Coma

by Pierre Guyotat, Gary Indiana (Preface), Noura Wedell (Translator)

A poetic exploration of trauma and renewal from the last avant-garde visionary of the twentieth century. Long ago, in childhood, when Summer reverberates and feels and throbs all over, it begins to circumscribe my body along with my self, and my body gives it shape in the “joy” of living, of experiencing, of already foreseeing dismembers it, this entire body explodes, neurons rush toward what attracts them, zones of sensation break off almost in blocks that come to rest at the four corners of the landscape, at the four corners of Creation.—from Coma The novelist and playwright Pierre Guyotat has been called the last great avant-garde visionary of the twentieth century, and the near-cult status of his work—because of its extreme linguistic innovation and its provocative violence—has made him one of the most influential of French writers today. He has been hailed as the true literary heir to Lautréamont and Arthur Rimbaud, and his “inhuman” works have been mentioned in the same breath as those by Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud. Winner of the 2006 prix Décembre, Coma is the deeply moving, vivid portrayal of the artistic and spiritual crisis that wracked Guyotat in the 1980s when he reached the physical limits of his search for a new language, entered a mental clinic, and fell into a coma brought on by self-imposed starvation. A poetic, cruelly lucid account, Coma links Guyotat's illness and loss of subjectivity to a broader concern for the slow, progressive regeneration of humanity. Written in what the author himself has called a “normalized writing,” this book visits a lifetime of moments that have in common the force of amazement, brilliance, and a flash of life. Grounded in experiences from the author's childhood and his family's role in the French Resistance, Coma is a tale of initiation that provides an invaluable key to interpreting Guyotat's work, past and future.

Genres: Fiction, France, Contemporary, Literature, French Literature

232 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 2006

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

[Jim Elkins]

Dangers of Self-Regard

This book is enamored of its own unbelievable, rich, resourceful, brilliant self-regard. There can't be many authors who have looked at themselves from inside such a cocoon of self-praise. "No one before me, and in this language, has written as I write, as I dare to write, as it is my pleasure and my plenitude... It is already hard enough that this world, my world, cannot be reproduced, because of its sexual power, even in future anthologies!" (pp. 181-83) Guyotat's monumental sense of his genius makes Saul Bellow (who was embalmed, late in his life, in the certainty of his immortality) look like Woody Allen (also encased in the certitude of his genius, but embarrassed about it like the comic he needs to be). Of course it's understandable that someone praised by "Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers... Michel Foucault... Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Boulez, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Dac, Jean Genet, Joseph Kessel, Maurice Blanchot, Max Ernst, Italo Calvino, Jacques Monod, Simone de Beauvoir... Nathalie Sarraute... François Mitterrand... Georges Pompidou, [and] Claude Simon" (that's from Wikipedia) would hold himself in high regard. But it's also necessary to note that radically explicit homoerotic prose and an incarceration in Algeria were practically passports for praise in the minds of mid-twentieth century French writers.

Aside from those hyperbolic moments of self-praise, what is there? A warm and affecting love for nearly everything; and many echoes of Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Genet, and Céline. The book doesn't actually describe the author's coma until ten pages from the end, and it says remarkably little that might help us understand his descent into the coma. There's a lot of talk about his addiction to an over-the-counter painkiller, and many mentions of his dwindling weight. But his sexual encounters are described so coyly that they're actually puzzling. (Why did he have to leave Orléans, exactly? And why don't we get to hear the reason, given that Guyotat is so famous for writing explicitly?) And the book has next to no direction: there is no sense, as the book goes on, of any reason why he should be declining so drastically.

These are reasons why it is important, even for important writers, not to love yourself too much.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cold peas and Compralgyl.

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

As long as my communist commitment lasts, having learned to see with the first images of the death camps, I rule out the violence of revolution and yet the revolution is, for me, a new man, with new sentiments, and perhaps as well, if I carry the whole thing to its logical conclusion, a disappearance of feeling that might begin with the inversion of feelings, their subversion. The depth of that movement, even though it hurts me, is plain to see if you pause an instant on what the work I do shows and proves: a world overturned.

