The Seventh Function of Language

by Laurent Binet

  “If the fish could put their heads above the water, they would perceive that their world is not the only world…”

  Simon is beginning to find Sollers’s strategy extremely audacious.

  Bayard whispers in his ear: “A bit too Hollywood, isn’t it?”

  The old man with the pocket handkerchief mutters: “He’s got coglioni, this francese. At the same time, if he’s going to use them, it’s now or never.”

  Bayard asks him to elaborate.

  The old man replies: “Clearly, he has not understood the subject any more than we have, vero? So he is trying to flamber à l’esbroufe—to bullshit his way through it, no? It’s brave.”

  Sollers rests an elbow on the lectern, which obliges him to lean down lopsidedly. Curiously, however, this unnatural pose makes him look relatively relaxed.

  “Je suis venu j’ai vu j’ai vomu.” I came, I saw, I vomited.

  Sollers’s speech accelerates, becomes more fluid, almost musical: “God is really close without mystery gently oiled gently hand of mysfère glove of hell…” Then he says something that Simon and even Bayard find surprising: “The belief in tickle-wickle on the organ enables the corpse to be maintained as the sole fundamental value.” After uttering these words, Sollers licks his lips lasciviously. Bayard can now observe clear signs of tension on Kristeva’s face.

  Bayard lets himself be rocked by the rhythm, like a river carrying little logs that occasionally knock against a fragile boat.

  “… the whole soul of Christ did it enjoy bliss in its passion it seems not for several reasons is it not impossible to suffer and to enjoy at the same time since pain and joy are opposites Aristotle notes it does not deep sadness prevent delectation however the opposite is true…”

  Sollers is salivating more and more but he goes on: “I change form name revelation nickname I am the same I mutate sometimes palace sometimes hut pharaoh dove or sheep transfiguration transubstantiation ascension…”

  Then he comes to his peroration—the audience can tell, even if they cannot follow it: “I will be what I will be that means take care of what I am as much as I am in I am don’t forget that I am what follows if I am tomorrow I will be what I am at the point where I would be…”

  Bayard exclaims to Simon: “Is that it, the seventh function of language?”

  Simon feels his paranoia rise again, thinking that a character like Sollers cannot really exist.

  Sollers concludes, abruptly: “I am the opposite of the Nazi-Soviet.”

  Universal stupefaction.

  Even the Great Protagoras looks gobsmacked. He hums and haws, a little embarrassed. Then he takes the stand, because it’s his turn.

  Simon and Bayard recognize Umberto Eco’s voice.

  “I don’t know where to start, after that. My honorable opponent has, how to say it, fired on all cylinders, si?”

  Eco turns to Sollers and politely bows, readjusting the nose of his mask.

  “Perhaps I might make a little etymological remark, to begin with? You will no doubt have noted, dear audience, honorable members of the jury, that the verb forcener no longer exists in modern French, its only surviving trace being the substantive forcené, which signifies a mad individual who behaves violently.

  “Now, this definition of forcené might lead us into error. Originally—if I may make a little orthographical remark—forcener was written with an s, not a c, because it came from the Latin sensus, ‘sense’ (‘animal quod sensu caret’): forsener, then, is literally to be out of one’s senses, in other words, to be mad, but to begin with there was no connotation of force.

  “That said, this connotation must have appeared gradually, with the orthographic renovation that suggested a false etymology and, I would say, that from the sixteenth century onward this spelling was attested to in Middle French.

  “Allora, the question that I would have discussed, if my honorable opponent had raised it, is this: Is ‘forcener doucement’ an oxymoron? Is this an association of two contradictory terms?

  “No, if one considers the true etymology of forcener.

  “Si, if one accepts the connotation of force in the false etymology.

  “Si, but … are gentle and strong necessarily opposed? A force can be exercised gently, for example when you are taken by the current of a river, or when you gently squeeze a loved one’s hand…”

  The singsong accent resonates through the large room, but everyone has grasped the violence of the attack: beneath his debonair appearance, Eco has calmly underlined the insufficiencies in Sollers’s speech by conjuring, alone, a discussion that his opponent was unable to even begin.

