The Seventh Function of Language
Page 5
Simon Herzog knows perfectly well that it would make more sense for Bayard to approach the gigolo rather than him but, seeing the cop’s blank face, he realizes it would be pointless to argue. Awkwardly, he walks over to the gigolo and says good evening. His voice quavers. The gigolo smiles but does not reply. Outside his classroom, Simon Herzog is naturally shy, and he has never been much of a ladies’ man (or a man’s man, for that matter). He manages to make a few banal comments that immediately sound inappropriate or merely ridiculous. Without a word, the gigolo takes his hand and leads him toward the back rooms. All strength gone, Simon follows him. He knows he has to react quickly. In a toneless voice, he asks: “What’s your name?” The man replies: “Patrick.” No o or eu to help him detect a southern accent, and no use of the telltale word con. Simon follows him into a little cell where the young man grabs his hips and kneels down in front of him. In the hope of making him pronounce a full sentence, Simon stammers: “Wouldn’t you prefer it if I went first?” The gigolo says no and his hand moves under Simon’s towel. Simon shivers. The towel falls. With surprise, Simon notices that his cock, touched by the young man’s fingers, is not completely flaccid. So he decides to go for broke: “Hang on! You know what I’d like to do?” “What?” the other asks. Still not enough syllables to detect his accent. “I’d like to shit on you!” The gigolo looks surprised. “Can I?” And finally Patrick replies, without even a hint of a southern accent: “All right, but it’ll be more expensive!” Simon Herzog picks up his towel and rushes out, calling: “Never mind! Another time?” If he has to do the same with the dozen potential gigolos patrolling the club, this could be a very long night. He passes the half-witted Arab again, who tries to touch his dick, and the two men with mustaches, the two Japanese men, the fat tattooed men, the velvet-eyed youths, and rejoins Bayard just as a loud, nasal, professorial voice intones: “A functionary of the powers that be showing off his repressive muscles in the service of biopower? What could be more normal?”
Behind Bayard, a wiry, square-jawed, bald man is sitting, naked, arms outstretched and resting on the back of a wooden bench, legs spread wide, being sucked off by a skinny young man who does have an earring but also has short hair. “Have you found anything interesting, Superintendent?” asks Michel Foucault, staring at Simon Herzog.
Bayard conceals his surprise, but doesn’t know how to respond. Simon Herzog’s eyes open wide. The silence is filled with the echoes of cries and moans from back rooms. The mustachioed men hold hands in the shadows, stealthily observing Bayard, Herzog, and Foucault. The Arab dick-toucher wanders around. The Japanese pretend to go for a swim in the pool with their towels on their heads. The tattooed men accost the velvet-eyed youths, or vice versa. Michel Foucault questions Bayard: “What do you think of this place, Superintendent?” Bayard does not reply. No sound but the echoes from the back rooms. “Ahh! Ahh!” Foucault: “You came here to find someone, but it looks to me like you’ve already found him.” He points to Simon Herzog and laughs: “Your Alcibiades!” The back rooms: “Ahh! Ahh!” Bayard: “I’m looking for someone who saw Roland Barthes not long before his accident.” Foucault, caressing the head of the young man hard at work between his legs: “Roland had a secret, you know…” Bayard asks what it was. The back-room panting grows louder. Foucault explains to Bayard that Barthes had a Western understanding of sex, i.e., something simultaneously secret and whose secret must be uncovered. “Roland Barthes,” he says, “is the ewe that wanted to be a shepherd. And was! That’s as brilliant as it gets! But for everyone else … as far as sex is concerned, he always remained a ewe.” The back rooms moo. “Oh! Oh! Ooh! Ooh!” The Arab groper tries to slip his hand under Simon’s towel, but is gently pushed away, so he goes over to the mustachioed men. “Essentially,” says Foucault, “Roland had a Christian temperament. He came here like the first Christians went to Mass: uncomprehendingly but fervently. He believed in it without knowing why.” (In the back rooms: “Yes! Yes!) “Homosexuality disgusts you, doesn’t it, Superintendent?” (“Harder! Harder!”) “And yet it was you who created us. The notion of male homosexuality didn’t exist in Ancient Greece: Socrates could bugger Alcibiades without being seen as a pederast. The Greeks had a more elevated notion of the corruption of youth…”
Foucault throws back his head, eyes closed. Neither Bayard nor Herzog can tell if he’s abandoning himself to pleasure or thinking. And still the back-room chorus rises in volume: “Oh! Oh!”
