Rewriting the World: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Book

Isidore Isou (b. Jean-Isidore Goldstein, 1925-2007) escaped an anti-Semitic pogrom in his native Romania and arrived in Paris in 1945 with an urgent mission: to found a new avant-garde movement – Lettrisme – which would surpass Dada and transform the world towards a paradisiacal society based on creativity. Lettrisme engaged every art form – painting, poetry, performance, film – and addressed theoretical subjects from economics to erotology.

The book is a key Lettrist form, both as a carrier and as an expression of Lettrist ideas. Isou conceived of the new Lettrist novel as metagraphic — or, later, hypergraphic — in that it would combine all possible codes of communication: text, images, mathematical formula, music, asemic writing, and more. Isou first articulated and demonstrated his ideas in Les Journaux des dieux (The Diaries of the Gods, 1950), a book which included a fifty-page sequence that combined a dizzying array of communicative systems in layers of overlapping blue, red, and yellow inks. [publisher's note]