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    Guyotat: A Vital Aberration: Writings On Pierre Guyotat 1994-2010
    Guyotat: A Vital Aberration: Writings On Pierre Guyotat 1994-2010
    Guyotat: A Vital Aberration: Writings On Pierre Guyotat 1994-2010
    Ebook47 pages45 minutes

    Guyotat: A Vital Aberration: Writings On Pierre Guyotat 1994-2010

    By Stephen Barber

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    About this ebook

    Pierre Guyotat's work is a legendary presence within, and at the periphery of, experimental writing and art, from the 1960s to the contemporary moment. From his novels of the 1960s "Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers" and "Eden, Eden, Eden" to his recent books on his own corporeal history, notably "Coma", Guyotat has undertaken a relentless exploration of the human body, conflict, sex and social disintegration, which appears unprecedented. At the same time, it exudes the aura of being final work the novelist Edmund White described Guyotat as the 'last great avant-garde visionary' for terminal cultures, worlds and bodies, beyond which only a void remains. Guyotat's work is also bound up with immediate, urgent matters: censorship, ecological devastation, all-engulfing prostitution, and dictatorial power. This collection of Stephen Barber's writings on Guyotat spans a period of sixteen years, in the form of both introductions to translated editions and autonomous essays.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElektron Ebooks
    Release dateMar 4, 2015
    ISBN9781909923249
    Guyotat: A Vital Aberration: Writings On Pierre Guyotat 1994-2010
    Author

    Stephen Barber

    Stephen Barber is Professor of Global Affairs at Regent’s University London, Senior Fellow at the Global Policy Institute, Board Member of the International Public Management Network, and Visiting Professor at the University of Cagliari.

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      Book preview

      Guyotat - Stephen Barber

      credits

      GUYOTAT: A VITAL ABERRATION

      BY STEPHEN BARBER

      AN EBOOK

      ISBN 978-1-909923-24-9

      PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

      COPYRIGHT 2011 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

      www.elektron-ebooks.com

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

      INTRODUCTION

      Pierre Guyotat’s work is a legendary presence within, and at the periphery of, experimental writing and art, from the 1960s to the contemporary moment. From his novels of the 1960s – Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers and Eden, Eden, Eden – to his recent books on his own corporeal history, notably Coma, Guyotat has undertaken a relentless exploration of the human body, conflict, sex and social disintegration, which appears unprecedented. At the same time, it exudes the aura of being final work – the novelist Edmund White described Guyotat as the ‘last great avant-garde visionary’ – for terminal cultures, worlds and bodies, beyond which only a void remains. Guyotat’s work is also bound up with immediate, urgent matters: censorship, ecological devastation, all-engulfing prostitution, communism and dictatorial power.

      This collection spans a period of sixteen years of writing on Guyotat’s work, in the form of introductions to translated editions and autonomous texts.

      The introductions are those to Eden, Eden, Eden, and Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, both published by Creation. Both introductions were written very rapidly, in the space of an hour or two. A third translation was planned, of Guyotat’s 1975 novel Prostitution, but it proved too demanding for the three or four translators who attempted to render it, then abandoned it. Guyotat’s work has an intricate and delicate translation history – an earlier translation, by Helen Lane, of Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, undertaken soon after its original French publication, was completed but then destroyed, in its sole copy, by the translator herself, as a result of a personal crisis. Guyotat’s close friend, the theatre director Alain Olliver, told me that Guyotat’s life would have been very different – in terms of its precarious financial situation and his work’s international status – if that earlier translation had been published.

      I met Pierre Guyotat for the first time in 1988, while living in Paris for five years for work on my PhD on Artaud, which involved extensive contacts with Artaud’s close collaborator of his final years, Paule Thévenin. After I had known her for several years, visiting her at her apartment in a former factory in the rue de Reuilly with Artaud’s drawings on its walls, she recommended that I go and see Pierre Guyotat, who lived nearby, in the boulevard de Charonne. She certainly never believed that Guyotat’s work had any direct connection to that of Artaud; rather, she saw him as having the same stature and capacity for experimentation. Notably, during the eight years I knew her, until her death in 1993, she never recommended that I visit anyone else, and was more likely to discourage any such visits, with coruscating irony.

      Pierre Guyotat was extremely welcoming (certainly solely because of Paule Thévenin’s recommendation), at his apartment with its extraordinary view over the two eighteenth-century columns of the Barrière du Trône, and we began to meet very regularly, almost daily, for long walks, especially around the periphery of the city, for extended talks: the history of Europe, conflict, film, childhood. In 1990, I moved to Berlin, and he visited me there in 1991, for

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