Extremely French (read: turgid, twisting, sentimental) tonally, but god is it beautiful. Guyotat's fame I think rests outside of France (and maybe even within it) on his transgressive reputation for the likes of Eden, Eden, Eden and Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, whereas this book, one that is much easier to find and to read, shows that there truly is an aesthetic force behind those works that can be, and have been, written off as so much stylistic riffing on de Sade and Burroughs. One of the great books I have read on what it looks like to feel one's self a medium of the work rather than its author, something of Jack Spicer to it, of his cursed mysticism as a mere antennae for receiving messages, and of course something of Genet's warm logic, a sense of significance in degradation and a reading into of the arrangement of objects in a world.

I only hope more translations of Guyotat's later work are forthcoming.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this one way more than "Eden Eden Eden."

[Ben Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishing vigor for one in such a state

[Omar Abu Samra · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptional

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of this book, in retrospect, is sort of a blur. Guyotat's humanity, paranoia, utter despair, and deep filial love are the main factors that resonate in the end. There is also a deep level of frustration in the end with the way that he can not even figure out what is wrong with himself here, the language of his own work combining with the violence of the outside of his life to create an in ability to function, or even to eat. The stories he tells of his family are a beautiful counterpoint to the horrifying realities of his bodily decay.
Really in the end, Coma made me want to read Guyotat's other work more than it was actually enjoyable in itself. He comes off as fascinating, but incomprehensible here.

[Tosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Compared to what is being produced today, Pierre Guyotat's "Coma" is really good, but for me, and for whatever reason, leaves me cold. Which is strange, at least to me. Perhaps its the articulation of its writing that gives me the distance betweeen what is being written/said and its reader.

Without a doubt Guyotat is an intense figure in the contemporary French letters. i want to love it, but instead I like it. Which comes as a disappointment to me. On the other hand I am going to check out his other titles, because he has my interest, but alas, I hope something more happens.

[Leonard Klossner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guyotat's prose explodes with a lyricism both beautiful and perverse. Written in a style more traditional than the avante-garde schizophrenic single-sentence structure of Eden, Eden, Eden and perhaps less hallucinatory than Tomb For 500,000 Soldiers, this fractured biographical narrative recounts Guyotat's violent desire to create, to give birth to figures and worlds, to lend them a displaced voice which contains echoes of their creator, despite the negligence and depletion of his physical body, this "immolated 'I'".

[Jed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent as both text and book.

[Nj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly radical, disruptive, disturbing prose. Fulfills some of Bataille's provocations.

[nonegloga]

Un tempo, bambino, quando l’estate risuona e sente e palpita ovunque, il mio corpo insieme al mio io comincia a circoscriversi e a formarlo: la “gioia” di vivere, di sentire, di prevedere già, lo smembramento, tutto in questo corpo scoppia, i neuroni vanno verso ciò che li sollecita, le zone di sensazioni si staccano quasi in blocchi che si posano nel paesaggio, nella Creazione. Oppure è la fusione con il mondo, la mia scomparsa in tutto ciò che mi tocca, che vedo, e in tutto quello che non vedo ancora. Senza dubbio non posso sopportare di essere un solo io, di fronte a tutti questi altri io e di essere immobile nonostante l’effervescenza dei miei sensi, di essere immobile in questo spazio in cui si salta, ci si slancia, si prende il volo... Che dolore non poter essere condiviso, essere condiviso, come un banchetto da tutto quello che desideriamo mangiare, da tutte le sensazioni, da tutti gli esseri: questo resto buttato di piccolo animale per terra sono io... se potessi essere io!

[Robert Carey]

Accurate portrayal of my 2022.

[lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

dnf at around 70% much of the same

[Xavier Durand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guyotat, c’est la littérature de l’obstacle. On n’y rentre pas, on l’encercle et ça prend forme(s).

[Chico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pitch perfect prose.