"The Seventh Function of Language"

Who can resist a novel that's been called "the most insolent"? Laurent Binet's mystery/adventure is like the pseudo-intellectual's "The Da Vince Code".

• Barthes’s stroke of genius is to not content himself with communication systems but to extend his field of inquiry to systems of meaning. Once you have tasted that freedom, you quickly become bored with anything less
• * Man is an interpreting machine and, with a little imagination, he sees signs everywhere: in the color of his wife’s coat, in the stripe on the door of his car, in the eating habits of the people in the apartment next door,.. With Barthes, signs no longer need to be signals: they have become clues. A seismic shift. They’re everywhere.
• Very professorial: Bayard can sense that. He tries to grasp what the voice is talking about, but unfortunately he makes this effort just as Foucault says: “In such a way that the subject moving toward the truth, and attaching itself to it with love, in his own words manifests a truth that is nothing other than the manifestation in it of the true presence of a God who, Himself, can tell only truth, because He never lies, He is completely honest.” <> If Foucault had been speaking that day about prison, or power, or archaeology, or green energy, or genealogy, who knows?… But the implacable voice drones on:
• Monsieur Foucault: He looks at once sturdy and slender. He has a determined jaw with a slight underbite and the stately demeanor of those who know that they are valued by the world.
• most notably, Roland Barthes Made Easy, by Rambaud and Burnier. This is quite a slim book with a green cover, a photograph of Barthes staring out severely from an orange oval. Coming out of the frame, a Crumb-style cartoon character says “hee-hee,” grinning and laughing, mockingly, one hand over his mouth. In fact, I’ve checked, and it is Crumb... Bayard is no cartoon-strip connoisseur, and does not make the connection. But he buys the book, and the Pommier, too. He doesn’t order the Picard, because at this stage of the investigation dead authors don’t interest him.
• *  (M, the metonymical representation of England, the representative of the queen, often repeats that Bond is his best agent: he is the favorite son)—but that provides him with all the material means necessary to accomplish them. James Bond, in fact, has his cake and eats it, too, and that is why he is such a popular fantasy, an extremely powerful contemporary myth: James Bond is the adventurer-functionary. Action and security. He commits offenses, misdemeanors, even crimes, but he is permitted, he has the authority; he won’t be punished because he has the famous ‘license to kill’ signified by his identification number. Which brings us to those three magic figures: 007. <> “Double 0 is the code for the right to commit murder, and here we see a brilliant application of the symbolism of figures. How could the license to kill be represented by a figure? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? A million? Death is not quantifiable. Death is nothingness, and nothingness is zero. But murder is more than mere death, it is death inflicted on another. It is death times two: his own inevitable death, whose probability is increased by the dangers of his job (we are often reminded that the life expectancy of double 0 agents is very low), and that of the other. Double 0 is the right to kill and to be killed. As for 7, it was obviously chosen because it is traditionally one of the most elegant numbers,... and prime (a prime number is divisible only by one and by itself) in order to express a singularity, a uniqueness, an individuality that confounds the whole impression of interchangeability suggested by an identification number.
• Another student speaks up now: “And in English, Q is pronounced exactly the same way as the word queue, which implies shopping. People queue outside the gadget store, they wait to be served; it is a dead time, a playful time, between two action scenes.” <> The young professor waves his arms enthusiastically: “Exactly! Well observed! That’s a very good idea! Don’t forget that one interpretation never exhausts the sign, and that polysemy is a bottomless well where we can hear an infinite number of echoes: a word’s meaning never runs dry. And the same’s true even for a letter, you see.”
• Your shoes are badly scuffed, and you came here in a car, which signifies that you are not deskbound—you are out and about in your job. An executive who leaves his office is very likely to be assigned some kind of inspection work.” <> “I see,” says Bayard. (A long silence, during which Herzog can hear the man in lizard-skin boots telling his fascinated audience how, back when he was head of the Armed Spinozist Faction
• I’m not sure how widely known Barthes’s homosexuality was at the time. When he wrote his bestseller, A Lover’s Discourse, he took care never to characterize his love object in terms of gender, striving to use neutral formulations such as “the partner” or “the other” (both of which, for what it’s worth, are masculine words in French, meaning that the pronoun is always “he”). Unlike Foucault, whose homosexuality was very open, almost as a form of protest, I know that Barthes was very discreet, perhaps ashamed, in any case very preoccupied with keeping up appearances, until his mother’s death at least.
• Bayard notes the inverted-V mouth, the shining blue eyes, the typical upper-class accent that verges on mispronunciation.
• Sartre stares at him contemplatively. Françoise Sagan whispers into his ear, like a simultaneous translator. Jean-Edern narrows his eyes, which makes him look even more weasel-like under his thick, frizzy hair, is silent for a few seconds, apparently thinking, and then starts shouting again: “Existentialism is a contagion! Long live the third sex!
