Destroy Humanism

Eric Vanderwall reviews Peter Behrman de Sinéty’s new translation of French author Pierre Guyotat’s memoir “Idiocy.”

By Eric VanderwallOctober 29, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

ON AN AUTUMN NIGHT in 1958, two young men—the 18-year-old narrator and his father’s younger brother—lie in a tent on a cobblestoned Parisian street between “two flows of dried piss.” It is two months after the death of the narrator’s mother, and although he will return to Lyon to resume his first year at lycée, it is not long before he runs away from his father and sisters to eke out a hardscrabble existence on these same streets.

Light from a passing boat sweeps over them, and the narrator looks over at “a plump hand, its bare arm marked with scars,” scratching at a dimly seen face where “lice leap on the nostril hairs.” Scents of perfume, filth, and dried piss waft over to him, along with another smell, one “issuing from the intimate parts, the secret places” of women, one that reminds him of three years earlier, smelling “the tampon of the sleeping girl” on a ferry crossing over from England. The narrator’s gaze lingers on the sleeping figure, noting how “the buttocks arch in a long purr,” moving along “the line of the crotch, clogged with dirt, crusted, toward the organ where the fleece glistens, damp, greasy,” until “the red halo of the boat […] starts off again in a plume of smoke.”

With this scene, Pierre Guyotat ushers readers into the time of his life chronicled in his memoir Idiocy, originally published in French (as Idiotie) in 2018 and now available from NYRB Classics in an English translation by Peter Behrman de Sinéty. Of Guyotat’s 80 years of life, this book, for which the author won the Prix Médicis (awarded to an author whose fame does not yet match his talent), covers only the period from 1958 to 1962, from the age of 18 to 22, in dreamy, digressive fragments.

From those fragments, Guyotat’s background emerges. He is one of six children born to a Polish mother and a French father who works as a country doctor in a “low mountain town.” When his mother dies in March 1958 after seven bedridden under the care of his two oldest sisters, Guyotat soon fulfills the escape to the city that has become “an inner imperative” for him. Guyotat’s thoughts often, especially in the early chapters, return to his mother, a woman “who understood the world only through the sacred, through its holy servants, celebrants of faith, charity, courage, and beauty,” a woman who showed some pride in her son choosing to “stake [his] life, [his] fate, [their] family honor, on inspiration alone.” Guyotat’s memories of his mother are always adoring, though sometimes erotic, as he recalls having “possibly trespassed the unspoken limits of the knowledge a son may have of his mother.”

From the house in the country, Guyotat flees to Paris twice. After the first flight, he returns for Christmas but leaves again for good out of shame at his theft from the family cashbox. Guyotat, by this point dedicated to his writerly calling (so disciplined in his practice at even this young age that he believes “a day without work is a day of death”), survives in Paris doing courier work and various temp jobs. These early chapters are full of moments of beauty, of the grotesque, of pain, of joy in observation—the “sobs of a saxophone” in a nightclub, a sparrow that “sleeps in a box of rags on the ground” and “lets out a little peep each time it wakes,” nighttime “arriv[ing] at the café’s glass door, beaten by the snow.” His vision is resolutely materialist: the body, for him, is an “enclosure of meat,” “a swarming of matter from one tube to another, from one gluey duct to another, incessant chemical transmutations, twisted black pudding.” Young Guyotat has been called to write (and he does write), but he has not yet found his first great subject or his political stance.

One night in Paris, mere months before his compulsory military service begins, Guyotat wanders into a café that caters to Arabs. As an ensemble consisting of “a small flute, darabukka, [and] rustic viol” plays, “a girl comes and goes from the semidarkness, loins glittering to the thrusts of her dance” as she “sheds clothes at each turn.” In this place, “everything […] smells sweet, good, the humans, the instruments,” but Guyotat knows that “over there, in Algeria, people are hunting humans down, killing.” Police raid the café, and when asked if he is one of these foreigners, Guyotat replies that he is “not worthy to be.” In the pages that follow, Guyotat’s outward life seems as before, but he feels his “conscience pricking at [his] chest” (though he does not explicitly say why), and the account of his impecunious Parisian youth ends with a desire for self-transcendence: “Slaughter my I, live without. Without restraint, the senses alone, animal. Exist without being.”

