Bayard stammers something incomprehensible, but the fact of his stammering indicates that he has understood. Cixous smiles her Sphinx-like smile and says: “So let’s perform!” Bayard follows the two women, who pick up a six-pack and climb the stairs, where Chomsky and Camille Paglia are making out. In the corridor, they pass a Latin American student wearing a D&G-branded silk shirt, who Judith buys some little pills from. As he isn’t aware of that particular brand, Bayard asks Judith what the initials stand for and Judith tells him it’s not a brand but the initials of “Deleuze & Guattari.” The same two letters feature on the pills.
Down below, an American guy tells Cordelia: “You are the muse!”
Cordelia pouts disdainfully, and Simon guesses she has practiced this expression to show off her voluptuous lips: “That’s not enough.”
This is the moment Simon chooses to approach her, in front of all her friends, with the resolve of an Acapulco diver. Feigning a cool spontaneity, as if he just happened to be passing, he says that having overheard her remark he couldn’t help responding: “Well, sure, who wants to be an object?” Silence. He reads in Cordelia’s eyes: “Okay, now you have my attention.” He knows he must not only show himself to be urbane and cultivated but must pique her curiosity, provoke her without shocking her, demonstrate his spirit in order to arouse hers, mix lightheartedness with profundity while avoiding pedantry and pretentiousness, indulge the comedy of social life but suggest that neither of them is fooled by it, and, naturally, immediately eroticize the relationship.
“You are made for powerful physical love and you love the iterability of photocopiers, right? A sublimated fantasy is nothing other than a fantasy fulfilled. Anyone who claims the opposite is a liar, a priest and an exploiter of the people.” He hands her one of the two glasses he is holding. “You like gin and tonic?”
The stereo plays “Sexy Eyes” by Dr. Hook. Cordelia takes the glass.
She raises it for a toast and says: “We are lies of trust.” Simon lifts his glass and drinks it almost in a single gulp. He knows he has passed the first test.
Instinctively, he scans the room and spots Slimane, leaning with one hand on the banister of the staircase, on the half-landing, surveying the crowd in the hall, making a V-for-victory sign with his free hand, then using both hands to draw a sort of cross, the hand forming the horizontal bar slightly above the midpoint of the vertical hand. Simon tries to make out who he is addressing the sign to, but all he can see are students and professors drinking and dancing and flirting to Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America,” and he senses that something is wrong, though he can’t tell what. And the increasingly tight group forming around Derrida: it is him Slimane is looking at.
He does not see Kristeva or the old man with the bush hair and the wool tie, but they are there, all the same, and if he could see them, if they weren’t hidden in different but equally concealed positions, he would see that both had their eyes fixed on Slimane and he would know that both had intercepted the sign Slimane was making with his hands and he would guess that both had guessed that the sign was addressed to Derrida, hidden, too, behind his admirers.
Nor does he see the man with the bull’s neck who fucked Cordelia on the photocopier, but he is there too, staring at her with his bull’s eyes.
He searches for Bayard in the crowd but doesn’t find him, for the very good reason that Bayard is in a bedroom upstairs, beer in hand, unidentified chemical substance coursing through his veins, discussing pornography and feminism with his new friends.
He hears Cordelia say: “The Church, in the goodness of its heart, did at least ask the council of Mâcon in 585 if a woman had a soul…,” so to please her, he adds: “… and was very careful not to find a response.”
The tall Egyptian girl quotes a line of Wordsworth whose provenance Simon does not manage to pinpoint. The short Asian girl explains to an Italian man from Brooklyn that she is writing her thesis on the queer in Racine.
Someone says: “Everyone knows that psychoanalysts don’t even talk anymore, and they don’t do much interpreting either.”
Camille Paglia screams: “French go home! Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores.”
Morris Zapp laughs and yells across the hall: “You’re damn right, General Custer!”
Gayatri Spivak thinks: “You’re not Aristotle’s granddaughter, you know.”
