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Idiotie
« 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. »
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. »
- GenresFranceMemoirNonfiction
256 pages, Paperback
First published August 29, 2018
About the author
Pierre Guyotat
39 books118 followersBorn 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 22, 2026
First here: https://ocreviewofbooks.org/2026/04/1...
In an interview that appeared in The White Review shortly after his death in 2020, Pierre Guyotat said that he found in Faulkner “a kind of idiocy” that is “wonderful,” Faulkner’s world one “that suits me perfectly.” The titular “idiocy” of Guyotat’s memoir of runaway youth and military servitude is a nod to Shakespeare and Faulkner, to Macbeth’s line that life is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.” Guyotat’s narrator is far more sophisticated than the disabled Benjy of The Sound and the Fury, but in both books simplicity is a mask worn for estranging effect.
After a Rilkean sojourn in the seams, les plis sinueux of Paris, Guyotat’s narrator, a sexual and political innocent, from a family of selfless medics and Resistance martyrs, is called up for national service and deployed to an abyss of rape, terrorism, torture, and putsch. There he witnesses abrupt exposures of desire and suffering (in Algeria as in Paris, he’s a voyeuristic lurker), hears distant gunfire and a pidgin of “Kabyle mixed with Army French,” and breathes the ambiguous odors “commonplace in this tragic territory: rubbish heaps in heat waves, presumed mass graves, unknown carcasses from threefold civil war.”
Guyotat and those around him are mutes. Single words and short phrases occur at wide intervals; speech is severely summarized, minimally reported; and the narrator speaks but once, to read aloud from Faulkner’s The Mansion (Maurice Coindreau’s translation, Le Domaine, appeared in 1962). One of the beauties of silence is that every act stands out, closely observed, slowly followed in a pure filmic hush, and so becomes eloquent, ominous, terrifying – at times all at once. Guyotat even declined to give dialogue to the lengthy interrogation that preceded his imprisonment – solitary confinement in a basement brig, a basin of effluent – for aiding a deserter and recording the boasts of rape and trophy-taking (ears, of course) committed by the Commandos de Chasse. The recording of atrocities, not their commission, is ever the act said to “constitute the crime of corrupting the morale of the army.”
Not that that army had any morale left to corrupt by 1962 (he notes Faulkner’s death that year). The postbellum “exodus” was a Faulknerian panorama of demoralization and displacement, a defeated homeward tramp: conscripts herded by officers stained by torture and treason; the pied-noirs, foolish settlers who, having made the indigènes refugees in their own land, embark for France as refugees, their “repatriation” really an exile; the Harkis, auxiliaries who feared the threat of massacre behind and faced nothing but banlieues ahead. When his old unit forwarded the narrator his belongings, an officer opened the package and demanded he explain each item, including the Gallimard Le Domaine:
France and the Confederate states have been in dialogue for a long time. Julien Green, whose agonous sexuality resembles Guyotat’s, was the first non-national elected to the Académie française; he owed his birth in Paris to an incident of 1893, when his father, a Virginian, was offered a choice of the Paris or the Berlin office of his employer (a producer of cottonseed oil), and Green’s mother, a Georgian, insisted on Paris – because of La Débâcle of 1870, she cried, “they will understand us!”
De Gaulle’s handling of Algeria echoes Lincoln’s handling of the southern states, a century earlier. Both presidents spoke emotionally, tactically and sincerely, from an excess of imaginative, writerly empathy, if not of identification (when you hear Je vous ai compris, watch your back). Their practice mixed pliable temporising and firm constitutional assertion. Both had to rely on a fractious army (though General McClellan’s minions, while dreaming of coups, never tried to assassinate Lincoln), and both cherished certain guardrails: France must jettison Algeria, if the French presence meant fruitless expenditure and the racist backwardness and the shabby stain on its grandeur that came with the policing of a colonized people (ratissage, “raking,” the paratroops called it, as the Israelis say “mowing the grass,” כיסוח דשא) – as Lincoln saw that the future of the United States – its coherent expansion, international example, and spiritual health – must proceed without slavery and the illiberal forces that supported slavery, and would have spread slavery, and had already irreparably warped the nation’s fragile civility.
