Pierre Guyotat - Éden, Éden, Éden

EDEN EDEN EDEN

Pierre Guyotat

ISBN 1-84068-063-6

English edition first published by Creation Books in 1995

This new edition published 2003

www.creationbooks.com

World English rights reserved

Editions Gallimard 1970

Translated by Graham Fox

Design: the Tears Corporation

Pierre Guyotat's legendary novel of atrocity and extreme obscenity, Eden Eden Eden, finally appears in English. Set in the dirt of a majestically tainted zone of the Algerian desert in a time of civil warfare, Guyotat's novel brings scenes of brutal violence into intimate collision with relentless acts of prostitutional sex and degradation. Eden Eden Eden was banned as "pornographic" by the French Ministry of the Interior on its publication and remained under governmental censorship for eleven years. The book is a courageous and unique exploration into the virulent matter of sex, language and the human body. It is lethal, and it has no precedent. Guyotat has declared: "The very origin of the whole system of literature has to be attacked."

Guyotat is a reviled and revered figure in France. His books have astonished and appalled their readership with their raw physical power. He has been acclaimed as the only writer alive who is creating a new language. He has said: "There is something inside me that makes it necessary for me to go further, always further into aberration. "

Guyotat was born in 1940 in a remote mountainous region of southern France. He has written obsessively from his first years. As a child, he masturbated constantly while writing, and his first manuscripts (as he narrates in his "seminal" text of the early 1970s, The Language Of The Body) are extraordinary visual coagulations of semen, ink, dirt and blood. As a teenager, he became a soldier in the Algerian colonial war, and was arrested for inciting soldiers to desert and kept imprisoned for three months in a hole in the ground. His first celebrated book, Tomb For 500,000 Soldiers (also published by Creation Books) is a hallucinatory account of the terror and ecstasy provoked by that genocidal war, the memory of which has been suppressed in France. Eden Eden Eden was written in an intense six month period in a concrete highrise in the desolate suburbs of southern Paris.

Over the last twenty years, Guyotat has written incessantly but has published only one novel, The Book. This astonishing work compacts all the cruelty and exhilaration of Guyotat's early work into a monstrous abjection of language, stripped to the infected bone, viral and skeletal. The writing of The Book and his subsequent work, The Story Of Samora Machel, almost killed Guyotat. At the end of 1981 he was living the creation of his language with such obsessionality that he gave up eating, lost half his body weight and was rushed to hospital and resuscitated from a coma that was almost fatal. Since then, Guyotat has worked on preparing the manuscript of Samora Machel for publication and begun an immense new work which is now nearing completion, Progenitor. Every three or four years, Guyotat gives a series of readings in the basement of the Pompidou Centre in Paris - partly improvisations and partly a delivery of raw work in progress, these performances leave their audiences unforgettably scorched and lacerated by Guyotat's language. He has also given readings at events around the work of the only two writers whose vision in any way approaches the extremity and the dissidence of his own: Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet.

Eden Eden Eden is a delirious and exhausting book to experience: it propels its reader into itself with fury and adrenalized elation. The hero of the book is a teenage Algerian prostitute boy, Wazzag, who participates in a series of sex acts which constantly escalate in scale, intensity and number. The book stinks of sperm and killing. It is a malignant orgasm. It is the perfect book for contemporary Europe. Guyotat's language is welded into a headlong rush into the wild terrain of obscenity. He has commented: "Pornography is certainly more beautiful than eroticism. I say three cheers for pornography!" Like Antonin Artaud, Guyotat views the act of writing as a physical secretion - a feral exudation of the body's material, creatively expectorating deadly substances which are savage and interrogative in their visceral impact upon the reader. And like Artaud, Guyotat speaks with blunt and sensational desire, against the bogus apparition of society and its paralysed languages. The action of writing, in Eden Eden Eden, becomes a disciplined intervention which cracks censorship wide open in all its horror.

On the publication of Eden Eden Eden, Roland Barthes wrote that Guyotat's book literally constituted a historical shock. The writer Philippe Sollers said that nothing had been done that risked so much since the novels of the Marquis de Sade. Pierre Guyotat has relentlessly beaten the comatose, catatonic nature of language into an anatomical matter of writing. Pierre Guyotat is the most original writer alive, and this is his most livid, atrocious book. It will derange you and it will scar you.

-Stephen Barber, Paris 1994

Eden Eden Eden is a free text: free of all subjects, of all objects, of all symbols, written in the space (the abyss or blind-spot) where the traditional constituents of discourse (the one who speaks, the events recounted, the way they are expressed) would be superfluous. The primary consequence is that criticism, unable to discuss the author, his subject, or his style, can find no way of taking hold of this text: Guyotat's language must be "entered", not by believing it, becoming party to an illusion, participating in a fantasy, but by writing the language with him in his place, signing it along with him.

Getting in on the language, in the sense of "getting in on the act", is possible because Guyotat produces not a manner, a genre, a literary object, but a new element (which might even be added to the four Elements of cosmogony); this element is the phrase: substance of speech with the qualities of a fine cloth or a foodstuff, a single sentence which never ends, whose beauty comes not from it refers to (the reality towards which it is supposed to point) but from its breath, cut short, repeated, as if the author were trying to show us not a series if imaginary scenes, but the scene of language, so that the model of this new mimesis is no longer the adventure of some hero, but the adventure of the signifier itself: what becomes of it.

Eden Eden Eden constitutes (or ought to constitute) a sort of eruption, a historical shock: the whole of an earlier evolution of writing, seemingly double but coinciding in ways we can now see more and more clearly, from Sade to Genet, from Mallarme to Artaud, is gathered up, displaced, purified of its historical circumstances: no Story and no Sin (surely the same thing), we are left simply with language and lust, not the former expressing the latter, but the two bound together in a reciprocal metonymy, indissoluble.

The strength of this metonymy, sovereign in Guyotat's text, might presage a strong censure, which will find here its two favourite pastures, language and sex, united; but any such censure, which may take many forms, will be unmasked by its own vehemence: condemned to being excessive if it claims to censure simply the subject and not the form, or vice versa: in either case condemned to reveal its own essence as censorship.

Yet whatever the institutional peripeteia, the publication of this text is important: a whole body of critical and theoretical work will be carried forward, without the text ever losing its power of seduction: outside all categories and yet of an importance beyond any doubt, a new landmark and a starting-point for new writing.