Rewriting the Bible
Frédéric Acquaviva
(excerpt, p. 16-18)
In the front matter of his third and last hypergraphic novel, Jonas, Isou placed a list of
“works by the same author.” As was his usual practice, he limited this list to just one
specific area of study, in this case
hypergraphology.
This new form of art was invented by Isou in 1950, even though the basic idea of the
Lettrist novel was born at an earlier date that Isou indicated precisely: May 25, 1942.
This art is in fact the fusion of painting and the novel, or of prose with all the means,
mechanics and signs of communication. It is a sort of hyper-writing, which Isou
would first call
metagraphics before replacing this term with
hypergraphics in 1954.
Meanwhile Wolman and Debord continued using the term
metagraphics, so much so that I have met people who think the term was invented by the successful author of
La Société
du spectacle.
In an ironic “détournement,” the term
hypergraphic, brought into use in 1974 by Stephen
Waxman and Norman Geschwind to designate the
writing mania and applied after the fact
to Dostoevsky, Dante and Petrarch, could naturally relate to the gigantic and uninterrupted
body of writing by the whimsical and fantastic author of Romanian origin! Besides, numerous
neologisms coined by Isou have entered general usage, such as the term
neo-Nazi that Isou
claimed to have used first.
The term
metagraphics was in fact the name of a system of simplified stenography created
by Abbot Duployé in 1867, which led Isou to decide to advantageously replace it with
hypergraphics to avoid confusion. Furthermore, this term is better suited to specifying
a super‑writing, a post-writing, integrating all alphabets (possible, ancient, current or
invented), all codes (morse, braille, musical notes), and even games (rebuses, pictograms),
which are used — and this is what makes all the difference — for their creative and artistic
aspect, and not simply for functional communication. What immediately distinguishes a
urinal installed by a plumber from Duchamp's ready-made urinal is not the object, which is
identical, but the meaning and function of the urinal which has become an esthetic object
(even non-esthetic or ending up that way, as Duchamp understood so well). Likewise, the
Mayan Codices, pictograms on highway signs, musical scores and Sumerian steles do not
have the function of operating in the same exact field as
hypergraphics, as defined here, in
1950. That is because, for Isou, a novel comes from the field of art, which takes us far away
from the kind of book that is a waste of trees and that one reads in order to “sleep better,”
as I once heard someone say.
Isou gives a generic title —
Les Journaux des Dieux — to the collection which includes
Genèse (namely the 50 plates from the book published by Aux Escaliers de Lausanne
with the name
Les Journaux des Dieux),
Initiation à la haute volupté, which was
subtitled
Cantique des Cantiques (Song of Songs), then
Jonas, making up the three
far-reaching hypergraphic novels he would conceive. Under this same label we
can also group
Les nombres, which was his first group of oils on canvas, dating
from 1952, as well as Amos, a series of 9 hypergraphic photographs, published in
the form of a book, but also to be considered a film. We must note here the hypercontemporary
aspect of this choice, given that
Les Journaux des Dieux, like
Canailles (“Scoundrels”) by Maurice Lemaître (but not like Gabriel Pomerand's
Saint-Ghetto
des Prêts (“Saint-Ghetto of the Loans”)) are transmedia works, using all the formats:
book, drawings, photos, film, painting etc. Isn't this mixture made easier today by
centralizing creation through the computer, which makes it simple to move from
one format to another, even without realizing it? In this sense, these works and their conception have a striking modernity, like the theories that led up to them and that
seem to be 50 years ahead of their time. One only has to see the recent appearance of the
term graphic novel or the hybrid form of the vook, a cross between video and book. As for the
sound books proposed by Isou in 1950, they would appear 10 years later, before becoming
ordinary a decade ago.
However, the goal of this exhibition and its catalog is not hypergraphic painting or
photography, but only the novelistic matter. I will thus concentrate on the precise field of the
written novel, of which
Les Journaux des Dieux, published in 1950 in the form of a revealing
and courageous self-publication, would be the next innovative link in a chain, following Joyce,
Proust, Gide, Dostoevsky, Zola, Flaubert, Stendhal.
(...)
