rare case of censorship in post-war France; the novel is available in an English translation from Creation Books). Guyotat admits that he “painfully produces an oeuvre that is inhuman, against nature, both in mind and language”. “My ‘savage’ working material banishes me ever more irremediably”, he adds, “from society . . . even from my own being.”
The preceding remark, cited by Catherine Brun in Pierre Guyotat: Essai biographique, signals just one of several arresting paradoxes about this “artist” (as he prefers to be called): few authors have gone to such trouble to explain themselves. Besides interviews scattered in periodicals, Guyotat has published two collections of mainly autobiographical essays, Littérature interdite (1972) and Vivre (1984; revised edition, 2003) and Explications (2000), a remarkable book-length interview with Marianne Alphant. These three books help one to tackle Guyotat’s difficult work for the first time. And now, alongside Brun’s biography, still other invaluable propaedeutics have appeared.
Guyotat’s first two novels, Sur un Cheval (1961) and Ashby (1964), have recently been reissued as a single volume by the Éditions du Seuil. Stylistically transparent in ways that his subsequent books are not, they are love stories, with an arresting emphasis on amorous yearning and sexual abstinence. Mainly set in England and Scotland, where Guyotat spent the summer of 1955, both novels reveal the author’s early passion for Thomas Hardy and the Brontë sisters. Partly drawing on his personal life, Guyotat is working through his own infatuations, notably with a young woman whom he met in Paris in 1960 and who is fictionalized as “Nine” in Sur un Cheval. Other passages reflect his revolt against his family and especially his father, a medical doctor and respected regional politician. The Shakespearean pen name under which Sur un Cheval was first published could not be more trenchant: Donalbain, Duncan’s son in Macbeth, who refuses to take up arms to avenge his murdered father and rejects the throne. In the second novel, Donalbain becomes a character.
With hindsight, one sees that the first two novels announce the bold writing to come. They display Guyotat’s narrowing focus on, not the morality, but rather the phenomenology of sexual desire; and they show his growing concern with consciousness, multiple viewpoints, the non-linear representation of time, and cruelty (especially in Ashby). Sur un Cheval, the more engaging of the two books, is collage-like and polyphonic, revealing (as Brun suggests) Guyotat’s close readings of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Roger Nimier’s Le Hussard bleu.
The thick first volume of Guyotat’s Carnets de bord (“Logbooks”), covering the years 1962–9, offers precious insights into the author’s literary and philosophical quests. It records his wide reading during those formative years. Besides Faulkner’s novels, Guyotat devoured the Old Testament, the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as The Thousand and One Nights. Above all, the volume unveils how the initial versions of his manuscripts are based on precise daily observation. As an aficionado of Balzac (another cherished mentor), Guyotat would stroll Parisian streets and jot down brief descriptions of the alluring young women and (especially) men he came across. He describes their bodily attitudes, gestures, language, clothing, and the bulges in men’s tight jeans. “Use this in Eden!”, he orders himself. Elsewhere, he points out (with reference to Tombeau . . ., also available in English from Creation Books) that he selects details mirroring the gruesome, banal realities of the First World War, the Second World War or the Algerian War because they represent “une atteinte à l’image de Dieu dans l’homme”. To chronicle human life strictly at the “animal” level – a narrative restriction implying the total absence of a God and all other forms of transcendence – is also a decision eventually made by this writer who attended Catholic boarding schools, albeit rebelliously, and acquired an intricate knowledge of the Bible. At one point, he even wanted to become a priest.
Perspectives on Guyotat’s realism, materialism, aesthetics and never-relinquished search for divine sparks of some sort are opened up in Musiques, his commentaries on classical and contemporary music, originally broadcast on the radio station France Culture. (The book includes twelve broadcast CDs.) Besides evincing well-informed enthusiasm for composers ranging from Orlande de Lassus and Monteverdi to Wagner, Schumann, Debussy, Bartók and Berg, his digressions about his own life and art are candid. In the past, Guyotat has emphasized his debt to music, but never has it been so clear that a “musicalisation de la langue”, as he phrases it, lies at the heart of his project. To his mind, all that is base, low, sordid – in a word, “human” – can be musically exalted. Although Guyotat does not put it this way, think of the technical problems facing a painter (or composer) who is working on a crucifixion scene: the blood, mud, thorns, spears and tears must all be expressed with rigour and – not least – a terrifying beauty.