The words of de Gaulle, quoted by Horne, though they might have been Lincoln’s in August 1862, mulling his draft of the Proclamation, amidst the objections of his cabinet.
I’ve wandered from Guyotat’s qualities and affinities. Beyond Faulkner, Idiocy evokes the classics of military injustice: De Vigny’s The Servitude and Grandeur of Arms, Three Soldiers, The Enormous Room, From Here to Eternity, Paths of Glory, The Battle of Algiers, Breaker Morant, A Soldier's Story, Farewell to the King, The Thin Red Line, Beau Travail; but I think its true mood-mates are Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems of the Russian Civil War and her Moscow diaries, The Demesne of the Swans and Earthly Signs: an unrestrainable witness, politically outraged and personally esoteric, an orphic scream from the ranks in step.
In an interview that appeared in The White Review shortly after his death in 2020, Pierre Guyotat said that he found in Faulkner “a kind of idiocy” that is “wonderful,” Faulkner’s world one “that suits me perfectly.” The titular “idiocy” of Guyotat’s memoir of runaway youth and military servitude is a nod to Shakespeare and Faulkner, to Macbeth’s line that life is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.” Guyotat’s narrator is far more sophisticated than the disabled Benjy of The Sound and the Fury, but in both books simplicity is a mask worn for estranging effect.
After a Rilkean sojourn in the seams, les plis sinueux of Paris, Guyotat’s narrator, a sexual and political innocent, from a family of selfless medics and Resistance martyrs, is called up for national service and deployed to an abyss of rape, terrorism, torture, and putsch. There he witnesses abrupt exposures of desire and suffering (in Algeria as in Paris, he’s a voyeuristic lurker), hears distant gunfire and a pidgin of “Kabyle mixed with Army French,” and breathes the ambiguous odors “commonplace in this tragic territory: rubbish heaps in heat waves, presumed mass graves, unknown carcasses from threefold civil war.”
Guyotat and those around him are mutes. Single words and short phrases occur at wide intervals; speech is severely summarized, minimally reported; and the narrator speaks but once, to read aloud from Faulkner’s The Mansion (Maurice Coindreau’s translation, Le Domaine, appeared in 1962). One of the beauties of silence is that every act stands out, closely observed, slowly followed in a pure filmic hush, and so becomes eloquent, ominous, terrifying – at times all at once. Guyotat even declined to give dialogue to the lengthy interrogation that preceded his imprisonment – solitary confinement in a basement brig, a basin of effluent – for aiding a deserter and recording the boasts of rape and trophy-taking (ears, of course) committed by the Commandos de Chasse. The recording of atrocities, not their commission, is ever the act said to “constitute the crime of corrupting the morale of the army.”
Not that that army had any morale left to corrupt by 1962 (he notes Faulkner’s death that year). The postbellum “exodus” was a Faulknerian panorama of demoralization and displacement, a defeated homeward tramp: conscripts herded by officers stained by torture and treason; the pied-noirs, foolish settlers who, having made the indigènes refugees in their own land, embark for France as refugees, their “repatriation” really an exile; the Harkis, auxiliaries who feared the threat of massacre behind and faced nothing but banlieues ahead. When his old unit forwarded the narrator his belongings, an officer opened the package and demanded he explain each item, including the Gallimard Le Domaine:
What’s this Faulkner about? From what I know of the history of French and European colonization, the violent conquest, the plundered and the profiteers, the small and large estates, the urban and rural servitude, the bonds between the subjugated and their masters, and from what I know of Faulkner, having read The Unvanquished and a little of Absalom, Absalom! I prepare myself to speak of the “South.” But at the sound of the sublieutenant's pied-noir accent, I refrain from replying, for fear that the evocation of a people vanquished for its inextinguishable sin might lead him to believe I am thinking of his own people, and cause him to denounce me as an agitator again.
France and the Confederate states have been in dialogue for a long time. Julien Green, whose agonous sexuality resembles Guyotat’s, was the first non-national elected to the Académie française; he owed his birth in Paris to an incident of 1893, when his father, a Virginian, was offered a choice of the Paris or the Berlin office of his employer (a producer of cottonseed oil), and Green’s mother, a Georgian, insisted on Paris – because of La Débâcle of 1870, she cried, “they will understand us!”
