‘Let there be darkness!’ These words, which open Alfred Jarry’s L’Amour absolu, antithetically borrowing from Genesis its most sudden and devastating effect, appear to be the very kernel around which the still-unpublished works of Jean-Pierre Duprey crystallize. It indeed seems that ‘darkness’ could have emerged from the primordial chaos just as easily as light, and the fact is that the blackest night is populated with animals that see only in the dark and that we may in no way consider inferior to diurnal beasts. Moreover, it is more or less a given that nothing is less favourable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms. The idea of the preeminence of light over shadow doubtless can be taken as a relic of oppressive Greek philosophy. In this regard, I ascribe major importance and great liberating value to the objection made by Stéphane Lupasco to the Hegelian dialectical system, which was derived much more than necessary from Aristotle: ‘A dialectics that is the exact inverse of Hegel’s … is not only possible but real. In it, the value of negation and diversification – in other words, what he calls the antithesis – virtualizes, by becoming real, both the contradictory value of affirmation and identity that constitute his thesis, and a third dialectic, in which neither one could triumph over the other and which therefore progressively deepens a relative contradiction.’1
Jean-Pierre Duprey is one of the arches – and by no means the smallest – that uphold this view, this arch being pure intuition. Every spiritual age, in retrospect, is distinguished both by the particular movements of speculative thought that its contemporaries choose to heed (as, it seems, they have chosen Lupasco’s recent interventions), and, on the artistic level, by eruptive phenomena that occur even in the very young – naturally without the slightest intercommunication to explain their concordance.
The years separating the first and second editions of the present anthology, whatever historical stagnation they might have witnessed, are nonetheless among those that count the most heavily in emotional terms, because it was during these years that the future, in its most concrete and basic form, turned uncertain. What will become of this approximate future or non-future? For once, it’s the pulse of the entire human race that we must take; and how better to do that than by entering into contact with, and calling upon, a body of work that would be the newest and most inspired to date?
On the eve of 1950, I can say without hesitation that this privileged opus is by Jean-Pierre Duprey, even though it is (or because it is) the most ‘difficult’ that these last haggard years have given us. It is worth venturing into his underbrush. It is neither my fault nor his that the composition of black humour today, in contrast to ten years ago, requires us to exaggerate the dose of pure black. Duprey’s genius is to offer us a spectrum of blackness that is every bit as diverse as the solar spectrum. No less secret than in Igitur – ‘He leaves the room and becomes lost in the stairways (instead of sliding down the banister)’ – humour here smoulders under the ashes (‘And things happened in the same order, after they had drowned the sea and buried the earth; fire having burned, the air disappeared in the smoke of the new fire regenerated by all of this’).
The lamp of presence tends to conceal from us the real Duprey, Prince of the realm of Doubles, in guises that are, moreover, very seductive. About his main self, the others tell us very little – except that he lives with his wife, ‘Ueline the Black,’ in a house located in the heart of a forest full of wolves.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Derrière son double, 1948. La Fin et la Manière, 1950. La Forêt sacrilège.
Same setting, but the Night has become green. Two men are sitting.
NUMBER 1: We are at green midnight, on August third of the year zero, and later on, when the rooster spits three times …
NUMBER 2: … The rooster is no more, for the spider has replaced him. She sings better and louder with all those legs, which are her trunks … She sneezes for real! …
NUMBER 1: When the spider spits three times, when she spins the web of her voice thickened by her trumpet crutches, the world will change its meaning and the earth its name. And already I’ve heard that an advance guard from the army of corpses has set fire to the graves and is proclaiming the coming of freedom by casket …
NUMBER 2: And the forest prowlers will see their heads flying above them in projectiles that they didn’t launch. They’ll see them, all right, for their severed necks ablaze with their own blood will be large gaping eyes … My anger stands witness, for I’m seeing red.
NUMBER 1: Bodies hang like useless bells … The trees will always bear fruit.
NUMBER 2: But the thousand-fingered spider will have a lot to spin, and shrouds will be very scarce. Our master Estern, who can make a single blow of two stones, grants us the freedom to be his dogs. At his signal, we shall bark with a single, common, toothless mouth, and the battle will surely be won!
