It concerns the never-satisfied drive to profit (or cum) on the backs of whatever can be exchanged-the human, the animal, the natural. But beyond this historical anchoring, the scene breaks with historical boundedness to reach farther and farther through time, coursing man’s endless alienation, driving for the “divine slaving infinite,” the endless and utmost abandon to need, or control, or power. Pictures from the camps of World War II seen in books by the young Guyotat had imprinted their slaughterhouse images of naked and tortured bodies on his mind. Its slave figures have names borrowed from combatants in the struggles against colonialism and post-colonialism (for example, one hero is named Samora Machel after the revolutionary and eventual president of Mozambique who successfully fought Portuguese colonial rule), and are inflected by Guyotat’s observations and personal experiences (sexual encounters, men and women seen during his travels, or on the streets).

He has shifted its setting from the former French colonies in North Africa ( Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers or Eden, Eden, Eden ) to invented contemporary metropolises (in the recent and as-yet-untranslated Joyeux Animaux de la Misère ).

Over its long development, Guyotat has given this brothel scene many names. Indeed, the term vocation is not excessive to describe Guyotat’s devotion of more than fifty years to inventing the language for a dark horror: the writing of a prostitutional scene where prostitute slaves are bred for the sole purpose of their labor of lust and where all human life has a price. Pierre Guyotat’s autobiographical fiction In the Deep 1 is a backwards look, from the author’s 69th year, at the beginning of a creative vocation.

Eden eden eden by pierre guyotat