- All the King's Horses
Originally published in 1960, All the King's Horses is a story about a group of friends who narrate and, in so doing, narrativize their own lives.1 The first three pages of the book are perhaps the most important: they not only set the novel's emotional temperature (invariably chilly), they also establish its primary thematic concerns: heteronormativity and dissimulation. While the first is tested with varying degrees of success, the second is embraced wholeheartedly. In Bernstein's novel, identity is consistently figured as an act of bad faith. The "self" of All the King's Horses is not only indulgent and polymorphous, but also flexible, contingent, and highly performative.
All the King's Horses was Bernstein's first novel, and it was followed one year later by La Nuit, both published by Buchet-Chastel. Thanks to Greil Marcus and Odile Passot (see Marcus 1989; and Passot in the afterward to the book under review), the basic lineaments of All the King's Horses are already known, so I will reiterate only the most important of them here. Bernstein was a founding member of both the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, two of the postwar era's most influential avantgarde collectives. Bernstein married fellow Lettrist member Guy Debord in 1954. These real events inform Bernstein's fiction at many levels: the author's relationship with Debord is the basis for the novel's subject matter, while artistic and philosophical debates among the Situationists inspired much of its overarching structure.
All the King's Horses takes place over the course of several months, between May and December 1957 (Passot:119). The novel is divided into three sections that correspond to crucial moments in the narrative arc: a meeting, a vacation, and a series of break-ups that ultimately results in a reunion. The novel's main protagonists include Geneviève, modeled on Bernstein, and her husband Gilles, based on Debord. Geneviève and Gilles are collectors, of sorts. Always in pursuit of extramarital affairs, Geneviève and Gilles take numerous lovers—in this case, Carole, Bertrand, and Hélène—whose affections they alternately relish, embrace, and manipulate. Geneviève and Gilles are not irredeemably ruthless. They certainly care for one another, and at times, they even seem to harbor genuine fondness for their lovers, but this fondness is often disavowed just as quickly as it is expressed. Ultimately, Geneviève and Gilles are faithful only to the games they play. The universe they inhabit is one in which relationships are formed through the exploitation of opportunity, need, and emotion. It is a universe in which desire is routinely instrumentalized, if not weaponized. It is a universe in which attachments are described with detached indifference and passion with dispassionate remove. In the world sketched by Bernstein, sexual liberation occasions pleasure but not joy.
To those who have read Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel Les liaisons dangereuses or seen Roger Vadim's 1959 cinematic adaptation, Bernstein's bleak emotional landscape and its cast of amoral libertines will be familiar: All the King's Horses travesties them both, along with [End Page 161] Marcel Carné's 1942 film Les visiteurs du soir (The Devil's Envoys) (Passot:118, 123). Bernstein's détournement of Laclos's novel was systematic and deliberate, placing All the King's Horses squarely in the tradition of Situationist artistic production.
As Tom McDonough reminds us, détournement was conceived in the shadow of Bertolt Brecht, whose penchant for revising the past through acts of appropriation had a considerable impact in Paris, where he staged productions of Mother Courage and Her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Club in 1954 and 1955 respectively (McDonough 2007:35-38).2 Umfunktionierung, or "refunctioning," is not the only Brechtian strategy to have left its mark on All the King's Horses, however. The technique of verfremdungseffekt (translated as either distanciation or alienation effect) has equal bearing on Bernstein...