The Seventh Function of Language

by Laurent Binet

  22

  “Georges Marchais? No one cares about Georges Marchais! Surely you know that!”

  Daniel Balavoine is finally able to speak. He knows that in less than three minutes they will stop him speaking, one way or another, so he tears into his maniacal monologue, stating that politicians are old, corrupt, and completely missing the point.

  “I’m not talking about you, Monsieur Mitterrand…”

  But still …

  “What I’d like to know, what would interest me, is who the immigrant workers pay their rent to that they pay … I’d like to … Who dares every month to ask seven hundred francs a month from immigrant workers to live in Dumpsters, in slums?” It’s muddled, unstructured, full of grammatical errors, delivered way too fast, and it’s magnificent.

  The journalists, who as usual understand nothing, grumble when Balavoine reproaches them for never inviting young people (and there’s the inevitable rhetorical snigger: well, obviously we do—you’re here, you little twerp!).

  But Mitterrand understands exactly what is happening. This young brat is showing them up for what they are—him, the journalists around the table, and all their kind—old farts who have been moldering in one another’s company for so long that they’ve become dead to the world without even realizing it. He tries to agree wholeheartedly with the angry young man, but each attempt to get a word in edgewise ends up sounding like misjudged paternalism.

  “Hang on, I’m trying to read my notes … In any case, what I want to give you is a warning…” Mitterrand fiddles with his glasses, bites his lip. This is being filmed, it’s live on television, it’s a disaster. “What I want to tell you is that despair is a motivating force and that when it’s a motivating force, it’s dangerous.”

  The journalist, with a hint of sadistic irony: “Monsieur Mitterrand, you wanted to speak with a young person. You’ve listened very carefully…” Now get out of that, you jerk.

  And so Mitterrand starts to stammer: “What interests me very much is that this way of thinking … of reacting … and also of communicating!—because Daniel Balavoine also expresses himself through writing and through music—should have the rights of a citizen … should be heard and, in that way, understood.” Keep digging, keep digging. “He says things his way! He is responsible for his words. He’s a citizen. Like any other.”

  It is March 19, 1980, on the set of a Channel 2 news program. It is 1:30 p.m. and Mitterrand is a thousand years old.

  23

  What does Barthes think about as he dies? About his mother, they say. His mother killed him. Of course, of course, there’s always the hidden personal business, the dirty little secret. As Deleuze says, we all have a grandmother who had amazing experiences … so what? “About his grief.” Yes, sir, he is going to die of heartbreak and nothing else. Poor little French thinkers, trapped in your vision of a world reduced to the pettiest, most formulaic, most flatly egocentric domestic concerns. A world without enigma, without mystery. The mother—mother of all responses. In the twentieth century, we got rid of God, and put the mother in His place. What a great trade. But Barthes is not thinking about his mother.

  If you could follow the thread of his hazy reverie, you would know that the dying man thinks about what he was, but above all about what he could have been. What else? He doesn’t see his whole life in a flash, just the accident. Who ran the operation? He remembers that he was manhandled. And then the document disappeared. Whoever’s responsible, we are probably on the brink of an unprecedented catastrophe. Whereas he, Roland, his mother’s son, would have known how to make good use of it: a little for him, the rest for the world. His shyness defeated him in the end. What a waste. Even if he survives, it will be too late to celebrate.

  Roland does not think about his mommy. This is not Psycho.

