by Greil Marcus
Smashing the faith in genius, the belief that God blessed the artist with special powers and guided his hand toward some transcendent revelation, dada had revealed the process. After dada, all art sat in a compost pile, its mystifications sucked into the methane. There could be no real communication; all words had come loose from their meanings and floated free of their owners. Still, a compost pile was good for something: fertilizer. Along with the preordained stages of amplification and decomposition there was another possibility: that of “ciselant” (chiseling away). This was active, conscious decomposition, and it was the only means to active creation. The true artist, the true god, would position himself as a lever beneath the edifice of art. He would force it toward changes that were, because of inertia and fear, everywhere resisted—changes that the mechanics of invention demanded but that, without the intervention of the nascent god, would never come, at least not while the nascent god was around to enjoy them. That any given form contained within itself the seeds of its own transcendence did not remove the need for intervention; because all forms were human inventions, this fact demanded it. Whatever had been made had to be unmade, and then made new. Civilization, Isou was sure, was mindlessly perpetuating the Last Days; without him, it would live them out forever.
THUS LETTRISM
Thus “lettrism”: “the avant-garde of the avant-garde.” Isou began with poetry, because as creation was the highest form of human activity, and art the highest form of creation, poetry was the highest form of art.
The amplifying stage of poetry, the seventeen-year-old Isou determined, ended with Victor Hugo. Then Baudelaire destroyed the anecdote in favor of the poetic form; Verlaine destroyed the poetic form in favor of the pure line; Rimbaud destroyed the line in favor of the word; Mallarmé perfected the word and turned it toward sound—and then, heedlessly overreaching the mechanics of invention, Tristan Tzara had destroyed the word in favor of the void: “Dada,” Tzara’s motto ran, “signifies nothing.” Isou corrected him: “nothing” was a stage, not a goal. Yes, the word signified nothing, a roomful of talkers was a roomful of confetti—so Isou would rescue the letter from the word. He would reenact and redirect a stage in the reduction of the word, and the world, to nothing: he would forcibly reduce the word to the letter, the pure sign, seemingly meaningless, in truth endlessly fecund.
Diagram from Isidore Isou, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et une nouvelle musique, 1947
He would set the sign loose in the ether. It would float past time, through history, in and out of consciousness, until it had repelled all old meanings—and then, with its charge reversed, it would begin to attract new meanings. The letter would be ready to form a new alphabet and a new language, a language that could say what had never been said, in tones that had never been heard. On the plane of the mechanics of invention, this would mean that once again the creation of the anecdote, the telling of new stories, would be possible. Once stories could be told, they could be lived; because a story was an account of the world, a new world could be created. And because Isou was speaking not only of the history of poetry but of the poetry of history—of consciousness, which like memory is of time but not in it—this absolute transformation could happen in a flash. It would be like time travel in a 1940s radio play: “I will be gone for a thousand years,” says the scientist to his assistant, “but to you it will seem only like a moment.”
Now there is no question that the fanatical symmetry of Isou’s system was absolutely teenage—or that, in the mid-1940s, it contained a real challenge to the accepted view of what art was, what it could do, and what it was for. Isou was ready: all that was left was to reach Paris, to him the capital of culture, announce his discovery, and change the world. With the help of local Zionists, he escaped from the Nazis in Romania; in August 1945 he arrived in the City of Light as a twenty-year-old crank.
High culture at the turn of the half-century: Isidore Isou, 1951
HE WAS
He was, though, a crank with a sense of history, and a fierce sense of publicity. He wasn’t born “Isidore Isou”; he was born Jean-Isidore Goldstein, just as his Romanian-Jewish dada forebear was born Sami Rosenstock. Rosenstock gave himself the exciting new name “Tristan Tzara”; awarding himself a name almost as alliteratively memorable, Isou played Chubby Checker to Tzara’s Fats Domino.
