On the subject of love, bourgeois novels are variations on two themes. The first is the couple in love getting together despite all obstacles; the second is how unhappily they live ever after. “Marriage seems to have been invented to reward perversity,” the utopian socialist writer Charles Fourier once said.1 Marriage, says the bourgeois novel, is the worst of institutions for a woman, except for all the others. In the novel, a woman can refuse marriage. She may be drawn towards sexual ecstasy, but that way lies poverty, misery and social exclusion. Proper love is of the sacred domesticated kind, placed in the service of reproducing the heterosexual family and passing on property. Socialist writers, from Fourier to Engels to Alexandra Kollontai had long opposed marriage as a relation which makes women into property, and pointed to the hypocrisy of the bourgeois gentleman who polices the sexual fidelity of his wife yet goes adventuring in bohemia for a bit on the side.
And yet in postwar France, the figure of the monogamous, heterosexual couple became ever more widespread. Kristin Ross: “the construction of the new French couple is not only a class necessity but a national necessity as well, linked to the state-led modernization effort. Called upon to lead France into the future, these couples are the class whose very way of life is based on the wish to make the world futureless and at that price buy security.”2 The couple was a modern alternative to both the more reactionary order of the wartime collaborationist Vichy regime, and the autonomous female sexuality embodied by Saint-Germain figures like Juliette Gréco or Françoise Sagan, and promulgated as a theory in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. The couple refuses both the patriarchal past of Vichy and the feminist future of The Second Sex, and secures a private space where the good life of the spectacle can be brought home and domesticated.
In the third issue of Internationale Situationniste is a reproduction of the “Map of Tenderness” by the Precocity movement writer Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701). This famous drawing was included in her popular multivolume novel Clélie. The map charts three possible journeys from the town of New Friendship at the bottom. Friendship could take the paths of Inclination, Esteem or Gratitude to one of three destinations in the center of the map. It could wander off course, and end up in dismal places such as the Lake of Indifference. Or the journey could go too far, into uncharted territory. For de Scudéry, love requires skill and tact if it is not to lurch towards great ecstasy, which also brings great pain.
The goal was not marriage. De Scudéry was more interested in erotic friendship between women. Hers was a Sapphic alternative to Platonic relationships between men, a tenderness that can be sustained, developed, transformed and ornamented, without rupture. De Scudéry initiates a counter-tradition, skeptical of the sacred quality of ecstasy, indifferent to questions of property and outside the heterosexual norm.3 While acknowledging the power of feeling, it can nevertheless be crafted and directed. It can become the material of play and strategy.
How is a modern woman who lives in a so-called open relationship with a man supposed to retain her hold on him, if he starts an affair that has a little more intensity than usual? Affairs are allowed. They are within the rules, but they are not supposed to break with a fundamental agreement between the man and the woman. And if this man is coming too close to breaching that agreement, what stratagems can the woman employ to see that he returns to it? This scenario can be found in what Debord calls Michèle Bernstein’s “fake novel” All the King’s Horses, and its sequel The Night.4 These books, which both describe the same events, concern the lives of three characters who are not unlike Michèle Bernstein, her husband Guy Debord, and his lover Michèle Mochot. Bernstein borrows from socialist, bohemian and aristocratic writings to create an alternative to the middle-class ideal of the married couple. “The personal is political,” as feminists would say later in the 1960s, but for Bernstein, writing in the early ’60s, the political is very, very personal.5
Both novels cover the same events in the lives of Gilles and Geneviève, but from different perspectives and in different styles: King’s Horses adopts the style of Françoise Sagan (1935–2004); The Night, that of Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008). Saint-Germain identity Sagan’s racy novels coincided with the arrival of mass paperback publishing in France in the 1950s. Those of Robbe-Grillet were a high-modernist analogue of the new consumerist and technocratic France of those years. Lefebvre called them “pure spectacle.” As Maurice Blanchot pointed out at the time, what was once a cultural rhythm to the diffusion of writing had with the arrival of the paperback been replaced by a technical one. The technical purported to solve all problems. “There is no need for political upheaval, and even less for changes in the social structure. It suffices to reproduce works.”6 Even radical works started appearing in paperback. Literature discreetly integrated itself into the spectacle.