  “But none of that tells us what it’s about, no?

  “I will be more modest than my opponent, who attempted some very ambitious and, I think, pardon me, somewhat fanciful interpretations of this expression. For my part, I will simply try to explain it to you: he who ‘forcène doucement’ is the poet, ecco. It is the furor poeticus. I am not sure who uttered that phrase, but I would say it is a sixteenth-century French poet, a disciple of Jean Dorat, a member of the Pléiade, because one can clearly sense here the Neoplatonic influence.

  “For Plato, you know, poetry is not an art, not a technique, but a divine inspiration. The poet is inhabited by the god, in a trancelike state: that is what Socrates explains to Ion in his famous dialogue. So the poet is mad, but it is a gentle madness, a creative madness, not a destructive madness.

  “I do not know the author of this citation, but I think it is perhaps Ronsard or Du Bellay, both of them disciples of a school where, giustamente, ‘on forcène doucement.’

  “Allora, we can discuss the question of divine inspiration, if you like? I don’t know, because I didn’t really understand what my honorable opponent wanted to discuss.”

  Silence in the room. Sollers realizes that it is his turn to speak. He hesitates.

  Simon mechanically analyzes Eco’s strategy, which can be summarized very simply: do the opposite of Sollers. This implies adopting an ultramodest ethos and a very sober and minimalist level of development. The refusal of all fanciful interpretations and a very literal explanation. By falling back on his proverbial erudition, Eco simply explained without making an argument, as if to underline the impossibility of discussion in the face of his opponent’s frenzied logorrhea. He uses rigor and humility to highlight his megalomaniacal adversary’s mental disorder.

  Sollers starts to speak again, less confidently: “I talk about philosophy because the action of literature now is to show that the philosophical discourse can be integrated into the position of the literary subject, if only so that its experience be taken all the way to the transcendental horizon.”

  But Eco does not reply.

  Sollers, panic-stricken, blurts out: “Aragon wrote a thundering article about me! About my genius! And Elsa Triolet! I have their autographs!”

  Embarrassed silence.

  One of the ten sophists makes a gesture and two guards, stationed at the room’s entrance, seize the dazed Sollers, who rolls his eyes and yells: “Tickle-wickle! Ho ho ho! No no no!”

  Bayard asks why there has not been a vote. The old man replies that in certain cases, unanimity is obvious.

  The two guards lay the loser on the marble floor in front of the platform and one of the sophists advances, a large pair of pruning shears in his hands.

  The guards strip Sollers from the waist down as he screams beneath Tintoretto’s Paradise. Some of the other sophists leave their seats to help control him. In the confusion, his mask comes off.

  Only the first few rows of the audience see what happens at the foot of the platform but everyone, all the way to the back, knows.

  The sophist with the doctor’s beak wedges Sollers’s balls between the two blades of the shears, firmly grips the handles, and presses them together. Snip.

  Kristeva shudders.

  Sollers makes an unidentifiable noise, a sort of throat-clack followed by a long caterwaul that ricochets off the paintings
and reverberates throughout the room.

  The sophist with the doctor’s beak picks up the two balls and drops them in a second urn, which Simon and Bayard now realize was put there for that very purpose.

  Pale-faced, Simon asks his neighbor: “Isn’t the penalty normally a finger?”

  The man replies that it is when one challenges a duelist of a rank just above yours, but Sollers wanted to cut corners. He had never participated in a single duel and he directly challenged the Great Protagoras. “In that case, the price is higher.”

  While the attendants attempt to give first aid to Sollers, who squirms and makes horrible moaning noises, Kristeva takes the urn containing the testicles and leaves the room.

  Bayard and Simon follow her.

  She quickly crosses Piazza San Marco, cradling the urn in her arms. The night is still young and the square is packed with tourists, stilt-walkers, fire-eaters, actors in eighteenth-century costumes pretending to duel with swords. Simon and Bayard push their way through the crowds so as not to lose her. She rushes down narrow alleyways, crosses bridges, does not turn around once. A man dressed as Harlequin grabs her by the waist to kiss her, but she emits a piercing cry, escapes his clutches like a small wild animal, and runs away carrying her urn. Crosses the Rialto. Bayard and Simon are not certain that she knows where she is going. From far off, in the sky, they hear fireworks exploding. Kristeva trips on a step and almost drops the urn. Her breath hangs in the air. It’s cold, and she has left her coat at the Doge’s Palace.