That was not all. Isou was sexy—sexy in an androgynous manner far ahead of its time. His lower lip was enormous, enticing; his mouth was all sensuality, all come-on. His dark curls began in an elephant’s trunk and ended in a proto-D.A.; in some early 1950s photos he looks amazingly like Tony Curtis, whose internationally right, cuddly-delinquent face would appear on the Hollywood screen about the same time Isou gained his first taste of fame. So I suggested to Michèle Bernstein, as we stood in her living room before Guy Debord’s first lettrist metagraphic (“a fancy word for collage”), which featured a torn photo of Isou. “No!” she said. “Elvis Presley!” Isou’s field of action may have been high art, his theories penumbratic; physically, instinctively, he was a hound dog.
Isou’s own description of his invasion of Paris—from his 1947 L’Agrégation d’une nom et d’un messie (The Making of a Name, the Making of a Messiah)—gives something of the flavor of his monomania. Hitting the city with a suitcase full of manuscripts and a letter of introduction to Jean Paulhan, in 1945 managing editor of the Gallimard publishing house, Isou made straight for the offices of his—he was sure—patron-to-be; it being a Saturday, Paulhan was not in. Putting into effect his principle of “the minimum and the maximum” (derived from the mechanics of amplitude-ciselant: life, like art, had to be taken to extremes), Isou then claimed to be a Romanian journalist and demanded an interview with Gaston Gallimard himself. Once through the door he abandoned the minimum and pressed the maximum, offering his book-length “Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, de Charles Baudelaire à Isidore Isou.” Gallimard agreed to consider it; Paulhan read it and, according to Isou, “expressed interest,” though perhaps “acknowledged receipt” pops up between the lines. But no decision was forthcoming—and so, Isou continues, he brought to bear his system of “calculated impatience,” retrieved his manuscript, and began taking it to other publishers. This brought no results.
It was only when Isou began to exploit his talent for publicity that he gained a foothold in Paris—and for that he needed disciples. His first was Gabriel Pomerand, whom he met at a canteen for Jewish refugees. Born Pomerans, Pomerand was an indigent, nineteen-year-old devotee of the surrealist saint Lautréamont; after making common cause with Isou he would style himself the “cantor of lettrism” and the “saint of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.” Expelled by Isou from the lettrist movement in 1956, he became an opium addict; he killed himself in 1972.
Impressed by the famous authors Isou claimed to have met—André Gide, Jean Cocteau—Pomerand agreed to double the membership of the lettrist crusade. In the dead of night, the two plastered the walls of the Latin Quarter with handbills denouncing socialist-realist and surrealist poets as reactionary enemies of true creation. Nothing happened. They held a reading; few took notice.
Their chance for a coup came—with dada-trumps-dada serendipity—with the 21 January 1946 premiere of Tristan Tzara’s play La Fuit (Flight), which was to be preceded by a lecture by former surrealist Michel Leiris. Tzara was Isou’s hero, the father he had to kill, the false god: the perfect target. Isou and Pomerand rounded up everyone they knew and bought tickets; when Leiris began to expound on dada, with Tzara seated in the audience, they stood up. “We know about dada, M. Leiris—tell us about something new! For example—lettrism!” “Dada is dead! Lettrism has taken its place!” Understandably, Leiris had no idea what they were talking about. The cries went on: “Long live lettrism!” “You’re kidding! You’ve never heard of lettrism?” A shout came from the back of the room: “Throw the lettrists in the toilet!”
Rattled, Leiris broke off his talk and the play began. Afterward, Pomerand
bulled his way onto the stage and demanded that the creator of an epochal breakthrough in the arts, one Isidore Isou, be permitted to explain his theories and recite his letter poems. Isou stepped forward; most of the audience walked out. A few people approached.
Thus did Isou make the papers for the first time—and brilliantly. A front-page article in the left-wing daily Combat put Isou into headlines: “THE ‘LETTRISTS’ SHAKE UP A READING ON TZARA.” More publicity and more recruits followed—and on that basis, according to Isou, Gallimard finally offered a contract. According to the word on the street, Gallimard did so because Isou’s followers threatened to burn down his offices—but such rumors were merely fuel for the fire. Six months after his arrival in Paris as a nobody, Isou was on his way.
