The Seventh Function of Language

by Laurent Binet

  “Whoever had the knowledge and the mastery of such a function would be virtually the master of the world. His power would be limitless. He could win every election, whip up crowds, provoke revolutions, seduce any woman, sell any kind of product imaginable, build empires, swindle the entire world, obtain anything he wanted in any circumstances.”

  10:07.

  Bayard and Simon are beginning to understand.

  Bianca says: “He could dethrone the Great Protagoras and take control of the Logos Club.”

  Eco replies, with an easygoing smile: “Eh, penso di si.”

  Simon says: “But since Jakobson didn’t talk about that function of language…”

  Eco: “Maybe he did, in fin dei conti? Maybe there is an unpublished version of Essays in General Linguistics in which this function is detailed?”

  10:08.

  Bayard thinks out loud: “And Barthes found himself in possession of this document?”

  Simon: “And someone killed him to steal it?”

  Bayard: “Not only for that. To prevent him from using it.”

  Eco: “If the seventh function exists and it really is a kind of performative function, it would lose a large part of its power were it known by everyone. Knowledge of a manipulative mechanism doesn’t necessarily protect us from it—look at advertising, public relations: most people know how they work, what methods they use—but, all the same, it does weaken it…”

  Bayard: “And whoever stole it wants it for his own exclusive use.”

  Bianca: “Well, one thing’s for sure: Antonioni didn’t steal it.”

  Simon realizes that he has been staring at the black bag forgotten under the seat for the past five minutes. It looks enormous. He has the impression that it has tripled in volume. It must weigh ninety pounds now. Either that or he’s still really high.

  Eco: “If someone wanted to appropriate the seventh function for himself alone, he would have to ensure that no copies existed.”

  Bayard: “There was a copy at Barthes’s apartment…”

  Simon: “And Hamed was a walking copy; he carried it around inside him.” He has the impression that the gold-colored buckle on the bag is an eye, staring at him as if he were Cain in the tomb.

  Eco: “But it’s also probable that the thief himself would make a copy and hide it somewhere.”

  Bianca: “If this document is really so valuable, he can’t take the risk of losing it…”

  Simon: “And he has to take the risk of making a copy and entrusting it to someone…” He thinks he sees a curl of smoke float out of the bag.

  Eco: “My friends, I’m going to have to leave you! My train leaves in five minutes.”

  Bayard looks at the clock. It is 10:12 a.m. “I thought your train was at eleven?”

  “Yes, but in the end I decided to take the one before. This way, I’ll be in Milano earlier!”

  Bayard asks: “Where can we find this Austin?”

  Eco: “He’s dead. Ma, he had a student who has continued to work on all those questions of the performative, the illocutionary, the perlocutionary, and so on … He’s an American philosopher, his name is John Searle.”

  Bayard: “And where can we find this John Searle?”

  Eco: “Ma … in America!”

  10:14. The great semiologist goes off to catch his train.

  Bayard looks at the departures board.

  10:17. Umberto Eco’s train leaves Bologna Central. Bayard lights a cigarette.

  10:18. Bayard tells Simon that they are going to catch the eleven o’clock train to Milan, from where they must fly to Paris. Simon and Bianca say goodbye. Bayard goes to buy the tickets.

  10:19. Simon and Bianca smooch in the middle of the crowded waiting room. The kiss goes on for a while and, like boys often do, Simon keeps his eyes open while he kisses Bianca. A woman’s voice announces the arrival of the Ancona-Basel train.

  10:21. While he is kissing Bianca, Simon glimpses a young blonde. She is maybe thirty feet away. She turns around and smiles at him. He jumps.

  It’s Anastasia.

  Simon thinks the grass must really have been powerful stuff or maybe he’s just tired, but no: that figure, that smile, that hair … it really is Anastasia. The nurse from the hospital in Paris, here, in Bologna. Before Simon can emerge from his stupor and call her name, she walks out of the station. He says to Bianca, “Wait here for me!” and he runs after the nurse, just to be sure.