  What does he think about? Maybe he sees this or that memory flash through his mind, things that are private or insignificant or known only to him. One evening—or was it still daylight?—he was sharing a taxi with his American translator, who was over in Paris for a brief stay, and Foucault. The three of them are sitting in the backseat, the translator in the middle, and Foucault, as usual, is monopolizing the conversation. He speaks in his animated, confident, nasal voice, like a voice from days of old, and he is the one in control, as ever. He improvises a little speech to explain how much he hates Picasso, how crappy Picasso really is, and he laughs, of course, and the young translator listens politely; in his own country he is a writer and a poet, but here, he listens deferentially to these two brilliant French intellectuals’ speeches, and Barthes already knows that he’s powerless to match Foucault’s loquacity, but he has to say something all the same if he doesn’t want to be left out, so he wins some time by laughing, too, but he knows that his laughter doesn’t ring true, and he’s embarrassed because he seems embarrassed, it’s a vicious circle. It’s been like this all his life. He wishes he could have Foucault’s self-assurance. Even when he speaks to his students and they listen reverently, he shelters his shyness behind a professorial tone, but it is only when he writes that he feels sure of himself, that he is sure of himself, alone, in the refuge of his page, and all his books, his Proust, his Chateaubriand, and Foucault continues to babble on and on about Picasso, and so Barthes, in order not to be left out, says that he, too, hates Picasso, and when he says this he hates himself, because he can see exactly what’s happening, it’s his job to see what’s happening: he’s debasing himself in front of Foucault, and no doubt the young and handsome translator realizes it too. He spits on Picasso but only timidly, a small gob of spit, while Foucault roars with laughter, he agrees that Picasso is overrated, that he has never understood what people saw in him, and I can’t be certain that he didn’t think this; after all, Barthes was above all a classicist who, deep down, did not like modern life, but really—what does it matter? Even if he did hate Picasso, he knows that’s not the point; the point is not to be outdone by Foucault; the point is that as soon as Foucault makes such a provocative statement, he would look like an old fart if he disagreed, so even if he genuinely didn’t like Picasso, he now denigrates him and mocks him, in this taxi taking him God knows where, for the wrong reasons.

  Perhaps that is how Barthes dies, thinking about that taxi ride, that is how he closes his eyes and falls asleep, sadly, with that sadness that has always filled him, never mind his mother, and perhaps he spares a brief thought for Hamed, too. What will become of him? And of the secret he now guards? He sinks slowly, gently into his final sleep and, well, it’s not an unpleasant sensation, but while his bodily functions give out one by one, his mind continues to wander. Where else will this final reverie lead him?

  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.” There—that would have impressed the young translator. But Barthes wrote that much later. Ah, if only he’d had the function then …

  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 …

  He does not hear the footsteps approaching his bed.

  Of course, they were peerless rhetoricians, but he doesn’t like their coldness, their fleshlessness. The Racinian passions? Pfft, big deal. Phaedra, sure … well, the confession scene in the pluperfect subjunctive, tantamount to the conditional past … all right, sure, that was brilliant. Phaedra rewriting the story with her in Ariadne’s place and Hippolytus in the place of Theseus …

  He doesn’t know that someone is leaning over his electrocardiogram.

  But Berenice? Titus didn’t love her anymore, that was blatantly obvious. It’s so simple, you’d think it was Corneille …

  He does not see the figure rummaging in
his belongings.

  And La Bruyère, so scholarly. At least Pascal conversed with Montaigne, Racine with Voltaire, La Fontaine with Valéry … But who would want to have a conversation with La Bruyère?

  He does not feel the hand delicately turning the valve of the ventilator.

  But La Rochefoucauld … him, yes. After all, Barthes owes a great deal to Maximes. He was a semiologist before his time, in that he knew how to decode the human soul through the signs of our behavior … The greatest master in French literature, no less … Barthes sees the Prince of Marcillac riding proudly beside the Grand Condé in the ditches of Faubourg Saint-Antoine, under fire from Turenne’s troops, thinking, my word, what a beautiful day for dying …

  What’s happening? He can’t breathe anymore. His throat has suddenly shrunk.

  But the Grande Mademoiselle will open the city gates to let the Condé’s troops in, and La Rochefoucauld, wounded in the eyes, temporarily blind, will not die, not this time, and will recover …

  He opens his eyes. And he sees her, haloed by blinding light, like a representation of the Virgin Mary. He is suffocating. He tries to call for help, but no sound emerges from his mouth.

  He’ll recover, won’t he? Won’t he?

  She smiles sweetly at him and presses his head against the pillow to prevent him from sitting up. Not that he has enough strength, anyway. This time it’s for good, he knows it. He would like to surrender but his body goes into convulsions. His body wants to live. His frightened brain craves the oxygen that is no longer entering his bloodstream. Spurred by a final burst of adrenaline, his heart races, then slows down again.

  “Always to love, to suffer, to expire.” In the end, his final thought is a line of verse from Corneille.