• Foucault opens his eyes, as if he’s just remembered something: “And yet the Greeks had their limits too. They used to deny the young boy his share of pleasure. They couldn’t forbid it, of course, but they couldn’t conceive of it, and in the end, they did what we do: they excluded it through decorum.” (The back rooms: “No! No! No!”) “At the end of the day decorum is always the most effective means of coercion…” He points at his crotch: “This is not a pipe, as Magritte would say, ha ha!” He pulls up on the head of the young man, who is still pumping away conscientiously:
• It’s a shame there is no photographer in the room to immortalize this great moment in the history of French intellectuals: Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Bernard-Henri Lévy upbraiding the hospital staff for the disgraceful way they are treating a patient as prestigious as their great friend Roland Barthes. <> Maybe you’ll be surprised by the presence of BHL but, even back then, he is always where the action is. Barthes supported him as a “new philosopher” in slightly vague but nevertheless relatively official terms,
• Giscard: “I was lucky enough to obtain one of the most beautiful works in the history of French painting from the Museum of Bordeaux: Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, by Eugène Delacroix. Magnificent, isn’t it? I’m sure you know Missolonghi: it’s the city where Lord Byron died, during the war of independence against the Turks. In 1824, I believe.” (Simon notes the false modesty of that “I believe.”)
• that pleasure will undoubtedly be less than the feeling of power he is experiencing now by knowing he is the object of desire—and this is the upside of being young, handsome, and poor: without even thinking about it he can calmly despise all those prepared to pay, in one way or another, to have him.
• the feeling that he does not belong here intoxicates him with a cruel joy. What we steal is worth twice as much as what we earn through hard work.
• Hervé Guibert: is young and handsome, his beauty so exaggerated that only a Parisian could take him seriously as a writer.
• * What does Barthes think about as he dies? ... Hey, he should have said that he didn’t like Racine! “The French boast endlessly about having had their Racine (the man who used only two thousand words) and never complain about not having had their Shakespeare.”...  The door opens slowly, but Barthes is in his coma and does not hear it. <> It’s not true that he’s a “classicist”: deep down, he doesn’t like the seventeenth century’s dryness, those heavily layered alexandrines, those finely chiseled aphorisms, those intellectualized passions …
• Roland Barthes always wrote about language! But he found that … his tie … our tie … is a way of speaking. [Sollers, indignantly: “A way of speaking … Oh, come on!”] It’s a way of expressing oneself, fashion. The motorbike: it’s the way a society expressed itself. The cinema: obviously! Photography, too. So that’s to say that Roland Barthes is, at heart, a man who spent his time tracking signs!… The signs a society, a community, uses to express itself. Expresses vague, confused feelings, even if it’s not aware of it! In this sense, he was a very great journalist. He was the master of a science called semiology.
• an old editorial on Mitterrand by Jean Daniel, which he cut out of a Nouvel Obs from 1966: “Not only does this man give the impression that he believes in nothing: when you are with him, he makes you feel guilty for believing in something. Almost involuntarily, he insinuates that nothing is pure, all is sordid, and that no illusions are allowed.”
• Badinter pleads Mitterrand’s cause: in politics, cynicism is only a relative handicap; it can also suggest shrewdness and pragmatism. After all, compromise doesn’t have to be unprincipled. The very nature of democracy necessitates flexibility and calculation. Diogenes the Cynic was a particularly enlightened philosopher.
• * party scene: And there is always that procession of boys and girls wearing live lobsters on their heads or walking them on leashes, the lobster being, for reasons unknown, the fashionable animal in Paris, 1980... The Sergeant and Bono have disappeared. Slimane is buttonholed by Yves Mourousi. Foucault emerges from the toilets and begins a heated conversation with one of the singers from ABBA.
• Barthes asked him to learn the document by heart and destroy it immediately. Apparently, the semiologist believed that the southern accent was a mnemonic technique that facilitated memorization.
• Roman Jakobson was a Russian linguist: Beginning with two stylistic devices taken from ancient rhetoric, namely the metaphor (replacing one word with another linked to it by some sort of resemblance, “raging bull” for the boxer Jake LaMotta, for example) and metonymy (replacing one word with another linked to it by contiguity: “having a glass” to say that one drinks the liquid in the glass—the container for the contents, for example), he succeeded in explaining the functioning of language according to two axes: the paradigmatic axis and the syntagmatic axis. <> Broadly speaking, the paradigmatic axis is vertical and concerns the choice of vocabulary: ... Then you join it to other words: “belonging to Monsieur Seguin,” “stagnant,” “with his scythe,” “creased,” “undersigned,” to form a phrase: this chain is the horizontal axis, the word order that will enable you to make a sentence,...
  Vocabulary and syntax.
  Each time you formulate a phrase, you are subconsciously practicing these two operations. The paradigmatic axis uses your hard disk, if you like, and the syntagmatic your processor. (Although I doubt whether Bayard knows much about computers.)
