Pierre Guyotat

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Pierre Guyotat (born January 9, 1940 in Bourg-Argental , Loire department , France ; † February 7, 2020 in Paris ) was a French author and university professor .

Life

Guyotat was born in 1940 to a country doctor and a Polish mother near Kraków . As a toddler, his family's relationships with the Resistance shaped his life . He graduated from school after completing various Catholic boarding schools. At the age of fourteen he began to write, in addition to his hobbyhorse painting, and at sixteen he sent his poems to René Char , who encouraged him to keep going.

At the age of nineteen, Guyotat, then still a minor, went to Paris and got by with small jobs. In 1960 he wrote his first prose work Sur un cheval , which appeared in Paris the following year. In 1960 he was drafted and sent to Algeria as a soldier . In the spring of 1962, he was arrested by the military security service and interrogated for ten days. He was accused of planning an attack on the morale of the armed forces as well as his escape from the army. Another allegation was possession of banned magazines and books. After three months of solitary confinement, he was posted to a criminal unit .

On his return to France, he became an editor at Editions du Seuil and wrote articles for Arts et spectacles and later for France Observateur . In 1964 he became responsible for the culture pages of this magazine, which later changed its name to Nouvel Observateur . In 1967, his publisher Éditions du Seuil refused to publish his third book. In Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats the author dealt with the Algerian war as well as topics such as sex, mostly among men. The book met with rejection and sparked bitter controversy. Among other things, it was banned for the French barracks in Germany.

In July 1967 Guyotat was with Michel Leiris , Marguerite Duras and others from Fidel Castro to Latin American solidarity conference to Cuba invited. He published his encounters during this conference in 2005 in his first volume, Carnets de bord . In 1968, during the May riots , he joined the French Communist Party after Charles de Gaulle had accused it of plans to overthrow. He left the party in 1972.

In September 1970 Editions Gallimard published the book Eden, Eden, Eden accompanied by three forewords by Michel Leiris , Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers . It was practically forbidden by the Ministry of the Interior on October 22, 1970, because it was not sold to minors, it was not advertised and it was not allowed to be displayed in shop windows. A petition by dozens of artists from home and abroad in favor of the book was ignored. François Mitterrand spoke out in favor of the book before the National Assembly, as did the President of the Republic Georges Pompidou in a letter to Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin . The reason for the ban was the description of a long series of sexual acts that took place in a North African desert landscape. After eleven years, the bans were lifted in 1981 - a German translation was not published until 2015.

Guyotat published his novel Prostitution in 1975 , in which he transformed the French language to the point that it became incomprehensible, and in which he described other sexual practices and transgressed deeply rooted taboos . In the following years his health deteriorated; he suffered from depression. In 1981 he fell into a coma and had to be resuscitated. In 2006 he wrote the autobiographical report Coma about these experiences . This was followed in 2007 by the band Formation , in which he described his youth, followed in 2010 by a third band Arrière-fond .

From 2001 to 2004 Guyotat was a lecturer at the Institut d'Études Européennes at the University of Paris VIII . In 2004 he made his manuscripts available to the Bibliothèque nationale de France .

Prizes and awards

Exhibitions

Publications

  • Sur un cheval . Seuil, Paris 1961
  • Ashby . Seuil, Paris 1964
  • Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldiers . Gallimard, Paris 1967
  • Eden, Eden, Eden . Gallimard, Paris 1970
    • Übers. Holger Fock: Eden. Eden, Eden . Diaphanes, Zurich 2015
  • Litterature interdite . Gallimard, Paris 1972
  • Prostitution . Gallimard, Paris 1975
  • Le Livre . Gallimard, Paris 1984
  • Progénitures . Gallimard, Paris 2000
  • with Marianne Alphant: Explications . Léo Scheer, Paris 2000, again 2010
  • Carnets de bord, volume I (1962–1969). Léo Scheer, Paris 2005
  • Coma . Mercure de France, Paris 2006
  • Formation . Gallimard, Paris 2007
  • Arrière-fond , autobiography. Gallimard, Paris 2010
    • In the deep. Translated by Heinz Jatho. Diaphanes, Zurich 2017
  • Leçons sur la Langue Française . Léo Scheer, Paris 2011
  • Joyeux animaux de la misère . Gallimard, Paris 2014 ISBN 978-2-070784462

literature

  • Tanguy Viel : Tout s'explique: réflexions à partir d '"Explications" de Pierre Guyotat . Inventaire-invention, Paris 2000, ISBN 2-914412-04-5 .
  • Catherine Brun: Pierre Guyotat. Essai biographique . Éditions Léo Scheer, Paris 2005, ISBN 2-915280762 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Décès de Pierre Guyotat le subversif , lematin.ch, published and accessed on February 7, 2020
  2. ^ Fock in the translator database of the VdÜ , 2019
  3. Sexual excesses as a sleep aid. FAZ , February 24, 2016, p. 10
  4. ↑ at the age of 15, 2 months from it, summer 1955