The Seventh Function of Language

by Laurent Binet

  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. “The right wing,” says Bianca, wrinkling her nose in contempt. “That historic compromise bullshit, that’s him.” Bayard sees Simon hanging on her every word, and raises his glass of red toward him: “So, lefty, you like Bologna, eh? Isn’t this better than your dump in Vincennes?” Bianca repeats, eyes shining: “Vincennes … Deleuze!” Bayard asks the waiter, Stefano, if he knows Umberto Eco.

  Just then, a hippie in sandals enters, walks straight over to the bearded guy, and taps him on the shoulder. The bearded guy turns around. The hippie solemnly unzips his trousers and pisses on him. The bearded guy reels back, horrified, and everyone starts yelling. There is general confusion, and the hippie is ushered toward the exit by the boss’s son. People crowd around the bearded guy, who moans: “Ma io non parlo mai di politica!” The hippie, before leaving, shouts at him: “Appunto!”

  Stefano comes back behind the counter and points out the bearded man to Bayard: “That’s Umberto.”

  The man with the bag leaves, forgetting it on the floor by the bar, but thankfully the other customers catch him and hand it back. The man, embarrassed, apologizes strangely, says thank you, then disappears into the night.

  Bayard approaches the bearded man, who is symbolically wiping his trousers, because the piss has already soaked into the cloth, and takes out his card: “Monsieur Eco? French police.” Eco becomes agitated: “Police? Ma, you should have arrested the hippie, then!” Then, considering the clientele of left-wing students that fill the Drogheria, he decides not to pursue this line of attack. Bayard explains why he is here: Barthes asked a young man to contact him if anything happened, but the young man died, with Eco’s name on his lips. Eco seems sincerely surprised. “I knew Roland well, but we weren’t close friends. It’s a terrible tragedy, of course, ma it was an accident, no?”

  Bayard realizes he is going to have to be patient again, so he finishes his drink, lights a cigarette, looks at the man in gloves waving his arms around as he talks about materialismo storico. Enzo is hitting on the young student while playing with her hair, Simon and Bianca are toasting “desiring autonomy,” and Bayard says: “Think about it. 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. But perhaps not even 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. You see? It is impossible to say if one interpretation is valid, or if it is the best one, but it is possible to say if the text refuses an interpretation incompatible with its own contextuality. In other words, you can’t just say whatever you want about it. Insomma, Barthes was an Augustinian, not a Kabbalist.”

  And while Eco drones on at him, in the hubbub of conversations and the clinking of glasses, amid the bottles arranged on the shelves, while the students’ young, supple, firm bodies exude their belief in the future, Bayard watches the man in gloves haranguing his listeners about some unknown subject. And he wonders why a man would wear gloves in eighty-five-degree heat.

  The professor to whom Eco was telling jokes cuts in, in accentless French: “The problem, and you know this, Umberto, is that Barthes did not study signs, in the Saussurian sense, but symbols, at a push, and mostly clues. Interpreting a clue is not unique to semiology, it is the vocation of all science: physics, chemistry, anthropology, geography, economics, philology … Barthes was not a semiologist, Umberto, he didn’t understand what semiology was, because he didn’t understand the specificity of the sign, which, unlike the clue (which is merely a fortuitous trace picked up by a receiver), must be deliberately sent by a sender. Fair enough, he was quite an inspired generalist, but at the end of the day he was just an old-fashioned critic, exactly like Picard and the others he was fighting against.”

  “Ma no, you’re wrong, Georges. The interpretation of clues is not all science, but the semiological moment of all science and the essence of semiology itself. Roland’s Mythologies were brilliant semiological analyses because daily life is subject to a continual bombardment of messages that do not always manifest a direct intentionality but, due to their ideological finality, mostly tend to be presented under an apparent ‘naturalness’ of the real.”

  “Oh, really? I don’t see why you insist on labeling as semiology what is ultimately just a general epistemiology.”

  “Ma, that’s exactly it. Semiology offers instruments to recognize what science does, which is, first and foremost, learning to see the world as a collection of signifying events.”

  “In that case, you might as well come out and say that semiology is the mother of all sciences!”

  Umberto spreads out his hands, palms open, and a broad smile splits his beard: “Ecco!”

  There is the pop, pop, pop of bottles being uncorked. Simon gallantly lights Bianca’s cigarette. Enzo tries to kiss his young student, who shies away, laughing. Stefano fills everyone’s glasses.

  Bayard sees the man in gloves put down his glass without finishing it and disappear into the street. The store is arranged in such a way, with a closed counter denying access to the whole back half of the room, that Bayard deduces there is no customer toilet. So, by the look of things, the man in gloves does not want to do what the hippie did, and has gone outside to piss. Bayard has a few seconds to come to a decision. He grabs a coffee spoon from the counter and walks after him.