  • The “phatic” function is the most amusing. This is the function that envisages communication as an end in itself. When you say “hello” on the telephone, you are saying nothing more than “I’m listening,” i.e., “I am in a situation of communication.” ... you talk for the sake of talking, without any objective other than making conversation. In other words, this function is the source of the majority of our verbal communications.
  Nevertheless, after thinking about it, or rather after rereading Jakobson, Simon Herzog does come up with a possible seventh function, designated as the “magic or incantatory function,” whose mechanism is described as “the conversion of a third person, absent or inanimate, to whom a conative message is addressed.”
• Kristoff knows exactly how a good lie works: it must be drowned in an ocean of truth. Being 90 percent truthful enables you to render the 10 percent you are attempting to conceal more credible, while reducing the risks of contradicting yourself. You buy time and you avoid becoming muddled. When you lie, you must lie about one point—and one only—and be perfectly honest about the rest. Emil Kristoff leans toward Andropov and says: “Comrade Yuri, you know Roman Jakobson? He’s a compatriot of yours.
• Together, they are a formidable political war machine already, working toward the heights of an exemplary career in the next century: when Kristeva receives the Legion of Honor from the hands of Nicolas Sarkozy, Sollers, also present, will be sure to mock the president for pronouncing “Barthès” instead of “Barthes.” Good cop, bad cop. They get their cake full of honors and they eat it with insolence. (Later, François Hollande will elevate Kristeva to the ranks of commandeur. Presidents come and go, people with meaningless medals remain.)
• Hélène, Althusser’s wife, is well aware of what these people think of her and gives an evil grin in return, the two women’s instinctive hatred instantly bordering on a sort of complicity.
• Sollers unctuously begins a discussion about Poland: “Now that is a subject that will never go out of fashion!… Solidarnosc, Jaruzelski, yes, yes … from Mickiewicz and Slovacki to Walesa and Wojtyla … We could be talking about it in a hundred years, a thousand years, but it will still be bowed beneath the yoke of Russia … it’s practical … it makes our conversations immortal …
• she decides to drive home her advantage: “But what about this new pope, do you like him?” (She plunges her nose into her plate.) “I wouldn’t have thought so.” (She imitates a working-class intonation.) <> Sollers opens his arms wide, as if beating his wings, and declares enthusiastically: “This pope is just my type!” (He bites into an asparagus spear.) “Isn’t it sublime when he gets off his plane and kisses the ground?… Whichever country he’s in, the pope gets down on his knees, like a beautiful prostitute preparing to give you a blow job, and he kisses the ground…” (He waves his half-eaten asparagus.) “What can you do? This pope is a kisser … How could I not like him?”
• The evening draws to a close. Lacan’s mistress will go home with BHL. The Bulgarian linguist will accompany the Canadian feminist. The Chinese woman will go back alone to her delegation. Sollers will fall asleep and dream about the orgy that didn’t happen. Out of nowhere, Lacan makes this observation, in a tone of infinite weariness: “It’s curious how a woman, when she ceases being a woman, can crush the man she has under her thumb … Yes, crush him. For his own good, of course.” There is embarrassed silence among the other guests. Sollers declares: “The king is he who wears on his sleeve the most vivid experience of castration.”
• Having grown up in a totalitarian country evidently aided the development of a very strong humanist conscience, which comes out even in his linguistic theories. For example, he believes that rhetoric can truly blossom only in a democracy, because it requires a venue for debate that, by definition, neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship can offer.
• * Take your place in the lair of madness and reason, the theater of thought, the academy of dreams, the school of logic! Come and hear the clamor of words, admire the interlacing of verbs and adverbs, taste the venomous circumlocutions of the duelers of discourse! Today, for this new session, the Logos Club is offering not one digital combat, not two, but three, yes, three digital combats,
• Bayard has the unhappy impression that he is going farther down a dead end. After all, if the two killers had been from Marseille or Yugoslavia or Morocco, what would he have deduced from that? Without knowing it, Bayard is thinking like a structuralist: he wonders if the Bulgarian connection is relevant.
• * Shouting and whistling in the crowd. “May the gods of antithesis be with you!”
• Both of them are speakers. That is the lowest tier in the hierarchy of the Logos Club. Private soldiers, basically. Above that, there are the rhetoricians, and then the orators, the dialecticians, the peripateticians, the tribunes, and, at the very top, the sophists. But here, people rarely get past level three. I’ve heard there are very few sophists, only about ten, and they all have code names. Once you get to level five, it becomes very sealed off. I’ve even heard it said that the sophists don’t exist, that level seven has been invented to give people in the club a sort of unreachable goal,
• Subject: The written word versus the spoken word:
  Besides, both the author’s and the recipient’s situation will have changed later. It is already obsolete; it was addressed to someone who no longer exists, and its author no longer exists either, vanished in the depths of time as soon as the envelope was sealed. <> “So that’s how it is: writing is dead. The place for texts is in textbooks. Truth lives only in the metamorphoses of discourse, and only the spoken word is sensitive enough to capture thought’s eternal developing flow in real time. The spoken word is life: I prove it, we prove it, gathered here today to speak and listen,
  That was good stuff. Socrates, the guy who never wrote a book—a no-brainer, in this context! He’s a bit like the Elvis of rhetoric, isn’t he? And, tactically, he played safe because defending the spoken word legitimizes the club’s activity, of course; the mise en abyme!
