Wayne Koestenbaum on the Journals of Hervé Guibert

Wayne Koestenbam writes about the "unbridled eroticism" of Hervé Guibert, "the French novelist, memoirist, critic, and photographer who would die of AIDS in 1991, at the age of thirty-six," for the summer issue of Bookforum. Guibert's 600-plus-page Mausoluem of Lovers, Journals 1976-1991, translated by Nathanaël, has just come out from Nightboat Books, which tells us that "the sensual exigencies and untempered forms of address in this epistolary work, often compared to Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, use the letter and the photograph in a work that hovers between forms, in anticipation of its own disintegration."

Koestenbaum, who "can’t write about Guibert without mentioning his beautiful face" (we were just thinking the same thing, and would go with Michael Pitt for the movie), also notes that "Guibert’s lifework looms before me not merely as what Keats called (describing the Elgin Marbles) the 'shadow of a magnitude,' but as the magnitude itself, sans shadow." More:

Genet’s work might have taught the young Guibert to connect violence and desire, or maybe the wunderkind figured it out for himself. With or without tutelage, he quickly discovered how to worship a beautiful body while also wishing to despoil it. Punctures and holes gave him literary energy; gold-panner, he remapped the male body (not famous for its holes) as a gap-ridden and therefore ontologically profound locale. To acknowledge plural orifices is to acquire, if not agency, then majesty, complexity, cavernousness, tingle, introspection, enigma. And therefore Guibert (with Guy Hocquenghem, Michel Foucault, Tony Duvert, Dennis Cooper, Pierre Guyotat) sought to write hole-conscious fiction and theory, a prose eager for rifts in maleness wherever those rifts could be found.

Guibert’s journals, The Mausoleum of Lovers, form a vast arena of such holes—an operating theater, a humming phalanstery; filled, yes, with jetting, penetration, jacking off, and with anuses that are distinctly male—but also writing these hot zones in time and not as monolithic forces, writing these pricks and surges of desire as mistakes, falls from grace, and narrative absences. Where story falls apart, Guibert’s journal begins; where an erection happens, writing becomes futile but also gains the energy to articulate its own futility. Erection—occasion for journal-writing—announces not a triumphant arrival but an aporia, a goof, a misprision, a chance to stumble into impossible, irresolute speech.

There's so much more. Read it all at Bookforum.