  He has not gone very far: there is no lack of dark alleyways in this part of town. He is facing the wall, in the midst of relieving himself, when Bayard grabs him by the hair, yanks him backward, and pins him to the ground, yelling into his face: “You keep your gloves on to piss? What’s up, don’t like getting your hands dirty?” The man is of average build, but he is too stupefied to fight back or even cry out, so he simply stares wide-eyed in terror at his assailant. Bayard immobilizes him by pressing his knee into the man’s chest and grabs his hands. Feeling something soft under the leather of the left-hand glove, he tears it off and discovers two missing phalanges, on the pinkie and ring fingers.

  “So … you like cutting wood, too, huh?”

  He crushes his head against the damp cobblestones.

 
“Where is the meeting?”

  The man makes some incomprehensible gurgling noises, so Bayard lessens the pressure and hears: “Non lo so! Non lo so!”

  Perhaps infected by the climate of violence that permeates the city, Bayard does not seem in the mood to show much patience. He takes the little spoon from his jacket pocket and wedges it deeply under the man’s eye. The man starts to screech like a frightened bird. Behind him, he hears Simon running up and shouting: “Jacques! Jacques! What are you doing?” Simon pulls at his shoulders, but Bayard is much too strong to be moved. “Jacques! Fucking hell! What’s wrong with you?”

  The cop digs the spoon into the eye socket.

  He does not repeat his question.

  He wants to cause distress and despair at maximum intensity, at maximum speed, taking advantage of the element of surprise. His aim is efficiency, as it was in Algeria. Less than a minute ago, the man in gloves thought he was going to have a nice, relaxed evening and now some French guy has appeared out of nowhere and is trying to enucleate him while he pisses all over himself.

  When he feels the terrorized man is ready to do anything to save his eye and his life, Bayard finally consents to make his question more specific.

  “The Logos Club, you little shit! Where is it?” And the man with the missing fingers stammers: “Archiginnasio! Archiginnasio!” Bayard does not understand. “Archi what?” And behind him, he hears a voice that is not Simon’s: “The Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio is the headquarters of the old university, behind the Piazza Maggiore. It was built by Antonio Morandi, known as Il Terribilia, perché…”

  Bayard, without turning around, recognizes the voice of Eco, who demands: “Ma, perché are you torturing this pover’uomo?”

  Bayard explains: “There is a meeting of the Logos Club tonight, here in Bologna.” The man in gloves emits a hoarse wheezing sound.

  Simon asks: “But how do you know that?”

  “Our services obtained this information.”

  “‘Our’ services? The Renseignements Généraux, you mean?”

  Simon thinks about Bianca, who has stayed behind in the Drogheria, and would like to make it clear to everyone within earshot that he does not work for the French secret services but, to spare himself the bother of putting his growing identity crisis into words, he remains silent. He also realizes that they did not come to Bologna simply to interrogate Eco. And he notes that Eco does not ask what the Logos Club is, so he decides to ask the question himself: “What do you know about the Logos Club, Monsieur Eco?”

  Eco strokes his beard, clears his throat, lights a cigarette.

  “The Athenian city was founded on three pillars: the gymnasium, the theater, and the school of rhetoric. The trace of this tripartition remains today in a society obsessed with spectacle that promotes three categories of individuals to the rank of celebrity: athletes, actors (or singers: the ancient theater made no distinction between the two), and politicians. Of these three, the third, up to now, has always been dominant (even if, with Ronald Reagan, we see that some overlap is possible), because it involves the mastery of man’s most powerful weapon: language.

  “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!

  “It was on the basis of this supposition, and also to counter Christianity’s growing influence, that a sect of heretics founded the Logi Consilium in the third century A.D.

  “Thereafter, the Logi Consilium spread through Italy, then through France, where it took the name the Logos Club in the eighteenth century, during the revolution.

  “It developed as a highly compartmentalized secret society, structured like a pyramid, with its leaders—a body of ten members known as the sophists—presided over by a Protagoras Magnus, practicing their rhetorical talents, which they used essentially in the service of their political ambitions. Certain popes—Clement the Sixth, Pius the Second—are suspected of having been leaders of the organization. It has also been said that Shakespeare, Las Casas, Roberto Bellarmino (the inquisitor who led the trial of Galileo, sapete?), La Boétie, Castiglione, Bossuet, Cardinal de Retz, Christina of Sweden, Casanova, Diderot, Beaumarchais, de Sade, Danton, Talleyrand, Baudelaire, Zola, Rasputin, Jaurès, Mussolini, Gandhi, Churchill, and Malaparte were all members of the Logos Club.”

