Pierre Guyotat


Pierre Guyotat was a French writer.

Literary Career

Born in Bourg-Argental, Loire, Guyotat wrote his first novel, Sur un cheval, in 1960. He was called to Algeria in the same year. In 1962 he was found guilty of desertion and publishing forbidden material. After three months in jail he was transferred to a disciplinary centre. Back in Paris, he got involved in journalism, writing first for France Observateur, then for Nouvel Observateur. In 1964, Guyotat published his second novel Ashby.
In 1967, he published Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats. Based on Guyotat's ordeal as a soldier in the Algerian War, the book earned a cult reputation and became the subject of various controversies, mostly because of its omnipresent sexual obsessions and homoeroticism.
In 1968, Guyotat became a member of the French Communist Party, which he left in 1971.
Eden, Eden, Eden came out in 1970 with a preface by Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers. This book was banned from being publicized or sold to minors. A petition of international support was signed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Boulez, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Dac, Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, Joseph Kessel, Maurice Blanchot, Max Ernst, Italo Calvino, Jacques Monod, and Nathalie Sarraute. François Mitterrand, and Georges Pompidou tried to get the ban lifted but failed. Claude Simon resigned from the jury of the Prix Médicis after the prize wasn't awarded to Eden, Eden, Eden.
Between 1964 and 1975, Pierre Guyotat travelled extensively in the Sahara. In July 1967, he was invited to Cuba, along with other writers, where he travelled to the Sierra Maestra with Fidel Castro.
In 1973, Guyotat's play Bond en avant was performed. During the 1970s Guyotat was involved in various diverse protests: for soldiers, immigrants, and prostitutes. One of those cases was of great importance for him: he personally helped Mohamed Laïd Moussa, a 24 years old Algerian ex-teacher who was accused and then found guilty of unintentional murder in Marseilles. One week after he came out of jail, Mohamed Laïd Moussa was murdered by a masked man; the event had a profound impact on Pierre Guyotat.
In 1975 his novel Prostitution came out. From this point on, Guyotat's novels deal with a new kind of illegibility and obscenity. The fictions still explore the unthinkable possibility of worlds structured by sexual slavery and transgression of fundamental taboos. But the French language is now unrecognizable, estranged by an extreme grammatical, syntactic and lexical creativity. Ellipses of letters or words, neologisms and phonetic transcriptions of Arabic speaking utterances make it difficult to understand. In the 1987 re-edition of Prostitution, a 120 pages appendix - résumé, glossary, "grammar" and translations - is added to the actual fiction to help the disoriented reader.
In 1977, while working on Le Livre and Histoire de Samora Machel, he suffered a psychiatric illness. The depression and the deterioration of his physical and mental state culminated, in December 1981, in a coma.
Following the election of Francois Mitterrand, France's first socialist president, in 1981, the ban on Eden, Eden, Eden was lifted.
From 1984 to 1986, Guyotat gave a series of readings and performances of his work all over Europe.
In January 2000 he was involved in the reopening of the Centre Georges Pompidou at Beaubourg, contributing a reading of the first pages of Progénitures. The book was published shortly after, in 2000, and Explications. In 2005, Sur un cheval was reedited and in April 2005 it was read on Radio France under Alain Ollivier's direction. The Carnets de bord were published the same year, as well as Pierre Guyotat's first biography by Catherine Brun, Pierre Guyotat, essai biographique
Between 2005 and 2010, Pierre Guyotat wrote and published three autobiographical books: Coma, Formation and Arrière-fond. In 2011, Pierre Guyotat wrote Independence about his experience of the war, published for the centenary of the Nouvelle Revue Française. The classes he gave at the University of Paris 8, between 2001 and 2004, were published in 2011 under the title Leçons sur la langue française.
In 2014 he published Joyeux animaux de la misère. An excerpt of the book was read at the Ircam by actor and director Stanislas Nordey who brought the text to the stage in 2016. The second part of the book was published in the spring of 2016.
In 2004, Pierre Guyotat donated his manuscripts to the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

English translations