• *Jacques Bayard and Simon Herzog will never know, never knew what happened that day, what was said. They could barely even get hold of the guest list. But I can, maybe … After all, it’s all a question of method, and I know how to proceed: interrogate the witnesses, corroborate, discard any tenuous testimonies, confront these partial memories with the reality of history. And then, if need be … You know what I mean. There is more to be done with that day. February 25, 1980, has not yet told us everything. That’s the virtue of a novel: it’s never too late.
• Barthes: He has already theorized about this in his book on Japan: Western food—accumulated, dignified, swollen into the majestic, linked to some prestigious operation—always tends toward excess, abundance, copiousness; Eastern food goes in the opposite direction, it blossoms into the infinitesimal: the future of the cucumber is not its piling up or its thickening, but its division.
• * Mitterrand leans back in his chair: “Giscard is a good technician. His strength is his precise knowledge of himself, of his strengths and weaknesses. He knows he is short of breath, but his phrasing is perfectly matched to the rhythm of his breathing. A subject, a verb, a direct complement. A period, no commas: because that would lead him into the unknown.” He pauses to give the obliging smiles time to spread across his guests’ faces, then goes on: “And there need not be any link between two sentences. Each is enough in itself, as smooth and full as an egg. One egg, two eggs, three eggs, a series of eggs, regular as a metronome.”

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• Bianca’s eyes are shining. After a diatribe like that, her only option is to go for broke, with added lyricism if possible, but not too much because she knows that all politicized lyricism tends to sound religious,
• Bianca explains to Simon that the Communist Party is very strong in Italy: it has 500,000 members and, unlike in France, it did not hand over its weapons in ’44, hence the phenomenal number of German P38s in circulation in the country. And Bologna the Red is a bit like the Italian Communist Party’s shop window, with its Communist mayor who works for Amendola, the current administration’s representative.
• * There must be a reason why Barthes expressly asked him to contact you.”
  He then listens to Eco failing to answer his question: “Roland’s great semiological lesson that has stayed with me is pointing to any event in the universe and explaining that it signifies something. He always repeated that the semiologist, walking in the street, detects meaning where others see events. He knew that we say something in the way that we dress, hold our glass, walk … You, for example, I can tell that you fought in the Algerian War and…”
  “All right! I know how it works,” grumbles Bayard.
  “Ah? Bene. And, at the same time, what he loved in literature is that one is not obliged to settle on a particular meaning, ma one can play with the meaning. Capisce? It’s geniale. That’s why he was so fond of Japan: at last, a world where he didn’t know any of the codes. No possibility of cheating, but no ideological or political issues, just aesthetic ones, or maybe anthropological.
• The pleasure of interpretation, pure, open, free of referents. He said to me: ‘Above all, Umberto, we must kill the referent!’ Ha ha! Ma attenzione, that doesn’t mean that the signified does not exist, eh! The signified is in everything. [He takes a swig of white wine.] Everything. But that does not mean either that there is an infinity of interpretations. It’s the Kabbalists who think like that! There are two currents: the Kabbalists, who think the Torah can be interpreted in every possible way to produce new things, and Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine knew that the text of the Bible was a foresta infinita di sensi—‘infinita sensuum silva,’ as Saint Jerome said—but that it could always be submitted to a rule of falsification, in order to exclude what the context made it impossible to read, no matter what hermeneutic violence it was subjected to... Insomma, Barthes was an Augustinian, not a Kabbalist.”
• “From antiquity until the present day, the mastery of language has always been at the root of all politics, even during the feudal period, which might look as though it was dominated by the laws of physical force and military superiority. Machiavelli explains to the Prince that one governs not by force but by fear, and they are not the same thing: fear is the product of speech about force. Allora, whoever has mastery of speech, through its capacity to provoke fear and love, is virtually the master of the world, eh!
• Eco explains: “In fact, there are two main currents within the Logos Club: the immanentistes, who consider the pleasure of the oratory duel an end in itself, and the fonctionnalistes, who believe rhetoric is a means to an end. Functionalism itself can be divided into two subcurrents: the Machiavellians and the Ciceronians. Officially, the former seek simply to persuade, and the latter to convince—the latter thus have more moral motivations—but in reality, the distinction is blurred because the goal for both factions is to acquire or conserve power, so…”
• Bianca, excited, tugs at Simon’s sleeve: “Look! It’s Antonioni! Have you seen L’Avventura? It is so magnifico! Oh, he came with Monica Vitti! Che bella! And look over there, that man on the jury, the one in the middle? That’s ‘Bifo,’ the head of Radio Alice, an independent station that’s really popular in Bologna. It was his programs that sparked the civil war, three years ago, and he’s the one who introduced us to Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault.
