The Seventh Function of Language

by Laurent Binet

  “Glory to the logos, my friends! Long live dialectics! Let the party begin! May the verb be with you!”

  42

  Tzvetan Todorov is a skinny guy in glasses with a big tuft of curly hair on the top of his head. He is also a linguistics researcher who has lived in France for twenty years, a disciple of Barthes who worked on literary genres (fantasy, in particular), a specialist in rhetoric and semiology.

  Bayard has come to interrogate him, at Simon’s suggestion, because he was born in Bulgaria.

  Having grown up in a totalitarian country evidently aided the development of a very strong humanist conscience, which comes out even in his linguistic theories. For example, he believes that rhetoric can truly blossom only in a democracy, because it requires a venue for debate that, by definition, neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship can offer. As proof, he cites the fact that in imperial Rome, and later, in feudal Europe, the science of discourse abandoned its objective of persuasion, focusing not on the receiver’s interpretation but on the spoken word itself. Speeches were no longer expected to be effective, simply beautiful. Political issues were replaced by purely aesthetic issues. In other words, rhetoric became poetic. (This is what is known as the seconde rhétorique.)

  He explains to Bayard, in immaculate French but with a still very noticeable accent, that the Bulgarian secret services (the KDC), as far as he knows, are active and dangerous. They are supported by the KGB and are therefore in a position to mount sophisticated operations. Assassinating the pope? Maybe not, but they are certainly capable of eliminating individuals whose existence is inconvenient. That said, he does not see why they would be involved in Barthes’s accident. What possible interest could they have in a French literary critic? Barthes was not political and had never had any contact with Bulgaria. Sure, he went to China, but you couldn’t say he returned a Maoist, any more than he did an anti-Maoist. He was neither a Gide nor an Aragon. When he came back from China, Barthes’s anger, Todorov remembers, was focused mainly on the quality of Air France’s in-flight meals: he even thought of writing an article on the subject.

  Bayard knows that Todorov has pinpointed the central difficulty of his investigation: discovering a motive. But he also knows that in the absence of any other information he must make do with the objective evidence at his disposal—a pistol, an umbrella—and, even though in theory he sees no geopolitical implications in Barthes’s murder, he continues to interrogate the Bulgarian critic about the secret services of his country of origin.

  Who is in charge of them? A Colonel Emil Kristoff. His reputation? Not especially liberal, but not particularly well versed in semiology either. Bayard has the unhappy impression that he is going farther down a dead end. After all, if the two killers had been from Marseille or Yugoslavia or Morocco, what would he have deduced from that? Without knowing it, Bayard is thinking like a structuralist: he wonders if the Bulgarian connection is relevant. He mentally reviews the other clues that he has not yet investigated. Just to be sure, he asks:

  “Does the name Sophia mean anything to you?”

  “Well, yes, it’s the city where I was born.”

  Sofia.

  So the Bulgarian lead really is a lead, after all.

  At this moment, a beautiful young Russian woman in a dressing gown makes her appearance and crosses the room, discreetly greeting the visitor. Bayard thinks he can detect an English accent. So maybe this bespectacled egghead doesn’t lead such a boring life. He notes automatically the silent, erotic complicity between the Anglophone woman and the Bulgarian critic, the sign of a relationship that he assesses—not that he cares, it’s just a professional reflex—as being either nascent or adulterous or both.

  While he’s at it, he asks Todorov if “echo,” the last word pronounced by Hamed, means anything to him. And the Bulgarian replies: “Yes, have you heard from him recently?”

  Bayard does not understand.

  “Umberto. How is he?”

  43

  Louis Althusser holds the precious sheet of paper in his hand. The discipline of the Party, which formed him, his obedient temperament, his years as a docile prisoner of war, all command him not to read the mysterious document. At the same time, his rather un-Communist individualism, his fondness for enigmas, his historical propensity to cheat, all encourage him to unfold the page. If he did, not knowing but suspecting what it contains, his act would join the long list of dishonesties that started with a fraudulent 17/20 on a philosophy dissertation in his classe préparatoire for the École Normale Supérieure (a sufficiently important episode in his personal mythology that he thinks about it all the time). But he is afraid. He knows what they’re capable of. He decides, wisely (spinelessly, he feels), not to read the document.

  But, then, where should he hide it? He looks at the great mess piled up on his desk and thinks of Poe: he slips the page into an open envelope that had contained some flyer (for a local pizzeria, say, or maybe a bank; I don’t remember what kinds of flyers we got in our mailboxes back then); what matters is that he places this envelope on his desk, clearly visible amid a clutter of manuscripts, works-in-progress, and rough drafts, almost all devoted to Marx, Marxism, and, in particular—in order to draw out the “practical” consequences of his recent “antitheoreticist autocriticism”—to the unpredictable material relationship between “popular movements” and the ideologies to which they have given themselves or in which they have invested. The letter will be safe here. There are also a few books—Machiavelli, Spinoza, Raymond Aron, André Glucksmann—that look as if they have been read, which is not the case (he thinks about this often, as part of his carefully constructed neurosis that he is an impostor) for most of the thousands of books that fill his shelves: Plato (well, he read that), Kant (never read), Hegel (leafed through), Heidegger (skimmed), Marx (read volume 1 of Capital, but not volume 2), etc.

  He hears the key in the door. It’s Hélène, coming home.

  44

  “What’s it about?”

  The bouncer looks like every other bouncer in the world except that he is wearing a thick wool scarf and he is white, ageless, gray-skinned, with a cigarette stub in his mouth, and his gaze is not expressionless, staring behind you as if you weren’t there, but malignant and staring right into you, as if trying to read your soul. Bayard knows he cannot show his card, because he must remain incognito in order to see what happens behind this door, so he gets ready to invent some pathetic lie, but Simon, struck by sudden inspiration, beats him to it and says: “Elle sait.”

  The wood creaks, the door opens. The bouncer moves aside and, with an ambiguous gesture, invites them in. They enter a vaulted cellar that smells of stone, sweat, and cigarette smoke. The room is full, as if for a concert, but the people have not come to see Boris Vian and the walls have forgotten the jazz chords that once ricocheted from them. Instead, amid the vague hubbub of preshow conversations, a voice like a circus ringmaster’s declaims:

  “Welcome to the Logos Club, my friends. Come demonstrate, come deliberate, come praise and criticize the beauty of the Word! O Word that sweeps away hearts and commands the universe! Come attend the spectacle of litigants jousting for oratory supremacy and for your utmost pleasure!”

  Bayard gives Simon a puzzled look. Simon whispers into his ear that Barthes’s last words were not the beginning of a phrase, but two initials. Not “elle sait” (she knows), but “LC” for “Logos Club.” Bayard looks impressed. Simon shrugs modestly. The voice continues to warm up the room:

  “My zeugma is beautiful, and so is my asyndeton. But there is a price to pay. Tonight you will know the price of language once again. Because this is our motto, and this should be the law of the world: None may speak with impunity! At the Logos Club, fine words are not enough. Are they, my darlings?”

  Bayard goes up to an old white-haired man who has two phalanges missing on his left hand. In a tone he hopes sounds neither professional nor like a tourist, Bayard asks: “What’s going on here?” The old man stares at hi
m without hostility: “First time? Then I would advise you just to watch. Don’t rush to join in. You have plenty of time to learn. Listen, learn, progress.”

  “Join in?”

  “Well, you could always play a friendly, of course—that won’t cost you anything—but if you’ve never seen a session before, you’d be better off staying a spectator. The impression your first combat leaves will be the basis of your reputation, and reputation is important: it’s your ethos.”

  He takes a drag from a cigarette held between his mutilated fingers while the invisible ringmaster, hidden in some dark corner of the stone vaults, continues at the top of his voice: “Glory to the Great Protagoras! Glory to Cicero! Glory to the Eagle of Meaux!” Bayard asks Simon who these people are. Simon tells him that the Eagle of Meaux is Bossuet. Bayard again feels an overriding desire to slap him.