Without any transition besides the chapter title “Prisons,” the narrative skips ahead to Guyotat’s time in Algeria as a soldier. Military life—its regimentation, its “spell of stupidity”—does not agree with Guyotat, but he refuses to be broken. He keeps alive his sense of himself as an artist, even being able to “laugh and tremble” at the Dear John he receives on the same day as his publishing contract, seeing this as evidence that “love is forbidden [him] so that [he can] create.” And his artistry does indeed make it difficult for him to love and be loved, even by his devoted father, who sends him torn copies of his “first little published book” with “another letter of admonishment.” (The novel in question, Sur un cheval, was published under a pseudonym in 1961 since Guyotat père refused to allow his son, still a legal minor, to use the family name. Guyotat fils chose Donalbain—one of the sons of murdered King Duncan in Macbeth—for his nom de plume.)

Guyotat’s writing also gets him in trouble more serious than paternal disapproval. Upon finding some of his notebooks (in which, among other things, he compared one officer to “some auburn youth of Stendhal’s, with a naive, tenebrous charm,” and another to “a figure of Thomas Hardy’s, bent under some secret, fatal social burden”), military authorities imprison him in an earthen cellar for three months. In spite of the isolation and hardships (such as having to dig channels in the dirt with his hands during rainstorms, lest the runoff that fills his cell soak the sawdust mattress and cause it to rot), Guyotat remains committed to his artistic vision and to “the French language, which since [his] early adolescence, [he had] aspired to renew.” He conceals a small notebook smuggled in by a friend (his first note: “Nothing is pure”) and maintains the acuity of his imagination by humming pieces by Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Debussy, and others in their entirety, so much so that his “jaw hurts from chewing on all this music.”

The final two chapters of Idiocy (about a third of the book) focus on the last days of the Algerian war of independence, and here the fragments become even shorter, even more abrupt, conveying the confusion and violence of war. The author muses on the history of the French colony, how all “the regimes of nineteenth-century France are steeped in the blood of the conquest of Algeria,” and considers the myths that might help him understand the conflict, especially Antigone’s “obstinacy in wanting to bury her brother,” having himself seen “how corpses are violated, mutilated,” as “a new nation giv[es] birth to itself before us, against us, with us.” Much of that violence, though, remains out of sight, just off the page, though signs and rumors of violence are inescapable: the handsome, well-dressed fellow soldier said to delight in “cutting off the ears of those he kills”; a woman holding “a bloodied turban in her outstretched hand”; a “single motorcycle, lying on its side, jolting, beneath the smoke, a belted body opened atop it, a leg quivering, the front wheel still spinning slowly.” Guyotat devotes most of his account of the spring and summer of 1962, which saw the end of the war and the withdrawal of French troops, to an outing with an army mate (a snaggletoothed man whose record of “attempted public intercourse with dogs male and female, goats male and female” angers the army authorities less than Guyotat’s nonconformity) to a forbidden civilian area on one of the most dangerous nights of the withdrawal.

When the memoir ends, the question of the title remains an open one. Does it refer to the idiocy of youth? Of French colonialism? Of French bourgeois values, which Guyotat sets himself against? Of the conformity and corrupted language of the military? Perhaps the idiocy the author had in mind is hinted at in a passage that comes shortly after his three-month confinement. It is spring 1962 in Algeria, and Guyotat has just begun reading William Faulkner’s The Mansion, finding its treatment 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” relevant to his own experience. He vows to “create an oeuvre of the beast, of the idiot who speaks, of ‘nothing,’” and “through the idiot” to “destroy humanism, comprehend the political monster.” This can be taken as a description of the present memoir, as well as of Guyotat’s work as a whole, a corpus that never ceases to transgress and surprise. Indeed, Idiocy ends with the war over and the narrator embracing a sense of “strength of flesh renewed,” en route to Paris, “determined to do battle” and believing that “everything is to be reconquered.”