• The young duelist rotates slowly, declaiming to the whole room. We know exactly what morbid phenomenon Gramsci was alluding to. Don’t we? It is the same one that menaces us today. He leaves a pause. He shouts: “Fascismo!” <> By leading his audience to conjure the idea before he pronounces the word, it is as if, at this instant, he delivers the thought of all his listeners telepathically, creating a sort of collective mental communion by the power of suggestion. The idea of fascism crosses the room like a silent wave. The young duelist has at least achieved one essential objective: setting the agenda of the debate.
• the subject: “Gli intellettuali e il potere.” Intellectuals and power... The old woman says that this is the very beauty of the true intellectual: he does not need to want to be revolutionary in order to be revolutionary. He does not need to love or even know the people in order to serve them. He is naturally, necessarily Communist.
• The anatomical theater swells with their union, a muffled, irregular growl testifying to the fact that desiring machines continually break down as they run, but run only when they are breaking down. “The product is always an offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a graft, and the machine parts are the fuel that makes it run.”
• Simon says: “But since Jakobson didn’t talk about that function of language…”
  Eco: “Maybe he did, in fin dei conti? Maybe there is an unpublished version of Essays in General Linguistics in which this function is detailed?”
  10:08.
  Bayard thinks out loud: “And Barthes found himself in possession of this document?”
  Simon: “And someone killed him to steal it?”
  Bayard: “Not only for that. To prevent him from using it.”
  Eco: “If the seventh function exists and it really is a kind of performative function, it would lose a large part of its power were it known by everyone. Knowledge of a manipulative mechanism doesn’t necessarily protect us from it—look at advertising, public relations: most people know how they work, what methods they use—but, all the same, it does weaken it…”

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• Baudrillard writes: “The people want to accept everything, swipe everything, eat everything, touch everything. Looking, deciphering, studying doesn’t move them. The one mass affect is that of touching, or manipulating. The organizers (and the artists, and the intellectuals) are alarmed by this uncontrollable impulse, for they reckoned only with the apprenticeship of the masses to the spectacle of culture.”
• We are in a Parisian hospital again, but this time no one can enter the room—because this is Sainte-Anne, the psychiatric hospital, and Althusser is sedated. Régis Debray, Etienne Balibar, and Jacques Derrida stand guard outside the door and discuss how best to protect their old mentor...  who regards it as absolutely unthinkable—more than that—physically, “technically” impossible (I quote) that Althusser could have strangled his wife. <> Foucault turns up. If you were a professor at the ENS between 1948 and 1980, then among your students and/or colleagues, you’d have had Derrida, Foucault, Debray, Balibar, Lacan. And BHL, too. That’s how it is in France.
• Foucault, always happy to answer questions, no matter what they might be, and unsurprised that Slimane should be interested in his conference, replies that Cornell is a large American university situated in a small city in the northern United States named Ithaca, like Ulysses’s island. 
• Mitterrand must record his statement of principle. He has prepared his little speech: it is dreary, formulaic … it’s just crap. It talks about stasis and the dangers of not changing. No passion, no message, no inspiration, just hollow, bombastic phrases. The cold anger of the eternal loser, palpable on the screen. The recording takes place in gloomy silence. Fabius’s toes writhe nervously inside his slippers.
• Officially, Kristeva has gone to Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, for a conference whose title and subject Bayard has not even attempted to understand. All he needs to know is that John Searle, the American philosopher mentioned by Eco, is also among the guests. The aim is not to kidnap the Bulgarian woman in an Eichmann-style raid. If Giscard had wanted to arrest Barthes’s murderer (because everything suggests she is involved), he would have prevented her from leaving the country. The aim is to understand what’s going on. Isn’t that always the way? <> For Little Red Riding Hood, the real world is the one where wolves speak... Bayard tries to understand: Is the seventh function a set of instructions? A magic spell? A chimera provoking hysteria in all those little political and intellectual cabals who see in it the ultimate jackpot for whoever can get their hands on it?
• *“In the beginning, there was philosophy and science and until the eighteenth century they walked hand in hand, basically so they could fight against the Church’s obscurantism, and then, gradually, from the nineteenth century on, with Romanticism and all that stuff, they started to get into the spirit of the Enlightenment, and philosophers in Germany and France (but not in England) started saying: science cannot penetrate the secret of life; science cannot penetrate the secret of the human soul; only philosophy can do that. And suddenly, continental philosophy was not only hostile to science but also to its principles: clarity, intellectual rigor, the culture of proof. It became increasingly esoteric, increasingly freestyle, increasingly spiritualist (except for the Marxists), increasingly vitalist (with Bergson, for example).
