“Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams”: Lettrism, Isou and the Hypergraphic Novel

The movement known as Lettrism (Lettrisme) was founded in Paris in 1947, by the Franco-Romanian artist Isidore Isou (1925–2007). One of the central tenets of Lettrism is that societies develop not because of the human instinct for survival, but because of the desire to create. More than this, if creativity is the highest form of action, and art its most visible form, then humanity is in charge of history. In this way, the artist takes the place of God, the first creator or artist. This philosophy takes visual form in the so-called “Hypergraphic Novels” created by Isou—a new form of artistic expression that would take writing, painting and thought beyond even Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (Joyce’s book was an endless source of inspiration for Isou). The aim of this chapter is to examine these works and, most importantly, to investigate how Isou brought the culture of Jewish mysticism to the Western avant-garde, an argument that fundamentally changes our understanding of movements such as Situationism, which were directly rooted in Lettrisme.