The Velvet Diagrams of Claude Pélieu: Dissidence in Fractured Syntax
Claude Pélieu’s voice ricochets down the corridors of post-war counterculture like a dying star that refuses to vanish—collapsing and regenerating in flashes of surreal data, speculative terror, and apocalyptic tenderness. While often skulking just outside the mainstream literary canon, Pélieu carved a linguistic chrysalis all his own, where Burroughsian cut-ups metamorphosed into weapons of semantic revolt. Born in 1934 in Pontoise, France, Pélieu began his literary life rather unconventionally: as an art student and, later, a soldier during the Algerian War, an experience that would come to haunt and vitalize his prose. His subsequent deserts—both literal and figurative—included stints in psychiatric hospitals, a tumultuous flight to the United States, and a lifelong peregrination through the international avant-garde.
Pélieu’s early works in France, like Les Mémoires d’un Vieux Décapité (1963), are premonitions of his later experimentations. They portray dream-drenched hallucinations of a world split between language and blood. To categorize his writing under tidy genres—Beat, Surrealist, Situationist—is to miss the polyphonic disassembly at the heart of his method. His life, like his texts, was collaged into thingness—a mosaic of amphetamines, collages, translations, jazz records, art manifestos, and smuggled syntax. Alongside his wife, Mary Beach, Pélieu translated many Beat texts into French (including works by Burroughs and Ed Sanders), embodying the rhizomatic drift of postmodern literary cross-pollination.
It is with Automatic Pilot and Kali Yug Express (1970) that Pélieu begins to transmogrify linguistic substance into projectile. These works embody the cycles of modern dystopia delivered in bursts, like telegrams sent from the rubble of consciousness. Yet, there is always that whispered lucidity, a cryptic compassion peering through degraded code:
“The snake dreams of typewriters / and cyclotrons / shadows of a forgotten refrigerator hum / processing morphine into memory.”¹
At first reading, such lines can seem opaque, a sort of static masquerading as verse. But to read Pélieu correctly is to abandon structural expectation and instead give oneself to the kinetic rawness of his vision. The “snake” as an archetypal being, dreaming—of machines once symbolizing human agency now turned hermetic; refrigeration—cold storage—for narcotic memory. The cut-up techniques he adopted bewilder traditional narrative gravity, but were never merely gimmicks; instead, they effaced control itself. In this, Claude Pélieu was a dissident even among dissenters.
If we take his fragment from Infra Noir (1990),
“A crucifix of radar / deep-throat auroras / tickle the ministry of shadows”²
we are met not just with imagistic pile-up but a structural rebellion against teleology. “A crucifix of radar” proposes a grotesque sanctification of surveillance—a holy transposition of state control, and simultaneously, the perversion of innocence and transcendence. “Deep-throat auroras”—the notion of cosmic beauty being swallowed into mechanized subservience. These fragments do not pretend to heal or even protest neatly; they exist to injure the coherence we inherit from Western rationalism.
In understanding Pélieu, one must understand the radical role of translation—not just linguistic, but metaphysical shifting—he occupied. His collages, both textual and visual, were ritual acts of undoing and becoming. Influenced by Ginsberg and friends with Ed Dorn, he nonetheless escaped the confines of Beat romanticism. Instead of obsession with freedom-as-gesture, Pélieu’s work points to a jagged metaphysics—a reality where memory is mutilated and stitched together, never whole, never known through language but only through its shattering.
My own revelatory moment with Pélieu’s work came on a still November evening, in one of the back rooms of the abandoned La Roche monastery near Rouen. The moon hung like a buried surveillance drone, its aluminum glow reflecting on the crumbling altar where some passing seeker had left a tattered copy of With Revolvers Aimed… Finger Bowls (1972). I opened it at random and found the line:
“There are no fingerprints on glass blown by prayer”³
The intimacy of absence. The implied violence of touchless glass. And prayer—the most un-governable human impulse—able to shape, vacate, redefine the very medium of existence. Was this the hope buried beneath his linguistic terror? A faith in something pre-linguistic, even post-historic, where prayer—perhaps not the religious noun, but the existential verb—could exist untouched by identity?
And so I ask: is not language merely the shadow of prayer? In Pélieu’s orbit, words are narcotics as well as weapons, capable of soothing and obliterating. He seems to whisper not in clarity, but in rhythm—a syntax as tremor, not theory.
Like many experimental poets, his work is best received through auditory and visual encounters. Pélieu’s own voice, in dulcet, drug-softened French-accented English, is a drone of warped lullabies and ravaged alphabets.⁴ His often obscured visual collages, echoing Hannah Höch and Prévert, ought not to be separated from his literary corpus. They form the second limb of a triptych—a visual language against decay. Strips of advertising, horror film posters, and newspaper ephemera sewn together by an intuitive mind that had peered too long into the abyss and chose, nevertheless, to create.
Perhaps the genius of Pélieu lies not in what he wrote, but in how he dragged one’s grammar into anorexia. Reading him, we confront lacunae as much as meaning. His syntax is wounded; it limps, it forgets, it scratches at closed doors. He diagnosed modernity as a system of rigid signs, and sought to rupture it—not with ideology, but with sheer ontological surrealism.
In a final tape found after his death in 2002, Pélieu murmurs,
“I crawl backwards through the calendar / eating the silence that time left behind”⁵
This retrograde retreat embodies Pélieu’s ultimate poetic act—not to advance or climax in narrative catharsis, but to ingest what time itself has discarded. In a world compulsively driven by innovation, by forward-slow death, Pélieu lurches backwards—into ruins, archives, churches converted into shopping malls—searching for fragments unshaped by propaganda.
In this, he becomes a type of mystic—tormented, yes—but one who utters the languages of a devastated, not-yet-born divinity.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, collage, beat-generation
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¹ Claude Pélieu, *Kali Yug Express*, City Lights, 1970, p. 37.
² Claude Pélieu, *Infra Noir*, La Presse Noire, 1990, p. 12.
³ Claude Pélieu, *With Revolvers Aimed… Finger Bowls*, Beach Books Texts & Documents, 1972, p. 9.
⁴ See the archival recording in *Claude Pélieu Reads*, Underground Audio Archive #5, 1994.
⁵ Claude Pélieu, unpublished audio journal, estate of Mary Beach, private collection released ca. 2010.