  Simon remarks that this list is not restricted to politicians.

  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…”

  Bayard asks him: “And you?”

  Eco: “Me? I’m Italian, allora…”

  Simon: “Like Machiavelli. But also like Cicero.”

  Eco laughs: “Si, vero. Anyway, I would be more of an immanentist, I think.”

  Bayard asks the man in gloves for the password. He has recovered from his fright a little and protests: “Ma, it’s a secret!”

  Behind Bayard, Enzo, Bianca, Stefano, and half the wine merchant’s clientele, drawn by the noise, have come to see what is going on. All of them listened to Umberto Eco’s little lecture.

  Simon asks: “Is it an important meeting?” The man in gloves replies that tonight the standard will be extremely high because there is a rumor that a sophist may attend, maybe even the Great Protagoras himself. Bayard asks Eco to accompany them, but Eco refuses: “I know those meetings. I went to the Logos Club when I was young, you know! I even went up onstage and, as you can see, I didn’t lose a finger.” He proudly shows them his hands. The man in gloves represses a grimace of bitterness. “But I didn’t have time for my research, so I stopped going to meetings. I lost my rank a long time ago. I would be curious to see how good today’s duelists are, ma I am going back to Milan tomorrow. I have a train at eleven a.m. and I have to finish preparing a lecture on the ekphrasis of Quattrocento bas-reliefs.”

  Bayard cannot force him, but in the least threatening tone he can manage, he says: “We still have questions to ask you, Monsieur Eco. About the seventh function of language.”

  Eco looks at Bayard. He looks at Simon, Bianca, the man in gloves, Enzo and his new friend, his French colleague, Stefano and his father, who has also come out, and his gaze scans all the other customers who have crowded into the alleyway.

  “Va bene. Meet me at the station tomorrow. Ten o’clock in the second-class waiting room.”

  Then he goes back to the store to buy some tomatoes and cans of tuna and finally disappears into the night with his little plastic bag and his professor’s satchel.

  Simon says: “We’re going to need a translator.”

  Bayard: “Fingerless here can do it.”

  Simon: “He’s not looking his best. I’m afraid he won’t do a very good job.”

  Bayard: “All right, then, you can bring your girlfriend.”

  Enzo: “I want to come too!”

  The Drogheria customers: “We want to come too!”

  The man in gloves, still lying on the ground, waves his mutilated hand: “Ma, it’s a private function! I can’t get everyone in.”

  Bayard gives him a slap. “What? That’s not very Communist! Come on, let’s go.”

  And in the hot Bologna night a little troop sets off toward the old university. From a distance, the p
rocession looks a bit like a Fellini film, but it’s hard to tell whether it’s La Dolce Vita or La Strada.

  12:07 a.m.

  Outside the entrance of the Archiginnasio is a small crowd and a bouncer who looks like all bouncers except that he wears Gucci sunglasses, a Prada watch, a Versace suit, and an Armani tie.

  The man in gloves speaks to the bouncer, flanked by Simon and Bayard. He says: “Siamo qui per il Logos Club. Il codice è fifty cents.”

  The bouncer, suspicious, asks: “Quanti siete?”

  The man in gloves turns around and counts: “Uh … Dodici.”

  The bouncer suppresses a smirk and says that won’t be possible.

  So Enzo moves forward and says: “Ascolta amico, alcuni di noi sono venuti da lontano per la riunione di stasera. Alcuni di noi sono venuti dalla Francia, capisci?”

  The bouncer doesn’t bat an eyelid. He does not seem overly impressed by the notion of a French branch of the Logos Club.

  “Rischi di provocare un incidente diplomatico. Tra di noi ci sono persone di rango elevato.”

  The bouncer gives the group the once-over and says all he sees is a bunch of losers. He says: “Basta!”

  Enzo does not give up: “Sei cattolico?” The bouncer lifts up his sunglasses. “Dovresti sapere che l’abito non fa il Monaco. Che diresti tu di qualcuno che per ignoranza chiudesse la sua porta al Messia? Como lo giudicheresti?” How would he judge the man who, in ignorance, closed the door to Christ?

  The bouncer pulls a face. Enzo can tell he’s on the fence. The man spends several seconds considering the matter, thinks about the rumor of the Great Protagoras arriving incognito, then, finally, points to the twelve of them: “Va bene. Voi dodici, venite.”

  The group enters the palace and climbs a stone staircase decorated with coats of arms. The man in gloves leads them to the Teatro Anatomico. Simon asks him why the code word fifty cents? He explains that, in Latin, the initials of the Logos Club signify 50 and 100. Like that, it’s easy to remember.