Debord cites Brenan’s summation of Manrique from The Literature of the Spanish People in his preface to Stances sur la mort de son père. Perhaps, as age 50 neared and drink began to take its toll, the ex-Situationist had become aware of his own mortality. For during the late 1970s he’d quietly and painstakingly translated into French Manrique’s Castilian Coplas. It was an amazing linguistic achievement, particularly for somebody ‘who had never judged highly the frequenting of universities’ and ‘who isn’t in any degree a Hispanist’. Nevertheless, the circumstances of ‘his itinerant life’, he added, ‘and of his less socially accepted occupations’, made him more than qualified to capture the true flavour and meaning of this Spanish classic.18 ‘When one has had the pleasure of knowing the true Spain’, Debord wrote, ‘from one or two admirable figures whom she has produced in the history of this century, and in those preceding, one also had to love its language, and its poetry.’19
Debord aged 45; a still from his film In Girum Imus Node Et Consumimur Igni.
In 1980, when Champ Libre released Debord’s Stances, it disclosed his deeply ontological connection with Spain, as well as a 48-year-old rebel’s connection with himself. Perhaps he’d recognized that his only remaining strategy was to dig in grimly, to await the end with loyal obstinacy, because to struggle against death was futile. ‘The earthly life’, Debord said, ‘is still seen as a voyage towards another eternal life; but one senses [in Manrique], above all, its brevity, the triumph of death, the dissolution and loss of all that exists one moment in the world.’20 This post-Machiavellian froideur conjures up magnificently the spirit of Manrique – a spirit Debord wanted to haunt our age as much as it haunted him. I have tried to be faithful to Debord’s French translation of Castilian Spanish in my English translation:
Arouse yourself, sleeping soul
and step out of your torpor,
Contemplating
How life has passed,
And how death arises,
By surprise;
How pleasure slips away…
And in verse III we hear the futility of wealth:
There are rivers, our lives,
That descend toward the sea Of death.
There go the lordships themselves
And in verse XVI we hear a romantic lament:
Where is he, the king Don Juan?
And the princes of Aragon,
Where are they?
Where are so many of the amorous?
Where did their ruses lead?
What did they find?
Were they only vain shadows,
That passed through the grass
Like seasons,
The duels and tournaments,
The ornaments and embroideries,
And crests?
And in verse XXVI Don Rodrigo and his type are immortalized:
What friend for his friends!
For his people and parents, what a
Lord! What an
Enemy for the enemy!
What leader of the fearless,
And the steadfast!
What judgement for the wise!
For the pleasant, what grace!
What grand sense!
Mild to his dependents
But, for the mean and harmful,
What a lion!
And in verse XXXIV, we hear the virtue of strength and reputation:
Saying to him: ‘Honest Knight,
Flee this deceptive world
Of reflections;
And that your heart so firm
Display its celebrated strength
This instant.
Since for you health, life,
Do not compare with
Reputation,
That virtue so taut
For withstanding this affront
Which summons you.’
The morbidity of the verse is offset by grandeur of the will. ‘One needs to recognize some more modern traits’, Debord pointed out. ‘One needs to fight for the “true king”’, he said, ‘who is the one you’ve created yourself.’21 Maybe, here, there’s some punctuation between the young and mature radical, an epistemological break in himself and in his thought? For, as in 1980, it seems that Debord wants to wrench himself out of the political realm altogether, and propel his body and mind elsewhere, into medieval metaphysics. In one sense, Stances marks a political withdrawal, an abandoning of the collective project Debord affirmed so ardently in his Situationist years. In another, it exhibits him ratcheting up the political stakes. It shows him getting stronger, not weaker, as the spectacle gets stronger. He tells us he’s more devoted than ever before to the ‘true king’, to oneself, against all odds. He reminds us that virtue and reputation will win out in the end, despite everything. If the spectacle is going to erode all higher values, convert everyone and everything into exchange values, he’s going to invent new values, older values, longer-ranged values, about virtue and stoicism in the face of death and imminent old age. Meanwhile, he’s going to wander with Alice, amongst peripatetic heroes and Romany adventurers, knowing that there are certain things he can’t avoid, and knowing this means he can wander more freely.
