Hypergraphic Novels – 1950-1984

This catalogue focuses on one unique but essential aspect of Isidore Isou‘s work: his innovative and ultra-contemporary contribution to the novel, especially what he called the hypergraphic novel.
The hypergraphic novel is a novel that is no longer restricted to using words and sentences, but integrates all the customary signs of communication, wrenched from their initial function in order to become the engines for overthrowing the art of prose and narration. It is a super-writing which integrates all the world's alphabets (ancient, present, or invented), codes (morse, braille, musical notation, rebus), signs of communication, pictograms, prophetically anticipating the possibilities of computers and the Internet. This post-Joycean multi-narration, which from a distance could look to our modern eyes like trash comics half a century before their time, sometimes superimposes several layers of different colors, like screen filters in computer programs—call it the multi-colored novel—resulting in wild creations of an astonishing modernity.