Life as a Dropout and Colonial Soldier

Summary

Daniel Culpan reviews Pierre Guyotat’s Idiocy as a comparatively conventional but still stylistically intense memoir of his coming of age from 1958 to 1962, spanning his Paris dropout years, conscription into the Algerian War, interrogation, and imprisonment. Culpan argues that bodily degradation, sexual awakening, Catholic guilt, artistic ambition, and military humiliation converge in a narrator who rejects purity and stable moral identities rather than claiming innocence. Guyotat’s sympathy for Algerian independence and depiction of French colonial brutality coexist with scrutiny of his own compromised position, while art offers a means of psychic survival rather than escape. For Culpan, the memoir ultimately shows war and colonialism consuming claims to civilization, yet preserves a fragile faith in humanity and the possibility that life might be otherwise.

Highlights

• Halfway through Idiocy, the final volume of memoir by Pierre Guyotat, the avant-garde writer reminds us that “nothing is pure”.
• The child of a country doctor, Guyotat ran away from home when he was eighteen. He spent two years on the streets of Paris before being conscripted into the Algerian War in 1960. The death of his mother (in 1958) prompted his rst novel, Sur un Cheval (1961), about a motherless wanderer, and, after notes for the second were discovered in his barracks, he found himself accused of “complicity in desertion”, interrogated and imprisoned for three months.
• There is no option, Guyotat says, but to “fling yourself into filth, approach it, touch it, handle it; to live at last as a man [through] this partaking of misery”. Later, the Seine becomes festering and nightmarish: “Boat lights shine against the black undersides of the arches; the water slaps at stone – drowned corpses, carcasses of beaten dogs”.
• We glimpse the growing awareness of his bisexuality (“Does she only want me with him as well, wanting me to want her since he wants me?”) and witness his spiritual hunger for transformation through art: “I … have the future before me, which I have to fill with deeds, acts, new works; a body for doing”. Each of the book’s short chapters moves to its own shellshocked rhythm.
• Idiocy’s last section traces the end of the war and the writer’s journey back home, where “freedom” is imprinted with the memory of violence: “Me, my army mate too, we’ve emerged from underneath the jets whose war machinery we clean; twenty-months of communal life, servitude, nights in ‘meatsacks,’”. He ends up in a brothel, where predatory images – dogs eating scraps of meat, a cat that catches a swallow – become a microcosm of the world. The machinery of war and colonialism devours every claim to “civilisation”, yet Guyotat salvages the hope that things can be otherwise. “I still believe, a little,” he writes, “in that God of humanity alone.”

Source

Author

Daniel Culpan

Publication

The Times Literary Supplement

Reviewed work

Idiocy by Pierre Guyotat, translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty