The Seventh Function of Language

by Laurent Binet

  Simon turns without thinking and finds himself in a little side street parallel to Boulevard Magenta, and what scares him most now is that the car behind him is not even attempting to conceal its presence. And so, as it moves closer again, guided by a vague inspiration, he slams on the brakes and the DS crashes into the back of the R16.

  For a few seconds, the two cars are immobile, one behind the other, as if they had lost consciousness, and the passersby, too, seem petrified, stunned by the accident. Then he sees an arm emerge from the DS and a shiny metallic object and he thinks: that’s a gun. So he shoves the car into gear, missing first, which produces a horrible crunching noise, and the R16 leaps forward. The arm disappears and the DS also takes off.

  Simon runs every traffic light he sees, honking his horn constantly, so much so that it sounds like an air-raid siren warning the Tenth Arrondissement of an imminent bombardment. Behind, the DS stays close to him, like a fighter plane that’s locked an enemy plane in its crosshairs. Simon hits a 505, bounces off a van, skids onto the pavement, almost runs over two or three passersby, and enters Place de la République. Behind him, the DS weaves between obstacles like a snake. Simon slaloms through traffic, avoiding pedestrians, and yells at Hamed: “The text! Recite the text!” But Hamed can’t concentrate; his hand is clinging to the handle above the window and not a single word escapes his lips.

  Simon tries to think as he drives around Place de la République. He doesn’t know where the nearest police stations are, but he remembers attending a July 14 party in the fire station near the Bastille, in the Marais, so he piles down Boulevard des Filles-du-Calvaire and barks at Hamed: “What’s it about? What’s the title?” Hamed is pale, but manages to articulate: “The seventh function of language.” But just as he starts to recite it, the DS comes up alongside the R16, the passenger-side window opens, and Simon sees a man with a mustache pointing a pistol at him. Just before the gunshot, Simon slams on the brakes with all his strength and the DS overtakes them as the bullet leaves the gun, but a 404 behind him crashes into the back of the R16, shunting it forward until it is, once again, level with the DS, so Simon yanks the steering wheel to the left and sends the DS into the line of oncoming traffic. By some miracle, however, the DS avoids a blue Fuego coming the other way and escapes into a side road at Cirque d’Hiver, then disappears in Rue Amelot, which runs parallel to Boulevard Beaumarchais, an extension of Filles-du-Calvaire.

  Simon and Hamed believe they’ve shaken off their pursuers, but Simon is still heading toward the Bastille—it doesn’t cross his mind to lose himself in the labyrinth of little streets in the Marais—so when Hamed starts to recite mechanically “There exists a function that eludes the various inalienable factors of verbal communication … and which, in a way, encompasses all of them. This function we shall call…,” at that very moment, the DS speeds out of a perpendicular street and smashes into the side of the R16, which collides with a tree in a howl of steel and glass.

  Simon and Hamed are still in shock when a mustachioed man armed with a pistol and an umbrella bursts out of the smoking DS, rushes over to the R16, and pulls open the loose passenger door. He aims his pistol, straight-armed, at Hamed’s face and squeezes the trigger, but nothing happens. His pistol jams. He tries again—click click—but it doesn’t work, so he wields his closed umbrella like a sword and attempts to stick it between Hamed’s ribs, but Hamed protects himself with his arm, knocking aside the umbrella’s point, which sinks into his shoulder. The sudden pain provokes a high-pitched cry. Then, his fear turning to rage, he wrenches the umbrella from the man’s hands, releasing his safety belt in the same movement, launches himself at his aggressor, and stabs him in the chest with the umbrella.

  While this is happening, the other man has gone around to the driver’s door. Simon is conscious and tries to get out of the R16, but his door is blocked—he’s trapped inside—and when the second mustachioed man aims his gun at him, he is paralyzed with terror and stares at the black hole the bullet will emerge from before perforating his head, and he has time to think “A lightning flash, then night!” when suddenly a buzzing noise fills the air and a blue Fuego crashes into the man, who is sent flying and lands in a crumpled heap on the pavement. Two Japanese men get out of the Fuego.

  Simon escapes through the passenger door and crawls over to Hamed, who is slumped over the body of Mustache No. 1. He turns Hamed over and discovers, to his relief, that he is still alive. One of the Japanese men comes over and supports the wounded young gigolo’s head. He feels his pulse and says “Poison,” but Simon initially hears “poisson” and he thinks of Barthes’s analyses of Japanese food before understanding dawns on him as he looks at Hamed’s yellow complexion and yellow eyes and the spasms that shake his body, and he yells for someone to call an ambulance and Hamed tries to say something to him, he struggles to sit up a bit, and Simon leans over and asks about the function but Hamed is completely incapable of reciting a word because everything is whirling inside his head: he sees his poor childhood in Marseille again and his life in Paris, his friends, his tricks, the saunas, Saïd, Barthes, Slimane, the cinema, croissants at La Coupole, and the silken reflections of the oiled bodies that he rubbed himself against, but just before dying, while the sirens scream in the distance, he has time to whisper: “Echo.”

  31

  When Jacques Bayard arrives, the police have secured the area but the Japanese have disappeared and so has Mustache No. 2, the man knocked over by the Fuego. Hamed’s body is still laid out flat on the pavement alongside his attacker’s, whose umbrella is sticking out of his chest. Simon Herzog is smoking a cigarette, a blanket wrapped around him. No, he has nothing. No, he doesn’t know who those Japanese guys are. They didn’t say anything, they just saved his life and then left. With the Fuego. Yes, the second mustachioed man is probably injured. He must be hard as nails to have gotten up after being hit like that in the first place. Jacques Bayard contemplates the two wrecked cars, perplexed. Why a DS? Production of that model ended in 1975. The Fuego, on the other hand, is so new that it’s fresh from the factory and is not yet on sale. Someone draws an outline in chalk around Hamed’s corpse. Bayard lights a Gitane. So the gigolo’s calculation was wrong: the information he possessed did not protect him. Bayard concludes that the men who killed him did not want to make him talk but to shut him up. Why? Simon tells him Hamed’s last words. Bayard asks what he knows about this seventh function of language. Still in shock, but professorial by instinct, Simon explains: “The functions of language are linguistic categories that were once the subject of a theory by a great Russian linguist named…”

  Roman Jakobson.

  Simon goes no further in the lecture he was about to give. He remembers the book on Barthes’s desk, Essays in General Linguistics by Roman Jakobson, opened at the page on the functions of language, and the sheet of notes that served as a bookmark.

  He explains to Bayard that the document for which four people have already been killed was perhaps right under their noses when they searched the apartment on Rue Servandoni, and pays no heed to the policeman standing behind them who then walks away to make a telephone call once he’s heard enough. He cannot see that the policeman has a finger missing on his left hand.

  Bayard, too, thinks he’s heard enough, even if he still doesn’t really understand this thing about Jakobson; he pushes Simon inside his 504 and zooms off toward the Latin Quarter, escorted by a van full of uniformed officers, including the one with the severed finger. They arrive in Place Saint-Sulpice, sirens howling, and that is probably a mistake.

  There is an entry code beside the heavy double doors, and they have to hammer on the window of the concierge’s office. She opens it for them, stupefied.

  No, nobody has asked to see the attic room. Nothing special has happened since the installation of the entry code by a Vinci technician last month. Yes, the one with the Russian accent, or maybe it was Yugoslav, or maybe Greek. Actually, it’s funny, he came back today. He said he wanted to do
an estimate for installing an intercom. No, he didn’t ask for the key to the seventh-floor room, why? It’s hanging on the board, with the others, look. Yes, he went upstairs not five minutes ago.

  Bayard takes the key and climbs the stairs two by two, followed by half a dozen policemen. Simon remains downstairs with the concierge. On the seventh floor, the door to the attic room is locked. Bayard inserts the key in the lock, but it’s obstructed by something: another key, on the inside. The key that was not found on Barthes, thinks Bayard, as he bangs on the door and shouts, “Police!” They hear a noise inside. Bayard orders the door smashed down. The desk looks intact, but the book is no longer there, nor is the page of notes, and there is nobody in the room. The windows are shut.

  But the trapdoor to the apartment below is open.

  Bayard screams at his men to get downstairs but by the time they have turned around, their prey is already on the stairs and they bump into Barthes’s brother, Michel, coming out of his apartment in a panic because an intruder just came through the hole in his ceiling. So the Vinci technician is now two floors below them, and on the ground floor, of course, Simon, who has no idea what is going on, is shoved out of the way by the man, who sprints out of the building at top speed, and when he slams the double doors shut behind him, the mechanism that he himself installed is triggered, locking them inside.

  Bayard rushes into the concierge’s office and grabs the telephone. He wants to call for backup, but it’s a rotary phone and the time it takes him to compose the number feels enough for the man to have reached Porte d’Orléans, or maybe even the city of Orléans.

  But the man is not going in that direction. He wants to escape by car, but two policemen left on guard outside prevent him from picking up his vehicle, parked at the end of the street, so he runs toward the Jardin du Luxembourg while behind him the two officers shout their first warnings. Through the double doors, Bayard shouts, “Don’t shoot!” He wants the man alive, of course. When his men finally manage to free the mechanism, by pressing on the button embedded in the wall, the guy has disappeared but Bayard has sounded the alert. He knows that the area is being sealed off and the man won’t get far.

  The man runs through the Jardin du Luxembourg and he can hear the policemen blowing their whistles behind him, but the passersby, used to joggers and the park guards’ whistles, pay no notice until he finds himself face-to-face with a cop. The cop tries to tackle him, but the man runs smack into him, like a rugby player, knocks him down, steps over him, and continues running. Where is he going? Does he know? He changes direction. One thing is sure: he has to get out of the park before all the exits are blocked.

