The two adversaries stare at each other. Their features are hardened, their jaws tensed, they are sweating, but the old woman’s bun is still immaculate.
The audience is divided, indecisive.
Bifo’s two fellow judges vote, one for Antonioni, the other for Luciano’s mother.
Everyone waits for Bifo’s decision. Bianca squeezes Simon’s hand in hers. Sollers salivates slightly.
Bifo votes for the old woman.
Monica Vitti turns pale.
Sollers smiles.
Antonioni does not flinch.
He places his hand on the dissecting table. One of the judges gets to his feet: a tall and very thin man, armed with a small, blue-bladed hatchet.
When the hatchet chops off Antonioni’s finger, the echo of the severed bone mingles with that of the blade hitting marble and the director’s scream.
Monica Vitti bandages his hand with her gauze scarf while the judge respectfully picks up the finger and hands it to the actress.
Bifo proclaims loudly: “Onore agli arringatori.” The audience choruses: Honor to the duelists.
Luciano’s mother returns to sit down next to her son.
As at the end of a movie when the lights have not yet come back up, when the return to the real world is experienced as a slow, hazy awakening, when the images are still dancing behind our eyes, several minutes pass before the first spectators, stretching their numb legs, stand up and leave the room.
The anatomical theater empties slowly. Bifo and his fellow judges gather pages of notes into cardboard folders then retire ceremoniously. The session of the Logos Club dissolves into the night.
Bayard asks the man in gloves if Bifo is the Great Protagoras. He shakes his head like a child. Bifo is a tribune (level six), but not a sophist (level seven, the highest). The man in gloves thought it was Antonioni, who, it was said, used to be a sophist in the 1960s.
Sollers and BHL slip out discreetly. Bayard does not see them leave, because in the bottleneck near the door, they are hidden behind the man with the bag. He must make a decision. He decides to follow Antonioni. Turning back, he says out loud to Simon, in front of everyone: “Tomorrow, ten o’clock at the station. Don’t be late!”
3:22 a.m.
The amphitheater is almost empty. The crowd from the Drogheria has gone. Simon wants to leave last, just to be sure. He watches the man in gloves walk out. He watches Enzo and the young student leaving together. He notes with satisfaction that Bianca has not moved. He might even suppose that she is waiting for him. They are the last ones. They stand up, walk slowly toward the door. But just as they are about to exit the room, they stop. Gallienus, Hippocrates, and the others observe them. The flayed men are absolutely motionless. Desire, alcohol, the intoxication of being away from home, the warm welcome that French people so often receive when they travel abroad … all these things give Simon a boldness—albeit a very shy boldness!—that he knows he would never have had in Paris.
Simon takes Bianca’s hand.
Or maybe it’s the other way around?
Bianca takes Simon’s hand and they walk down the steps to the stage. She turns in a circle and the statues flash past her eyes like a ghostly slide show, like images-mouvements.
Does Simon realize at this precise moment that life is role-play, in which it is up to us to play our part as best we can, or does the spirit of Deleuze suddenly breathe life into his young, supple, slim body, with his smooth skin and short nails?
He puts his hands on Bianca’s shoulders and slips off her low-cut top. Suddenly inspired, he whispers into her ear, as if to himself: “I desire the landscape that is enveloped in this woman, a landscape I do not know but that I can feel, and until I have unfolded that landscape, I will not be happy…”
Bianca shivers with pleasure. Simon whispers to her with an authority that he has never felt before: “Let’s construct an assemblage.”
She gives him her mouth.