Bernstein’s strategy was a détournement of the spectacle of the novel, first in its popular form, then its literary form. “There is not much future in the détournement of complete novels,” declared Debord and Wolman, “but during the transitional phase there might be a certain number of undertakings of this sort.” Elsewhere, Debord sets out the tenets of a Situationist approach to literature in the transitional phase: “In the novel, the fundamental question of time resided more in the liberty of beginning and ending the story at significant points, rather than in the choice of including certain moments and excluding others … I believe it is this form of sovereignty (used derisorily in the novel) that everyday life aims at appropriating.”7 In the absence of the means to construct situations, the détourned novel might at least gesture towards the liberty of beginnings.
Debord met cabaret singer Michèle Mochot in 1955, at a Paris opening for the Belgian surrealist painter Jane Graverol.8 Bernstein’s fictional Gilles meets Carole a few years later, also at an opening of a surrealist painter, only Bernstein’s painter is male and Carole is his stepdaughter. In The Night we learn of the sexual tension between them. The painter covets his stepdaughter. “Though by her spite she showed that she wanted no part of it, still she encouraged it a little, admitted it was there.”9 With a little prompting from Carole’s mother, Gilles and Geneviève whisk Carole away from the old man. Gilles takes her wandering around the streets of Paris, and in the morning finally makes love to her.
In Horses, we only hear in general terms about Gilles and his art of wandering. Geneviève goes home to sleep and the story picks up again the next day. The Night is structured around the dérive itself.
They pass beside a column, a streetlight rather, on which is fixed, above their heads, a blue and white sign indicating by an arrow: Cluny Museum. On the same column, another signal, luminous and blinking, is the only one that attracts the glance of the passersby. At regular intervals, for the pedestrians, the permission to go or the order to wait flashes. Gilles and Carole pass near the column without seeing it. Gilles waits, before crossing, for the cars to stop. Carole follows Gilles, who holds her by the nape of the neck. They take the direction indicated by the sign Cluny Museum, and skirt the railings of the garden of the museum.
The dérive is Carole’s initiation into the knotted streets of the sleeping city. “I’d like to be in a labyrinth with you,” says Carole. “We already are,” says Gilles.10
A Galton machine is a grid of equally spaced pins, arranged vertically, above which is a single slot that releases balls, and below which is a series of slots that catch them. If the top slot is positioned in the middle and balls are released into the grid of pins, the chances are that most balls will deviate a bit when they hit the pins but will fall in one of the center slots below. A few of the balls will end up bouncing farther off the center line, but overall the device will show a Gaussian distribution. It’s essentially pinball without the fun. Pinball arrived in Saint-Germain bars such as the Mabillon and the Old Navy after the war, and became a favorite way for quarter people to waste time. Arthur Adamov wrote an absurdist play about it called Ping-Pong (1955).11
In pinball, the ball is always going to end up passing through the middle between the flippers, but some balls—through luck or skill—will take longer to do so. The Galton machine, or pinball, is Jorn’s image of a situology, both ludic and analytic, “as a game device, this machine that tilts, can be found in most Paris bistros, and is the possibility of calculated variability.”12 Time and space are not smooth or even. There are tilts, there are eddies, there are zones that attract the balls and zones that repel them. Debord and Wolman had already proposed a détournement of pinball, in which the “play of the lights and the more or less predictable trajectories of the balls would form a metagraphic-spatial composition entitled Thermal Sensations and Desires of People Passing by the Gates of Cluny Museum Around an Hour After Sunset in November.”13 They abandoned this idea, for Paris was already a pinball machine. All that remained was to bounce around it like a shiny silver ball, and find its psychogeographic centers of gravity.