  “Eat stones like Demosthenes! Long live Pericles! Long live Churchill! Long live de Gaulle! Long live Jesus! Long live Danton and Robespierre! Why did they kill Jaurès?” At least Bayard knows those people. Well, apart from the first two.

  Simon asks the old man about the rules of the game. The old man explains to them: all the matches are duels; they draw a subject; it is always a closed question to which the answer is either yes or no, or a “for or against” type of question, so that the two adversaries can defend their opposing positions.

  “Tertullian! Augustine! Maximilian! Let’s go!” yells the voice.

  The first part of the evening consists of friendly matches. The real matches come at the end. There is always one, sometimes two. Three is rare, but it does happen. Theoretically, there’s no limit to the number of official matches but, for reasons that the old man thinks obviously don’t need explaining, there is not exactly a long line of volunteers.

  “Disputatio in utramque partem! Let the debate begin! And here are two smooth talkers, who will do battle over the lively question: Is Giscard a fascist?”

  Shouting and whistling in the crowd. “May the gods of antithesis be with you!”

  A man and a woman take their places on the stage, each behind a lectern, facing the audience, and start scribbling notes. The old man explains to Bayard and Herzog: “They have five minutes to prepare, then they make a presentation where they set out their point of view and the broad outlines of their argument. After that, the dispute begins. The duration of the contest varies and, like a boxing match, the judges can call a halt whenever they like. The person who speaks first has an advantage because he chooses the position he will defend. The other one is obliged to adapt and to defend the opposite position. For friendly matches featuring two opponents of the same rank, they draw lots to see who will begin. But in official matches between opponents of differing ranks, it is the lower-ranked player who goes first. You can tell from the kind of subject they get; this is a level-one meeting. Both of them are speakers. That is the lowest tier in the hierarchy of the Logos Club. Private soldiers, basically. Above that, there are the rhetoricians, and then the orators, the dialecticians, the peripateticians, the tribunes, and, at the very top, the sophists. But here, people rarely get past level three. I’ve heard there are very few sophists, only about ten, and they all have code names. Once you get to level five, it becomes very sealed off. I’ve even heard it said that the sophists don’t exist, that level seven has been invented to give people in the club a sort of unreachable goal, so they’ll fantasize about the idea of an unattainable perfection. Personally, I’m sure they exist. In fact, I reckon de Gaulle was one of them. He might even have been the Great Protagoras himself. That’s what president of the Logos Club is called, so they say. I’m a rhetorician. I made it to orator one year, but I couldn’t hold on to it.” He lifts up his mutilated hand. “And it cost me dear.”

  The duel commences, everyone falls silent, and Simon is unable to ask the old man what he means by a “real match.” He observes the audience: mostly male, but all ages and types are represented. If the club is elitist, its criteria are apparently not financial.

  The first duelist’s melodious voice rings out, explaining that in France, the prime minister is a puppet; that Article 49-3 castrated Parliament, which has no power; that de Gaulle was a benevolent monarch in comparison with Giscard, who is concentrating all the power in his own hands, including the press; that Brezhnev, Kim Il-Sung, Honecker, and Ceausescu were at least accountable to their parties; that the president of the United States possesses far less power than our own leader, and that while the president of Mexico cannot stand for reelection, the French president can.

  He is up against a fairly young speaker. She responds that all one need do to verify that we are not in a dictatorship is read the newspapers (like Le Monde, earlier this week, which ran a headline about the government reading: “Failure across the board”; and there have been more severe criticisms than that…), and she offers as proof the attacks by Marchais, Chirac, Mitterrand, etc. For a dictatorship, there is a healthy amount of freedom of expression. And, talking of de Gaulle, let’s not forget what was said about him: de Gaulle is fascist. The Fifth Republic is fascist. The Constitution is fascist. The Permanent Coup d’Etat, etc. Her peroration goes on: “To say that Giscard is a fascist is an insult to history; it is to spit on the victims of Mussolini and Hitler. Go and ask the Spanish what they think. Go and ask Jorge Semprun if Giscard is Franco! Shame on rhetoric when it betrays the past!” Prolonged applause. After a brief deliberation, the judges declare the young woman the victor. Looking thrilled, she shakes her opponent’s hand, then gives the audience a little curtsy.