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: “But you like sucking me, don’t you, Hamed?” The young man nods carefully. Foucault looks at him tenderly and says, stroking his cheek, “Short hair suits you.” The young man smiles and replies, in a strong southern accent: “Thanks a lot!”
Bayard and Herzog prick up their ears. They are not sure they heard him correctly, but the boy adds: “You’re a nice guy, Michel, and you have a really lovely dick, con!”
15
Yes, he saw Roland Barthes, a few days ago. No, they didn’t really have sexual relations. Barthes called it “boating.” But he wasn’t very active. More the sentimental type. Barthes bought him an omelet at La Coupole and afterward insisted on taking him back to his attic room. They drank tea. They didn’t talk about anything special; Barthes was not very chatty. He seemed pensive. Before he left, Barthes asked him: “What would you do if you ruled the world?” The gigolo replied that he would abolish all laws. Barthes said: “Even grammar?”
16
It is relatively calm in the lobby of Pitié-Salpêtrière. Friends, admirers, acquaintances, and the merely curious line up to sit at the great man’s bedside; they fill the hospital foyer, conversing in undertones, a cigarette or a sandwich or a newspaper in hand, or a book by Guy Debord or a Milan Kundera novel. Suddenly, three figures appear: a small-waisted woman, short-haired, full of energy, flanked by two men; one in a white shirt open to the navel and a long black coat, black hair billowing, and the other, beige-haired, birdlike, a cigarette holder between his lips.
The formation moves resolutely through the crowd. You can tell that something is about to happen. It’s all a bit Operation Overlord. They plow into the coma wing. The people there to see Barthes look at one another, and the other visitors do the same. Barely five minutes have passed before the first yells are heard: “They’re letting him die! They’re letting him die!”
The three avenging angels return from the kingdom of the dead raging: “This is a place for the dying! It’s a scandal! Who are they trying to fool? Why didn’t anyone warn us? If only we’d been there!” 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, and Deleuze took him to task for it. According to his friends Barthes was always weak, he never knew how to say no. When Barbarism with a Human Face comes out in 1977, BHL sends him a copy and he gives a polite response praising the book’s style, while not lingering on its substance. No matter: BHL has the letter published in Les Nouvelles littéraires, teams up with Sollers, and here he is three years later, raising his voice in the Salpêtrière in a show of noisy concern for his friend the great critic.
They are still barking (“Do you know who he is? Are you going to pretend that Roland Barthes can be treated like any other patient?” It’s always the same with people like that, expecting privileges because of who they are…) when the two badly dressed figures reappear in the lobby before discreetly slipping away. And they are still there when a terrified nurse runs in, a blonde with slender legs who whispers something in the doctor’s ear. Cue a mass movement: people push past one another, charge down the corridor, rush into Barthes’s room. The great critic is lying on the floor, the tube and all his wires torn out, his flabby buttocks visible under the paper-thin hospital tunic. He groans as he is turned over and his eyes roll frantically, but when he sees Superintendent Jacques Bayard, who is standing among the doctors, he sits up, in a superhuman effort, grabs the policeman’s jacket, forcing him to squat down, and pronounces weakly but distinctly, in his famous bass voice, only broken now and as if he is hiccupping:
“Sophia! Elle sait…”
But what does Sophia know?