Guy and Alice greatly admired Romany culture and each was absorbed in its tradition. Throughout the 1970s they seemed happiest themselves on the high road, in flight. They’d read George Borrow, the quirky nineteenth-century ‘Romany Rye’, an English gent who’d befriended Gypsies, and who’d lived amongst them and knew their tongue. Borrow’s autobiographical tales of open roads, empty fields, dense undergrowth and Romany lore spoke volumes to kindred free spirits.22 He taught himself half-a-dozen languages and, between 1835 and 1840 journeyed to Spain under the employ of the Bible Society; in The Bible in Spain, a book that made his name, his love of the zincali and of Spain shone more than his salesmanship or proselytizing. Borrow was a veritable ‘man in black’, a renegade after Guy’s and Alice’s own hearts. He was a lavengro, a gifted ‘word-smith’, an autodidact philologist who similarly recognized the joy and power of language, of argot and patois, of a natural, authentic literary beauty.
Borrow, like Guy and Alice, was fascinated by the colloquial speech of ‘the dangerous classes’. He likewise knew how to put idiom into practice, learning his craft in wandering, not just in books. He was the first to challenge stereotypes about the Roma; and in books like Lavengro (1851) and Romany Rye (1857), and with real-life characters like Jasper Petulengro (a maestro horseman and sage) and Isopel Berners (a striking, eighteen-year-old six-foot Gypsy belle), he popularized their truer nature. They are ‘widely different in their appearance from other people’, Borrow wrote in Lavengro. ‘Not so much in dress, for they are clad something after the fashion of rustic jockeys, but in their look… no ruddy cheeks, no blue quiet glances belong to them; their features are dark, their locks long, black and shining, and their eyes are wild… heroically beautiful, but wild, wild, wild.’23
The Gypsies whom Borrow described in Lavengro first arrived on British shores around 1500, in a trek begun five centuries earlier in India. Their westwards shift, across the Middle East, into the Byzantine Empire, and onwards to the Balkans and to continental Europe, was a restless tale of liberty and woe, of flight and exile, of wretchedness and spirit. They reputedly reached Constantinople in 1068; by 1320 they were well established in the Peloponnese. At the beginning of the fifteenth century they’d made it to Venice and Rome. In 1417 they’d hit Germany; in 1419, France; in 1425 they’d arrive in Spain. And yet, everywhere they went Gypsies were treated as pariah peoples. Their nomadic lifestyles threatened governments, whose rule had a prerequisite of order and stability; their features, their clothes, their habits and trades – horse-trading, blacksmiths, fortune-telling, circus performing, juggling, etc. – were disdained by normal ‘settled’ types.
The Debords affirmed the sensual and irrepressible joie de vivre of Gypsy lore that has endured despite centuries of persecution. One of their friends, Tony Gatlif, a Paris-based, Algerian-born filmmaker, him
self of Gypsy descent, has helped this cultural tradition flourish. It was Gatlif who turned Guy and Alice on to the magical world of the Roma, with memorably luscious portraits of Gypsies like Latcho Drom (1993), a documentary of dance and music, which featured alongside the premier public (and posthumous) screening on Canal + of Guy Debord, son art et son temps in January 1995.
Latcho Drom, or ‘Safe Trip’, maps the meandering 1,000-year Gypsy migration, from the golden sands of Rajasthan, haunting Kasbahs on the Nile, misty quays of Istanbul, bleak wintry cityscapes of Romania and Hungary, to the crowded peasant cafés in France and sun-drenched hills of Andalusia. Nowhere does Gatlif utilize actors in this musical odyssey; detail is authentic and real – the toothless grins, the pathos and squalor, the ecstatic chants and creaking violins, the vulgarity and the innocence, the melodies and the melodramas. ‘You’, a subtitle near the end of Latcho Drom says, ‘are a stork who has settled on the earth; me, I am a bird who has been cast there.’ In Gatlif’s films, even trees have duende.
Alice herself, under her maiden name Becker-Ho, has become an authority on Gypsy culture and Romany – the language, she says, ‘of those who know’. She’s published several critically acclaimed books, Les Princes du Jargon (1990), L’Essence du Jargon (1994) and Du Jargon héritier en Bastardie (2002), and presented another, Paroles de Gitans (2000), on their hybrid tongue and disappearing world. Romany itself is a genuine language, not just a dialect or an argot. Its origins can actually be traced to Sanskrit; but as these wandering peoples spread westwards, they appropriated many ‘loanwords’ en route, blending and mixing and hybridizing Hebrew, Greek, German and Romance languages, forging them into their own distinctive voice. In Les Princes du Jargon, Alice claimed that the ‘slang’ of every European vagabond group and the criminal ‘dangerous classes’, from the Middle Ages onwards, has an ascertainable base in Romany. This ‘secretive and deliberately disguised language’, she said, ‘had been created initially with the help of that spoken by Gypsies, instead of deriving, as had long been maintained, from various national patois.’ Hence Gypsy language ‘emerges here as a mother tongue, as important to etymological studies as Latin or Greek’.24
Slang, said Alice, is popular speech, the everyday language of real men and women; often, too, its camouflage, a lexicon of dissimulation and secrecy, beyond the reach of jargon, which is created by intellectuals and specialists, by people with power and wealth. Jargon is ‘like the colours of a team, while slang makes up the colour of a high wall, sheltered by popular phrases – like the knowing crowd, closing around itself, to protect a fugitive’.25 It is the vocabulary of the urban dispossessed, and that’s why she and husband Guy dig slang so much. It provokes and riles, is profane and rough and defies authority. It doesn’t lay out a single screen, ‘but is a play of mirrors and lighting’. It ‘amuses or menaces’; it is, Alice reckoned, ‘the power of words that recalls always that it is dangerous to speak: sometimes too much, sometimes not enough’.26 The notion of ‘the outsider’ is crucial in the formation of slang, and here Gypsies come into their own, bringing into the linguistic fray ‘their experiences of free men and nomads’. To that degree, Romany makes up one of the largest currents of slang, a major confluence in what Alice called a ‘delta’ configuration, whose tributaries include Hebrew-German, Greek, Armenian, Turkish, Arabic and Slavic.
Romany culture has deep roots in Arles, the Roman-Gaul capital of Provence, where Alice and Guy lived at the beginning of the 1980s. They lodged in a spacious first-floor apartment at 33 rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, in the old centre. Nestling on the east bank of the Rhône and gateway to the untamed Camargue, Arles’ mild climate and radiant Provençal light had inspired Van Gogh to shack up there a hundred years earlier. Arles Gypsies, who hark back to the 1430s, doubtless favoured Provence for its weather; they also liked the relative hospitality that the then-independent country offered as France battled against England in the Hundred Years War. In modern Arles, suntanned Gypsies continue to share space with rowdy Camargue cowboys and fearless matadors who regularly battle bulls in the town’s 12,000-seat, first-century Roman amphitheatre. And that most famous Gypsy band ever, Gipsy Kings, equally hail from Arles. (By the time their smash hit ‘Bamboleo’ reverberated around every European bar and nightclub, Guy would be in no shape to dance.)
