Violence and the Sacred

Idiocy by Pierre Guyotat, translated from the French by Peter Behrman de Sinéty. NYRB Classics, 208 pages. 2025.

In 2018, Pierre Guyotat won the Prix Médicis for his memoir Idiocy, a chronicle of his formative years as a young delinquent in Paris and a conscript in Algeria, detailing the experiences that would become the basis his notorious work of transgressive fiction Eden, Eden, Eden. Eden had been passed over by the prize committee nearly a half a century earlier, prompting one member, the future Nobelist Claude Simon, to resign in protest. Not that Guyotat cared. The prolific seventy-eight-year-old provocateur had spent his career as a scourge of the French literary and political establishments.

He published his first novel, 1961’s Sur un cheval, while he was serving as a conscript in Algeria. For the notes he took as he worked on his second, which recorded rumors about the commission of atrocities by French soldiers, and for distributing prohibited political material, the General Staff charged him with incitement to protest, corruption of army morale, and being an accessory to desertion. It was the year of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, with the controversial preface by Sartre justifying violence in the anti-colonial struggle; the military brass suspected that the sympathies of the intellectuals were with the revolutionaries rather than the colonizers. (In Guyotat’s case, they were correct.) Following a nine-day interrogation, he spent three months in solitary confinement in an underground prison in the desert.

Five years after Algeria won its independence in 1962, his third book, Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, scandalized the public with its depictions of brutal sex and extreme violence set in a country at war clearly based on the former colony. Tomb made its author infamous in the months leading up to the events of May 1968, during which he was arrested twice. After de Gaulle condemned the French Communist Party as subversive, the contrarian Guyotat joined, and then moved even further left as Tel Quel, the avant-garde magazine with which he was affiliated, entered its Maoist phase.

As for Eden, Eden, Eden, it was banned as pornography by the Ministry of the Interior almost immediately after its publication in September 1970. It was forbidden to display, publicize, or sell to minors. Despite an international campaign that included signatories Beuys, Barthes, Beauvoir, Derrida, Duras, Foucault, Pasolini, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, and Simon, the ban would not be lifted until 1981, when the socialist François Mitterrand—who had defended Guyotat against the Ministry on free speech grounds in front of the National Assembly—became president.

Outside of France, Guyotat became a cult writer’s cult writer. His American admirers included Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana, Dennis Cooper, and Blake Butler. Edmund White called him “the last great avant-garde visionary of our century.” Last October, when I was in Paris to participate on a panel on the future of the avant-garde, I saw a first edition on the shelf of a used bookstore in Jourdain. “You know what this is, right?” the bookseller felt obliged to ask before selling it to me.

“Sexuality is a fissure . . . which marks the limit within us and designates us as a limit,” Foucault observed in his 1963 essay on the literature of transgression. “Perhaps we could say that it has become the only division possible in a world now emptied of objects, beings, and spaces to desecrate.” Transgressive fiction treats eroticism as a branch of theology and digs below right and wrong to depict the depraved, abject, perverse, profane, and the genuinely taboo: that which lies on the other side of what we sentimentally call “civilization.” There is something quintessentially French about the genre, the product of a culture steeped in Catholic sensualism and Cartesian rationalism whose experience of modernity was marked by five revolutions, two empires, trench warfare, and Nazi occupation. France, after all, gave us the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Nights of Sodom, Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye, Antonin Artaud’s To Have Done With the Judgment of God, and Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, among other affronts to literary propriety.

But when it comes to obscenity, Eden, Eden, Eden is in a category of its own. Set largely in a men and women’s brothel in the Sahara patronized by marauding French soldiers, nomads and shepherds, and the grandees of a nearby village, the novel is a litany of horrors, starting with the rapes nauseatingly described in the opening pages. Wazzag, the young male prostitute at the center of the book, and his colleague Khammsieh endure sex acts in quantities that would kill a real human being. And that is all before the scene switches to the surrounding desert, the focus changes to an unnamed mother and her infant, and the non-human animals show up for the orgy. Eden is a filthy book in every sense of the word: the brothel is swarming with insects and vermin, and smells of sperm, piss, puss, vomit, menstrual blood, and buttocks caked with shit and sand. The only mercy Guyotat shows his readers is that he never describes the thoughts and feelings of his characters as they are pushed beyond the limits of subjectivity.