In the bedroom, Judith asks Bayard: “So where do you work, actually?” Bayard, taken by surprise, replies dumbly, immediately hoping that Cixous does not pick up on it: “I do research … at Vincennes.” But Cixous, of course, raises an eyebrow, so he looks her in the eye and says: “In law.” Cixous raises her other eyebrow. Not only has she never seen Bayard at Vincennes, but the university has no law department. To create a diversion, Bayard puts a hand under her blouse and squeezes a breast through her bra. Cixous suppresses a look of surprise but decides not to react, then Judith puts a hand on her other breast.
An undergrad named Donna has joined Cordelia’s group, and the Carthaginian princess asks her: “How’s Greek life so far?” In fact, Donna and her sorority sisters are planning to stage a bacchanal. Cordelia is excited and amused by the idea. Simon thinks that Slimane must have been arranging to meet Derrida. Maybe the sign he made was not a V for victory, but the time of the meeting. Two o’clock, but where? Had it been a church, Slimane would have made a standard sign of the cross, rather than that bizarre gesture. He asks: “Is there a cemetery nearby?” Young Donna claps her hands: “Oh yeah! That’s a great idea! Let’s go to the cemetery!” Simon is about to say that that was not what he meant, but Cordelia and her friends seem so thrilled by the proposal that in the end he says nothing.
Donna says she’ll go and fetch the stuff. The stereo plays “Call Me” by Blondie.
It is already almost one o’clock.
He hears someone say: “The interpretative priest, the soothsayer, is one of the despot-god’s bureaucrats, you see? Here’s another aspect of the priest’s treachery, damn it: the interpretation goes on forever and never finds anything to interpret that is not itself already an interpretation!” It’s Guattari, clearly quite drunk, hitting on an innocent postgrad from Illinois.
He has to tell Bayard.
The stereo sends Debbie Harry’s voice ricocheting from the walls: “When you’re ready, we can share the wine.”
Donna returns with a toiletry bag and says they can go now.
Simon rushes upstairs to tell Bayard to meet them at the cemetery at two o’clock. He opens all the doors, finding all kinds of stoned students, some more active than others. He finds Foucault jerking off in front of a poster of Mick Jagger, finds Andy Warhol writing poems (in fact, it’s Jonathan Culler filling out pay stubs), finds a greenhouse with marijuana plants growing up to the ceiling, even finds some well-behaved students watching baseball on a sports channel while they smoke crack, then finally locates Bayard.
“Oh? Sorry!”
He quickly closes the door, but he has time to see Bayard wedged between the legs of a woman he is unable to identify while Judith fucks him with a strap-on, yelling: “I am a man and I fuck you! Now you feel my performative, don’t you?”
Impressed by this vision, he doesn’t have the presence of mind to leave a message and rushes downstairs to join Cordelia’s group.
He passes Kristeva on the stairs, but pays no attention to her.
He is well aware that he is not following the emergency protocol, but his attraction to Cordelia’s white skin is too strong. After all, he’ll be at the meeting place, he thinks, legitimizing a plan he knows full well is driven only by the logic of his desire.
Kristeva knocks on the door with the strange growling noises behind it. Searle opens it. She does not go in, but whispers something to him. Then she heads for the room she saw Bayard go into with his two friends.
The cemetery in Ithaca is on a wooded hillside, and the gravestones look as if they have been scattered randomly between the trees. The only sources
of light are the moon and the city. The group gathers around the tomb of a woman who died very young. Donna explains that she is going to recite the secrets of the Sibyl, but that they must prepare the “birth ceremony of the new man,” and that they need a volunteer. Cordelia volunteers Simon. He would like to ask for more details, but when she starts undressing him, he lets her do it. Around them, a dozen people have come to watch the spectacle, and this seems like a crowd to Simon. When he is completely naked, she lays him down in the grass, at the foot of the gravestone, and whispers in his ear: “Relax. We’re going to kill the former man.”
