Guy Debord (Critical Lives)
Page 15
It’s here, within Champot’s peace and serenity, that Debord also savoured classic Pierre Mac Orlan lines like: ‘There exist a certain number of cities of adventure … The name of these cities brings an evocative precision to the spirit of passive adventurers.’ ‘One never should forget’, Mac Orlan said elsewhere in Petit manuel du parfait aventurier, ‘that adventure is in the imagination of those who desire it. It is effaced when one believes they’ve found it, and when one holds it, it’s not worth looking at.’13
‘Ah yes, Guy loved that Mac Orlan book,’ Alice said, matter-of-factly. ‘He’d read it many times over, knew it well. He adored Pierre Mac Orlan.’ Another of Guy’s favourite Mac Orlan texts, Alice informed me, was Villes. A charming memoir of Mac Orlan’s vagabond years between 1899 and 1927, Villes is a typical mixture of rhetoric and reality, evoking wandering and seaports, grubby back streets and shady, twilight characters, all of which hark back to another age, to a sentimental education seldom found on any latter-day curriculum. Mac Orlan’s voice resonates with a rich tonality of innocence. This is a writer’s adventure story: turning its pages kindles the imagination like the chance turning of an unknown street corner. Nocturnal street corners wend and weft their way through Villes. As we leaf through its time-served pages, beat-up personalities and nettle-ridden paving stones invade our living rooms and possess our minds. Suddenly, somehow, we find ourselves foisted backwards to fin-de-siècle Montmartre, outside the Lapin Agile tavern, sauntering along the rue Saint-Vincent in summertime, or loitering in winter at the place du Tertre, feeling its icy chill penetrate our threadbare overcoat and under-nourished body.
In Villes, we wander melancholically a step behind Mac Orlan’s shadowy presence, a journey an ageing Debord made many times, penetrating Mac Orlan’s enchanting urban labyrinth, a cascading array of back alleys and mangled memories, of wounded warriors and warped waysides. The narrative drift seems factual but the driving force is Mac Orlan’s own noblesse de phrase. He showed Debord how to access the city of dream, the sentimental city, a city that all true urbanists hold in their hearts, come what may. ‘Misery in Naples, in London, in Hamburg, in Berlin, in Paris, in Barcelona, in Anvers’, Mac Orlan said,
reveals itself through intimate details profoundly imprinted on memory. It’s relatively easy to be stirred and to write about a city after having touched the picturesque of its neighbourhoods. Tragedy often mingles with the familiar odours of the street. Misery plunges everybody and everything into an infinitely mysterious mist that permits the imagination to create literary characters more living than the living themselves.14
The shutters at Champot are open every July, August and September when Alice returns to the farmhouse. She cuts the grass and, for her, Guy still lives on in the balmy summer air. He’s in her as well, and she’s immortalized him in her poetry. In D’Azur au triangle vidé de sable, Alice evokes their singular presence:
Our two halves only made one
You are gone
One half of me survived you
When one half of you
Stayed here in me
If two only makes one
By what subtle arithmetic
The Prince of Division
Had you the right
to get the better of what was unique.15
In another touching, reflective stanza, ‘De part et d’autre de cette arme’, Alice says:
You are the true woman of a hoodlum
On either side of his arm
We will have no more of our time
We will see each other again I know not where
… His face forever so sweet
The memories are for tomorrow
We will see again our Indian.16
Elsewhere, in ‘Au centre de l’étoile flamboyante’, Guy is a shining light and her guiding star: ‘Written at the center of a Flamboyant Star/ The letter ‘G’/ Appeared so brilliant/ to guide the protégée.’ At frailer moments, though, without his physical presence, Alice admits:
I am afraid
Afraid of fear
… I am afraid of the night
And afraid of the day which follows
Afraid of love
And afraid of life without him
… And afraid of silence
Afraid of understanding
And afraid to see
Afraid of me
Afraid of others
Afraid of being me
And of not being me
Afraid of everything
Afraid of nothing
Afraid of being afraid
When it inhabits me
When it leaves me
I am afraid.17
Debord spent many evenings staring at the radiant night sky above Champot’s living planetarium. Millions of pearl-white stars twinkled brilliantly against a backdrop of deep infinite blackness, only to be extinguished by a passing mist a moment later. It was a land of storms. Storms have battered that pale stone wall surrounding his house for a long while. But the wall has absorbed anything pelted at it, and it’s stayed upright and undaunted. Storms have also rained down on the Seine, sometimes flooding the Square du Vert-Galant, cutting it off temporarily from mainland Paris. Storms in Champot and storms in Paris are two Debordian motifs that endure most: the stubborn older man in his fortress and the young voyager with his Argonauts. Searching for Debord meant scaling the former while swimming in the latter, peering over the wall while thrashing about against the current. Developing a head for heights and holding one’s breadth in chopping seas, not swallowing too much salt water, helps you get a little nearer to Guy, to the man and mortal, to the thinker and his ghost, to the activist and archivist, to his work and legacy.