In the doorway he sees Kristeva, next to the blond nurse. His eyes are fixed on her for several long seconds, and everyone in the room—doctors, nurses, friends, policeman—is frozen, paralyzed, by the intensity of his distraught gaze. Then he loses consciousness.
Outside, a black DS races off with a screech of tires. Simon Herzog, who has remained in the lobby, pays no attention.
Bayard asks Kristeva: “Sophia, that’s you?” Kristeva says no. But as he just stands there waiting, she eventually adds—pronouncing it the French way, with the j and the u palatalized—“My name is Julia.” Bayard can vaguely detect her foreign accent; he thinks she must be Italian, or German, or maybe Greek, or Brazilian, or Russian. He finds her face harsh; he doesn’t like the piercing look she gives him; he is well aware that those little black eyes want him to understand that she is an intelligent woman, more intelligent than he is, and that she despises him for being a stupid cop. Mechanically, he asks: “Profession?” And when she replies disdainfully, “Psychoanalyst,” he instinctively wants to slap her, but he suppresses the urge. He still has the two others to question.
The blond nurse puts Barthes back in his bed. He is still unconscious. Bayard puts two policemen on guard outside the room and forbids all visits until further notice. Then he turns to the two clowns.
Last name, first name, age, profession.
Joyaux, Philippe, aka Sollers, forty-three, writer, married to Julia Joyaux née Kristeva.
Lévy, Bernard-Henri, thirty-one, philosopher, former École Normale Supérieure student.
The two men were not in Paris when it happened. Barthes and Sollers were very close … Barthes contributed to Sollers’s magazine Tel Quel, and they went to China together with Julia a few years ago … To do what? A study trip … Bloody Communists, thinks Bayard. Barthes wrote several articles praising Sollers’s work … Barthes is like a father for Sollers, even if Barthes behaves like a little boy at times … And Kristeva? Barthes said one day that if he liked women, he would be in love with Julia … He adored her … And you weren’t jealous, Monsieur Joyaux? Ha ha ha … Julia and I, we don’t have that kind of relationship … And anyway, poor Roland, he already had enough problems with men … Why? He didn’t know how to handle things … He always got taken for a ride!… I see. And you, Monsieur Lévy? I admire him greatly, he’s a great man. Did you travel with him too? I was going to suggest several projects to him. What sort of projects? A project for a film about the life of Charles Baudelaire; I was planning to offer him the title role. A project for a joint interview with Solzhenitsyn. A project to petition NATO to liberate Cuba. Could you provide any evidence to substantiate these claims? Yes, of course, I spoke to Andre Glucksmann about them—he’s a witness. Did Barthes have any enemies? Yes, lots, replies Sollers. Everyone knows he’s our friend and we have lots of enemies! Who? The Stalinists! The fascists! Alain Badiou! Gilles Deleuze! Pierre Bourdieu! Cornelius Castoriadis! Pierre Vidal-Naquet! Uh, Hélène Cixous! (BHL: Oh, really? Did she and Julia fall out? Sollers: Yes … well, no … she’s jealous of Julia, because of Marguerite…)
Marguerite who? Duras. Bayard notes down all the names. Does Monsieur Joyaux know a certain Michel Foucault? Sollers starts whirling around like a dervish, faster and faster, his cigarette holder still held between his lips, the incandescent end tracing graceful orange curves in the hospital corridor: “The truth, Superintendent? The whole truth … nothing but the truth … Foucault was jealous of Barthes’s fame … and especially jealous because I, Sollers, loved Barthes … because Foucault is the worst kind of tyrant, Superintendent: a lackey … Can you believe, Mr. Representative of Public Order—cough cough—that Foucault gave me an ultimatum? ‘You must choose between Barthes and me!’ … One might as easily choose between Montaigne and La Boétie … Between Racine and Shakespeare … Between Hugo and Balzac … Between Goethe and Schiller … Between Marx and Engels … Between Merckx and Poulidor … Between Mao and Lenin … Between Breton and Aragon … Between Laurel and Hardy … Between Sartre and Camus (well, no, not them) … Between de Gaulle and Tixier-Vignancour … Between the Plan and the Market … Between Rocard and Mitterrand … Between Giscard and Chirac…” Sollers slows down. He coughs into his cigarette holder. “Between Pascal and Descartes … cough cough … Between Trésor and Platini … Between Renault and Peugeot … Between Mazarin and Richelieu … Hhhhh…” But just when it looks as if he is about to collapse, he finds a second wind. “Between the Left Bank and the Right Bank … Between Paris and Beijing … Between Venice and Rome … Between Mussolini and Hitler … Between andouille and mashed potato…”
Suddenly, there is a noise in the room. Bayard opens the door and sees Barthes twitching and jerking, talking in his sleep, while the nurse tries to tuck him in. He is saying something about “starred text,” a “minor earthquake,” “blocks of signification,” the reading of which grasps only the smooth surface, imperceptibly bonded by the flow of phrases, the running speech of the narration, the naturalness of vernacular.
