In an interview that appeared in The White Review shortly after his death in 2020, Pierre Guyotat said that he found in Faulkner “a kind of idiocy” that is “wonderful,” Faulkner’s world one “that suits me perfectly.” The titular “idiocy” of Guyotat’s memoir of runaway youth and military servitude is a nod to Shakespeare and Faulkner, to Macbeth’s line that life is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.” Guyotat’s narrator is far more sophisticated than the disabled Benjy of The Sound and the Fury, but in both books simplicity is a mask worn for estranging effect.
After a Rilkean sojourn in the seams, les plis sinueux of Paris, Guyotat’s narrator, a sexual and political innocent, from a family of selfless medics and Resistance martyrs, is called up for national service and deployed to an abyss of rape, terrorism, torture, and putsch. There he witnesses abrupt exposures of desire and suffering (in Algeria as in Paris, he’s a voyeuristic lurker), hears distant gunfire and a pidgin of “Kabyle mixed with Army French,” and breathes the ambiguous odors “commonplace in this tragic territory: rubbish heaps in heat waves, presumed mass graves, unknown carcasses from threefold civil war.”
Guyotat and those around him are mutes. Single words and short phrases occur at wide intervals; speech is severely summarized, minimally reported; and the narrator speaks but once, to read aloud from Faulkner’s The Mansion (Maurice Coindreau’s translation, Le Domaine, appeared in 1962). One of the beauties of silence is that every act stands out, closely observed, slowly followed in a filmic hush, and so becomes eloquent, ominous, terrifying – at times all at once. Guyotat declined to give dialogue to the interrogation that preceded his imprisonment – solitary confinement in a basement brig, a basin of effluent – for aiding a deserter and recording the boasts of rape and trophy-taking (ears, of course) committed by the Commandos de Chasse. The recording of atrocities, not their commission, is ever the act said to “constitute the crime of corrupting the morale of the army.”
Not that that army had any morale left to corrupt by 1962 (he notes Faulkner’s death that year). The postbellum “exodus” was a Faulknerian panorama of demoralization and displacement, a defeated homeward tramp: conscripts herded by officers stained by torture and treason; the pied-noirs, foolish settlers who, having made the indigènes refugees in their own land, embark for France as refugees, their “repatriation” really an exile; the Harkis, auxiliaries who feared the threat of massacre behind and faced nothing but banlieues ahead. When his old unit forwarded the narrator his belongings, an officer opened the package and demanded he explain each item, including the Gallimard Le Domaine:
What’s this Faulkner about? From what I know of the history of French and European colonization, the violent conquest, the plundered and the profiteers, the small and large estates, the urban and rural servitude, the bonds between the subjugated and their masters, and from what I know of Faulkner, having read The Unvanquished and a little of Absalom, Absalom! I prepare myself to speak of the “South.” But at the sound of the sublieutenant’s pied-noir accent, I refrain from replying, for fear that the evocation of a people vanquished for its inextinguishable sin might lead him to believe I am thinking of his own people, and cause him to denounce me as an agitator again.
France and the Confederate states have been in dialogue for a long time. Julien Green, whose agonous sexuality resembles Guyotat’s, was the first non-national elected to the Académie française; he owed his birth in Paris to an incident of 1893, when his father, a Virginian, was offered a choice of the Paris or the Berlin office of his employer (a producer of cottonseed oil), Green’s mother, a Georgian, insisted on Paris – because of La Débâcle of 1870, she cried, “they will understand us!”
De Gaulle’s handling of Algeria echoes Lincoln’s handling of the southern states, a century earlier. Both presidents spoke emotionally, tactically and sincerely, from an excess of imaginative, writerly empathy, if not of identification (when you hear Je vous ai compris, watch your back). Their practice mixed pliable temporising and firm constitutional assertion. Both had to rely on a fractious army (though General McClellan’s minions, while dreaming of coups, never tried to assassinate Lincoln), and both cherished certain guardrails: France must jettison Algeria, if the French presence meant fruitless expenditure and the racist backwardness and the shabby stain on its grandeur that came with the policing of a colonized people (ratissage, “raking,” the paratroops called it, as the Israelis say “mowing the grass,” כיסוח דשא) – as Lincoln saw that the future of the United States – its coherent expansion, international example, and spiritual health – must proceed without slavery and the illiberal forces that supported slavery, and would have spread slavery, and had already irreparably warped the nation’s fragile civility.
Were I to announce my intentions point-blank, there was no doubt that a sea of ignorant fear, of shocked surprise, of concerted malevolence through which I was navigating could cause such a tidal wave of alarms and passions in every walk of life that the ship would capsize. I must, therefore, manoeuevre without ever changing course until such time as, unmistakably, common sense broke through the mists.
The words of De Gaulle, quoted by Horne, though they might have been Lincoln’s in August 1862, mulling his draft of the Proclamation, amidst the objections of his cabinet.
I’ve wandered from Guyotat’s qualities and affinities. Beyond Faulkner, Idiocy evokes the classics of military injustice: De Vigny’s The Grandeur and Servitude of Arms, Three Soldiers, The Enormous Room, From Here to Eternity, Paths of Glory, The Battle of Algiers, Breaker Morant, The Thin Red Line, Beau Travail; but I think its true mood-mates are Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems of the Russian Civil War and her Moscow diaries, The Demesne of the Swans and Earthly Signs: an unrestrainable witness, politically outraged and personally esoteric, an orphic scream from the ranks in step.
Eric Byrd is a librarian and archivist living in Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota.
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