Despite how much Alice tries to deny Guy’s legacy – there is no Debord legacy, she insisted, in a letter to Le Monde (1 November 1996) – his legacy is surely that he taught us how to follow Hegel’s wonderful proclamation: ‘to look the negative in the face and live with it’.18 Living with the negative, Hegel said, is ‘the magical power’ that gives people Being, that brings meaning and definition to their lives, underwrites life as a voyage, as a quest. It is a weirdly positive force, entering through the back door, or flowing as an undertow. Debord spent a lifetime living with the negative, knowing its magical power. The power he leaves us today is the power to say No: to look the negative in the face and live with it forever. Of course, it may mean living with this negative in vain, never actually winning, never overcoming, never finding positive transcendence. Still, that doesn’t prejudice the value of the work, which may indeed be very good. Nor does it preclude that in striving, in battling against the negative, we can discover for ourselves a truly authentic life.
Perhaps, then, the real legacy of Debord isn’t so much his Situationist muck-raking as the more personal, stoical lesson he can teach us about how to stay true to our nature in these desperate times. In the late 1980s Debord expressed to the writer Morgan Sportès his admiration of Louis Malle’s 1981 film My Dinner with André, a quiet set-piece about two playwrights, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, rendezvousing for the first time in years at an old-moneyed New York restaurant. Christophe Bourseiller’s Vie et mort de Guy Debord recalls Debord’s numerous meetings with Sportès in assorted Parisian bars that Debord had chosen.19 A good few have since closed their doors or else gone upscale; others, like Le Vin des Rues at 21 rue Boulard, just south of Montparnasse Cemetery, we can still imagine Debord frequenting, sitting furtively out of sight, reading Mac Orlan’s Les dés pipés. ‘He was a man from another century’, Sportès said, ‘like a feudal lord’. Their conversations rarely touched upon politics; Debord spoke only about art, film and literature. To Sportès he confessed a fondness for Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities and a disdain for Proust.
Malle’s My Dinner with André might really be a glimpse of ‘My Dinner with Guy’. Debord himself, after all, wasn’t averse to organizing grand meals for his guests at Champot, where, ‘at the banquet of life’, he’d hold cour
t around its large rustic wooden table, the centrepiece of the house. In My Dinner with André nothing much happens: its form is a kind of anti-cinema that Debord loved. There is no action, no music, no gimmicks – a couple of hours slowly unfold; two men (both of whom retain their real names) sit at table, eat an expensive meal and talk about what they’ve done over the past two years. ‘Wally’ Shawn, who wrote the screenplay along with André Gregory, dreads meeting André, the once-famous experimental playwright, but accepts the invitation nonetheless. André, we hear, helped Wally get his first theatre break, though since then André has opted out of the limelight, taking off on mystical adventures to Tibet, India and deserted Polish forests. Everybody believes he’s cracked up and gone mad, and Wally presents him as a cranky freak. The dialogue starts off lightly, even whimsically, but then steadily the intensity and gravity get racketed-up; it’s André’s existential voyage that dominates; he could talk all day and night if need be. Wally, the realist and sceptic, worries more about paying his next rent demand. André, on the other hand, has been searching for new principles, for new meaning; his days of performing and pretending on stage – on the stage of real life – in a drama where he hasn’t scripted either rules or dialogue, is done.
André is a probing man of the anti-spectacle, a raconteur who expresses the content of a mature Debordian politics. He bemoans the modern world’s incapacity to feel anymore, overwhelmed as it is by electric blankets, central heating and air conditioning. People no longer have time to think, no longer want to think – are no longer allowed to think. He speaks of alienation like the young Marx. At one point, André even sounds like a young Situ: ‘We’re bored, we’re all bored; we’ve turned into robots.’ ‘But has it ever occurred to you, Wally,’ he confronts his incredulous friend, ‘that the process which creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money?’ ‘Somebody who is bored is asleep,’ André follows up, ‘and somebody who’s asleep will not say NO!’20 As far as he’s concerned, the 1960s were
the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished. And that this is the beginning of the rest of the future … and that from now on there will simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there will be almost nothing left to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts … and history and memory.21
But as darkness closes in, and as peoples’ lives become dominated by the society of spectacle – ‘the guardian of sleep’ – there will be others, like André, like Guy, who’ll see things differently, who will try to reconstruct a new future for the world, invent ‘new pockets of light’, as André calls them. They will resist by ‘creating a new kind of school or a new kind of monastery’, a new kind of ‘reserve’ – islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to function, in order to maintain the species through a Dark Age. In other words, André insists, ‘we’re talking about an underground, which did exist during the Dark Ages in a different way… And the purpose of this underground is to find out how to preserve the culture. How to keep things living.’22
You get the sense that Debord saw Champot as a new kind of reserve, as a new kind of monastery, where he preserved the culture in an underground. It’s there that he conceived what André called
a new language, a new language of the heart… a new kind of poetry, that is the poetry of the dancing bee, that tells us where the honey is. And I think that in order to create that language we’re going to have to learn how you can go through a looking-glass into a new kind of perception, in which you have that sense of being united to all things, and suddenly you understand everything.23
I can see in my mind’s eye Guy nodding approvingly as he watched My Dinner with André, understanding what André meant when he said that we’ve got to find a way ‘to cut out the noise, to stop performing, and to listen to what’s inside’, before it’s too late. One wonders, as Guy had wondered, whether it’s too late for most people, whether there’s anything left of the collective project he’d helped hatch during the 1960s? Or whether, in fact, that mission to change the world now had to begin again by creating new undergrounds, and that they’d commence from within, a little closer to home, where you’d fight, as Debord cited Jorge Manrique saying centuries earlier, ‘for your true king’, ‘the one you’ve created yourself’.