  There is a series of debates. The candidates are happy or unhappy, the audience applauds or boos, there is whistling, there is yelling … and then we come to the climax of the night: the “digital duel.”

  Subject: The written word versus the spoken word.

  The old man rubs his hands: “Ah! A metasubject! Using language to discuss language, there’s nothing better. I adore that. Look, their levels are shown on the board: it’s a young rhetorician challenging an orator so he can take his place. So it’s the rhetorician who goes first. I wonder which point of view he’ll choose. There is often one argument that’s harder to make but if you want to impress the jury and the audience it can be a good idea to choose the difficult one. With the more obvious positions, it can be harder to shine, because what you say is likely to be more straightforward, less spectacular…”

  The old man stops talking. The match is about to start. There is a fevered silence as everyone in the room listens intently. The aspirant orator begins his speech confidently:

  “Religions of the Book forged our societies and we made their texts sacred: the Tablets of Stone, the Ten Commandments, the Torah scroll, the Bible, the Koran, and so on. To be valid, it must be engraved. I say: fetishism. I say: superstition. I say: dogmatism.

  “It is not I who affirms the superiority of the spoken word, but he who made us what we are, o thinkers, o rhetoricians, the father of dialectics, our common ancestor, the man who without ever writing a single book laid the foundations of all Western thought.

  “Remember! We are in Egypt, in Thebes, and the king asks: What is the point of writing? And the god responds: It is the ultimate cure for ignorance. And the king says: On the contrary! In fact, this art will breed forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it because they will stop using their memories. The act of remembering is not memory, and the book is merely an aide-mémoire. It does not offer knowledge, it does not offer understanding, it does not offer mastery.

  “Why would students need professors if they could learn everything they need from books? Why do they need what is in those books to be explained? Why are there schools and not just libraries? Because the written word alone is never enough. All thought is alive on the condition that it is exchanged; if it is frozen in place, it is dead. Socrates compares writing to painting: the beings created by painting stand in front of us as if they were alive; but when we question them, they remain petrified in a formal pose and don’
t speak a word. And the same goes for writing. One might believe that the written word can speak; but if we question it, because we wish to understand it, it always repeats the same thing, down to the last syllable.

  “Language produces a message, which has meaning only to the extent that it has a recipient. I am speaking to you now; you are the raison d’être of my speech. Only madmen speak in the desert. And the madman also talks to himself. But in a text, to whom are the words addressed? To everyone! And thus to no one. When each discourse has been written down for good and all, it passes indifferently to those who understand it and those who have no interest in it. A text without a precise recipient is a guarantee of imprecision, of vague and impersonal words. How could any message be suited to everyone? Even a letter is inferior to any kind of conversation: it is written in a certain context, and received in another. Besides, both the author’s and the recipient’s situation will have changed later. It is already obsolete; it was addressed to someone who no longer exists, and its author no longer exists either, vanished in the depths of time as soon as the envelope was sealed.

  “So that’s how it is: writing is dead. The place for texts is in textbooks. Truth lives only in the metamorphoses of discourse, and only the spoken word is sensitive enough to capture thought’s eternal developing flow in real time. The spoken word is life: I prove it, we prove it, gathered here today to speak and listen, to exchange, to discuss, to debate, to create living thought together, to be as one in the word and the idea, animated by the forces of dialectics, alive with that sonorous vibration we call speech, of which the written word is only the pale symbol, when all’s said and done: what the score is to music, nothing more. And I will end with one final quotation from Socrates, as I am speaking under his high patronage: ‘The appearance of knowledge, rather than true knowledge,’ that is what writing produces. Thank you for your attention.”