Everyone has been drinking, everyone is extremely disinhibited, so all this could happen in reality, thinks Simon.
Donna hands the toiletry bag to Cordelia, who takes out a cutthroat razor and solemnly opens it. As Simon hears Donna mention the radical feminist Valerie Solanas in her introduction, he does not feel entirely reassured. But Cordelia also takes out a can of shaving foam and sprays it over his crotch before carefully shaving off his pubic hair. A symbol of symbolic castration, Simon thinks, following the operation attentively, all the more so when he feels Cordelia’s fingers delicately moving his penis.
“In the beginning, no matter what they say, there was only a goddess. One goddess, and one only.”
All the same, he would have preferred it if Bayard were there.
But Bayard is smoking a cigarette in the dark, naked, stretched out on the carpet of a student bedroom, between the naked bodies of his two friends, one of whom has fallen asleep, her arm across his chest, her hand holding the other woman’s.
“In the beginning, no matter what they think, women were all and one. The only power was female, spontaneous, and plural.”
Bayard asks Judith why she is interested in him. Judith, nestled against his shoulder, meows and replies, in her Jewish Midwestern accent: “Because you didn’t seem to fit in here.”
“The goddess said: ‘I came, that is just and good.’”
There is a knock at the door and someone comes in. Bayard sits up and recognizes Kristeva, who says: “You should get dressed.”
“The very first goddess, the very first female powers. Humanity by, on, in her. The ground, the atmosphere, water, fire. Language.”
A church bell tolls twice.
“Thus the day came when the little prankster appeared. He didn’t look like much but was self-confident. He said: ‘I am God, I am the son of man, they need a father to pray to. They will know how to be faithful to me: I know how to communicate.’”
The cemetery is only about a hundred yards away. The sounds of the party echo over the tombs, giving the ritualistic ceremony a decidedly anachronistic soundtrack: the stereo plays ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight).”
“Thus man imposed the image, the rules, and the veneration of all human bodies endowed with a dick.”
Simon turns his face away to hide his embarrassment and his arousal, and it is then that he makes out, about thirty yards away, two figures meeting under a tree. He sees the slimmer figure pass the earphones of his Walkman to the stockier figure, who is carrying a sports bag in one hand. He realizes that Derrida is checking the merchandise, and that the merchandise is a cassette recording of the seventh function of language.
“The real is out of control. The real fabricates stories, legends, and creatures.”
He watches as Derrida—only a few yards away, beneath a tree, amid the gravestones of Ithaca’s cemetery—listens to the seventh function of language.
“On horseback on a tomb, we will feed our sons with their fathers’ entrails.”
Simon wants to intervene, but cannot move a single muscle in his body in order to stand up, nor even the muscle of his tongue (which he knows is the most powerful) in order to articulate a word, particularly as the stage following the symbolic castration is that of the symbolic rebirth, and that the dawning of the new man is here symbolized by fellatio. When Cordelia takes him in her mouth and he feels the heat of the Carthaginian princess’s mucus membranes spreading through every particle of him, he knows that as far as the mission is concerned the game is up.
“We form with our mouths the breath and the power of the Sorority. We are one and many, we are a female legion…”
The exchange will take place, and he will do nothing to prevent it.
But throwing his head back, he sees at the top of the hill, illuminated by the lights of the campus, an unreal vision (and that unreality itself terrifies him more than the vision’s possible reality): a man with two huge, ferocious dogs on a leash.
In spite of the darkness, he knows it is Searle. The dogs bark. The startled spectators look over at them. Donna interrupts her prayer. Cordelia stops sucking Simon’s cock.
Searle makes a noise with his mouth and unleashes the two dogs, which rush at Slimane and Derrida. Simon gets up and runs to help them, but suddenly he feels a powerful grip on his arm: it’s the bull-necked man, the one who fucked Cordelia on the photocopier, who pulls him back and then punches him in the face. Simon, sprawled on the ground, naked and helpless, sees the two dogs leap on the philosopher and the gigolo, who fall backward.
