«A new book by Pierre Guyotat (b. 1940) is always an “event,” little matter whether one reads it. When Progénitures appeared in France, to the sort of consternated fanfare that has frequently greeted this writer’s output, one well-placed critic declared that neither he nor anyone else could, or would, read all eight hundred, bizarrely spelled, meticulously versified pages of this “novel” that is probably more akin to an extended Old Testament chronicle. This accusation of “unreadablenes,” attached to Guyotat’s strange and provocative work ever since (at least) the lexical and orthographic experiments of Prostitution (1975), is nonetheless qualified by…

BODY OF THE TEXT THIS IS NOT WRITTEN. BUT DICTATED. IMPROVISED. NOTEBOOKS IN HAND— NOT FOR A STOCKTAKING OF PAST OR PRESENT JOTTINGS ON WHAT I AM ABOUT TO DESCRIBE: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MASTURBATION AND WRITING— BUT IN ORDER TO SPEAK TEXT IN HAND AND EXPOSED TO VIEW—; NO USE EXPECTING THEN. A TEXT THAT MIGHT BE DESCRIBED AS “SCHOLARLY” OR “MARGINAL” (NECESSARY TERMS AT AN EPOCH DETERMINED BY POLITICAL ENGAGEMENTS OF AN ADMINISTRATIVE KIND. OR BY A HESITATION TO EXPRESS THE MOST VOCAL SOUNDINGS OF THE MASTURBATORY TEXT). NONETHELESS, THE NEED TO MAKE MY FIRST DECLARATIONS ON THE RELATIONSHIP…

  “This self-portrait is dated March 1962. I had returned from a mission as radioman in the interior, in the Djurdjura, having received a warning from my comrades in the radio station. I already knew when I got out of the jeep that I was in for a bad quarter of an hour, a quarter of an hour that could last a whole lifetime. I came back, and saw a secret service or military police jeep. I immediately disappeared into our room. My buddies had already hidden my notes and a few of my things – soldier solidarity. I only had…

    “This text was written at the end of 1962, after my return from Algeria. It stands under the immediate impression of Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead, and is the result of a paraphrase of a very bleak text fragment from Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John ­Passion, which I sung as a child. For me the text is the matrix for Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats.” P.G.   Our prison was encircled by marshland where birds and sick dogs came to die. At night we could hear their cries and death rattles. We could see nothing of…

Donatien Grau: I have a sense that, in your recent work, the question of humanity has become more and more explicit. There has been a series of titles—Humains par hasard [Humans by chance, 2016], Joyeux animaux de la misère [Joyous Animals of Misery, 2014], Par la main dans les Enfers [By the Hand into the Hades, 2016]—that echo one another and call our humanity into question. Where do you stand these days on this question? Pierre Guyotat: I’ve always dealt with that question. It’s nothing new, and it necessarily lies at the core of every work of art. To begin…