Years ago, when I was living in London, a man wandered down the street outside my flat sometime after midnight, stood under my bedroom window, and began to howl. It was so sudden, so alarming, it was as if my window had been shattered by a thrown brick. I lay there in the dark and listened. There were no words to his lament, no melody. It was anguish, despair, hopelessness, call it what you like. This was the sound of the city to me.
Reading Idiocy, Pierre Guyotat’s memoir of Paris and the Algerian War, brought this sound whirling back. Guyotat is interested in moments when the shouting outside breaks in. Sobs, cries, gunfire, moans, ejaculations of all kinds punctuate his writing. Idiocy is a book filled with violence, abjection, copulation, defilement, flows of blood, shit, saliva, and vomit, all observed with such focused intensity the narrator nearly evaporates. Guyotat, who died in 2020, was something of a legend in the Francophone world. He wrote novels, plays, memoirs, each more unconventional than the last. He was friends with Jean Genet, whom he claims to have ‘loaded’ in the back of his Volkswagen. Eden, Eden, Eden, his fictionalised account of serving in the French army during the Algerian War, was banned for obscenity immediately after its publication in 1970. This naturally put him in league with the bad boys of French literature, the De Sades and Comte de Lautréamonts. But he’s more interesting than De Sade or the Comte de Lautréamont; his writing shares their taste for transgression but he surpasses them with his distinct moral outrage, his allegiance to the experience of ‘the Other’, coloured in no small part by his time in military service. He is alone in his vehement disdain for cruelty, his fervent desire for change. He seems to actually wish the world would end. (Reading Eden, Eden, Eden, in which an inferno of dismembered limbs swill around an unnamed colony, you might believe it has.)
Idiocy loosely charts its writer’s adolescent rebellions and his time as a conscripted soldier in the Algerian War. Following the death of his mother and awaiting his compulsory enlistment, he runs away to ‘black green’ Paris, where he picks up odd jobs making deliveries on his bike and helping an ‘old dowager’ write a detective novel. He writes poetry, gets a taxi for the first time ever, then quickly runs out of money. Ah, city life! It is after returning home to steal from his father—the definitive sin—that Guyotat spirals. He enters a monk-like existence on the outskirts of Paris where he subsists solely on bread and ‘rancid’ peanut butter oil. He goes for punishing walks in the snow, hallucinates wildly, is struck by a car and wonders if he is still alive. He obeys orders from the sky, is judged by faceless apparitions, and in his delirium tries to conjure a warm embrace from his dead mother only to be haunted by the vision of her rotting skeleton. Idiocy unfolds in a succession of lurid, highly saturated tableaux, recalled with eidetic precision: the streaks of dried piss outside his tent in Paris, a ‘legless turbaned man moving on his trunk and fists’ along the quay in Algeria as the soldiers pull out, the column of flies that signal entrails buried in the dirt. These sensory facts cannot be explained, tidied away or summed up; they do not hold; you cannot build with them. Luckily, Guyotat is not a builder. He is a demolition artist exhibiting the detritus that now passes for life. If it all falls apart, so much the better.
Though the book moves chronologically through the years, it feels fragmented and discontinuous. Time has been reduced to a series of caustic shocks with little to no pause for rest between. Invariably, these shocks are recorded by the body, which is where Guyotat’s writing thrives. Guyotat is no saint, but if he was, he’d be the patron saint of wet dreams and nightmares, breasts and genitals, entrails and secretions; for him, the speck of froth clinging to a girl’s mouth is infinitely more interesting than anything else he could say about her. He doesn’t care about other people’s stories any more than he cares about his own. What he does care about are bodies, their slow accretion of experiences both painful and pleasurable, their cumbrous passage through the world, their lust, their vulnerability, their inevitable decline. Like a saint, he’s insatiable: he wants to be everyone and everywhere, ‘to live for a few minutes in the Other,’ through the shared medium of the body, for him a (literal) matter of words, an articulation of tissue, fluids, streams, his and another’s, indistinguishable. Writing offers him a direct but flickering line to the convulsive being of other people. Such a possibility seems to be the only thing keeping him alive.
Expressions of sexuality and bodily pleasure, though, are complicated. ‘Nothing is pure,’ he laments, ‘not them, not me.’ A crisis of sexuality develops into a more general, incurable shame: that of being human, of being part of the monstrous enterprise of domination and subjugation that sees other humans ‘hunted like animals’. He asks difficult questions: how can desire exist under violence and oppression? With the knowledge of atrocity, of the camps, of the Algerian War, how can I possibly want somebody? (The answer, if there is one, comes most clearly in his earlier book, Coma, which espouses a philosophy of nomadism: belong nowhere, love everybody).