Growls and screams.
The bull-necked man is completely indifferent to the drama being played out behind him and clearly wants to rip Simon to pieces. Simon hears insults in English, and understands that the fellow expected some exclusivity in his carnal relations with Cordelia. Meanwhile, the dogs are about to tear Slimane and Derrida limb from limb.
The mingled cries of men and beasts have petrified the apprentice Bacchae and their friends. Derrida rolls between gravestones, propelled by the slope and the fury of the dog pursuing him. Slimane is younger and tougher, and has blocked the animal’s jaw with his forearm, but the pressure bearing down on his muscles and bones is so powerful that he will faint any second, and then nothing can stop the beast devouring him. Suddenly, though, he hears a squeal and sees Bayard appear out of nowhere to dig his fingers into the dog’s head, gouging out its eyes. The dog makes a horrible yelping noise and runs away, stumbling blindly into gravestones as it goes.
Then Bayard hurtles down the hill to help Derrida, who is still rolling.
He grabs the second dog’s head to break its neck, but the dog turns on him, knocking him off balance. He immobilizes the hind legs, but the beast’s gaping mouth is only four inches from his face, so Bayard plunges a hand into his jacket pocket and takes out the Rubik’s Cube, the six faces perfectly assembled, and stuffs it down the dog’s throat, all the way to the esophagus. The dog makes a vile gurgling noise, smashes its head against trees, rolls in the grass, goes into convulsions, and finally lies still, choked to death on the toy.
Bayard crawls over to the human form lying next to it. He hears a horrible liquid noise. Derrida is bleeding profusely. The dog literally went for his jugular.
While Bayard is busy killing dogs and Simon is engaged in a full and frank discussion with the bull-man, Searle has rushed over to Slimane, who is still lying on the ground. Now that he understands where the seventh function was hidden, he naturally wants to take the Walkman. He turns over Slimane, who groans with pain, puts his hand on the tape player, and presses eject.
But the cassette holder is empty.
Searle roars like a rabid dog.
From behind a tree, a third man appears. He has a wool tie and a haircut that matches his surroundings. He has perhaps been hiding there since the beginning.
In any case, he is holding a cassette.
And he has unspooled its length of tape.
With his other hand, he thumbs the wheel of a lighter.
Searle, horrified, cries out: “Roman, don’t do that!”
The old man in the wool tie brings the Zippo’s flame to the tape, which is instantly set alight. From a distance, it is just a little green glimmer in the great dark night.
Searle screams as though someone has just torn his heart out.
Bayard turns around. So does the bull-man. Sim
on can at last escape. He moves toward the bush-man like a sleepwalker (he is still naked) and asks, hollow-voiced: “Who are you?”
The old man readjusts his tie and says simply: “Roman Jakobson, linguist.”
Simon’s blood turns to ice.
Down the hill, Bayard is not sure he heard correctly. “What? What did he say? Simon!”
The last scraps of tape crackle before being transformed into ash.
Cordelia has hurried over to Derrida. She tears her dress to make a bandage for his neck. She is hoping she can stop the bleeding.
“Simon?”
Simon makes no reply, but silently answers Bayard’s silent question: Why didn’t he tell him that Jakobson was alive? You never asked.
The truth is that Simon never imagined that the man who was there at the birth of Structuralism, the man who gave Lévi-Strauss the idea for Structuralism when they met in New York in 1941, the Russian formalist from the Prague School, one of the most important pioneers of linguistics after Saussure, could still be alive. For Simon, he belonged to another age. The age of Lévi-Strauss, not Barthes. He laughs at the stupidity of this reasoning: Barthes is dead, but Lévi-Strauss is alive, so why not Jakobson?
Jakobson crosses the few yards between him and Derrida, taking care not to trip on a stone or a clod of earth.
The Seventh Function of Language Page 27