  Bayard is now in the van, giving orders by radio. Police officers have fanned out around the Latin Quarter. The fugitive is surrounded. He’s screwed.

  But this man is resourceful. He hurtles down Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, a narrow one-way street, which prevents any cars from following him. For some reason known only to him, he must cross over to the Right Bank. Coming out of Rue Bonaparte, he runs onto the Pont-Neuf, but that is where his race ends, because at the other end of the bridge, police vans block the way, and when he turns around he sees Bayard’s van cutting off his retreat. He’s trapped like a rat. Even if he jumps in the river, he won’t get far, but maybe he has one last card to play, he thinks.

  He climbs onto the parapet and holds out a piece of paper he has taken from his jacket. Bayard approaches him, alone. The man says one step farther and he’ll throw the paper in the Seine. Bayard stops dead, as if he’s just walked into an invisible wall. “Calm down.”

  “Don’t come any nearrrer!”

  “What do you want?”

  “A car with a full tank of gas. If not, I thrrrow the document in the rrriver.”

  “Go ahead, throw it in.”

  The man’s arm twitches. Bayard shivers, in spite of himself. “Wait!” He knows that this scrap of paper might solve the mystery of at least four deaths. “Let’s talk, okay? What’s your name?” Simon has joined him. At both ends of the bridge, the police have the man in their sights. Out of breath, chest wheezing from the effort, he moves his other hand to his pocket. At that precise instant, there is the sound of a gunshot. The man swivels. Bayard yells: “Don’t shoot!” The man drops like a stone, but the paper flutters around above the river, and Bayard and Simon, who have rushed to the stone balustrade, lean over to watch the graceful curves of its erratic descent as if hypnotized. At last, it lands delicately on the water. And floats. Bayard, Simon, and the policemen who have instinctively understood that this document was their real objective, all stare, petrified, breath held, as the sheet of paper drifts along with the current.

  Then Bayard tears himself from this contemplative torpor and, deciding that all hope is not yet lost, yanks off his jacket, his shirt, and his trousers, steps over the parapet, hesitates for a few seconds. And jumps. Disappears in a huge splash.

  When he resurfaces, he is about sixty feet from the paper and, from up on the bridge, Simon and the policemen start shouting at him, all at the same time, indicating which direction to take, like supporters at a football match. Bayard starts swimming, as hard as he can. He tries to get closer, but the paper is carried away by the current. Still, the gap is gradually reduced. He’s close now, he’s going to catch it, only another ten feet, and then they disappear under the bridge and Simon and the policemen run to the other side and wait for them to reappear, and when they reappear the shouting starts up again. Three more feet and he’ll have it, but at that moment a riverboat passes, creating little waves that submerge the paper just as Bayard is about to reach out and grab it. The paper sinks, so Bayard dives after it, and for a few seconds all they can see is the pair of underpants he’s wearing, poking up out of the water. When he resurfaces, he is clutching the soaked paper in his hand and he swims doggedly over to the bank amid cheers and hurrahs.

  But when he hauls himself onto the grass, he opens his hand and realizes that the sheet of paper is now merely a shapeless paste and that the writing has been dissolved because Barthes wrote with a fountain pen. This isn’t CSI and there will not be any way of making the text reappear: no magic scanner, no ultraviolet light. The document is lost forever.

  The officer who fired the shot comes over to explain: he saw the man reaching for a gun in his pocket and he didn’t have time to think, so he fired. Bayard notes that the cop has a finger missing on his left hand. He asks him what happened. The policeman replies he had an accident while he was chopping wood at his parents’ house in the countryside.

  When the police divers fish the corpse out of the water, they will find in his jacket pocket not a firearm but Barthes’s copy of Essays in General Linguistics, and Bayard, still drying himself, will ask Simon: “For fuck’s sake, who is this Jakobson guy?” And so, at last, Simon will be able to finish his lecture.

  32

  Roman Jakobson was a Russian linguist, born at the end of the nineteenth century, who was at the inception of a movement named Structuralism. After Saussure (1857–1913) and Peirce (1839–1914), and along with Hjelmslev (1899–1965), he is probably the most important theoretician among the founders of linguistics.

  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: each time you pronounce a word, you choose it from a list that you have in mind and which you mentally scroll through. For example, “goat,” “economy,” “death,” “trousers,” “I-you-he,” or whatever.

  Then you join it to other wo
rds: “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, then several sentences, and finally a speech. This is the syntagmatic axis.

  With a noun, you must decide if it needs an adjective, an adverb, a verb, a coordinating conjunction, a preposition … and you must choose which adjective or which adverb or which verb: you renew the paradigmatic operation at each syntagmatic stage.

  The paradigmatic axis makes you choose from a list of words in the equivalent grammatical class: a noun or a pronoun, an adjective or a relative proposition, an adverb, a verb, etc.

  The syntagmatic axis makes you choose the order of words: subject-verb-complement or verb-subject or complement-subject-verb, and so on.

  Vocabulary and syntax.