Guyotat is eighteen when the book begins and twenty-two when it ends, but the usual compositional elements of a bildungsroman, with the exception of leaving home and ghosting your family, are absent. This is not the story of Guyotat forming an identity or resolving his place in the world. ‘Slaughter my I,’ Guyotat writes. ‘Exist without Being.’ Idiocy describes a trajectory of self-effacement rather than self-discovery; it is an anti-memoir, a suicide avant la lettre. Holes, ropes, stairways, windows, brothels, passageways, prison camps: the book is a barrage of conveyances, interstices, thresholds where the self, pushed to its most extreme limits, threatens to expire. Sometimes it does. On seeing the corpse of a prisoner thrown in the back of a van, Guyotat writes: ‘Which of us runs to the barracks, comes out holding a pair of khaki socks that another of us takes from him and slips onto the frozen feet of the corpse where, at the touch of the sun, the flies advance from the back of the vehicle, from the face toward the genitals?’ The loss of the self here reads almost like relief. Who wants to be a person anyway? Our narrator is in a hurry to lose himself, and it isn’t hard to see why.
Condemned to bear witness, there is nowhere safe to direct his gaze, no place to rest his senses. Smells are fastidiously reported, their various layers carefully divulged; light is gold, red, crimson; sounds, weather, textures, the buzzing of flies’ wings all vie for the narrator’s attention. The sheer volume of sensory detail that swarms the reader evokes the shimmering omniscience brought on by amphetamines or the latent foreboding of a panic attack. Minutiae vibrate with significance the way they often do in eye-witness accounts of disasters: how the trees look moments before the bomb explodes, how the child laughs before the planes collide. But the catastrophe in Idiocy isn’t something that arrives. It is already here, in this world of war, poverty, incest, rape, bestiality, mutilation. The general horrors, and then some.
Idiocy is Guyotat’s final book, and it won him a major prize in France, which many believe he should have received much earlier. I’d like to say that this corrective gesture shows a long overdue appreciation for his talents, that he did, however belatedly, receive his flowers, but that’s not the case. When he died, a national French news outlet ran an obituary with the depressing headline: ‘“Pornographic” French writer Pierre Guyotat dies aged 80.’ You call them flowers?
Many of his books remain untranslated; those that are available in English are difficult to find. Once found, they are not exactly easy to read. Guyotat crafted an idiom all his own, drawing on Arabic as much as French slang to create a garrulous, mercantile, expletive-ridden prose riddled with gaps, ellipses, and harsh demotic that rushes headlong, picking up as it goes the blaring of car horns, the emission of fluids, shouts, curses, the crude solicitations of sex workers. These ‘language texts’, as he called them, are exemplary of his philosophical outlook: they are porous, violable, polyvocal, and wide open to the world. Idiocy may differ in form from these books (it is, by comparison, a breeze to read) but it remains ontologically consistent with the rest of his oeuvre, and reads almost like a foundational text in which his advocation for the Other becomes central: it is a more straightforward protest against the horrors of colonialism, capitalism and the violence we inflict on nature and those we deem Other. It is not irrelevant that this, Guyotat’s parting statement to the world, is related in such lucid terms: he wanted to be loud and clear, to smash the window, to wake the sleeper up. It is not irrelevant that Guyotat writes, in this book, at the age of 78: ‘Life, as repetition, isn’t worth it; only the first time counts.’
In Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad’s voyeuristic novel of deceit and revolt in St Petersburg and Geneva, there is the following exchange between a grieving sister and the narrator. It’s a complicated novel, full of secret plots, conspiracies and doubt, but more than anything it’s a book about visibility, about watching and being seen. The sister thanks our narrator for his friendship, which has given her comfort during difficult times. ‘I have done little else but look on,’ he replies, to which she counters: ‘There is a way of looking on which is valuable.’ I have often wondered about this last remark. Is there a way of looking on that is worthless? And how can one be sure which kind one is engaged in? I think it has something to do with ‘looking on’ in a way that risks rather than preserves your own comfort and safety, because it is the first step towards joining someone in their pain. Or perhaps it is nothing more than choosing to look when everyone else looks away. There are, I think, worse terms to judge a book’s value by. And by these terms, Idiocy is priceless.