Partisans of Oblivion: A Situationist Novel (Page 2)

All of this begins to suggest the historical context in which Bernstein's book finally appears in English, in the somewhat flatfooted translation of John Kelsey ("I walk. Mainly I walk."). Because of its cult value, the book is condemned to expectations. What one thinks is likely to depend on what question one asks of the book. Radical tract, sly goof, period piece, anthropology of a movement, feminist apparition?

It is surely not the first; little is to be found of the SI's ascetic philosophical vitriol. Odile Passot's afterword has a go at the last possibility, misreading history to do so. Greil Marcus, who helped recover the book for English-speaking audiences in his landmark Lipstick Traces via a considered discussion of plot and style, as well as extensive interviews with the author, stands perplexingly accused along with everyone else for slighting Bernstein's novel out of gender bias. However, there is a kernel of truth in the umbrage; certainly the Situationist International was not entirely hospitable to women, leaving a blind spot in its radical vision. Debord may have been an equal-opportunity tyrant, but his willingness to let feminine beauty stand for something all but magical, even as he savaged the domination of appearance, is scarcely redeemable for all its familiarity. Bernstein points this out, rapier-quick: "Gilles is always the first one to notice the beautiful soul in a pretty girl." At the same time, the novel does not hesitate to objectify the poor saps batted about by Geneviève and Gilles: "Carole, being herself a poetic object, loved poetry."

This has the ring of insight, albeit one that comes from a position of self-certain superiority. In this, Bernstein is as glittering and empyreal as any of her cohort. Geneviève's temporary consort Bertrand is as easily dispatched: the self-styled poet "takes himself for an enfant terrible, and what's more, plans to write books that will still create shockwaves after he's dead and gone. He's very good looking." In short, he is the usual romantic youth, easy on the eyes and as shallow as he believes himself deep. The retrospective irony is that it would be the SI--not poets to speak of, but theorists and drunkards and enragés--who would create the shock waves reverberating down the century. This irony is repeated in the description of Carole's avocation: "What jumped out first in Carole's painting were its pleasantly stylish derivative qualities, not bold blunders of genius."

But if the foils, Bertrand and Carole, are so conventionally bohemian, might not one say the same of the story? Its promises of shock--amorous cruelty! lesbian encounters!--are little more than a comedy about mores and literary sensation. Indeed, there is something profoundly and familiarly bourgeois about the whole scenario, wherein a true marriage of souls must divert itself with physical affairs lest the partners consume and then weary of each other. It is a French national story, played out everywhere from François Mitterrand's funeral (famously and calmly attended by wife and mistress) to the Claire Denis vampire film Trouble Every Day. In this regard, the tale is every bit as old-fashioned as the tunes Carole plays for the couple on her guitar, in a scenic garret. They are "classic songs: girls who are beautiful at fifteen, their boyfriends gone to war. Girls who lose a golden ring by the riverside, lamenting the passing of the seasons, who never give up on love. Girls who go into the woods, girls one misses later, at sea, and the voyage will never end."

These are volunteered as clichés, as romantic banalities. A lesser novel would surely offer us some competing vision of a more authentic life, the brawling and thrill-laden new. But this is not quite what happens; as we have seen, Geneviève and Gilles in many regards conform to equally empty myths. The new life is not on offer as an alternative. Rather, it is hidden within the old, the foolish--within Bertrand's desire, Carole's chansons. And the voyage will never end: this lie is surely the only truth, the promise of an endless adventure not lost to the deep past but hiding in the shallows of the present. It will require absolute demands; it will require oblivion.

This is the sense that haunts the book's contrived conventionality, poking through only momentarily. "Gilles offered to play another game of chess," Geneviève narrates at one point. "After he'd won, I told him he should teach Carole. And suddenly they were inventing a new game, completely mad: the value of each piece was subjective and changing, decided by the player with each move." This game is nothing but the drift itself. Its possibility, of another life that can be played within this one, is the book's secret.

To communicate this secret, the novel must be boring--must make the context in which such a vision makes sense. Its events are scarcely worth remembering; that's the point. In this it is far better written than Sagan's novels, which are stylish and diverting and rather modern in their sensibilities; such books wish only to be contemporary. All the King's Horses is absolutely modern: boring as the surface of administered life, Paris paused between Old World and New Wave, between manners and style. Within that infinitely flat moment, a secret adventure lurks almost in plain sight. It is visible only as the double of the terrible boredom of modernity, can reveal itself only within old songs and romantic notions, at the bottom of a shot glass. The book is familiar with everything, satisfied with nothing, hollowed out as life: "Vodka goes well with a wintery perspective. Nothing else evokes such presentiments of falling snow except, for some, the communist seizure of the state." But this presentiment is the end of desire, the moment of possibility. "We are partisans of oblivion," Bernstein wrote in an essay signed only with her picture, in December of 1958, evoking that same frozen contradiction, the Finland Station of the modern. This book is, in its way, the oblivion itself: what must be passed through, the doorway to which the absolute demand comes calling. "We forget the past, the present which is ours. We do not recognize our contemporaries in those who are satisfied with too little."

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