The grid at the Galton machine is like a street layout or a telephone network, a flat and even field, a distributed network.14 A ball could land anywhere; a call could connect any two points. There are infinitesimal eddies and fissures shaping the ball’s trajectory, or the call’s circuit, or the swerve of someone on a dérive who takes this street rather than that. Actually, some passages are more likely than others, but only by playing the game does this become clear. The city, unlike the Galton machine, may have several vortices of gravity. The Night is structured around the passage of Gilles and Carole through the streets of Paris, bouncing from one trajectory to the next. The Night subordinates the narrative of the affair to the description of the dérive. Horses is rather more conventional, and the dérive there is just a moment. It reverses the relationship between situation and story.
Gilles’ affair with Carole causes at least two rifts in the libidinal universe. Carole’s girlfriend Béatrice is jealous and possessive. Geneviève’s feelings are perhaps more complicated. It is not the first time Gilles has had other lovers, but Geneviève is a little worried about this one. The Night can be read as an account of the disturbance the affair causes Geneviève. Her character is in the habit, on waking, of putting the events of the previous day in order, but in The Night events refuse to fall into place. The novel jumps from one fragment of time—charged with affect—to another. It is a beginning that doesn’t end.
Horses presents a rather more straightforward version of Geneviève’s strategies for holding on to Gilles. One tactic is to become Carole’s intimate friend, establishing a relationship independent of Gilles between the two women. It is an emotional intimacy—Sapphic, in de Scudéry’s sense—that is perhaps greater than the sexual one between Carole and Gilles, if rather one-sided. Carole confides in Geneviève, but not vice versa. It’s a tactic on Geneviève’s part, to be sure, but not quite as coldly manipulative as the similar move in Dangerous Liaisons, a book from which Bernstein freely borrows.15 Another tactic is to take the same liberties as her husband. Whereas Gilles found Carole at a party hosted by passé old surrealists, Geneviève finds her love interest at the rather more advanced soirée hosted by Ole, an artist perhaps modeled on Asger Jorn (Ole is the name of Jorn’s son). There she hooks up with a young man called Bertrand, fucks him in a hotel, throws him out next morning, then telephones Gilles to tell him about it. This tactic doesn’t work: it doesn’t make Gilles feel as jealous as she feels. Bertrand is handsome enough, but, if anything, bringing him into the picture only gives Gilles more license to love Carole.
Both Carole and Bertrand make bad art. Carole dabbles at painting, merely repeating the clichés current in the art world. Bertrand’s poetry is worse, in thrall to experiments that have long since lost their charge. As Debord once wrote to his old Letterist comrade Patrick Straram, “poetry, yes, but in life. No return possible to surrealist or preceding poetical writing.”16 What neither Carole nor Bertrand quite realizes is that they already embody the aesthetic. Neither knows that they are in play in a game of everyday life. Of the two, Carole comes closer, at least when she sings. She has a small repertoire of old French songs. When she sings for Gilles she appropriates their words as her own, détourns them, and reveals a capacity that leads Geneviève to suspect that here might be a rival.
The four of them, Gilles and Carole, Geneviève and Bertrand, go off on vacation. They meet Bertrand’s friend Hélène, a slightly older and very sophisticated woman from the literary scene. On returning to Paris, Geneviève discards Bertrand and takes up with Hélène. This gets Gilles’ attention. Gilles drops Carole. The trio of Geneviève, Hélène, and Gilles hang out together for a while, but it doesn’t last. In the end it is just Geneviève and Gilles again—for now. But the game has changed. Horses ends with letters from Carole and Hélène in which it is clear that Carole, although still young, is beginning to appreciate a new way of thinking about life, while Hélène, encrusted with habit, is left to her fate.
In her letter to Bertrand, Hélène dismisses Gilles and Geneviève as “damaged people,” but she does not really understand them.17 Neither Gilles nor Geneviève are really heartless libertines. They appreciate beauty but not just as an object, a thing apart. Their romantic strategies are not about conquest or possession. Gilles really does fall in love, and often. Geneviève’s strategies are aimed mainly at sustaining Gilles’ love for her, because she cannot help loving him. This love is hardly romantic. Their feelings are genuine, but feelings can be shaped aesthetically, in pursuit of adventures, in the creation of situations, in the river of time.