  Thankfully, Bianca does not obey him but follows him instead. This is what will save her life.

  10:23. Anastasia has already crossed the traffic circle outside the station but she stops and turns around again, as if she is waiting for Simon.

  10:24. At the station exit, Simon looks around for her and spots her at the edge of the old town’s ring road, so he walks quickly across the flower beds in the middle of the traffic circle. Bianca follows him, about ten feet behind.

  10:25. The train station explodes.

  10:25 a.m.

  Simon is thrown to the ground. His head hits the grass. The rumble of an earthquake spreads above him in a series of waves. Lying in the grass, breathless, covered in dust, stung by a dense rain of debris, deafened by the noise of the explosion, disoriented, Simon experiences the collapse of the building behind him as in a dream where you are falling endlessly or when you are drunk and the earth sways beneath your feet. It seems that the flower bed is a flying saucer whirling all over the place. When the background finally starts to slow down, he tries to come back down to earth. He looks around for Anastasia, but his field of vision is obstructed by an advertising billboard (for Fanta) and he can’t move his head. But his hearing gradually returns and he hears voices screaming in Italian and, in the distance, the first sirens.

  He feels someone moving his body. It is Anastasia, turning him onto his back and examining him. Simon sees her beautiful Slavic face against the dazzlingly blue Bologna sky. She asks him if he’s injured but he is incapable of responding because he has no idea and because the words remain trapped in his throat. Anastasia takes his head in her hands and tells him (her accent returning): “Look at me. There’s nothing wrrrong with you. Everrrything’s fine.” Simon manages to sit up.

  The entire left-hand side of the station has been pulverized. All that remains of the waiting room is a heap of stones and beams. A long, formless groan rises from the bowels of the devastated building, its twisted skeleton visible where the roof has been blown away.

  Simon glimpses Bianca’s body close to the flower bed. He crawls over to her and lifts up her head. She is groggy but alive. She coughs. She has a gash on her forehead and blood is streaming down her face. She whispers: “Cosa è successo?” In a reassuring reflex, her hand fumbles in the little handbag that still hangs from her shoulder and lies on her bloodstained dress. She takes out a cigarette and asks Simon: “Accendimela, per favore.”

  And Bayard? Simon searches for him among the wounded, the terrified survivors, the policemen arriving in Fiats, and the medics jumping out of the first ambulances like parachutists. But in this confused ballet of hysterical marionettes, he can no longer recognize anyone.

  And then, suddenly, he sees him, Bayard, the French cop, emerging from the rubble, covered in dust, looking massive and powerful and giving off a slow-burning, righteous anger, carrying an unconscious young man on his back. Amid the scene of warlike chaos, this ghostly apparition leaves a deep mark on Simon, who thinks of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables.

  Bianca whispers: “Sono sicura che si tratta di Gladio…”

  Simon spots a shape like a dead animal on the ground, and realizes it is a human leg.

  “Between the desiring machines and the body without organs, an apparent conflict arises.”

  Simon shakes his head. He contemplates the first bodies being evacuated on stretchers, alive and dead alike, all lying still with their arms hanging down and dragging along the ground.

  “Each machine connection, each machine production, each machine noise has be
come unbearable to the body without organs.”

  He turns to Anastasia and finally thinks to ask her the question that he imagines will answer many others: “Who do you work for?”

  Anastasia spends a few seconds thinking about this, then replies, in a professional tone he has never heard her use before: “Not for the Bulgarians.”

  And, despite the fact that she is a nurse, she slips away, without offering to help the paramedics or look after the wounded. She runs toward the ring road, crosses, and disappears under the arcades.

  At that very moment, Bayard reaches Simon, as if the whole thing had been meticulously choreographed, like a play, thinks Simon, whose paranoia has not exactly been eased by the combination of the bomb and the joints.

  Holding up the two tickets to Milan, Bayard says: “We’ll rent a car. I don’t think there’ll be any trains today.”