INSISTING
Insisting on the maximum even before his first book appeared, Isou began placing exclusive interviews with luminaries of literary Paris: Gide, François Mauriac, and others. That the conversations were entirely made up displeased the publication in which they ran, so Isou began his own: La Dictature lettriste (The Lettrist Dictatorship), there and gone with a single number, but the first of many lettrist reviews.
Today, one has the luxury of taking the title as an effusion of simple puerility, or flat megalomania. In 1946 it was appalling. Every day, the papers were full of stories exposing Frenchmen who collaborated with the Nazis, with reports on unthinkable Nazi crimes and dispatches from the Nuremberg trials; in this context the flaunting of the word “dictatorship” was worse than the punk celebration of the swastika, and it worked on the same levels. Isou’s provocation was a way of getting attention; it was an argument that, in the world everyone accepted without questioning, one dictatorship had been replaced by another; it spoke for an authentic flirtation with the fascist abolition of limits. The result was more publicity and more adepts.
Isou produced books on the theater, on himself, on love: the latter was La Mécanique des femmes (The Mechanics of Women), which in 1949 made his name a password on the Left Bank. In his preface Isou more or less dared the police to arrest him (the brochure was in essence a sex manual), announcing that he was sure the police would not arrest him—after all, hadn’t he already issued a far more subversive manifesto, a call for a “Lettrist Revolution”? The minister of the interior took the bait: he banned the book and had Isou picked up. Hauled before a magistrate, Isou declared that his work made a “useful contribution to the education of youth”; the judge ignored the Socratic jibe and packed Isou off to a state psychiatrist. Meanwhile, The Mechanics of Women topped the black-market charts.
After hours at the Tabou—once Boris Vian’s jazz band packed up, Sartre, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty had stumbled on home, and Juliet Greco vanished into the night—Pomerand mounted the tables, shook a tambourine, and recited letter poetry. He passed the hat among drunken tourists and turned the proceeds over to the Messiah. In the cafes, more serious work continued. Submitting to the mechanics of invention—and thus, if one divined the rules correctly, making cultural history by definition—the lettrists pushed their post-dada letter poetry into “estheperist” poetry, a poetry of the final element, a proto-language based on linguistic particles “that have no immediate meaning, where each element exists in so far as it allows one to imagine another element which is either nonexistent or possible”—a typically mathematical isouienne formula that soon produced extraordinary results. They replaced both visual art and narrative prose with metagraphics (later “hypergraphics”), a neo-hieroglyphics where sentences were interrupted or completed by pictures and vice versa, “thus introducing into alphabetic writing not only the art of painting, but the graphics of all peoples or social categories past and present, as well as the graphics or anti-graphics of every individual imagination.” In 1950, with his Saint ghetto de prêts, subtitled “grimoire” (book of spells or, alternately, gibberish), Pomerand raised the metagraphic to the level of a cosmic pun. It was a fabulous production: every word was shifted by a picture, every picture subverted by a word, and what the situationists would call “the insubordination of words” was dramatized even in Pomerand’s title. With the substitution of the word “prêts” (loans), the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés—the lettrist stomping ground, the “protagonist” of the book—became a place where people lived on borrowed time; with the substitution of the word “ghetto,” it became a place no one could leave. But as one turns the pages, the neighborhood becomes a labyrinth, where every chance encounter with a word, a picture, a building, or a person seethes with legend and possibility, opening into a secret utopia accessible to anyone capable of recognizing it. “Saint germain des prés is a ghetto,” Pomerand began. “Everyone there wears a yellow star over his heart . . . Saint germain des prés is a mirror of heaven.”
