path: root/edenx3.tex

\documentclass[10pt,twoside]{memoir}

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\begin{document}

\graphicspath{{img/}}

\frontmatter

% --- title page
{
\title{EDEN EDEN EDEN}

}

\clearpage

% --- colophon
{

Pierre Guyotat

ISBN 1-84068-063-6

English edition first published by Creation Books in 1995

This new edition published 2003

www.creationbooks.com

World English rights reserved

© Editions Gallimard 1970

Translated by Graham Fox

Design: the Tears Corporation
}
\clearpage

\chapter{Salitter Workings Editorial Comment}

i have made Decisions, here. i do not own a copy of Eden Eden Eden. i do not own a creation edition
of Eden Eden Eden, and i fucking certainly do not own a copy of the vauxhall \& company edition. i
actually did, once! i got it from mark harwood's record label website thing. i gave it to a friend
as a present, under strange circumstances\ldots it was an odd gesture, but i'm fairly awkward, i
guess\ldots now they cost \$500. 



\signoff{phoebe}
\signoffnote{brooklyn 2024}

\clearpage

\chapter{Introduction}

Pierre Guyotat's legendary novel of atrocity and extreme obscenity, \booktitle{Eden Eden Eden},
finally appears in English. Set in the dirt of a majestically tainted zone of the Algerian desert in
a time of civil warfare, Guyotat's novel brings scenes of brutal violence into intimate collision
with relentless acts of prostitutional sex and degradation. \booktitle{Eden Eden Eden} was banned as
\enquote{pornographic} by the French Ministry of the Interior on its publication and remained under
governmental censorship for eleven years. The book is a courageous and unique exploration into the
virulent matter of sex, language and the human body. It is lethal, and it has no precedent. Guyotat
has declared: \textquote{The very origin of the whole system of literature has to be attacked.}

Guyotat is a reviled and revered figure in France. His books have astonished and appalled their
readership with their raw physical power. He has been acclaimed as the only writer alive who is
creating a new language. He has said: \textquote{There is something inside me that makes it
necessary for me to go further, always further into aberration.}

Guyotat was born in 1940 in a remote mountainous region of southern France. He has written
obsessively from his first years. As a child, he masturbated constantly while writing, and his first
manuscripts (as he narrates in his \enquote{seminal} text of the early 1970s, \booktitle{The
Language Of The Body}) are extraordinary visual coagulations of semen, ink, dirt and blood. As a
teenager, he became a soldier in the Algerian colonial war, and was arrested for inciting soldiers
to desert and kept imprisoned for three months in a hole in the ground. His first celebrated book,
Tomb For 500,000 Soldiers (also published by Creation Books) is a hallucinatory account of the
terror and ecstasy provoked by that genocidal war, the memory of which has been suppressed in
France. \booktitle{Eden Eden Eden} was written in an intense six month period in a concrete highrise
in the desolate suburbs of southern Paris.

Over the last twenty years, Guyotat has written incessantly but has published only one novel,
\booktitle{The Book}. This astonishing work compacts all the cruelty and exhilaration of Guyotat's
early work into a monstrous abjection of language, stripped to the infected bone, viral and
skeletal. The writing of \booktitle{The Book} and his subsequent work, \booktitle{The Story Of
Samora Machel}, almost killed Guyotat. At the end of 1981 he was living the creation of his language
with such obsessionality that he gave up eating, lost half his body weight and was rushed to
hospital and resuscitated from a coma that was almost fatal. Since then, Guyotat has worked on
preparing the manuscript of Samora Machel for publication and begun an immense new work which is now
nearing completion, Progenitor. Every three or four years, Guyotat gives a series of readings in the
basement of the Pompidou Centre in Paris --- partly improvisations and partly a delivery of raw work
in progress, these performances leave their audiences unforgettably scorched and lacerated by
Guyotat's language. He has also given readings at events around the work of the only two writers
whose vision in any way approaches the extremity and the dissidence of his own: Antonin Artaud and
Jean Genet.

