Interview with Pierre Guyotat
In this interview, the author Pierre Guyotat talks about his writing process in his work and in his latest novel, Joyeux animaux de la misère (© Éditions Gallimard). Excerpts from this novel will be read and staged by Stanislas Norday for the opening of ManiFeste-2014.
[Frank Madlener] The writing of Joyeux animaux de la misère began in May 2013, interrupting Géhenne. What is the genesis of this “relaxation exercise”, of this flow that has become irrepressible?
Pierre Guyotat © Léa Crespi
[Pierre Guyotat] Was Géhenne, momentarily too difficult, too radical, too terrifying? I have lived for a long time with an imaginary, ancient background, where the decoration and the characters evolve along with time. I bring the vision I like. I admit that Imagination is a gift, but it is also an act and an addiction, a risky practice that requires a struggle to impose oneself, on others, and on yourself, right from the onset when daring to commit to something is looked upon poorly. In addition to this are drives, worries, a search for the absolute. Géhenne is a radical world where categories are permanently discernable: humans and non-humans, animals are higher than non-humans, with rotten rat food. In Joyeux animaux, the figures are half human, or were never human.
My verbal desire pushes me towards Géhenne just as much as towards the rest of humanity: it begins in the jaw. Joyeux animaux de la misère raised a problem: do I have the right to do this, while I am in the middle of a more radical work, do I have the right to relax? In this unexpected text, I wanted to find new characters, originating from the human. The title came from the text itself. I didn’t find it, but Rosario, the main character, in the midst of a nocturnal confusion, evokes animals, dogs, flies, vermin, half-human figures, human figures, and qualifies them as “happy animals of misery”: it is all of us.
[FM] Rhythm, speed, and joy are conspicuous in the language of Joyeux animaux de la misère in addition to a multiplicity of voices; one lone voice or an ensemble of diffracting voices. Is this liveliness inspired by a desire for the theater?
[PG] What I do has long been derived from theater. Why? Because creation is a solitary act, we need instant characters that speak, that we make speak, amongst themselves, to whom we also speak. We need to duplicate ourselves into a me different from yours. I was always attracted by quick questions and answers, by the difficult art of dialogue that always appeared to be the epitome of the poetic-fictional act. In this text, I was able to get what I wanted fairly quickly: brief interactions. A reply that is too long stiffens the narration, something I don’t want. The action must continue only through the ripostes. The characters exist through quick exchanges, they are responsible for what they do and also, in a certain fashion, this happens by itself. I set the scene, they work it out.
[FM] In this dialogue we also here a sonorous landscape, an exterior, specific to this work…
[PG] You are talking about the moments where the main character crosses the hills – the mountain, like a space of purity. I was born in the mountains, with the scent of flowers, of sap. In this landscape, depravity should be impossible… It is an absurdity, naturally: there is as much crime in the mountains as down below. We go up toward the jingling bells with the herds, animals, in principle, which are innocent, the raptors. And on earth, below, there are monsters and less noble animals, vermin, etc. Since my childhood, I have thought about the fate of animals. Today, the questions of animals and the cosmos remain primordial for me. I have never been satisfied to be human. I naturally go towards the being bestowed with another language, and I quickly understood that animals are bestowed with a language as real as our own.
[FM] Joyeux animaux emerges from a transgression that is neither provocation, nor subversion, but more of a line that is constantly crossed. The animal-man boundary is crossed. Everything is sayable, everything is seen and reacts simultaneously, isn’t that the most transgressive?
[PG] This has been the subject of my research for a long time: finding a language that is free of society, of all the imperatives of a normal life in society. I always though writing was that. Making art is transgressing. It is not about provocation, but I am not surprised that we react to what I do. I lived the censoring of Éden, Éden, Éden like a war. Blanchot went further, writing that is was not because of sex that the book was censored, but because it went “too far”. Because I seek a language as close to reality as possible, close to sexual and societal urges, I can only produce this very by characters that have the freedom of taking action. Characters that lose nothing and gain nothing, that are not interested in society. From enslaved characters in Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, I went on to the characters of a brothel in Éden, Éden, Éden, to the non-human characters here where language is finally possible. In classic comedy, those who speak the most freely are the servants, the enslaved, the submissive. The others perpetuate customs. It’s below that everything happens. The real is found there because the bodies exist with all their reality. In this world, we can not imagine an intellectual. Gods, madmen, a poet presumably, but no intellectuals. Because here it is about people who have direct contact with the material: manual people.