  All the same, she does make it somewhere: to the basilica Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, home, in her husband’s own words, to “the glorious heart of the Serenissima,” with Titian’s tomb and his red Assumption. At this time of night, the basilica is closed. But she doesn’t want to go inside.

  It is chance that has brought her here.

  She advances over the little bridge that straddles the Rio dei Frari and stops in the middle. She puts the urn on the stone ledge. Simon and Bayard are just behind her, but they dare not set foot on the bridge, nor climb the handful of steps to join her.

  Kristeva listens to the murmur of the city, and her dark eyes stare down at the little waves formed by the nocturnal breeze. A fine rain wets her short hair.

  From within her blouse, she takes a sheet of paper folded in four.

  Bayard feels an urge to throw himself at her and tear the document from her hands, but Simon holds him back. She turns toward them and narrows her eyes, as though she has only just noticed their presence, as though she has only just learned of their existence, and glares at them with hatred, a cold look that petrifies Bayard, while she unfolds the page.

  It is too dark to see what is written on it, but Simon thinks he can make out a few cramped letters. And there is definitely writing on both sides.

  Slowly, calmly, Kristeva starts to rip it up.

  As she does this, the increasingly small scraps fly off over the canal.

  In the end, nothing remains but the black wind and the delicate sound of rain.

  93

  “But in your opinion, did she know or didn’t she?”

  Bayard tries to understand.

  Simon is perplexed.

  It seems possible that Sollers failed to realize that the seventh function didn’t work. But Kristeva?

  “Difficult to say. I’d have had to read the document.”

  Why would she have betrayed her husband? And, from another perspective, why not use the function herself to compete?

  Bayard says to Simon: “Maybe she was like us. Maybe she wanted to see if it worked before she tried it?”

  Simon watches the crowd of tourists leaving Venice as if in slow motion. Bayard and he are waiting for the vaporetto with their little suitcases and, as Carnival is coming to an end, the line is long, with hordes of tourists heading to the train station and the airport. A vaporetto arrives, but it’s not the right one; they must wait a little longer.

  Simon is pensive, and asks Bayard: “What is reality, for you?”

  As Bayard obviously has no idea what he’s talking about, Simon tries to be more specific: “How do you know that you’re not in a novel? How do you know you are not living inside a work of fiction? How do you know that you’re real?”

  Bayard looks at Simon with genuine curiosity and replies indulgently: “Are you stupid or what? Reality is what we live, that’s all.”

  Their vaporetto arrives, and as it draws alongside, Bayard pats Simon’s shoulder: “Don’t ask yourself so many questions, son.”

  The vessel is boarded in a disorderly scramble, the vaporetto guys herding the stupid tourists who climb on board so clumsily, with their bags and their children.

  When it is Simon’s turn to get in the boat, the head-count man brings down a metal barrier just behind his back. Stuck on the dock, Bayard tries to protest, but the Italian replies indifferently: “Tutto esaurito.”

  Bayard tells Simon to wait for him at the next stop. Simon waves goodbye, as a joke.

  The vaporetto moves away. Bayard lights a cigarette. Behind him, he hears raised voices. He turns around and sees two Japanese men yelling at each other. Intrigued, he goes over to them. One of the Japanese men says to him, in French: “Your friend has just been abducted.”

  It takes Bayard a second or two to process this information.

  A second or two, no more, then he switches into cop mode and asks the only question a cop must ask: “Why?”

  The second Japanese man says: “Because he won, the day before yesterday.”

  The Italian he beat is a very powerful Neapolitan politician, and he did not take defeat well. Bayard knows about the assault after the party at the Ca’ Rezzonico. The Japanese men explain: the Neapolitan sent some henchmen to beat Simon up so he couldn’t compete, because he was afraid of him. Now that he has lost the duel, he wants vengeance.

