Pierre Guyotat's Moral Order

Pierre Guyotat’s fiction pursues a radical egalitarian project that negates the right’s nihilism. Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers presents a colonial war setting in a thinly veiled Algeria, called Ecbatana, unfolding as an apocalyptic, largely plotless prophecy filled with violence and sexual obscenity. Eden, Eden, Eden concentrates this delirium into a single long sentence and was banned in France for a decade. Across later novels, plays, and memoirs, he continued remaking French by tearing syntax and phonemes apart. Writing is portrayed as physically intense, including works written during masturbation and works involving self-starvation and near-death. His late fiction continues linguistic convulsions mixing gutter French, transliterated Arabic, and typographical abandon.

"Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers-first scrawled on loose scraps, over three months, while in solitary confinement during the Algerian War for "morally corrupting" his fellow French conscripts-there is the brute fact of the text itself: a monstrous catalog of violence and sexual obscenity set during a colonial war in a thinly veiled Algeria (called Ecbatana) that unspools over 400 breathless, largely plotless pages into an apocalyptic prophecy, as immersive as it is unsparing."

"Guyotat's next great novel, Eden, Eden, Eden (1970), focalized this delirium into a single 200-page sentence that was banned in France for a decade, albeit with endorsements by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Michel Leiris, and Philippe Sollers that anointed Guyotat as the foremost avant-gardist of his era."

"Across the following decades, in five more novels, three plays, and a series of memoirs, Guyotat continued to pursue his professed aim of remaking the French language by ripping it apart at the seams of syntax, then phoneme. Writing, for Guyotat, was a task of uncompromising physical intensity: There was The Book (1984), infamously written while masturbating, the manuscript plashed with his semen, and Coma (2006), where writerly monomania drew him into a semi-mystical torpor, starving himself nearly to the point of death."

"A glance at his last fiction, 2014's Joyful Animals of Misery -a convulsing morass of gutter French, transliterated Arabic, and typographical abandon-attests that even age could not temper his zeal. Indeed, a prime reason for Guyotat's relative unknown in the Anglosphere is that translation becomes a progressively moot concept when the original"

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