The first thing I ever read about the Situationist International was, like many people my age, in the basement of the Compendium bookshop in Camden. I still have no idea which book I was reading, as I became enthralled by the ideas I was encountering, and the fact that one of the members, Michele Bernstein, had written two novels. In 1987 trying to find an out of print English novel was difficult enough, but a long out of print French novel from the early 1960s, well, I never bothered even trying to track them down. At that point it was still very difficult to read works about the group that weren't in French and for a lot of people the little Spectacular Times booklets produced by Larry Law were their way in. I also assumed I was so bad at French and not particularly bright academically that I didn't have a chance of understanding Bernstein's novels, let alone one day write about the Situationists.
Michele's novels, Tous les Chevaux du Roi (All the King's Horses) and La Nuit (The Night) were published in 1960 and 1961 and were translated into English in 2008 and 2013 resepectively. When people write about them they recall how they are, in Debord's words "fake" novels, or in Bernstein's words "a joke". They also say how they are romans a clef about the intimate lives of Debord and Michele, and Debord's girlfriend Michele Mochot. The novels were written to make money, with the costs of producing the exotic metallic shiny covers of the Internationale Situationniste journal, travelling and staying in other European cities for Situationist conferences, a proposed journey to Canada to see their friend Patrick Straram, and the economic fallout from the overnight devaluing of the franc; "I needed margarine for my broccolis" as Michele put it in an interview in 2021. So what is a Situationist novel? Well maybe I'll be taking a look at that very question in a week or so, but Michele decided to write a pastiche of Francoise Sagan's best selling novels, then the literary sensation of France and the outside world. In under two years Bonjour Tristesse sold 350,000 copies, and many people still couldn't understand how an 18 year old Sorbonne dropout had written it. Michele has said that novels such as these were read by her "without displeasure" - so even the most Situationist of them all (as her second husband Ralph Rumney called her) could enjoy these, even though the form of the novel was dead.
Bonjour Tristesse is about a sojourn on the south of France, a tangle of love and growing up, and a death. Sagan's second novel, A Certain Smile, concerns a journey to the south of France, a tangle of love and growing up, and a break up. All the King's Horses concerns a journey to the south of France, a tangle of love and no growing up, and lots of fun and games. Borrowing also from Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the film Les Visiteurs du Soir, Bernstein tells the story of Gilles (a Guy Debord type figure), his wife Genevieve (a Bernstein type figure) and a young girl with whom Gilles falls in love and has an affair with. Six months after Guy and Michele married, they met Michele Mochot, a young art student, with whom Debord had an affair which only ended in 1984, and her influence on Debord and on the SI has yet to be discussed. The story of their immediate relationship is told, along with Genevieve firstly having an affair with Bertrand, a young would-be poet, a stay in the south of France and later on an affair with Helene which becomes seemingly a threesome with Gilles. Before Gilles and Carole spend the night together for the first time, they walk around the Left Bank during the night of the 22nd April, and this forms the basis for the story of The Night.
I have said that I am discussing this because it is a novel which discusses the Situationist International. Well, it doesn't, but it discusses something much more important to them at the time, their everyday life. The academic and author Henri Lefebvre had spent some time with the Debords, writing with them and sharing ideas about his work about the everyday, until, obviously, they parted company on bad terms, as they did several other people. So we can look at the novel and think about the day to day life of the members of the SI, but we can also look at the novel through the theories the group had. These are :
psychogeography and the derive - this is the basis of many of the scenes of the book, and the plot of The Night. The walks around Paris form and inform the most important parts of the book.
detournement - the act of putting an opposite message on to something. The detournement of highly popular books by Francoise Sagan, turning bourgeois ideas about love and everything else on its head.
potlatch - anyone who writes a novel is making an act of potlatch, a gift you cannot give back. You've written it, people read it, you might only read a bit, but it stays with you forever, whether you want it or not, or remember it.
The Night is a pastiche of the novels of the nouvelle vague, writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, "the trick was to elongate sentences, to scramble time and place," said Michele, but it also expands the story of the earlier novel. We see Gilles and Genevieve struggling up the stairs of Carole's apartment building, hot and out of breath, "They did this [a climb of seven or eight flights of stairs] noiselessly, and (most importantly) without stopping," we see Gilles being unsure of who a statue is of, of Gilles lying on a beach in the south of France, getting on an aeroplane, and Genevieve going to the cinema. Genevieve watches a cowboy film and unlike Dominique in A Certain Smile doesn't get kissed and felt up by an anonymous boy in the next seat, but watches a rather detourned version of Johnny Guitar which features two cowboys, one older and one young, the younger looking slightly like Carole, later dubbed Cowboy Carole, gets shot by a stray bullet and the older cowboy gets the girl. These are the cowboys who later feature in the Situationist pamphlet The Return of the Durutti Column, where one asks the other 'what are you working on?' The other replies 'reification,' to which Cowboy Carole says that it sounds like lots of hard work, with many books at a big desk. No, says the other cowboy, mostly I just walk around. This is the same conversation that Gilles and Carole have in All the King's Horses as they walk around Paris, lifted by Andre Bertrand during the events at Strasbourg University in 1966 to illustrate one of the most famous Situationist pamphlets of all. The portentous writing of the nouvelle vague style is copied hilariously "Here the response at last is found. Complete warmth is guaranteed. In the Rhone Valley, the wind drops, she will no longer be afraid." A disjointed narrative of one night but also a couple of years, and the novel is done. And it's a joy to read.
Michele Bernstein said she put all the things she loved into the novels, the 5th and 6th arrondisments of Paris, and writing all the while in the near presence of her cherished husband, Guy Debord. I find it quite striking that when the novel was translated into English and appeared in 2013 that most critics just concentrated on saying that it was a portrait of the Debords' marriage, with it's extra marital activities, and wrote about psychogeography. The idea that maybe psychogeography might actually have a revolutionary Situationist meaning that spreads beyond just walking seems to have passed most of them by, but the up-ending of a traditional love story of these two books along with the in jokes, the detournement, the absolute fun and joy of reading Situationist novels. Debord refers to these in his letters, seemingly proud and glad that they were coming out and sending them, in the early years of their friendship, to Gianfranco Sanguinetti. While they are talked about a lot, they aren't really taken seriously, but that goes for a lot of the influence of women on the SI. On the back of the Semiotexte translation of All the King's Horses there is a great photo in the space where the author's photo usually goes. Unfortunately it is not a photo of Michele Bernstein, but it highlights how lazy people are about such things. I know that some Situationist texts took a long time to reach a translated publication, but surely someone must have thought it would be a good idea in the intervening fifty odd years in the case of The Night. And the influence of Michele Bernstein on the Situationist movement deserves a book in its own right.
On a final note, there are a few more novels which deserve a mention. Debord was enraged by Georges Perec's Things : A Story of the Sixties, which appeared in 1965 and which he saw as a writer buying back Situationist ideas, manipulating them and reguritating them and selling them back for consumption. Michele Bernstein had an idea for another novel, wholly based on advertising slogans, but was too lazy to write it, and instead the journalist Walter Lewino wrote the novel on her suggestion, and it was published as L'eclat et la Blancheur in 1967. In the 1950s Patrick Straram wrote parts of a novel Les Bouteilles se Couchent, which he said he destroyed but was salvaged and published in 2006. Like Patrick Modiano's In the Cafe of Lost Youth, the Moineau regulars wander the streets of the Left Bank and St Germain des Pres drinking and chatting boozily well into the night. This is echoed again by Gerard Guegan, whose novel Les Irregulieures follows much the same theme, but after the events of May 68, and which again drove Debord to fury. It makes you wonder why people write about the SI in novel form, probably incurring Debord's wrath from beyond the grave.
Most of the statements of Michele Bernstein I have quoted or referred to can be found in the film On the Passage of Michele Bernstein through Time, the interview 'Michele Bernstein has Forgotten to Die', both with and by Clodagh Kinsella, 2021, and can be found here. I have also used information from the various Prefaces and Postfaces written by Michele Bernstein for the Book Works translations of The Night (2013, 2020)
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