‘Up the Garden Path with Jean Dubuffet’

While his extensive aesthetic writings have attracted considerable critical attention, most accounts of Jean Dubuffet’s work accord his textes en jargon a marginal status, reading them as adjuncts to his combatively expressed anti-culturism or as tentative textual experiments calqued in part upon the work of certain contemporary writers (notably, Raymond Queneau and Louis-Ferdinand Céline). However, close examination of the most fully developed ‘jargon text’, La botte à nique, reveals a tightly constructed and linguistically intricate work, which both illustrates some of Dubuffet’s most deeply held aesthetic principles and offers a reflexive résumé of his career. La botte à nique is a multi-layered work that demands of its reader-viewer not only repeated scrutiny, but also the mobilisation of a range of decoding procedures (visual, linguistic, literal, metaphorical, biographical and cultural). The ostensible linguistic rebarbativeness of La botte à nique camouflages its sophistication; detailed analysis not only shows the acuity of Dubuffet’s linguistic awareness and his understanding of the mechanisms of spoken French, but also highlights the many questions that the volume raises about the ways in which we read texts and images, about the relationships between the written and the spoken word, between text and image, between the handwritten and the printed, and among the heard, the read and the vocalised; not least, it makes us aware of the role played by the body in reading, rereading and, indeed, the cognitive processing of texts and images.