Idiotie

by Pierre Guyotat

« Cet Idiotie traite de mon entrée, jadis, dans l’âge adulte, entre ma dix-neuvième et ma vingt-deuxième année, de 1959 à 1962. Ma recherche du corps féminin, mon rapport conflictuel à ce qu’on nomme le “réel”, ma tension de tous les instants vers l’Art et vers plus grand que l’humain, ma pulsion de rébellion permanente : contre le père pourtant tellement aimé, contre l’autorité militaire, en tant que conscrit puis soldat dans la guerre d’Algérie, arrêté, inculpé, interrogé, incarcéré puis muté en section disciplinaire.
Mes rébellions d’alors et leurs conséquences : fugue, faim, vol, remords, errances, coups et prisons militaires, manifestations corporelles de cette sorte de refus du réel imposé : on en trouvera ici des scènes marquantes.

Drames intimes, politiques, amitiés, camaraderies, cocasseries, tout y est vécu dans l’élan physique de la jeunesse. Dans le collectif. »

Genres: France, Nonfiction, Memoir

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 29, 2018

About the author

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 (later released in English as Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers). 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 (Michel Foucault's text was received late and therefore didn't appear as a preface). This book was banned from being publicized or sold to under-18s. A petition of international support was signed (notably 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 (who won the Nobel Prize in 1985) resigned from the jury of the Prix Médicis after the prize wasn't awarded to Eden, Eden, Eden.

Reviews

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will have to save my stars for a latter date. This is a book that tested my abilities to stay focused to the extremes. I found it difficult to finish this one considering the fact that this is a slim volume to say the least. The bold premise of this work does not belie the fact that narrative prose can dish out a lot in a much lesser span of space and time- indeed, it is the wonderful possibilities that prose has to offer when it is pushed as much to the extremes as is by the writer of this work.

The style of prose is tough and engraved- and in a style that has more to do with a fragmentary and descriptive line of thought than pure storytelling. It is a book that blurs the thin line between literary perversion and eroticism- and has shades of Bataille and Genet in it. In its use of language and imagery it tests the limits of narrative fiction.

As a coming-of-age narrative it excels at the forefront in presenting the memoirs of one man's emerging sexuality and aptitude for rebellion, and it narrates with unflinching honesty about the atrocities he encountered first hand as a conscript in the Algerian war. The most remarkable facet in all of these and more is in his use of language as he describes human sexuality and brutality in equal terms in all its visceral and granular detail.

The hallmark in this short memoir are the descriptions especially of sex and desire. In wielding his use of language like a scalpel he instills a new motion to all the acts of sex and transgressions described in this book. In a way he turns the act of sex from the throes of some banal orgasm and penetration into a sort of poetical allure that is set in motion by the predestined machinations of some peculiarly enchanted realm. Indeed, the aura of sex set in a newer and transgressive mode of art form!

[Bernard Convert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce qui m'étonne c'est que, en ces temps de bien-pensance et de politiquement correct, ce livre ait obtenu tant de prix. Il est tout aussi dérangeant que ceux qui lui avaient valu la censure dans les années 70. Comme chez Sade ou Artaud ou Bataille on est parfois à la limite du lisible.

[Jean-Pascal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Une lecture âpre, difficile et belle qui m'a en définitive peu touché. Un bon quart du livre avant la fin est resté bien énigmatique.

[Jeanne Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Je m'attendais à trouver ce livre rebutant, mais en réalité j'ai été portée par le récit, autobiographique, écrit dans un style qui évoque la brutalité : il "manque" des mots dans les phrases, elles sont rapides et souvent rompues, filant à l'essentiel sans s'embarrasser de fluidité, de connecteurs.
Mais on comprend. On a le sentiment d'être immergé dans la subjectivité de l'auteur, on partage sa colère, son désespoir, sa soif de sexe, sa peur de se lancer.
Ca vaut le coup. Ca m'émerveille moins que Céline ou Claude Simon, mais c'est quand même un sacré morceau.
J'ai envie d'en lire d'autres.

[Gilles Russeil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recit autobiographique de l'entrée en âge adulte de l'auteur au début des années 1960. Complexe toujours, obscur parfois, très - trop - écrit. On s'accroche, on est parfois récompensé, parfois épuisé et dérouté.

[Chiara Moioli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pierre, feral savant, I am mauled meat in your clenched jaws.

[OT · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dur dur la lecture. Entrecoupé, haletant, décousu: sautant d’une époque à l’autre et d’un décor à un autre. Difficile à lire. Fatiguant. Sensuel, oui, parfois. Cru, oui, souvent.
Abandonné à la page 50!

[JediCaligula89 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir starts really good and then in the last 70 pages it just becomes an absolute mess. The prose is fantastic but some of the grotesque imagery is a bit much to me