  “And all this culminated in Heidegger: a reactionary philosopher, in the full meaning of the term, who decided that philosophy had been heading the wrong way for centuries and that it had to return to the primordial question, which is the question of Being, so he wrote Being and Time, where he says he’s going to search for Being. Except he never found it, ha ha, but anyway. So it was he who really inspired this fashion for nebulous philosophers full of complicated neologisms, convoluted reasoning, dubious analogies, and risky metaphors, leading to Derrida, who’s the heir to all that stuff now.
  “Meanwhile the English and the Americans stayed faithful to a more scientific idea of philosophy. This is called analytic philosophy, and Searle is the leader of that movement.”
• (each member wishing to seal his rightful sense of belonging to the here-and-now of this amphitheater—“another amphitheater,” thinks Simon, succumbing to an unhealthy structuralist-paranoiac reflex to search for recurrent motifs),  in the questions of the listeners, which are never really about the matter at hand but rather attempts if not to challenge the master, at least to position the questioner, in relation to the other listeners, as a serious thinker blessed with acute critical faculties and superior intellectual capacities (in a word, to distinguish the questioner, as Bourdieu would say). From the tone of each question, Simon can guess the asker’s situation: undergrad, postgrad, professor, specialist, rival … He can easily detect the bores, the wallflowers, the asslickers, the snobs, and—most numerous of all—those who forget to ask their question, so busy are they reeling off their interminable monologues, intoxicated by the sound of their own voices, driven by that imperious need to offer their opinion.
• “Life is an open system, literature a closed system. Life is made of things, literature of words. Life is what it seems to be: when you are afraid of flying, it is a question of fear. When you try to date a girl, it is a question of sex. But in Hamlet, even the most stupid critic realizes that it is not about a man who wants to kill his uncle—it is about something else.” <> This reassures Simon slightly, as he doesn’t have the faintest idea what his adventures could be about.
• The sun never sets on Cornell’s library, open twenty-four hours a day. <> All the books Simon could desire are there, and all the others, too. He is like a kid in a candy store, and all he has to do if he wants to fill his pockets is complete a form. Simon’s fingertips brush the books’ spines as if he were caressing ears of wheat in a field that was about to become his property. This, he thinks, is true communism: what’s yours is mine, and vice versa.
• * In Bologna, he had sex with Bianca in a seventeenth-century amphitheater and narrowly escaped death in the bombed train station. Here, he has almost been stabbed in a library at night by a linguistics philosopher and has witnessed a decidedly mythological doggy-style sex scene on a photocopier. He met Giscard in the Élysée Palace, bumped into Foucault in a gay sauna, took part in a car chase that ended with an attempt on his life, saw a man kill another man with a poisoned umbrella, discovered a secret society where people had their fingers cut off if they lost a debate, and crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a mysterious document. In the course of a few months he has lived through more extraordinary events than he expected to witness in his entire lifetime … Simon knows how to spot the novelistic when he sees it.
• * As it is his job, he analyzes it for its narrative structures, its additives, its adversaries, its allegorical significance. A sex scene (actor), an attack (bomb) in Bologna. An attack (paper knife), a sex scene (spectator) at Cornell. (Chiasmus.) A car chase. A rewriting of the final duel in Hamlet. The recurrent library motif (but why does he think of Beaubourg?) The pairs of characters: the two Bulgarians, the two Japanese, Sollers and Kristeva, Searle and Derrida, Anastasia and Bianca … And, most of all, the implausibilities: Why would the third Bulgarian wait until they realized there was a copy of the manuscript at Barthes’s apartment before going there to search for it? How did Anastasia, supposedly a Russian spy, manage to be assigned so quickly to the hospital ward where Barthes was being kept? Why did Giscard not have Kristeva arrested and tortured by one of his henchmen until she talked, rather than sending him and Bayard to the USA to keep an eye on her? Why would the document be written in French, rather than Russian or English? Who translated it?... “I think I’m trapped in a novel.”
• In a whisper, Bayard asks Judith why Derrida pronounces it “Sarl.” Judith explains that he is mocking Searle: in French, as far as she understands, “Sarl” signifies “Société à responsabilité limitée,” a private limited company. Bayard thinks this is quite funny.
• To be understood, at least partially, by our receiver, we must use the same language. We must repeat (reiterate) words that have already been used, otherwise our receiver will not be able to understand them. So we are always, fatally, in some form of citation. We use the words of others. Now, as with Chinese whispers, it is more than probable—it is inevitable—that through repetitions each and every one of us will employ the words of others, in a slightly different sense to those others.
  Derrida’s pied-noir voice becomes more formal and bombastic:
  “Even that which will ensure the functioning of the mark (psychic, oral, graphic, whatever) beyond this moment, namely the possibility of being repeated, even that begins, divides, expropriates the fullness or the intrinsically ‘ideal’ presence of intention, of the desire to express, and a fortiori the harmony between meaning and saying.”