  24

  The television news, March 26, 1980, 8:00 p.m., presented by Patrick Poivre d’Arvor:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. A great deal of news that … [PPDA pauses for a second] affects our day-to-day lives. So, some of it is good, some less so. I’ll let you decide which is which.” (From his apartment, next to Place Clichy, Deleuze, who never misses the evening news, replies from the comfort of his armchair: “Thank you!”)

  8:01 p.m.: “First of all, the rise in the cost of living for the month of February: 1.1 percent. ‘It’s not a very good sign,’ said René Monory, the minister for the economy—although it is better [it would have been difficult to be worse, says PPDA, and, in front of his TV set, on Rue de Bièvre, Mitterrand thinks the same thing] than the figure for January: 1.9 percent. Also better than the corresponding figures for the United States and Great Britain and … the same as West Germany’s.” (At the mention of their German rivals, Giscard, who is signing documents at his desk in the Élysée, chuckles mechanically without looking up. In his attic room, Hamed is getting ready to go out, but can’t find his second sock.)

  8:09 p.m.: “There are strikes, too, in schools. Tomorrow, the teachers’ union is calling on its members in Paris and the Essonne to protest against planned class closures for the next academic year.” (Holding a Chinese beer in one hand, his cigarette holder in the other, Sollers curses from his sofa: “A nation of bureaucrats!” From the kitchen, Kristeva replies: “I’m making sauté de veau.”)

  8:10 p.m.: “Finally, some news that will come as a ‘breath of fresh air,’ so to speak [Simon rolls his eyes]: the significant reduction in atmospheric pollution in France over the last seven years. Sulfur emissions down thirty percent, according to Michel d’Ornano, the environment minister, and carbon dioxide down forty-six percent.” (Mitterrand tries to put on a grimace of disgust, but in fact this doesn’t alter his usual expression.)

  8:11 p.m.: “So, foreign news … Today, in Chad … Afghanistan … Colombia…” (Various countries are mentioned but no one listens, except Foucault. Hamed finds his sock.)

  8:12 p.m.: “A rather surprising victory for Edward Kennedy in the New York State primaries…” (Deleuze picks up his telephone to call Félix Guattari. At home, Bayard irons his shirt in front of the television.)

  8:13 p.m.: “The number of road accidents rose last year, the Gendarmerie Nationale informs us: 12,480 deaths and 250,000 accidents in 1979 … that’s equal to the entire population of a town like Salon-de-Provence dying in these accidents. [Hamed wonders why the newsreader chose Salon-de-Provence.] Figures that give us food for thought, with the Easter holidays approaching…” (Sollers lifts a finger and exclaims: “Food for thought! Food for thought, Julia, do you hear?… Isn’t that marvelous?… Figures that give us food for thought, ha!” Kristeva replies: “Dinner’s ready!”)

  8:15 p.m.: “A road accident that could have had very serious consequences: yesterday, a truck transporting radioactive materials collided with another truck before crashing into a ditch. But thanks to the safety systems, there has not been a radioactive leak.” (Mitterrand, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser, Simon, Lacan, all laugh loudly in front of their respective TV sets. Bayard lights a cigarette while continuing to iron shirts.)

  8:23 p.m.: “And the interview with François Mitterrand in La Croix, with these little phrases that will go down in history [Mitterrand smiles with pleasure]: ‘Giscard remains the man bound to a clan, a class, and a caste. Six years of stagnation, belly-dancing in front of the Golden Calf. And pshit, said Ubu.’” (“That is François Mitterrand saying that,” PPDA makes clear. Giscard rolls his eyes.) “So that is what he said about the president. About Georges Marchais and his gang of three, well … ‘When he wants to be,’ says François Mitterrand again, ‘Marchais is a world-class comic.’ [In his apartment on Rue d’Ulm, Althusser shrugs. He shouts to his wife, in the kitchen: “Did you hear that, Hélène?” No response.] Finally, François Mitterrand, in response to a question about a possible Mitterrand-Rocard ticket for the Socialist Party, he pimply … [PPDA gets his words muddled, but continues impassively] simply replied that this American expression had no French equivalent in our institutions.”