  Simon borrows Bianca’s cigarette and lifts it to his own lips. Around him, everything is chaos. He closes his eyes and inhales the smoke. The presence of Bianca, stretched out on the pavement, reminds him of the dissecting table, the flayed men, Antonioni’s finger, and Deleuze. A smell of burning floats in the air.

  “Beneath its organs, it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by organizing it.”

  PART III

  ITHACA

  48

  Althusser is in a panic. He’s searched through all his papers, but he cannot find the precious document that was entrusted to him and which he hid in a junk-mail envelope, left in plain sight on his desk. Although he never read the document, he’s a nervous wreck because he knows it is of the utmost importance that he return it to the people who gave it to him for safekeeping, and that this is his responsibility. He rummages around in his wastepaper basket, empties his drawers, takes his books one by one from the shelves and hurls them onto the floor in a rage. He feels filled with a dark anger at himself, mixed with an embryonic suspicion, when he decides to shout: “Hélène! Hélène!” She runs up to him, worried. Does she, by any chance, know where … an envelope … opened … junk mail … a bank or a pizzeria … he can’t remember … Hélène, in a natural voice, says: “Oh yes, I remember, that old envelope … I threw it away.”

  Time stops for Althusser. He doesn’t ask her to repeat it. What’s the point? He heard her perfectly well. But still, there’s hope: “The trash…?” I emptied it last night, and the garbagemen took it away this morning. A long groan howls deep inside the philosopher while he tenses his muscles. He looks at his wife, dear old Hélène, who has put up with him for so many years, and he knows that he loves her, he admires her, he feels sorry for her, he blames himself, he knows what he put her through with his caprices, his infidelities, his immature behavior, his childlike need for his wife to support him in his choice of mistresses, and his manic-depressive fits (“hypomania,” they call it), but this, this is too much, this is much, much more than he can tolerate—yes, him, the immature impostor—and he throws himself at his wife, screaming like a wild beast, and grabs her throat with his hands, which tighten around it like a vise, and Hélène, taken by surprise, stares at him wide-eyed but does not try to defend herself, putting her hands on his but not really struggling. Maybe she knew all along that it would have to end like this, or maybe she just wanted to put an end to it one way or another, and this way was as good as any, or maybe Althusser is just too fast, too violent. Maybe she wanted to live and recalled, at that instant, one or two phrases written by Althusser, this man she loved—“one does not abandon a concept like a dog,” perhaps—but Althusser strangles his wife like a dog, except that he is the dog, ferocious, selfish, irresponsible, maniacal. When he loosens his grip, she is dead. A bit of tongue—a “poor little bit of tongue,” he will say—sticks out of her mouth and her bulging eyes stare at her murderer or the ceiling or the void of her existence.

  Althusser has killed his wife, but there will be no trial because he will be judged to have been temporarily insane at the time. Yes, he was angry. But why didn’t he say anything to his wife? If Althusser is a “victim of himself,” it’s because he didn’t disobey the person who asked him to remain silent. You should have said something, you jerk, at least to your wife. A lie is far too precious a thing to be misused. He should at least have told her: “Don’t touch this envelope, it’s extremely valuable, it contains a highly important document that X or Y [he could have lied here] gave me to look after.” Instead of which, Hélène is dead. Judged insane, Althusser will have his case dismissed. He will be committed for a few years, then will leave his apartment on Rue d’Ulm and move to the Twentieth Arrondissement, where he will write that very strange autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, which contains this crazy phrase, placed inside parentheses: “Mao even granted me an interview, but for reasons of ‘French politics,’ I made the stupid mistake, the biggest of my life, of not turning up for it…” (The italics are mine.)

  49

  “Italy! That place is unbelievable!” D’Ornano paces the presidential office, lifting his hands above his head. “What the hell is going on in Bologna? Is that connected to our case? Were our men targeted?”

  Poniatowski rummages around in the drinks cabinet. “Hard to say. It could be just coincidence. It could be the far left or the far right. It could also have been ordered by the government. You never know with the Italians.” He opens a can of tomato juice.

  Sitting behind his desk, Giscard closes the copy of L’Express that he was leafing through and puts his hands together in silence.