He stands and draws his dagger.
NUMBER 2: I must still sew the trees for our Mistress’s veil, for I have proclaimed myself tailor …
He plunges his dagger into the trunk of a tree.
NUMBER 2: The leaves cry out and branches bleed … But this wood alcohol tastes like nothing. I’m thirsty!
He drinks.
NUMBER 1: Still, the hour is getting late; and since Estern, our lord and master and doctor-of-esternity, grants us this under pain of death, let us be his dogs! But someone is coming. I can clearly hear the silence of his steps through my two hands, sculpted as stumps of deaf pork and pierced by donkey’s antennas … through my two front paws, rather, which are like two extra ears! … That explains why I hear two double steps …
… But let’s fix our masks!
Numbers 3 and 4 appear, wearing the same dog masks.
NUMBER 3: I salute you with all my teeth, and may leprosy complete your disguises! My comrade, who is a woman despite appearances, has come from afar to announce great news. At the hour determined by an exact number which is XII – and this hour shall vary no more – at the crossroads of missing spaces, the knight Sagittarius will appear, he whose steed, the steed of the spectre, tramples a discus sun! … The result has not been foretold, but I predict the imminent end of these hostilities for peace …
Moreover, the battle rages, and the fury of corpses at liberty guides the fair and ill wind.
He throws down his weapons. The female Number 4 comes closer.
NUMBER 4: A hearty greeting, as is the custom and manner of dogs! I would thus be greatly obliged to you …
She then tears off her mask … to appear with the authentic features of THE BLACK ONE, Estern’s wife …
THE BLACK ONE: Stand! Or rather, sit, following the ways of my dogs and crutch-handled serpents! Crutches you shall be! And since you owe me the obedience of freedom, I shall sew your bones together with the thread of your lives, if …
… But I prefer to close the book in whose centre I have inscribed your names, or else see you drunk on blood from your own swollen veins!
They remain petrified, but FINISHED. One has hardened like the stone on which he is sitting – rigid, but with head bowed. His companion has collapsed the height of his six-and-a-half feet, which he doesn’t reach – far from it. Number 3 is nowhere to be found.
THE BLACK ONE: But their lips were old, their veins arid! Their limbs were made of wood, crosses trailing behind them; and their eyes, blind eggs! … They’re dead, but that only makes for more stones, and we shall have plenty when we rebuild our castle.
With her toe, she nudges the sprawled corpse that does not move. She glances around her, seeking with her eye the Eye that has seen all or seen nothing … and exits.
Inanimate. THEY REVIVE and their bodies hold them up. Number 1 is unmasked. Both rub their aching limbs.
NUMBER 1: Death has no importance, since it’s only a kind of genuflection. But I banged my arm on something and I have a pain in my head, which opened onto an abyss inside me …
NUMBER 2: … Just like my handle or, if you prefer, my arms! … They show me a floating void inside the vase of my body; and I would rather see wounds in my fingers or elsewhere! Still, I’m neither bleeding nor perspiring …
… But I’m limping! And my left paw seems to be too short …
He tears off his mask and reappears with the features of the raving-madman-who-is-lame.
THE MADMAN: … I lack a sign! My clubfoot bears witness.
NUMBER 1: Vampire’s dream … Sea glass and triple death in my eyes! The wind will build us a public edifice and the sky of that gathering storm will be our arsenal. Come! mad if you like, but come!
He drags him off and the voice identified with the figure 1 and with the number of the same amount heads off behind them and fades away …
VOICE OF NUMBER 1: We’re late, but too bad! … Let us bite the dead and make the living impenetrable signs, to which I will nonetheless ascribe a clearly negative meaning. The battle rages … But here we leave behind our dog insignia …
1. Stéphane Lupasco, Logique et Contradiction (1947). For artists, this work will have the enormous additional interest of establishing and clarifying the ‘extremely enigmatic’ connection that exists between logical values and their contradiction, on the one hand, and actual data, on the other.