Bayard immediately brings in Simon Herzog to translate for him. Lying in bed, Barthes is becoming increasingly agitated. Bayard leans over him and asks: “Monsieur Barthes, did you see your attacker?” Barthes opens his madman’s eyes, grabs Bayard by the back of the neck, and declares, in an anguished, breathless voice: “The tutor signifier will be cut up into a series of short, contiguous fragments, which we shall call lexias, since they are units of reading. This cutting up, it must be said, will be arbitrary in the extreme; it will imply no methodological responsibility, because it will be carried out only on the signifier, while the proposed analysis will be carried out only on the signified…” Bayard shoots a quizzical look at Herzog, who shrugs. Barthes whistles threateningly between his teeth. Bayard asks him: “Monsieur Barthes, who is Sophia? What does she know?” Barthes looks at him without understanding, or perhaps understanding all too well, and starts singing in a hoarse voice: “The text is comparable in its mass to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks; like the soothsayer drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary rectangle wherein to consult, according to certain principles, the flight of birds, the commentator traces through the text certain zones of reading, in order to observe therein the migration of meanings, the outcropping of codes, the passage of citations.” Bayard curses Herzog, whos
e puzzled face reveals all too clearly that he is incapable of explaining this gobbledygook, but Barthes is on the verge of hysteria when he starts shouting, as if his life depended on it: “It’s all in the text! You understand? Find the text! The function! Oh, this is so stupid!” Then he falls back on his pillow and quietly intones: “The lexia is only the wrapping of a semantic volume, the crest line of the plural text, arranged like a berm of possible meanings (but controlled, attested to by a systematic reading) under the flux of discourse: the lexia and its units will thereby form a kind of polyhedron faceted by the word, the group of words, the sentence of the paragraph, i.e., with the language which is its ‘natural’ excipient.” And he faints. Bayard tries to shake him back to consciousness. The blond nurse has to force him to put the patient down, then she clears the room again.
When Bayard asks Simon Herzog to give him the lowdown, the young professor wants to tell him that he shouldn’t take too much notice of Sollers and BHL, but at the same time he sees an opportunity, so he says with relish: “We should begin by interrogating Deleuze.”
On his way out of the hospital, Simon Herzog bumps into the blond nurse who is looking after Barthes. “Oh, excuse me, mademoiselle!” She gives him a charming smile: “No prrroblem, monsieur.”
17
Hamed wakes early. His body, still soaked with last night’s steam and drugs, jolts him from a bad sleep. Dazed and groggy, disoriented, all at sea in this unfamiliar room, it takes him a few seconds to recall how he got here and what he did. He slides out of bed, trying not to wake the man next to him, puts on his sleeveless T-shirt and his Lee Cooper jeans, goes into the kitchen to make himself coffee, finishes a joint from the night before which he finds in a Jacuzzi-shaped ashtray, grabs his jacket, a black-and-white Teddy Smith with a large red F near the heart, and leaves, slamming the door behind him.