He tips her back and lays her on the dissecting table. She takes off her skirt, spreads her legs, and tells him: “Fuck me like a machine.” And while her breasts spill out, Simon begins to flow into her assemblage. His tongue-machine slides inside her like a coin in a slot, and Bianca’s mouth, which also has multiple uses, expels air like a bellows, a powerful, rhythmic breathing whose echo—“Si! Si!”—reverberates in the pulsing blood in Simon’s cock. Bianca moans, Simon gets hard, Simon licks Bianca, Bianca touches her breasts, the flayed men get hard, Gallienus starts to jerk off under his robe, and Hippocrates under his toga. “Si! Si!” Bianca grabs Simon’s dick, which is hot and hard as if it’s just come out of a forge, and connects it to her mouth-machine. Simon declaims as if to himself, quoting Artaud in an oddly detached voice: “The body under the skin is an overheated factory.” The Bianca factory automatically lubricates her devenir-sexe. Their mingled moans ring out through the deserted anatomical theater.
Well, not entirely deserted: the man in gloves has come back to check out the two youngsters. Simon sees him, crouching in a shadowy angle of the tiered seating. Bianca sees him while she is sucking Simon. The man in gloves sees Bianca’s dark eyes shine as they observe him, even as she goes down on Simon.
Outside, the Bologna night finally begins to cool. Bayard lights a cigarette while he waits for Antonioni, who is dignified but dazed, to decide to move. At this stage of the investigation, he isn’t sure whether the Logos Club is just a bunch of harmless lunatics or something more dangerous, implicated in the deaths of Barthes and the gigolo, connected to Giscard, the Bulgarians, and the Japanese. A church bell strikes four times. Antonioni starts to walk, followed by Monica Vitti, the two of them followed by Bayard. They silently traverse arcades lined with chic boutiques.
Arched on the dissecting table, Bianca whispers to Simon, loud enough for the man in gloves to hear: “Scopami come una macchina.” Simon stretches over her, fits his cock into the mouth of her vulva, which is, he notes with pleasure, producing a constant flow of fluid, and when he finally thrusts inside her, he feels like pure liquid in its free state, unimpeded, sliding on the voluptuous Neapolitan’s writhing body.
After going up to the top of Via Farini, outside the Basilica of Santo Stefano of the Seven Churches (constructed during the interminable Middle Ages), Antonioni sits on a stone post. He is holding his mutilated hand in his other hand, and his head hangs low. Standing at a distance under the arcades, Bayard can tell he is crying. Monica Vitti walks up to him. Nothing appears to indicate that Antonioni knows she is there, just behind him, but he knows, all the same, and Bayard knows that he knows. Monica Vitti raises her hand, but it remains suspended in the air, hesitant, immobile above the lowered head, like the sketch of a fragile and undeserved halo. Behind his column, Bayard lights a cigarette. Antonioni sniffs. Monica Vitti looks like a dream in stone.
Bianca struggles more and more under the weight of Simon’s body, which she grips convulsively, crying out: “La mia macchina miracolante!” as Simon’s dick pumps inside her like a piston. From his hiding place, the man in gloves hallucinates the hybridization of a locomotive and a wild horse. 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.”
Bayard has had time to light another cigarette, and then another. Monica Vitti at last decides to put her hand on Antonioni’s head. The director is now sobbing openly. She strokes his hair with an ambiguous tenderness. Antonioni weeps and weeps. He can’t stop. She lowers her beautiful gray eyes to the director’s neck and Bayard is too far away to distinguish the expression on her face clearly. He tries to squint through the darkness but when he finally thinks he can see the compassion that his logical mind supposes, Monica Vitti turns her gaze away, lifting her eyes toward the massive edifice of the basilica. Perhaps she i
s already elsewhere. A cat’s yowling can be heard in the distance. Bayard decides it is time to go to bed.
On the dissecting table, Bianca is now the iron horse atop Simon, who lies on the marble slab, all his muscles tensed to give more depth to the Italian girl’s thrusts. “There is only one kind of production: the production of the real.” Bianca slides up and down Simon, faster and faster and harder, until they reach the point of impact, when the two desiring machines collide in an atomic explosion and become, finally, that body without organs: “For desiring machines are the fundamental category of the economy of desire; they produce a body without organs all by themselves, and make no distinction between agents and their own parts…” Deleuze’s phrases flash through the young man’s mind just as his body convulses, as Bianca’s bolts and breaks down, then collapses on top of him, exhausted, their sweat mingling.
