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On the Horizon: Messiah of Lettrisme
- Abstract
There is not a single habitué of the Parisian literary cafés, and scarcely a single French intellectual, who is not now aware of the existence of Isidor Isou—a young man of twenty-four who came to Paris on foot from Botosani, Rumania, in 1945, penniless, without official papers and barely speaking French, but armed with the unshakeable conviction that he was called upon to “revolutionize”—immediately and on a planetary scale—“art, poetry, literature, and music.”
A coterie of young people, assembled God knows how, accepted with uncontrolled enthusiasm the literary theory of the aposde from Botosani: poetry has nothing to do with literature, and in order to liberate poetry from its chains in this atomic century, it is necessary to destroy not only the verse forms, but the words themselves. “The new art,” declared Isou (his real name is Isidor Goldstein), “accepts as its subject matter the letters reduced to, and become simply, themselves, replacing completely all poetic and musical elements which go beyond the letters in order to shape them into coherent works.” Thus was born Lettrisme, which may be regarded as a resurrection of some old avant-garde theories, or as a postwar symptom comparable to the explosions of Surrealism and Dada after World War I. To the “seven manifestos of Dada,” Isou opposed the thick Introduction à une nouvelle poesie et à unenouvelle musique, which was issued by Gallimard, under threat, in case of refusal, of seeing its publishing house serve as fuel for a bonfire by the enthusiasts of Lettrisme. Among the “classics” of the new art, there is the following poem, which bears the tide “Sabbatical Orchestra of Infernal Spirits During a Sultry Summer Night”:
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