Unlike, say, Sade, Guyotat is not gleeful in his depictions of sexual atrocity. It is difficult to imagine anyone being aroused by Eden—that is, reading it for pornographic purposes—though we should never underestimate human ingenuity in the domain of eroticism. But that Eden is an artistic achievement is indisputable. Composed of a single 270-page long sentence whose clauses spurt, jet, drip, and ooze like the corporeal discharges it so obsessively catalogues, Eden aestheticizes horror without beautifying it, or retreating from the implications of horror into the apolitical formalism of l’art pour l’art. In my life as a reader and my work as a critic, I have always been interested in novels that transgress the boundaries of what is considered possible in form and permissible in content. Just as when I learn there is a writer who uses new techniques to challenge existing notions of what fiction is and what language can do, I want to experience it; when I hear there is a novel that explores subject matter that is considered too taboo, obscene, immoral, offensive, extreme, or deranged to print, I feel compelled to look it in the face. Still, I would not find it unreasonable if a different reader were to ask: Why should I subject myself to a book like this?

Throughout the 1970s, Guyotat maintained a furious pace. He published Littérature interdite, his reflections on the fallout of the Eden affair, and the novel Prostitution, while working simultaneously on three projects: Géhenne, Histoires de Samorâ Machel, and Encore plusque la lutte des classes. The first two remain unpublished; the latter, which treats the subject of enslavement and the “Great Prostitutional Pandemy of History,” appeared in fragmentary form, as Le Livre, in 1984. Suffering from burnout and painkiller addiction, Guyotat briefly fell into a vegetative state, an episode he revisited decades later in the 2006 memoir Coma, the first of an informal quartet of autobiographical writings that, along with Idiocy, included Formation, a story about growing up in the provinces to a family active in the Resistance, and In the Deep, which concerned his discovery, during a trip to England as a teenager, of both his bisexuality and the literary style he characterized as branlée-avec-texte (literally “jacking-off-with-text,” or as the book’s translator Noura Wedell ingeniously renders it, “the beat-sheet”). Guyotat classified his writings of the twenty-first century, with their renewed interest in individual psychology and relatively straightforward prose, as “normative,” distinguishing them from his more materialist, syntactically aberrant “language” writings of the 1960s and 1970s.

Guyotat died in February 2020, two weeks after France confirmed its first cases of the Covid-19 pandemic. Fittingly for a last book, Idiocy emulsifies the styles of his “language” and his “normative” periods. To give the flavor of Guyotat’s “language” style, here, in Peter Behrman de Sinéty’s translation, is the second sentence of the book:

On our tent floor that covers the cobblestones between two flows of dried piss—fling yourself into this filth, approach it, touch it, handle it; to live at last as a man comes only through this contact, this partaking of misery; the saints sanctified themselves by it, and therefore so should I, but how? confront my taste for clarity and order with it—we slip into our sleeping bags.

Guyotat stuffs four reflexive imperatives, an infinitive phrase, a declarative proposition, a deduction, and a reflexive question between the two em-dashes. Mortared together by semi-colons between the short present-tense description of action, the heterogeneous syntactic elements of the parenthetical content are intended to make for a reading experience as uncomfortable as the cobblestones and the two flows of dried piss must have made for sleeping.

The first half of Guyotat’s memoir moves briskly in twelve short chapters through the years 1958–62, Guyotat’s last as a minor and France’s last as a colonial power. It is a time of personal chaos set against the backdrop of political bedlam. Events such as the fall of the Fourth Republic, de Gaulle’s return to power, the failed general’s putsch against de Gaulle, the massacre against Algerian protesters in Paris, the peace talks in Évian between the French government and the National Liberation Front, and Algerian independence act as oblique chronological markers for Guyotat’s coming of age story, a story that follows his increasingly extreme rebellion against his family and society.

Following the death of his beloved mother, Guyotat starts to pilfer from the family cash box and periodically runs away from their village on the outskirts of Lyon, his only possessions a small motorcycle and the notebook where he records his observations. In squalid Paris, he experiences hunger and homelessness, until he is taken in by a young working-class family and then a pair of fraternal twins, whom he spies on. (Along with the figure of the prostitute, breastfeeding mothers and incestuous siblings appear as motifs throughout his work.) Plagued by guilt and shame—but also wanting to “slaughter [his] I,” “exist without being,” and “test” himself—he refuses a deferment and an officer’s commission. He is conscripted and sent to basic training, where he has a psychotic break that earns him his first stint in prison. Then he is shipped off to Algeria.

There he undergoes the formative moment of his life, the three months of solitary confinement, from which he emerges with a Flaubertian epiphany: “I must create an oeuvre of the beast, of the idiot who speaks of ‘nothing’.” From his observations and experiences of life in the colonial military camp in the Sahara he resolves to fashion an “epic of the idiot” and his “future poetry.” Idiocy, for Guyotat, has a double meaning. On one hand, it is his name for the colonial occupation, whose genealogy he traces back to those who repressed the revolutionaries of 1848 and the communards of 1871, and to the Vichy collaborators resisted by his family. On the other hand, the idiot—such as Wazzag and Guyotat himself—is a sympathetic figure, a holy fool à la Dostoevsky’s Mishkin, who takes on the suffering endemic to colonial and post-colonial society.