Although his mind was dark, Debord had a desire for sunshine in everyday life. Alice’s antique-dealing brother, Eugène Becker-Ho, had a big fifteenth-century manor house in Saint-Pierre-du-Mont, but Debord said he wasn’t attracted by the weather in Normandy. He preferred warmth. For much of the 1980s he and Alice would winter in Arles and summer in their Champot farmhouse. It was a nice split routine; everything, Debord insisted, is less costly for those who have taste. Arles today has narrow, higgledy-piggledy congested streets, one-way systems and hoards of tourists stomping around everywhere. A lot of old properties have terracotta rooftops; some houses are painted in bright primary colours; others are dull and shabby; all are cracked and crumbling. Tacky tourist stores jostle with trendy boutiques and graffiti-laden walls, making the glamour feel strangely seedy, an unappealing mix of kitsch wealth and squalour. Twenty-five-years ago, when Guy and Alice were here, things may have been different.
Walking down a narrow alley off the place du Forum, near the Café de Nuit, a horrible re-creation of the café Van Gogh immortalized, you reach the rue de l’Hotel de Ville; if you make a sharp right turn number 33 suddenly appears: a faded, once-grand, two-storey eighteenth-century building with a big oak front door, which has seen better days. The plasterwork around the doorframe is falling apart and nameless doorbells give no inkling of who lives there. On one side, a spattering of graffiti on a dishevelled wall; on the other, a bourgeoise fashion store. An apt Debordian metaphor perhaps, as he straddled the low and high life – a schism best incarnated by his friend Gérard Lebovici. A few yards along the same block is the magnificent twelfth-century Romanesque cathedral of St Trophime, with its carved stone portal depicting the Last Judgment. A series of trumpeting angels welcome worshippers and tourists through a giant red door. Facing the cathedral, the centrepiece of the place de la République, is the palatial seventeenth-century Town Hall, designed after Versailles. It’s a bizarrely central and public location for Debord to inhabit, especially for somebody so secret, so guarded.
He and Alice had neither a TV nor a telephone there. Apparently, they sometimes watched television with a next-door neighbour. The unsuspecting Madame took the debonair Guy for a local bank employee! If Debord rarely went out, it was probably because of the paparazzi, who’d camp outside the building, awaiting a precious glimpse of the infamous man of the shadow. It became a game of hide and seek. ‘I would certainly be a bad strategist of the urban milieu’, he joked,
if I did not know how to outmanoeuvre photographers. Always well accompanied, I was able to go out, eat at a restaurant, wander the city, without a single one of these bunglers – who are used to forcing stars out of their hiding – knowing how to meet up with me or daring to venture close enough to take a picture and get a worthwhile image. I do not think, having watched their antics, that I was sent the cream of the profession.27
It was behind these fraying Arles shutters that Debord planned another film, a mammoth, epic, cinematic undertaking on his great labour of love: Spain. ‘Evading all clichés’, he professed, the film would ‘translate to screen not everything foreigners (Europeans, Americans, Japanese, etc.) could imagine on the question, and not more than the Spanish themselves could believe, but: what Spain really is.’28 It would begin in the fifteenth century and move towards the present day. He envisaged a portrait lasting between two and four hours, something that ‘would eventually be destined to play in local movie houses and be broadcast on TV stations (cables, satellites, etc.). It might eventually entail some reconstituted parts in costumes, but must take into account contemporary Spain.’ Above all, ‘for diverse historical and evident cultural reasons’, the film, he said, must centre on
Andalusia.29
In October 1982 he signed a contract with Soprofilms, Lebovici’s offshoot company, who agreed to finance the film in its entirety. With all the paperwork in place, with everything ‘read and approved’, Debord could return to Spain to research detail. He now seemed scheduled to make a dramatic screen comeback, re-entering the cinematic limelight in what appeared a curious machination with the mainstream. But the world, lamentably, would never see its like. On the morning of 7 March 1984, the project received a mortal setback. The whole of France awoke to some startling and shocking news: the agent and cinema producer Gérard Lebovici, aged 51, was found dead in an underground parking lot beneath avenue Foch in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. He was slumped over the front seat of his Renault 30 TX with four bullets in the back of his head.
Guy Debord (Critical Lives) Page 10