\booktitle{Eden Eden Eden} is a delirious and exhausting book to experience: it propels its reader
into itself with fury and adrenalized elation. The hero of the book is a teenage Algerian prostitute
boy, Wazzag, who participates in a series of sex acts which constantly escalate in scale, intensity
and number. The book stinks of sperm and killing. It is a malignant orgasm. It is the perfect book
for contemporary Europe. Guyotat's language is welded into a headlong rush into the wild terrain of
obscenity. He has commented: \textquote{Pornography is certainly more beautiful than eroticism. I
say three cheers for pornography!} Like Antonin Artaud, Guyotat views the act of writing as a
physical secretion --- a feral exudation of the body's material, creatively expectorating deadly
substances which are savage and interrogative in their visceral impact upon the reader. And like
Artaud, Guyotat speaks with blunt and sensational desire, against the bogus apparition of society
and its paralysed languages. The action of writing, in \booktitle{Eden Eden Eden}, becomes a
disciplined intervention which cracks censorship wide open in all its horror.

On the publication of \booktitle{Eden Eden Eden}, Roland Barthes wrote that Guyotat's book literally
constituted a historical shock. The writer Philippe Sollers said that nothing had been done that
risked so much since the novels of the Marquis de Sade. Pierre Guyotat has relentlessly beaten the
comatose, catatonic nature of language into an anatomical matter of writing. Pierre Guyotat is the
most original writer alive, and this is his most livid, atrocious book. It will derange you and it
will scar you.

\plainbreak{2}

\signoff{Stephen Barber} 
\signoffnote{Paris 1994}

\chapter{Preface}

\booktitle{Eden Eden Eden} is a free text: free of all subjects, of all objects, of all symbols,
written in the space (the abyss or blind-spot) where the traditional constituents of discourse (the
one who speaks, the events recounted, the way they are expressed) would be superfluous. The primary
consequence is that criticism, unable to discuss the author, his subject, or his style, can find no
way of taking hold of this text: Guyotat's language must be \enquote{entered}, not by believing it,
becoming party to an illusion, participating in a fantasy, but by writing the language with him in
his place, signing it along with him.

Getting in on the language, in the sense of \enquote{getting in on the act}, is possible because
Guyotat produces not a manner, a genre, a literary object, but a new element (which might even be
added to the four Elements of cosmogony); this element is the phrase: substance of speech with the
qualities of a fine cloth or a foodstuff, a single sentence which never ends, whose beauty comes not
from it refers to (the reality towards which it is supposed to point) but from its breath, cut
short, repeated, as if the author were trying to show us not a series if imaginary scenes, but the
scene of language, so that the model of this new mimesis is no longer the adventure of some hero,
but the adventure of the signifier itself: what becomes of it.

\booktitle{Eden Eden Eden} constitutes (or ought to constitute) a sort of eruption, a historical
shock: the whole of an earlier evolution of writing, seemingly double but coinciding in ways we can
now see more and more clearly, from Sade to Genet, from Mallarme to Artaud, is gathered up,
displaced, purified of its historical circumstances: no Story and no Sin (surely the same thing), we
are left simply with language and lust, not the former expressing the latter, but the two bound
together in a reciprocal metonymy, indissoluble.

The strength of this metonymy, sovereign in Guyotat's text, might presage a strong censure, which
will find here its two favourite pastures, language and sex, united; but any such censure, which may
take many forms, will be unmasked by its own vehemence: condemned to being excessive if it claims to
censure simply the subject and not the form, or vice versa: in either case condemned to reveal its
own essence as censorship.

Yet whatever the institutional peripeteia, the publication of this text is important: a whole body
of critical and theoretical work will be carried forward, without the text ever losing its power of
seduction: outside all categories and yet of an importance beyond any doubt, a new landmark and a
starting-point for new writing.

\signoff{Roland Barthes}

\mainmatter

\part{Eden Eden Eden}

\img{edensymbols.png}
\input{part1.tex}
\input{part2.tex}
\end{document}