Svi kraljevi konji / Noć, Michèle Bernstein, trans. Marko Gregorić, Zagreb: Bijeli val Association, 2024
Access the Croatian original here.
A small group of intellectuals gathered in the Situationist International between 1957 and 1972 sought to truly live out what the “sixty-eighters” articulated with their revolutionary demand: “Be realistic, demand the impossible.” Following in the footsteps of the Lettrist International and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, the Situationists, drawing from the foundations of Lettrism, Surrealism, Dadaism, and Marxism, developed a strong critical perspective on contemporary capitalism. They particularly problematized the central role of consumption in everyday life and emphasized the political nature of private life. The movement’s most recognizable contribution remains Guy Debord‘s famous work The Society of the Spectacle (La société du spectacle), published in 1967—a kind of diagnosis of society’s entrapment in relationships mediated by images, where appearances have taken precedence over immediate reality.
The Situationists proposed a ludic escape from such rigid frameworks—an active transformation of everyday life that could, in turn, change the entire world. Synthesizing insights that emerged from the convergence of psychoanalysis and Marxism, they sought what the ancient Greeks referred to as the “good life.” According to the Situationists, bourgeois society alienates individuals from their true desires, the fulfillment of which would enable them to transcend the illusion of satisfaction offered by constant consumption and other forms of superficial ambitions and entertainment.
As part of this critique, the only two novels by Michèle Bernstein (b. 1932)—the lone female figure in the Situationist movement and Debord’s wife until its disintegration—were written. All the King’s Horses (Tous les chevaux du roi, 1960) and Night (La nuit, 1961) brilliantly illustrate the application of typical Situationist inventions, both in terms of content and execution. Both works depict a fragment of the lives of the unconventional Geneviève and Gilles, a Parisian couple in their mid-twenties, engaged in an open relationship that teeters on the edge of bourgeois respectability and predictability. The novels were translated from French by Marko Gregorić and edited by Dina Pokrajac in 2024, published in a collected edition by the Bijeli Val Association.
Geneviève and Gilles move within a circle of artists and intellectuals, of which they are also a part, though very little is known about Gilles. Geneviève works at a marketing agency, but she is often absent, arriving late and certainly not acting as though her existence entirely depends on the job. Gilles engages in “reification,” as Geneviève explains at one point, narrating All the King’s Horses in the first person. One can’t help but think that Gilles closely resembles the real Debord. In a 2013 interview, Bernstein acknowledged that her characters contain autobiographical elements, though not systematically, and All the King’s Horses is briefly dedicated to “Guy.” All this makes the text even more striking. While literary reality must be clearly distinguished from extra-literary reality, is it possible that some of the most prominent thinkers of the second half of the 20th century lived in the way described in Bernstein’s prose?
The portrayed couple allegedly loves each other, but they also have lovers—Gilles because he is very attached to shy, blue-eyed girls who are barely in their twenties, and Geneviève, it seems, more to comply with such a relationship model. She shares a deeper intellectual bond with Gilles than those he shares with his lovers, who evidently enter his life serially until they eventually bore him (something Geneviève herself warns one of them about). From the outset, it’s clear that her unusual connection with Gilles is reflected in the fact that she selects other women for him—”because, after all, if Gilles didn’t like the same girls [as she did], it would introduce an element of discord between [them].” Geneviève then socializes with the chosen girl, building a relationship with her that occasionally resembles that of a mother and daughter, yet tainted by mutual jealousy and competition after all.
How Gilles truly views this is never fully revealed. Night is a review of events presented in All the King’s Horses, told in the third person from the perspective of a narrator using restrained, superficial descriptions typical of the literature of the so-called French New Novel (nouveau roman) developed in the 1950s. For example, Gilles’ hands in the dark are described as “two bright spots,” “the sunlight will soon enter the room, the windows of which will remain open,” and the characters themselves perceive the space around them only as a collection of various shapes and light effects. Still, Bernstein distanced herself from the influences of authors typically associated with this new style, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet. The narrator’s perspective in Night indeed doesn’t resemble the passionless eye of a camera that renders everything before itself as flat—Bernstein’s narrator enters the characters at times, knowing what they are thinking, why they did what they did, or what they plan to do next.
Gilles, however, remains the embodiment of the modernist masculine ideal of an enigmatic artist whose mind is impossible to penetrate. It remains unclear what exactly his talent entails, although he mostly succeeds in convincing the women around him that it exists, seemingly without even trying. He embarks on long night walks with his lover, an activity the Situationists identified as dérive, or mapping space beyond rational categories, something akin to psychogeography. Paris, through Gilles’ aimless walks, is portrayed very poetically, but with precise street names and various locations, so it is possible to reconstruct it quite faithfully. Finally, Bernstein’s writing is somewhat like an estranging ode to the French capital, but also to other places where the unconventional group–which at one point even includes the lovers of both partners and their friends–decides to escape for a vacation.
The novels are also an example of the application of Situationist détournement, the taking of existing images from culture and playing with them to expose the ideology behind them. For instance, the plot of All the King’s Horses and Night is based on the film Night Visitors (Les Visiteurs du soir, 1942) by Marcel Carné. At the core of the story is the arrival of a couple at an organized event, after which they become part of a mental and emotional game that spawns numerous intrigues. Parallels have also been drawn between Bernstein’s novels and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ novel Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons dangereuses, 1782), which Roger Vadim adapted into a film in 1959. The cinematic medium was generally significant for literary experiments of that period. Détournement itself essentially echoes the deconstruction and dismantling of established cinematic patterns in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, particularly during his time with the Dziga Vertov Group (this estrangement similarly aimed to raise awareness of the social conditions in which the established codes of media developed and solidified).
The great value of Bernstein’s small literary oeuvre lies in expanding the existing notion of Situationist activity, which has until now been dominated by male figures. Her novels are also marked by a certain provocativeness in an extra-literary sense, where the question is raised about the limits of the Situationist willingness to dismantle social stereotypes and their true revolutionary nature beyond individual privileges. The world of Geneviève and Gilles remains a world of comfortable bourgeois life, a world of encounters between people who discuss painting and literature, yet are not concerned with bare existence. More than anything, they are simply burdened by boredom, precisely because every possible form of comfort is already guaranteed to them. The charm of their games of seduction and amusement becomes questionable when it involves others who are not promptly capable of understanding their implications.
Bernstein’s two analogous novels will offer particularly much to readers interested in the social climate that preceded 1968, as well as to those generally inclined towards literary experiments. All the King’s Horses and Night can also be read through the lens of the romance genre. According to the author herself, Debord was fascinated by them.