First page of the manuscript of Valentin l'Obscur (Valentin the Obscure)

“These are very old texts. I wrote this text at the end of 1958. It was a lot about my mother, little time after her death, on August 25th 1958. I gave it to read to my father before my great runner to Paris. He told me he saw a lot of my mother in it – one of the last kind sentences we said to each other, a long time ago. That I understood her well, and that this text did him some good. He authenticated it, endorsed it. This text, written by hand, typed by one of my friends in Paris, Yves Bouvier, is the one I sent to Jean Cayrol, who created the book series and the journal Ecrire, with Le Seuil. It is from that text that I was acknowledged as a “real writer”. He asked for some additions, and I rejected it. I began writing On a Horse (Sur un cheval). When I titled Valentin the Obscure (Valentin l’Obscur), I did not know Blanchot (Thomas l’Obscur), nor Bataille, barely Artaud, whom a friend from the lycée du Parc, Louis Mermet, had given me to read. For Sur un cheval, I also had to choose a pseudonym, since I was still under age , and since my father did not want our name to be linked to this new text he considered ferocious for the family. I therefore chose Donalbain as a pseudonym, the youngest son of Duncan, in Macbeth, and I smoothened the original version. Valentin is very connected to the “fête galante”, very adolescent. At the end of the day, even in my most recent texts, the strongest, I never gave up on the “fête galante”, its masks, its speech almost for nothing, its total world, performed.” Pierre Guyotat