As the years went on, the lettrists replaced poetry, music, dance, the novel, philosophy, theater, cinema, architecture, photography, theology (“All will be gods—all will be masters”), radio, television, and video with new forms based on the same principles of particle physics that Isou first applied to poetry. They are doing it now, as I write, still in their self-made ghetto—but in postwar Paris the lettrists remained best known for replacing civility with noise. Because Raoul Hausmann had in fact invented letter poetry in Berlin after the First World War (in 1968, past seventy, Hausmann gave a demonstration, growling “OFFEAHBDC/BDQ” through a long speaking tube, then hefting it like a harpoon and highstepping, finally hammering it to the floor: “You don’t think I remember this 1918 crap by heart, do you?”), Isou and his followers attacked the originator as a plagiarist—to Hausmann’s eternal bafflement and fury, though there survives a wondrous 1946 tape of Hausmann and various lettrists debating the question entirely through imaginary letter languages. It is said that in 1971, as Hausmann lay dying, Isou sent him a weekly letter, each containing only the repetition of a single word: “Ordure, ordure, ordure.”
Two pages from Gabriel Pomerand, Saint ghetto des prêts, 1950. Comment by Jean-Paul Curtay: “The right page displayed the magic of the mysteriographic transformation of the text, which was printed on the left page in regular words. [It was] a strange hybrid wherein ideograms, rebuses, Hebrew alphabet, cuneforms, and sign language intermingled . . . croirait (‘would believe’) [might be] represented by a cross (croix) drawn on the back of a ray (raie); déniche (‘rummage’) by faces of dice (dé) drawn on the roof and wall of a dog house (niche); chaivre (‘overturn’) by a cat (chat) whose tail had the form of a phallus (vit) and whose behind bore a stave and the note D (ré).”
The lettrists attacked Gide (“old bitch,” “faggot”) and Isou’s benefactor Paulhan (“the style of a toad”). André Breton was savaged as a windbag leaking “flabby rage,” hysterically attempting to maintain his place in times that had passed him by: “He offers himself, himself and his generation, to every faith, to every hope, to every boutique. One has learned not to be fooled—and there he stands.” Existentialism was dismissed as a pallid, vulgarized melange of Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and Jaspers—a not entirely inaccurate assessment. The culture war was on.
Isou’s declaration that his goal was to become god (“but,” he noted in 1958, “without renouncing the pleasures of suspicion and skepticism”) was not a joke; neither was his claim that anyone else who created a new form could become god as well. Just as dada called up millenarian ghosts, Isou too excavated the gnostic belief that those who gathered around the truth, they and no one else, would become the Gods of Truth, and inherit the earth. “He was the Messiah,” says Jean-Paul Curtay (today a doctor and a poet, in the late 1960s a member of Isou’s group). “He promised paradise: that the economy would be a horn of plenty, art a continual excitement, life a wonder.”
Cold on the page, it is hard to imagine anyone believed it—but in many ways, many did. What matters is not to take Isou’s declarations literally—though the more unbalanced among the lettrists, such as Pomerand, swallowed them whole—but to grasp, within a postwar context of social co
nformity and official artistic entropy (“This is a time,” Breton told Isou, “for adding to legends”), the power of Isou’s extremist appeals. Isou was not a dadaist; he was a politician. Throughout his early and mid-twenties his great role was to bring out the fanatic in anyone—especially in young people convinced of their own unacknowledged genius. In any time, this means a lot of young people; in Paris in the late 1940s the alternatives to lettrism included hanging out at the Deux Magots in order to learn what brand of cigarettes Simone de Beauvoir smoked. A few years later, Françoise Sagan and J. D. Salinger would offer young people self-pity and narcissism; Isou offered them heroism, comradeship, and, perhaps most important, their names in print. Isou himself, enemy of all conventional discourse, wrote hundreds, then thousands of pages explicating his theories; the productions of his followers, treatises and tracts on every kind of art filled with every kind of graph, chart, and equation, matched the master’s scholastic concentration and his cabalistic hermeticism—if not his endurance. But the curls cascading down Isou’s smooth forehead were no less inspiring than his words. “Even today,” Michèle Bernstein said of the picture of Isou on her wall, “when my nieces come to visit, they always ask the same thing: ‘Who’s the pop star?’ ” Isou’s visceral message was that the world belonged to the young—if they could make it.
