Couinque
Couinque is a short illustrated book by Jean Dubuffet, issued by the printer and publisher Pierre-André Benoît (PAB) in Alès, with the text set in Benoît’s typography and accompanied by Dubuffet’s own original prints. It belongs to the small, idiosyncratic series of livres d’artiste that Dubuffet made with Benoît and is the first of them. The work is not a novel, essay, or memoir in any ordinary sense: it consists of a brief text written in what Dubuffet called “jargon absolu,” a deliberately invented language, together with a set of prints made specifically for the volume.
The central fact about the book’s content is its language. Dubuffet had previously written texts in what he called “jargon relatif” — most notably Ler dla campane — in which invented spellings and coinages could still be sounded out and roughly understood by a French reader. Couinque goes further. Its words are invented outright, and their meanings are left deliberately unresolved; the artist described this idiom as made of invented words whose signification is problematic. The result is a text that cannot be paraphrased or translated into a summary of events, characters, or argument. It is meant to be read as a sound-and-shape event on the page rather than as a vehicle of describable content, and any account that purported to give its “plot” or its “message” would be inventing what the book deliberately withholds. What can be said with confidence is that the book presents a compact sequence of this invented-language writing, laid out as a small-format volume, with the prints interspersed.
The pictorial content is integral rather than decorative. The volume is illustrated with seven original engravings on celluloïd by Dubuffet, one of which serves as the cover image. These are printed images made by a transfer process using celluloïd sheets, consistent with the rough, immediate, anti-academic graphic manner Dubuffet cultivated. In addition to the seven prints belonging to the book, a separate suite of twelve was pulled: the seven illustrations in a different state together with five further plates that were not used in the published volume. This supplementary suite was printed in only a handful of copies, making it one of the rarest components associated with the work. Some copies of the book were also issued with such additional material, but the book itself, as designed by Benoît and Dubuffet, comprises the text plus the seven prints.
The physical object is deliberately modest and unusual. It is a small quarto, roughly 22 by 16 centimetres, issued in paper covers with a print on the front, the text and plates printed by Benoît himself. The edition was small and signed by Dubuffet, with a limited numbered run and a further small number of copies marked as outside commerce. Benoît’s typographic treatment — his choice of formats, papers, and printing procedures — was conceived as part of the work’s character rather than as a neutral container for it, and Dubuffet regarded these collaborations as fully his own books rather than as texts merely decorated with pictures.
Couinque was written in the summer of 1962, begun in Antwerp in mid-July and completed at Le Touquet in August. It stands at the opening of Dubuffet’s sustained involvement with Benoît and with the writing of invented-language texts, which he pursued alongside his painting and printmaking as a parallel activity rather than a sideline. Within that body of writing, Couinque is the point at which the invented idiom becomes fully opaque — the moment when Dubuffet abandoned even the phonetic foothold offered by his earlier jargons and asked the reader to encounter language as raw material, sound, and mark.
A summary of the book’s “contents,” then, must remain a description of its character rather than of a storyline: a short, handsomely made volume in which a compact text in a private invented language is set among seven celluloïd engravings, one of them forming the cover, produced in a small signed edition by Pierre-André Benoît in Alès. Its interest lies in the extremity of its linguistic experiment and in the integration of Dubuffet’s text and his prints into a single deliberately rough, anti-literary object.
Reading as non-reading
Couinque treats language as material to be seen and sounded rather than decoded. No glossary or key is supplied; the invented words do not resolve into a hidden French. The book therefore stages a deliberate blockage of the reader’s semantic habit. Its pages ask for a different attention—to rhythm, to the shape of letters and words, to the mouth-feel of syllables—and in doing so make reading itself the subject. The work’s “content” is this pressure on the act of reading: the constant expectation of meaning that the text refuses to satisfy.
Text and image as parallel idioms
The engravings do not illustrate a story; they are a second opaque language placed beside the first. Just as the text withholds paraphrase, the prints withhold descriptive legibility, and the book’s significance lies in that pairing: writing and image both become marks that resist consumption. The volume is not a decorated text but an object in which two forms of invented expression test the same anti-illustrative, anti-fluent premise.
Significance
Within Dubuffet’s bookwork, Couinque is a limit-case: it turns the livre d’artiste against literary reading. It insists that a book can be a vehicle for raw expression without yielding a message, and that typography, paper, and print are not neutral supports but part of the utterance. Its importance is less as a narrative or poem than as a demonstration—an enacted argument that language can be treated as a plastic and bodily material, and that the refusal of sense can itself be a form of meaning.