Music came to Guyotat through his artistically and musically inclined mother, as we learn in the biography. Brun also delineates the lives of other prominent relatives. One direct ancestor was Ethiopian; another was the first cousin of the famous Curé d’Ars (Saint Jean-Marie Vianney); still another co-directed the firm which sent Arthur Rimbaud to Harar to run a factory. During the Second World War, several relatives worked in the French Underground. Two aunts survived torture by the Gestapo, then internment in concentration camps; an uncle, in the Resistance, was exterminated in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen.
A small boy at the time, Guyotat was indelibly marked by the Occupation and its aftermath. The first publicly broadcast voices that he remembers hearing were those of Hitler, Mussolini and Pétain. Similarly, the first images of naked bodies that he saw were post-war photos of corpses piled up in Nazi extermination camps. Other early traumas include the sensitive boy’s stuttering. Finally, when Guyotat was seven, four adolescents gang-raped him in an empty classroom. These and other “fertiles traumatismes fondateurs”, as the biographer phrases it, certainly cast light on Guyotat’s themes and literary development.
Moving beyond biography, Brun sharply analyses Guyotat’s style, as it has evolved from Tombeau . . . to Progénitures and, presumably, the long-announced Histoires de Samora Machel. (Another book, Coma, relating to the author’s nervous breakdown in 1980–81, has recently been announced as well.) Interestingly, a number of key words used by Guyotat are tracked to their regional or patois origins. (He grew up in the town of Bourg-Argental, between Lyons and Le Puy-en-Velay.) Other terms come from Arabic and Kabyle. Guyotat became acquainted with both languages during his military service (1961–2) in the Algerian War and later during his frequent trips to North Africa. Finally, the novelist relished the ancient Greek and especially the Latin that he learned at school. Alongside other transpositions, he applies the Latin ablative absolute to French in order, as he explains, “to efface anthropomorphism and make different processes take place simultaneously”.
In Guyotat’s mature novels, “processes” (action) and the epic viewpoint are primordial. Instead of traditional plots, his fictions exhibit long sequences of brief, distinct acts that force the reader to contemplate humanity in its most rudimentary and repugnant postures. So scrupulously factual are his depictions that they formulate a provocative philosophical position engaging materialism, social determinism and individual freedom in a totalitarian context of slavery and prostitution. In the Carnets de bord, he often reminds himself to revise manuscripts so that action per se will be brought to the forefront. “Totally suppress adverbs in order to relieve the action of temporal and psychological burdens” is a typical command.
Writing of German philosophy, he observes that it resembles an “écume nostalgique d’un fond de mer tumultueux (action)”. Thanks to Brun and the Logbooks, it becomes easier to comprehend how Guyotat “sings” that tumultuous bottom of the sea. And like the sea, Guyotat’s epic novels somehow seem timeless; or more precisely, simultaneously set in the past, present and future.
Brun also clarifies punctuational oddities such as Guyotat’s apostrophes, which mark apocopes and syncopes of mute “e”s. For every word, he attends to this central element in French prosody. Clearly, we must learn to read him as a poet (and composer). After all, Progénitures is an epic novel in verse, a fact that few critics appear to have noticed. Guyotat calls each line a verset (in the biblical sense), and each is metrically (syllabically) counted out. The author insists that Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats is not a novel, but rather “seven songs”. Close inspection reveals that Guyotat, like a librettist, arranges vowels, consonants and diphthongs (or their respective conspicuous absences) into certain patterns. These arrangements obey a sort of private solfège, the ear, and the body in general, is all-important to his creativity. In Musiques, he recalls how, before going to sleep in his Catholic school dormitory, he would invent “bucco-mental” symphonies by using his teeth, tongue, and lips. It is not far-fetched to claim that the extravagant, at once guttural and sibilant, music of Progénitures derives from such precocious experiments.
Guyotat is a radical in his no-holds-barred exploration of subject matter avoided by most poets and writers, but he is also a conservative who values declamation, epic amplification and classical prosody. He pays homage to Antonin Artaud, but also to Alfred de Vigny and André Chénier. If you suspect that he might like, say, underground rock music, you learn that he much prefers Stravinsky – as well as Indian and Afghan classical music. He marvels at both contemporary architecture and fossils. Catherine Brun perceptively evokes “two faces of the same project”: the “anticipation of a possible future of the [French] language and the memory of its past”. Is his writing also a “music”? Or, as Guyotat sometimes claims, a “total art”? Call the results what we may, they offer one of the most extreme reading experiences in world literature.