• He knows he must not only show himself to be urbane and cultivated but must pique her curiosity, provoke her without shocking her, demonstrate his spirit in order to arouse hers, mix lightheartedness with profundity while avoiding pedantry and pretentiousness, indulge the comedy of social life but suggest that neither of them is fooled by it, and, naturally, immediately eroticize the relationship. <> “You are made for powerful physical love and you love the iterability of photocopiers, right? A sublimated fantasy is nothing other than a fantasy fulfilled. Anyone who claims the opposite is a liar, a priest and an exploiter of the people.” He hands her one of the two glasses he is holding. “You like gin and tonic?”
• Bayard turns around. So does the bull-man. Simon can at last escape. He moves toward the bush-man like a sleepwalker (he is still naked) and asks, hollow-voiced: “Who are you?”
  The old man readjusts his tie and says simply: “Roman Jakobson, linguist.”
  Simon’s blood turns to ice.
• The three little public housing blocks with their cracked paintwork, their rusted balconies, watch over the cemetery like sentinels, or like teeth planted in the sea.
  However, in December 1977, when Derrida was arrested in Prague, trapped by the Communist regime that planted drugs in his luggage, he received and accepted Sollers’s support.

-----

• * Anyway, you must absolutely go to the Campo Santo Stefano; just cross the Grand Canal … You’ll see the statue of Niccolò Tommaseo there, a political writer, therefore not of interest, known to the Venetians as Cagalibri: the book-shitter. Because of the statue. It really looks like he’s shitting books... the great Palladio, all in a row. You don’t know Palladio? A man who did not like things to be too easy … like you, perhaps? He was in charge of constructing an edifice opposite the Piazza San Marco.
• But listen closely and you will hear the difference. The conversations are of exordiums, perorations, propositions, altercations, refutations. (As Barthes said: “The passion for classification always appears byzantine for those who do not participate in it.”) Anacoluthon, catachresis, enthymeme, and metabole. (As Sollers would say: “But of course.”)
• * “Well, it’s very simple. Semiology enables us to understand, analyze, decode; it’s defensive, it’s Borg. Rhetoric is designed to persuade, to convince, to conquer; it’s offensive, it’s McEnroe.”
  “Ah si. Ma Borg, he wins, no?”
  “Of course! You can win with either; they’re just different styles of play. With semiology, you decode your opponent’s rhetoric, you grasp his things, and you rub his nose in it. Semiology’s like Borg: it is enough to get the ball over the net one time more than your opponent. Rhetoric is aces, volleys, winners down the line, but semiology is returns, passing shots, topspin lobs.”
• While he retreats, Simon thinks: in the hypothesis where he is truly a character from a novel (a hypothesis strengthened by the situation, the masks, the picturesque blunt objects: a novel by an author unafraid of tackling clichés, he thinks), what would he really risk? A novel is not a dream: you can die in a novel. Then again, the central character is not normally killed. Except, perhaps, at the end of the story.
• But if it was the end of the story, how would he know? How can he know what page of his life he is on? How can any of us know when we have reached our last page?
  And what if he wasn’t the central character? Doesn’t everyone believe himself the hero of his own existence?
• It is said that in the whole history of the Logos Club, only four women have ever attained the rank of sophist: Catherine de Medici, Emilie du Châtelet, Marilyn Monroe, and Indira Gandhi (and we can still hope that she will become one again). That is not very many. And none, of course, has ever been the Great Protagoras.
• * It’s a replica of the Bucintoro, the ship on board which the doge, every year, on the Feast of the Ascension, would celebrate the sposalizio del mare, the marriage with the sea, by throwing a gold ring into the Adriatic. It was a ceremonial ship not at all intended to go to war. They took it out for official engagements, but it never left the lagoon and it has no business being here, because we are supposed to be in the Gulf of Lepanto on October 7, 1571.”
• * Miguel de Cervantes, the brave midshipman under the orders of his captain, Diego of Urbino, has lost the use of his left hand in the battle, or maybe the surgeons did a bad job. <> Either way, from now on he will be known as the “one-armed man of Lepanto,” and some will mock his handicap. Incensed and wounded in body and soul, he will make this clarification in his preface to the second volume of Don Quixote: “As if the loss of my hand had been brought about in some tavern, and not on thegrandest occasion the past or present has seen, or the future can hope to see.”
• * The Baroque is that aesthetic trend that sees the world as a theater and life as a dream, an illusion, a mirror of bright colors and broken lines. Circe and the Peacock: metamorphoses, ostentation. The Baroque prefers curves to straight lines. The Baroque likes asymmetry, trompe-l’oeil, extravagance. <> Simon has put his headphones on, but he hears the Italian cite Montaigne in French in the line: “I do not paint its being, I paint its passage.”... The Baroque is elusive, it moves from country to country, from century to century, the sixteenth in Italy, the Council of Trent, the Counter-Reformation, the first half of the seventeenth century in France, Scarron, Saint-Amant, second half of the seventeenth century, return to Italy, Bavaria, eighteenth century, Prague, St. Petersburg, South America, Rococo … There is no unity to the Baroque, no essence of fixed things, no permanence. The Baroque is movement.
