"What do you do, exactly? I have no idea." "I reify," he answered.
"It's a serious job," I added. "Yes, it is," he said. "I see,"
Carol observed with admiration. "Serious work, with big books and a
big table cluttered with papers." "No," said Gilles. "I walk.
Mostly I walk." --from "All the King's Horses" Michele Bernstein's
novel, "All the King's Horses" (1960), is one of the odder and more
elusive, entertaining, and revealing documents of the Situationist
International. At the instigation of her first husband, Guy Debord,
Bernstein agreed to write a potboiler to help swell the
Situationist International's coffers. When she objected to the idea
of practicing a "dead art," Debord suggested that it would be
instead be "detournement"--the Situationist reuse of media toward
different, subversive, ends. Inspired by the pseudo-scandalous
success of Roger Vadim's filmed version of Choderlos de Laclos's
"Les Liaisons dangereuses" and the adolescent Francoise Sagan's
bestselling novel "Bonjour tristesse," Bernstein lampooned and
borrowed from both Sagan and de Laclos, concocting a "roman a clef"
that succeeded on several levels. A moneymaker for the most radical
front of the French avant-garde, the novel (by its very success)
demonstrated the bankruptcy of contemporary French letters and the
Situationist contempt for the psychological novel, while (perhaps
unintentionally) holding up a playful mirror to the private lives
of two of the Situationist International's most important members.
"All the King's Horses" is a slippery rewrite of "Dangerous
Liaisons" with Debord playing the role of cold libertine, Bernstein
as his cohort, and disguised walk-on roles by the likes of the
painter Asger Jornand others. Though Greil Marcus sparked interest
in this novel in his 1989 book "Lipstick Traces," "All the King's
Horses" remained unavailable until its 2004 republication in
France. This Semiotext(e) edition is its first translation into
English.
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