At one time, we said that I was subversive, of course. Now the Petit Larousse illustré (an illustrated French dictionary) talks about a “powerfully transgressive” work. Finally, transgression is connected to the comic: there is nothing funnier than going beyond the limits, saying what is forbidden. Humorous and facetious. I didn’t have to want it, it was my natural penchant, and my necessity, in composing the work. The way I worked on this text, in a state of great happiness, that I’m coming down from now, made me think of mysticism: imagination and hallucination. Mystics are grand lovers, very audacious. Saint Theresa of Avila, Saint Jean of the Cross, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux herself. Flesh in all its splendor. In all of this there is also a very logical order, not travelling fantasies. I have something I don’t release.
[Donatien Grau] You are always in the world where the work takes place. Each time, there is a character of a young being, here Rosario. Is this the figure of the young man you were, when you created this world?
[PG] Let’s not exaggerate; it is the young man I wanted to be, perhaps. Completely different from me, but very close. It is the expression of a determining factor: the intense manner I lived the apparition of sexuality in my early teen years. Immediately, a world was created, savagely. Later, I controlled all of that; I created this universe and this fantasy world. I was taken in by it, by that staggering force of sexual desire, that doesn’t last, a force that is added to all the others, nature’s storm. An interior thing. When I was 5 years old, in 1945, they explained to us the devastating and fatal force of the atom.
[DG] Do you believe that you have created a world or that you have entered a world?
[PG] That depends on the moment. When I write, it is in front of me, I am a part of it myself. It is not a text that one writes seated at a Louis XV secretary! I was in contact with these characters; I was like them, naked. I must add that I had no sexual activity during the conception of all of this: total sexual abstinence for close the 35 years. People continue to remember what I said a long time ago, without hearing or understanding the changes since then. These scenes were created from nothing, with what I could glimpse in brothels with women in Algeria and in Paris: the place of a brothel with men, since Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, pure imagination.
[FM] Your passion for music, an art close but autonomous, has provoked the desires of composers. This question was discussed often, even during the creation of this project for the stage. Furthermore, music has frequently accompanied the gestation of your books. What about Joyeux animaux de la misère?
[PG] I hardly listened to music during the writing of Joyeux animaux de la misère. It is dangerous to listen to music; you can have the impression of writing something that is as beautiful as what you hear. If it is Wagner, the musician-horizon par excellence, it becomes dangerous. Each note by Wagner is a testimonial, a note on the horizon, we have the feeling he is going to die immediate after that note, and his music with him.
I was very sensitive to Heinz Holliger’s Scardanelli Zyklus that I saw, and heard, at the end of May 2013, when my work was taking its final shape. I was touched by that music set to Hölderlin’s final poems – the cannons, the instruments, the short sentences read live by the composer, and even the space that was created. I was “confirmed” by that listening. There have been several attempts for my tongue to meet the stage with unique music. This hasn’t happened yet, basically because we are dealing with writing and its specific temporality. With the exception of music that follows the text and its prosody, this doesn’t always work. I always thought that when putting popular texts to music, by Schubert, Schumann, or Mahler, the simplicity of the speech suited a type of music that is simple. It is different when the texts are elaborate poems: there is a kind of “insincerity” in the desire for fusion that molds the question of a poem into a few musical minutes. What bothers me, is that the music doesn’t follow the tempo of the poem.
We can imagine music that embraces the action, the rhythm of the written language, a little like in Pelléas et Mélisande, or even in Schütz’s Oratorios. A musician could invent his own foundation with song from time to time. But imposing a “closed” music on a text that follows as many rules as a poem, no. In a certain manner, there is one musician too many.