Love is temporal, an event. There is nothing eternal in it. Timeless Love, like God, like Art, is dead. Eternal love is death itself, the metaphysical principle that plagues romance, that would make the lover one’s private property for all time. All that remains is the possibility of constructing situations. Odile Passot: “In Bernstein’s universe, there is no transcendence, divine or diabolic; humans are subject to their own negativity, which they cultivate to destabilize their century’s received truths.”18 Like the devils in Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert’s film The Devil’s Envoys (1942), Geneviève and Gilles trouble the sheets of the bourgeois bedchamber by disregarding property and propriety in the name of a quite different ethic of love.19 For all its genderfuck charm, The Devil’s Envoys still affirms in the end that love is eternal; in Bernstein’s world it is not.
As Geneviève says of Gilles: “When I met Gilles three years ago, I realized quickly that he was far from the cool libertine most people took him for. His desires always contain as much passion as he can put into them, and it’s this same state that he always pursued in various love stories that you’d be crazy to call unserious. The climate he created everywhere is one of honest feelings and a heightened consciousness of the tragically fleeting aspect of anything to do with love. And the intensity of the adventure was always an inverse function of its duration. Trouble and breakups happened with Gilles before any valid reason appeared: afterward, it was too late. I had been the exception, I was immune.”20 Strategy, as Debord says, “tends to impose at each instant considerations of contradictory necessities.”21 Geneviève’s strategies aim at the very least to preserve her immunity, but perhaps she has other ambitions as well. She might surpass her master at his own game.
Geneviève trumps Gilles’ desire for Carole when she presents him with her affair with Hélène. While Gilles is intrigued by Carole’s now lost love of Béatrice, he is much more attracted to Geneviève’s for the elegant Hélène. The reconciliation between Gilles and Geneviève entails not so much a renunciation of their desire for others, but rather a gift of the renunciation of that desire to each other. But while this ending has the appearance of equity, it is really Geneviève who wins the game. She secures her alliance with Gilles and puts her rival in her place, without invoking proprietary rights—but while taking her pleasures with Bertrand and Hélène. She does not insist that Gilles be hers, or that she is his.
Horses highlights the story of Geneviève’s triumph. The Night puts the story back into the situation of multiple and parallel encounters. While Carole or Bertrand are part of Geneviève’s story, she is also part of theirs. The reader glimpses a whole playing field, a veritable arcade of pinball machines. Jorn would later co-author an elaborate mock ethnography of Paris bohemia, which would do for structuralist theories of myth what James Joyce did for the myth of Ulysses. The elaborate kinship diagrams of his imaginary tribes seem baffling at first, until the reader decodes the forest of symbols and realizes that anyone can fuck anyone. It could be a mock-theoretical diagram of the world of The Night.22
The soundtrack to the lives of these characters, besides the American jazz popularized by Vian, was a distinctively French version of the folk-music revival. The title All the King’s Horses refers to an old song, “Aux marches du palais.” Carole sings it on the night when she and Gilles and Geneviève fall into one another’s lives. It is a song about a queen and her lover. One evening, the knight steals into the king’s castle and lies with the queen in her bed. Together they make a river that all the king’s horses cannot cross. Greil Marcus: “It is as deep and singular an image of revolution as there has ever been, but in All the King’s Horses so distant an element is barely an image at all.”23 When one is bored with the desire for mere things, there is only the desire for another’s desire. Gilles desires Geneviève’s desire for Hélène. But what if one could create a desire so strong that it put a river between it and its other? A desire that, like a river, has to keep moving, has always to change, a desire that can play out in time and play in the end into the sea. This then might be what the novel is still good for: that the situation of desire might not pass away all at once, but pass rather into another time.