De Gaulle’s handling of Algeria echoes Lincoln’s handling of the southern states, a century earlier. Both presidents spoke emotionally, tactically and sincerely, from an excess of imaginative, writerly empathy, if not of identification (when you hear Je vous ai compris, watch your back). Their practice mixed pliable temporising and firm constitutional assertion. Both had to rely on a fractious army (though General McClellan’s minions, while dreaming of coups, never tried to assassinate Lincoln), and both cherished certain guardrails: France must jettison Algeria, if the French presence meant fruitless expenditure and the racist backwardness and the shabby stain on its grandeur that came with the policing of a colonized people (ratissage, “raking,” the paratroops called it, as the Israelis say “mowing the grass,” כיסוח דשא) – as Lincoln saw that the future of the United States – its coherent expansion, international example, and spiritual health – must proceed without slavery and the illiberal forces that supported slavery, and would have spread slavery, and had already irreparably warped the nation’s fragile civility.
Were I to announce my intentions point-blank, there was no doubt that a sea of ignorant fear, of shocked surprise, of concerted malevolence through which I was navigating could cause such a tidal wave of alarms and passions in every walk of life that the ship would capsize. I must, therefore, manoeuevre without ever changing course until such time as, unmistakably, common sense broke through the mists.
The words of de Gaulle, quoted by Horne, though they might have been Lincoln’s in August 1862, mulling his draft of the Proclamation, amidst the objections of his cabinet.
I’ve wandered from Guyotat’s qualities and affinities. Beyond Faulkner, Idiocy evokes the classics of military injustice: De Vigny’s The Servitude and Grandeur of Arms, Three Soldiers, The Enormous Room, From Here to Eternity, Paths of Glory, The Battle of Algiers, Breaker Morant, A Soldier's Story, Farewell to the King, The Thin Red Line, Beau Travail; but I think its true mood-mates are Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems of the Russian Civil War and her Moscow diaries, The Demesne of the Swans and Earthly Signs: an unrestrainable witness, politically outraged and personally esoteric, an orphic scream from the ranks in step.
February 18, 2026
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!
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!
January 3, 2019
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.
December 8, 2018
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.
February 14, 2021
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.
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.
September 23, 2025
Pierre, feral savant, I am mauled meat in your clenched jaws.
February 25, 2026
A work of Master! The master of the prose
April 12, 2026
best book on a sentence by sentence level in a really long time
April 26, 2020
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.
March 11, 2026
My first experience with Guyotat's prose (and hopefully not the last)- I really enjoyed his style of writing and the all-encompassing way he described people/places/events
I knew next to nothing about the French occupation of Algeria before reading this book- Guyotat's experience as a conscript in the French army was so horrifying it led me to (finally) watch The Battle of Algiers (1966) to get more of an idea of what the occupation was like (just as- if not more-horrifying than Guyotat's descriptions)
Overall enjoyable read, his final essay, Exodus, dragged imo (we get it, you're horny!!) but still a very powerful end to a compelling collection of stories
I knew next to nothing about the French occupation of Algeria before reading this book- Guyotat's experience as a conscript in the French army was so horrifying it led me to (finally) watch The Battle of Algiers (1966) to get more of an idea of what the occupation was like (just as- if not more-horrifying than Guyotat's descriptions)
Overall enjoyable read, his final essay, Exodus, dragged imo (we get it, you're horny!!) but still a very powerful end to a compelling collection of stories
March 1, 2026
„unten spielt Phs. Gitarre vor dem Essen eine andalusische Melodie, ein verträumtes Präludium, an dessen Ende er, statt einen Tanz anzustimmen, das Präludium nochmals beginnt: kein Thema, nur Arpeggien; uns bleibt das Warten auf die Befreiung, auf die Rückkehr ins Leben, ins wahre Leben, von Herrschaft befreit.“
July 22, 2020
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!
Abandonné à la page 50!
January 24, 2026
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
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews