There have been quite a few novels written about, or fictionalising or mentioning the Situationist International, and this is the first in a short series of writing about those novels. In the first edition of the Internationale Situationniste (1958) an article appeared about modern artists and writers such as Francoise Sagan, Bernard Buffet and Allain Robbe-Grillet. One of the hallmarks of these artists and the disaffected youth that enjoyed their work all bore "the same utter innocuousness, the same reassuring flimsiness" and it is perhaps useful to compare the novels written about the group to the remarks they made about culture in such an early part of their history.
The most recent work to talk about the influence, not of the Situationists themselves, but specifically Guy Debord, is Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, which was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. It concerns a group of environmentalists in a remote region of France who are trying to live outside of a capitalist environment, as told by an infiltrator into the group who is trying to goad them towards violent action. At this point I would like to briefly address the whole subject of state intervention in groups such as these, as in the 1980s I had various experiences of police spies who infiltrated left wing groups in the hope of getting information and in many cases encouraging the groups to action they might not have previously taken.
Rachel Kushner has said that the experiences of the police spy Mark Kennedy was one of the inspirations for her novel, and having sat in the same room repeatedly as men with jobs like him, I was very reluctant to read this. Having finished the novel, I still feel uncomfortable. The whole issue of Spycops, as they are known in the UK, is the subject of a current inquiry into their behaviour, especially the tactic of having sexual relationships with female members of the groups and in some cases fathering children. In any of the groups I was involved with there was always a knowledge that we would be spied on, that you would always wait for one particular person to leave the meeting before you all went off to the pub, and once I was told in a quiet voice that the Met had a certain number of their officers embedded in anarchist groups, a number later confirmed in the Spycops revelations. I still don't know if the person who told me this was a cop or not, and one of my friends - who had much closer contact with one of them that I ever did - said to me that the experience steals your happy memories, that it taints part of your life, and ruins it.
In Creation Lake Sadie is the infiltrator who enters the commune of Les Moulins, a commune in the French countryside headed by Pascal Balmy, but who answers to a greater mind, Bruno Lacombe, a Debord-type figure who has not only retreated to the French countryside but who has lived in darkness in a cave for a while. The Moulinards are eco warriors (I also have had quite a large involvement with eco warriors myself during the M3 Twyford Down link in the 1990s, a movement undoubtedly riddled with police) who are suspected of imminent violent action, and Sadie's job is to encourage and enable this violence. I want to concentrate mainly on what is said about Debord in this novel, but one of the very interesting things in this generally disappointing novel is that it is all written in a very flat way, there are no highs or lows, no excitement, no emotion and no engagement we can have with Sadie who is by the nature of her work incredibly closed off. While this is maybe what it is like being a spycop, it makes the book quite distant in a way, and creates a rather strange effect. We don't root for Sadie but neither did I root for anyone else either.
Sadie is faultlessly written, but she is the brash American tourist we've all encountered in Europe, the one who will loudly tell the entire restaurant how American won the Second World War, applying her own criticism and world view on a different culture, and expecting that culture to say it's okay. This also makes the novel slightly infuriating to read.
The first mention of Debord says he was 'moody and dickish', but for a novel that several times says that American thinkers are superior to European ones without irony, we have to just roll our eyes a bit. Slightly later she says that after the 'colossal failure' of May 68 Debord retreated to a cottage in the French countryside, drank a lot and shot himself. Well never mind all those intervening years. Obviously a Serb bodyguard (read war criminal) has 'meaty thighs', all Italian food is bad, and Michel Houellebecq makes an appearance as Michel Thomas, a seedy writer who is obsessed with women and sex. Europe is often dry, dusty, old, superstitious and dispiriting. And she says you don't need an accent to be totally fluent in a foreign language, all you need is fluency, yeah tell that to French waiters. I long to feel that Kushner is just writing, writing a very clever and all encompassing world of a woman like Sadie, and she says in an interview "And there is something about an American eye – it’s going to be a little bit more coarse and vulgar, you know?"
Jean Marie Apostolides book Debord: Le naufrageur says that Debord raped his sister, and Sadie repeats this claim through Nadia, a former Moulinard, who says it was Debord's sister, not a half sister. According to published biographies, Debord was an only child until after his father's death and his mother remarried and have two more children, a boy and a girl. No full-blood sisters, although it gets a bit wearing having to repeatedly say well it's Sadie's ignorance, it's Nadia's mania, but Debord never had any full siblings. In Sex, Money, Power, Gianfranco Sanguinetti's writings about Apostolides' work, he basically says 'so what' to the claim that they slept together. But that's another story.
Very near the end of the novel Sadie drives out towards where Bruno lives, and meets an old man with long white hair who says he isn't Bruno Lacombe, after being questioned by her. Although Sadie might long for him to be Bruno, he isn't Bruno and he isn't Guy Debord either. Bruno's semi mystical ramblings about neanderthals in a pompous, portentious manner are mildly annoying at best and at worst just boring. If this is what the Situationist International means to people, especially people like Rachel Kushner, who has many links both personal and intellectual to France and its politics, that the ideas of Debord are slightly mad pretentious rubbish, then they should remember that he wrote that the Spectacle buys back all forms of protest and sells it back to us, but in a clean, non threatening and neutered way. The vision of the Moulinards appearing at the country festival to protest with their banners and hippy ideas is at odds with their rejection of accepted behaviours and apparently more sophisticated ideas, seems much more reminiscent of the 1960s protestors in Washington marching round and round in a circle holding placards than the streets of Paris in 68.
For Sadie the Situationists are pretty dire - ruined, no influence, boozing, raping sisters and making a hames of 68. Or in terms of Bruno, going a bit nuts in a cave, longwinded writing and being a pompous recluse. Kushner has said of him "People who have that kind of fundamental gentleness can inspire other people. A gentle person can make other people gentle." If Bruno is Debord then it's just another way the Spectacle has bought the image of him, neutered it and sold it back to us. Debord could have huge moments of gentleness, in his writing and in his personal life, but in politics - well, no wising up, no settling down.
The idea as well that Debord would have been interested in advising a group such as this is not accurate in the slightest, and is what irritates me the most. The idea that a group of single issue hippies would be of interest to the SI is ridiculous. The only group after the foundation of the SI Debord was ever associated with Socialism or Barbarism, and that was only briefly. Since it took a lot to change his mind about practise (which did he ever really do?) it's a huge leap of faith to take this seriously, because he'd have heard about them, shrugged his shoulders and had a drink and forgotten about them.
So, is it flimsy or innocuous? For me it does feel a bit flimsy, but I have been called a hard line Debordist, which I took as a compliment. Innocuous? Well if you are presenting radicalism as a bunch of hippies who can see through the person of Sadie very quickly, and that Rachel Kushner has described the Occupy movement as 'tumultuous times' well I think that even mentioning the Situationists is a bit of a stretch.
When we write novels we aren't polemicists - well, mostly. Rachel Kushner gives us the very brash world of a spy in a novel that is quite an easy read and fairly enjoyable, but as a way of involving - only sideways - the influence written or unwritten of Debord is for me unsatisfactory and mildly annoying, because I would love a proper engagement with Situationist thought. Boredom? It took me a couple of attempts to get past the first text about neanderthals until I read it in its entirety. The next novel I will look at is, to use a word Rachel Kushner talked about, gentle, and I will be talking about The Cafe of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano (2007), which never mentions Guy Debord once.
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