The bodies relax, shaken by aftershocks.
“Thus fantasy is never individual: it is group fantasy.”
The man in gloves has not yet managed to leave. He, too, is exhausted, but it is not a pleasant form of exhaustion. His ghost fingers hurt him.
“The schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfilment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel.”
Bianca explains the Deleuzian schizo to Simon as she rolls a joint. Outside, the first notes of birdsong can be heard. The conversation goes on until morning. “No, the masses were not deceived; they wanted fascism at that moment, in those circumstances…” The man in gloves ends up falling asleep in a row between seats.
8:42 a.m.
The two young people at last leave their wooden friends and go out into the already hot air of the Piazza Maggiore. They skirt the fountain of Neptune, his demonic dolphins, his obscene nymphs. Simon is giddy with fatigue, alcohol, pleasure, and cannabis. Less than twenty-four hours after his arrival in Italy, he thinks to himself that it is not going too badly so far. Bianca accompanies him to the station. Together, they walk up Via dell’Independenza, the city center’s main artery, past the still drowsy stores. Dogs sniff at trash cans. People come out, suitcases in hand: it is the start of a holiday, and everyone is going to the train station.
Everyone is going to the train station. It is 9:00 a.m., August 2, 1980. The July people are coming home, the August people preparing to leave.
Bianca rolls a joint. Simon thinks he should change his shirt. He stops outside an Armani shop and wonders if he could claim that on expenses.
At the end of the long avenue is the massive Porta Galliera, in appearance half byzantine house, half medieval arch, which Simon would like to pass under, though he doesn’t really know why, and then, as it’s not yet time for the meeting at the train station, he leads Bianca toward some stone steps by a park, they stop in front of a strange fountain embedded in the wall of the staircase, and they take turns smoking the joint as they contemplate the sculpture of a naked woman grappling with a horse, an octopus, and some other sea creatures that they are unable to identify. Simon feels lightly stoned. He smiles at the statue, thinking about Stendhal, which leads him to Barthes: “We always fail to talk about what we love…”
Bologna Central swarms with vacationers in shorts and bawling brats. Simon lets himself be guided by Bianca, who leads him to the waiting room, where they find Eco and Bayard, who has brought his little suitcase from the hotel where they checked in but in Simon’s case didn’t sleep. A small child, running after his little brother, charges into Simon, almost knocking him off balance. He hears Eco explaining to Bayard: “That is tantamount to saying that Little Red Riding Hood is not in a position to conceive of a universe where the Yalta Conference took place or where Reagan will succeed Carter.”
Despite the look Bayard shoots him, which he decodes as a cry for help, Simon does not dare interrupt the great academic, so he looks around and thinks he spots Enzo in the crowd, with his family. Eco says to Bayard: “So anyway, for Little Red Riding Hood, judging a possible world where wolves don’t speak, the ‘actual’ world would be hers, the one where wolves do speak.” Simon feels a vague rising anxiety, which he puts down to the joint. He thinks he sees Stefano with a young woman, moving off toward the tracks. “We can read the events described in The Divine Comedy as ‘credible’ in comparison with the medieval encyclopedia and legendary in comparison with ours.” Simon feels as if Eco’s words are ricocheting inside his head. He thinks he sees Luciano and his mother carrying a large bag overflowing with provisions. To reassure himself, he checks that Bianca is standing next to him. He has a vision of a German tourist, very blond, with a Tyrolean-style hat, a large camera on a strap around her neck, leather shorts, and knee-length socks, walking behind her. In the hubbub of Italian voices echoing under the roof of the station, Simon strains to isolate Eco’s French phrases: “On the other hand, if, reading a historical novel, we find a King Runcibald of France, the comparison with the world zero of the historical encyclopedia makes us feel uneasy in a way that presages the readjustment of cooperative attention: obviously, this is not a historical novel, but a fantasy novel.”