  Bayard watches the vanishing vaporetto. He quickly analyzes the situation, then looks around: he sees the bronze statue of a sort of general with a thick mustache, he sees the façade of the Hotel Danieli, he sees boats moored at the dock. He sees a gondolier on his gondola, waiting for the tourists.

  He jumps in the gondola, along with the Japanese men. The gondolier does not seem overly surprised and welcomes them by singing to himself in Italian, but Bayard tells him:

  “Follow that vaporetto!”

  The gondolier pretends not to understand, so Bayard takes out a wad of lire and the gondolier starts to scull.

  The vaporetto is a good three hundred yards ahead, and in 1981 there are no mobile phones.

  The gondolier is surprised. It’s strange, he says: that vaporetto is not going the right way. It’s headed toward the island of Murano.

  The vaporetto has been hijacked.

  On board, Simon has not realized what is happening, since almost all the passengers are tourists with no idea where they should be going, and apart from two or three Italians who protest to the driver, no one notices that they are headed the wrong way. Besides, Italians complaining loudly is nothing new; the passengers simply think it is part of the local color. The vaporetto docks at Murano.

  In the distance, Bayard’s gondola is attempting to catch up. Bayard and the Japanese men exhort the gondolier to go faster, and they yell Simon’s name to warn him, but they are too far away and Simon has no reason to pay them any attention.

  But he does suddenly feel the point of a knife in his back and hears a voice behind him say: “Prego.” He understands that he must get off the boat. He obeys. The tourists, in a rush to catch their plane, do not see the knife, and the vaporetto is on its way again.

  Simon stands on the dock. He feels almost certain that the men behind him are the same three who attacked him in masks the other night.

  They enter one of the glassblowers’ workshops that open directly onto the docks. Inside, a craftsman is kneading a piece of molten glass just removed from the oven, and Simon watches, fascinated, as the bubble of glass is blown, stretched, modeled, taking
shape with only a few touches of a plunger as a little rearing horse.

  Next to the oven stands a balding, paunchy man in a mismatched suit. Simon recognizes him; his opponent from La Fenice.

  “Benvenuto!”

  Simon faces the Neapolitan, surrounded by the three thugs. The glassblower continues shaping his little horses unperturbed.

  “Bravo! Bravo! I wanted to congratulate you personally before you leave. Palladio—that was well played. Easy, but well played. And Portia. It didn’t convince me, but it convinced the jury, vero? Ah, Shakespeare … I should have mentioned Visconti … Have you seen Senso? The story of a foreigner in Venice. It doesn’t end well.”

  The Neapolitan approaches the glassblower, who is busy shaping the hoofs of a second little horse. He takes out a cigar, which he lights with the incandescent glass, then turns to Simon with an evil grin.

  “Ma, I can’t let you leave without giving you something to remember me by. How do you say it? To each his due, yes?” One of the henchmen immobilizes Simon with an arm around his neck. Simon tries to free himself, but the second punches him in the chest, winding him, and the third grabs his right arm.

  The three men push him forward and pull his arm over the glassblower’s workbench. The little glass horses fall and smash on the floor. The glassblower takes a step back but does not seem surprised. Their eyes meet, and Simon sees in this man’s expression that he knows exactly what is expected of him and he is in no position to refuse. Simon starts to panic. He struggles and yells, but his yelling is pure reflex, because he is certain that he cannot expect any help. He doesn’t know that reinforcements are on their way, that Bayard and the Japanese are arriving in a gondola and that they have promised the gondolier they will triple his fee if he gets them there in record time.

  The glassblower asks: “Che dito?”

  Bayard and the Japanese use their suitcases as oars to make the boat move faster and the gondolier puts his all into it because, without knowing what exactly is at stake, he has gathered that it is serious.

  The Neapolitan asks Simon: “Which finger? Do you have a preference?”

  Simon kicks like a horse, but the three men hold his arm firmly on the workbench. He no longer wonders if he is a character in a novel; his reactions are pure survival instinct, and he tries desperately to free himself, but in vain.