While the Guy Debord that can help us survive the beginning of the century is found on the other side of the Champot wall, it’s fitting that he finally ended up in Paris, and in the Seine. Alice knew his Paris, his old Parisian urbanism, had been done over. But even in death the city still stood for something irresistible – still, in spite of it all, stood for hope, retained glimmers of light amid the setting sun. It was never a completely done deal. Even the showcase Left Bank retained its Left mountebanks. Like all big cities, Paris had an endless capacity to absorb and adapt to all thrown at it, and to somehow live on. Alice knew that, and wanted Guy back, back to Paris: she wanted him looking the negative in the face and dying with it. Paris was in him, in his bones, and it always would be. It once nourished his spirit and stimulated his brain; now it could re-energize his body, bring it to life again, perhaps seven leagues from this land, or maybe only a few steps away. In Paris, he’d found his zone of perdition; that memory lingered and could never be effaced nor denied.
This spirit can help us script our own lives. In searching for Debord we can find ourselves, become shipwrecked pirates who’ve found an island paradise, our bounty after the mutiny. Debord’s presence will endure as the Seine endures, as it keeps on flowing: nobody can stop it. The fabled river of poetry and romance circulated through him in much the same way that Dublin’s Liffey did James Joyce: no matter where Guy went, whether to Champot or Arles, to Florence or Barcelona, his big hometown vein kept on pumping. For Debord, as well as for the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, the ‘Sein annews’: it was Guy’s sinew Seine ‘anews’, is eternally recurring and constantly renewing. So, on the banks of the Square du Vert-Galant, in our land of storms, we can stare out to sea one last time, thinking about Debord’s past and our future, looking for his Situationist pirate ship on the horizon somewhere ahead. To begin again at the beginning, he’d said in In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni. We go around and around and are consumed by fire. A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, from swerve of shore to bend of bay…
References
1 Eyes for Blowing up Bridges
1 This is the list that Debord himself compiled in Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici (Paris, 1993), pp. 87–8.
2 Ibid., p. 92.
3 Carl von Clausewitz, On War (New York, 1993), p. 471. The section entitled ‘Fortresses’ comes from Book 6, chapter 10.
4 Guy Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, trans. James Brook (London, 1991), p. 64; Panégyrique, vol. I (Paris, 1993), p. 70.
5 Debord, Considérations, p. 69.
6 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, p. 6; and Panégyrique, vol. I, p. 15.
7 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, p. 34; Panégyrique, vol. I, p. 42.
8 In a letter to Patrick Straram, dated 31 October 1960, Debord wrote: ‘I had the occasion, and the time, to reread it [Under the Volcano] entirely, toward the beginning of September, on a train between Munich and Gênes. I had found it more fine, and more intelligent, than in 1953, despite loving it a lot then’ (Guy Debord, Correspondance, vol. II: Septembre 1960-décembre 1964, Paris, 2001, p. 40).
9 Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (New York, 1971), p. 86.
10 Ibid., p. 50.
11 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, p. 37; Panégyrique, vol. I, p. 46.
12 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, pp. 48–9; Panégyrique, vol. I, pp. 56–7.
13 DST, or La Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, established by de Gaulle in 1944 after Liberation from the Nazis, is France’s equivalent to the CIA and M
I6.
14 See Debord, Considérations, p. 67. In French, it is possible to pun both, since mouches means flies and mouchards police stool pigeons.
15 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, p. 13; Panégyrique, vol. I, p. 24.
16 Debord, Considérations, pp. 77–78.
17 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, p. 14; Panégyrique, vol. I, p. 26.
18 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, p. 13; Panégyrique, vol. I, p. 24.
19 Debord, Panegyric, vol. I, p. 16; Panégyrique, vol. I, pp. 28–9.