Pierre Guyotat: Essai Biographique (review)

Pierre Guyotat (b. 1940) is surely among the least discussed of the indisputably major literary talents of his generation. This is not to say that his work is entirely unknown, that his contribution to contemporary letters remains a secret of the cognoscenti. Indeed, no. For Guyotat’s name regularly arises in passing, in reference to literary experimentation, to postcolonial writing or the politics of censorship. Yet despite the frequency of these references, even the cognoscenti – reviewers, critics, historians of literature and thought – rarely discuss the work in any real depth (Catherine Brun’s Essai includes an exhaustive bibliography of both brief reviews and the rare substantial secondary pieces). Guyotat remains a shadowy figure, the sole persisting exemplar of the avant-garde trend in European arts and letters, arguably the only living writer whose works have a capacity to astonish their reader with the depth and shocking majesty of those of the Marquis de Sade, of Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Artaud, Bataille, or Genet.