Just as Simon finally decides to greet the two men, he thinks he might be able to deceive the Italian semiologist, but he sees that Bayard has immediately understood that he is—as he realized himself, standing by the statue—lightly stoned.
Eco addresses him as if he had been there since the start of the conversation: “When reading a novel, what does it signify to recognize that what is happening is ‘truer’ than what happens in real life?” Simon thinks that in a novel, Bayard would bite his lip or shrug.
Then Eco finally stops talking and, for a second, no one breaks the silence.
Simon thinks he sees Bayard biting his lip.
He thinks he sees the man in gloves walking behind him.
“What do you know about the seventh function of language?” In a haze, Simon doesn’t realize at first that it’s not Bayard who asks this, but Eco. Bayard turns toward him. Simon notices that he is still holding hands with Bianca. Eco gazes at the girl with lightly lustful eyes. (Everything seems light.) Simon tries to pull himself together: “We have good reason to believe that Barthes and three other people were killed because of a document relating to the seventh function of language.” Simon hears his own voice but feels as if Bayard is speaking.
Eco listens with interest to the story of a lost manuscript for which people are being killed. He sees a man walk past holding a bouquet of roses. His mind wanders for a second, and a vision of a poisoned monk flashes through it.
In the middle of the crowd, Simon thinks he recognizes the man with the bag from the night before. The man sits in the waiting room and slides the bag under his seat. It looks full to bursting.
It is 10:00 a.m.
Simon does not want to insult Eco by reminding him that there are only six functions of language in Jakobson’s theory; Eco knows this perfectly well but, according to him, it is not entirely correct.
Simon concedes that there is a mention of a “magic or incantatory function,” but reminds Eco that it was not considered serious enough to be kept in Jakobson’s classification.
Eco does not claim that the “magic” function exists, strictly speaking, and yet one can probably find something inspired by it in works that followed Jakobson’s.
Austin, an English philosopher, did indeed theorize the existence of another function of language, which he called “performative,” and which could be summarized in the formula “When saying is doing.”
It consists in the capacity that certain pronouncements have to produce (Eco says “realize”) what they pronounce through the very fact of their pronouncement. For example, when the minister says, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” or when the monarch declares, “Arise, Sir So-and-so,” or when the judge says, “I sentence you…,” or when the president of the National Assembly says, “I declare the assembly open,” or simply when you say to someone, “I promis
e…,” it is the very fact of pronouncing these phrases that makes what they pronounce come into being.
In one way, this is the principle of the magical formula, Jakobson’s “magic function.”
A clock on the wall shows 10:02.
Bayard lets Simon take charge of the conversation.
Simon knows Austin’s theories, but does not see anything in them worth killing people for.
Eco says that Austin’s theory is not limited to those few cases but is extended to more complex linguistic situations, when a pronouncement is not intended merely to affirm something but seeks to provoke an action—which is either produced or not by the simple fact that this pronouncement is made. For example, if someone says to you “it’s hot in here,” it can be a simple observation about the temperature, but generally you would understand that he’s counting on the effect of his remark being that you will open the window. Likewise, when someone asks, “Do you have the time?,” he expects not a simple yes/no answer but that you should tell him what time it is.
According to Austin, speaking is a locutionary act since it consists in saying something but can also be an illocutionary or perlocutionary act, which surpasses the purely verbal exchange because it does something, in the sense that it produces actions. The use of language enables us to remark something, but also to perform something.
Bayard has no idea where Eco is going with this, and Simon is not too sure either.
The man with the bag has left, but Simon thinks he can glimpse the bag under the seat. (But was it that big before?) Simon thinks the man must have forgotten it again; there are some pretty absentminded people around. He looks for him in the crowd but doesn’t see him.
The wall clock shows 10:05.
Eco continues: “Now, let us imagine that the performative function is not limited to these few cases. Let us imagine a function of language that enables someone, in a much more extensive fashion, to convince anyone else to do anything at all in any situation.”
10:06.
The Seventh Function of Language Page 19