• “It is not a question of playing Palladio against the bulbs of the San Marco basilica. Look. Palladio’s Redentore?” Simon peers toward the back of the theater as though visualizing the bank of the Giudecca. “On one side, Byzantium and the flamboyant Gothic of the past (if I may put it like that); on the other, Ancient Greece resurrected eternally by the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.” Nothing ever goes to waste for a duelist. Sollers smiles as he looks at Kristeva, who recognizes his words, and he makes smoke rings of contentment,
• he thinks about the “prestiges” of the seventeenth century, of Cervantes fighting at Lepanto, of his course on James Bond at Vincennes, of the dissecting table at the anatomical theater in Bologna, of the cemetery in Ithaca and a thousand things at the same time, and he understands that he can only triumph if he overcomes, in a mise en abyme that he would savor in other circumstances, this baroque vertigo that is taking hold of him.
• It was Debray, after talking about it with Derrida, who convinced him of the document’s importance. So they decided to organize the lunch with Barthes in order to steal it from him. During the meal, Lang discreetly pilfered the sheet of paper that was in Barthes’s jacket pocket and gave it to Debray, who was waiting, hidden, in the entrance hall. Debray ran off to hand the document to Derrida, who fabricated a false function based on the original text, which Debray took back to Lang, who slipped it into Barthes’s pocket before lunch was over. The timing of the operation was extremely precise; Derrida had to write the false function in record time, based on the real one, so that it would be credible but would not actually work.
• Lang cannot conceal a faint smile of vanity: “In fact, the whole operation was based on what I must say was a fairly audacious gamble: that Barthes would have the false document stolen from him before he noticed the substitution, so that the thieves would believe they had the real seventh function and, additionally, so that we would remain beyond suspicion.”
• Mitterrand’s objective was purely short-term: to beat Giscard in the debate. But Sollers, in a way, was aiming higher. He wanted to take Eco’s title as the Great Protagoras of the Logos Club, and for that he needed the seventh function, which would have given him a decisive rhetorical advantage. But in order to preserve the position once it was his, he would have to make sure that no one else got to know about it, in case they challenged him. Hence the Bulgarian assassins hired by Kristeva to track down all the copies: it was imperative that the seventh function remain the exclusive property of Sollers, and Sollers alone.
• “Barthes, Hamed, his friend Saïd, the Bulgarian on the Pont-Neuf, the Bulgarian in the DS, Derrida, Searle … They all died for nothing. They died so Sollers could have his balls chopped off in Venice because he had the wrong document. Right from the beginning, we were chasing a mirage.”
  “Well, not entirely. The sheet in Barthes’s apartment, the one inside the Jakobson book, that was a copy of the original. If we hadn’t intercepted the Bulgarian, he’d have given it to Kristeva, who would have realized there’d been a substitution when she compared the two texts. And Slimane’s cassette: that was a recording of the original too. It was important it didn’t fall into the wrong hands.” (Shit, thinks Bayard, stop talking about hands!)
• “San Gennaro—Saint January—stopped the lava during an eruption of Vesuvius and he has been Naples’s protector ever since. Every year, the bishop takes a bit of his dried blood in a glass vial and he keeps turning it upside down until the blood becomes liquid. If the blood dissolves, Naples will be spared misfortune. And what happened last year, do you think?” “The blood didn’t dissolve.”
• Simon says nothing. So, that’s how it is: a happy ending. The one-handed man and the one-legged girl. And, as in all good stories, some guilt to drag around with him: if Bianca lost her leg at Bologna Central, it was his fault.
• Nobody tries to hide, because Simon had the brilliant idea of bringing the man to this completely exposed place: in the middle of a volcanic crater more than two thousand feet in circumference. In other words, there is not a single tree, not a single bush behind which they can take shelter. Simon scans his surroundings for any potential hiding place and spots a well and a small building made of smoking stones (ancient steam rooms representing the gates of Purgatory and Hell), but they are out of reach.
• * He must deal with this hypothetical novelist the way he deals with God: always act as if God did not exist because if God does exist, he is at best a bad novelist who merits neither respect nor obedience. It is never too late to try to change the course of the story. And it may well be that the imaginary novelist has not yet made his decision. It may well be that the ending of the story is in the hands of his character, and that that character is me.
• just an inspired guess: Simon recognized the model of rifle, a Mauser, the weapon used by elite German marksmen. (Simon has always been partial to Second World War stories.) He deduced from this that the young man had inherited it from his father and this offered two possible hypotheses: either his father had come into possession of the rifle by fighting for the Italian army alongside the Wehrmacht, or quite the opposite: he had fought against them as a partisan and taken the gun from the corpse of a German soldier. As the first hypothesis offered him no hope of being saved, he gambled on the second.