Guyotat: A Vital Aberration

Pierre Guyotat's work is a legendary presence within, and at the periphery of, experimental writing and art, from the 1960s to the contemporary moment. From his novels of the 1960s "Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers" and "Eden, Eden, Eden" to his recent books on his own corporeal history, notably "Coma", Guyotat has undertaken a relentless exploration of the human body, conflict, sex and social disintegration, which appears unprecedented. At the same time, it exudes the aura of being final work the novelist Edmund White described Guyotat as the 'last great avant-garde visionary' for terminal cultures, worlds and bodies, beyond which only a void remains. Guyotat's work is also bound up with immediate, urgent matters: censorship, ecological devastation, all-engulfing prostitution, and dictatorial power. This collection of Stephen Barber's writings on Guyotat spans a period of sixteen years, in the form of both introductions to translated editions and autonomous essays.