The second half of the book, comprised of a single chapter titled “Exodus,” takes place in the confused and dangerous days following independence. Guyotat visits a desert brothel with his “army mate” in an unsuccessful attempt to lose his virginity before he, the remainder of the French army, and hundreds of thousands of the French colonists known as the pieds-noirs are forced to return to the mainland. In the brothel, Guyotat notices a crayon drawing on the wall, which prompts a memory of his mother turning his head to spare him from witnessing the execution of a resistance fighter by a Nazi soldier. He comments: “Each manifestation of the real is merely a precursor to or aftermath of a continuous thought of the violence of the world—the violence of life.” What draws readers to Guyotat and the other writers of the transgressive tradition is that they are candid about violence. Violence may not be the totality of life, but it is closer to the core of it than spurious humanisms would have us believe. And war—whether it takes place between societies or within them—has no heroes, only distributions of cruelty, debasement, and ruin, a fact that is routinely denied, ignored, or repressed by those most responsible for perpetuating it.

I often think of the story Hannah Arendt tells about Adolf Eichmann, one of history’s most prolific murderers, whose trial for crimes against humanity took place while Guyotat was in Algeria. While in an Israeli prison, an indignant Eichmann returned a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita to the guard who gave it to him, calling it a “very unpleasant book.” His case is not dissimilar to that of Raymond Marcellin, the minister of the Interior who ordered the Eden ban. As a parliamentarian, Marcellin enthusiastically voted for the Special Powers Act of 1956, which gave the French army carte blanche to displace, intern, summarily execute, and systematically torture suspected members of the FLN as a part of a counter-insurgency campaign that killed hundreds of thousands of Algerian civilians in violation of international law. When the detainees were women, rape, sexual assault, and sexual humiliation were common features of the interrogation process—as they are of every armed conflict of sufficient duration and, indeed, take place with less acknowledgment in the prisons, immigration centers, workplaces, churches, universities, and homes of so-called peacetime societies.

Eichmann’s response to Lolita, and Marcellin’s response to Eden is not merely hypocrisy. People who do evil things are often capable of recognizing moral depravity once they see it reconfigured in fiction. Of all socially symbolic acts, it is literature, not video, that makes us see the violence of the world. Literature is one of the few things left that retains the power of shocking us out of its overfamiliarity and reopening us to the experience of the sacred, a concept which, if you believe René Girard, is in turn intimately connected, in its very origins, to violence. Paradoxically, fiction gives us an experience that is realer than the real, in which the real, in all its horror, appears in all its fullness to those who haven’t experienced the horror directly. Even more than prudishness, guilty conscience, bad faith, or the desire to escape responsibility, that is why those who have created ugly realities have also always felt the need to censor and sanction the people who represent them.

And what of us? Idiocy arrives in English at a moment when every work of art that does not promote itself as “transgressive” comes with a trigger warning whose threshold for offending the viewer, or making them uncomfortable, has been lowered to the floor. It is a moment when the ability to verbally humiliate the weak and commit acts of social sadism against the vulnerable are considered by wide swaths of the American public to be the primary spoils of electoral victory. Our heated cultural debates about symbolic violence, including political rhetoric, take place against the backdrop of genocide; mass shootings at schools, concerts, and houses of worship; people being disappeared off the street by the state security apparatus; and assassinations that, just like pornography, are available for us to live stream.

During the past two years, I have seen video of a man burned alive in his hospital bed, a woman pinned to a wall without her legs, entrails slip out of an infant on an operating table, the X-ray of a teenager’s skull with a bullet in it, the gray skin of a woman being starved to death—all in Gaza, still undergoing the genocidal savagery of a colonial war carried out by the grandchildren of those who tried, convicted, and executed Eichmann, and financed by the W9 forms I fill out whenever I complete a piece of writing. I am not exactly proud to admit that on the day I picked up Idiocy to write this review, I learned what it looks like when a bullet shot from a bolt-action rifle at a distance of 150 yards makes contact with a man’s jugular and felt nothing, only to read, a few hours later, the description of a woman whose face had been mutilated in a massacre, and felt aghast.

“As I read the slightest phrase rendering the account of an atrocity,” Guyotat writes, “I live it from within those who live it and, in addition, from the perspective of one who watches it take place.” That is: from the perspective of the victim as well as the perpetrator and the complicit bystander, the very perspective so many of us have been forced to take by states and media apparatuses. What Guyotat is describing is not the empathic conditioning often attributed to the novel by the sentimental reader, but a redistribution of violent affect closer to justice—symbolic, alas, as all justice is.