  D’Ornano (tapping his foot): “Coincidence, my ass! If—and I mean if—a group, of whatever kind, or a government, or an agency, or a service, or an organization possesses the means and the determination to set off a bomb that kills eighty-five people just to hamper our investigation, then I think we have a problem. The Americans have a problem. The English have a problem. The Russians have a problem. Unless it’s them, obviously.”

  Giscard asks: “It seems like the kind of thing they’d do, Michel, don’t you think?”

  Poniatowski unearths some celery salt. “Random killing with as many civilian victims as possible? I have to say that’s more the far right’s style. And anyway, according to Bayard’s report, there was that Russian agent who saved the kid’s life.”

  D’Ornano (startled): “The nurse? She might just as easily have planted the bomb.”

  Poniatowski (opening a bottle of vodka): “Why would she show herself in the station, then?”

  D’Ornano (pointing at Poniatowski as though he were personally responsible): “We checked. She never worked at Salpêtrière.”

  Poniatowski (stirring his Bloody Mary): “It’s more or less proven that Barthes no longer had the document by the time he got to the hospital. In all probability, things went like this: he comes out of the lunch with Mitterrand, gets knocked over by a laundry van—driven by the first Bulgarian. A man posing as a doctor pretends to examine him and steals his papers and his keys. Everything suggests that the document was with his papers.”

  D’Ornano: “In that case, what happened at the hospital?”

  Poniatowski: “Witnesses saw two intruders whose description matches the two Bulgarians who killed the gigolo.”

  D’Ornano (trying to keep count of the number of Bulgarians involved): “But since he didn’t have the document anymore?”

  Poniatowski: “They probably came back to finish the job.”

  D’Ornano, who is soon out of breath, stops pacing and, as if his attention has been suddenly drawn to something, starts examining a corner of Delacroix’s painting.

  Giscard (picking up the biography of JFK and stroking the cover): “Let’s assume that it was our men who were targeted in Bologna.”

  Poniatowski (adding Tabasco): “That would prove they’re on the right track.”

  D’Ornano: “Meaning?”

  Poniatowski: “If it was really our men they were trying to eliminate, it must have been to prevent them f
rom discovering something.”

  Giscard: “This … club?”

  Poniatowski: “Or something else.”

  D’Ornano: “So we should send them to the USA?”

  Giscard (sighing): “Doesn’t he have a phone, this American?”

  Poniatowski: “The kid says it’ll be a chance to ‘get down to brass tacks.’”

  D’Ornano: “You don’t say! So that little twat wants to go on a trip paid for by the Republic?”

  Giscard (perplexed, as if chewing on something): “Given the available evidence, wouldn’t it be just as useful to send them to Sofia?”

  Poniatowski: “Bayard’s a good cop, but he’s no James Bond. Maybe we could send a Service Action team?”

  D’Ornano: “To do what? Bump off some Bulgarians?”

  Giscard: “I’d rather keep the Ministry of Defense out of all this.”

  Poniatowski (grinding his teeth): “Besides, we don’t want to risk a diplomatic crisis with the USSR.”

  D’Ornano (trying to change the subject): “Talking of crisis, what’s happening in Tehran?”

  Giscard (starting to leaf through L’Express again): “The shah is dead, the mullahs are dancing.”

  Poniatowski (pouring himself a neat vodka): “Carter is screwed. Khomeini will never free the hostages.”

  Silence.

  In L’Express, Raymond Aron writes: “It is better to let laws become dormant when, rightly or wrongly, they are refused by the morals of the day.” Giscard thinks: “How wise.”

  Poniatowski kneels in front of the refrigerator.

  D’Ornano: “Uh, and the philosopher who killed his wife?”

  Poniatowski: “Who cares? He’s a Commie. We shut him up in an asylum.”

  Silence. Poniatowski gets some ice cubes from the icebox.

  Giscard (in a belligerent voice): “This case must not have any influence on the campaign.”

  Poniatowski (who understands that Giscard has returned to the subject at hand): “We can’t find the Bulgarian driver or the fake doctor anywhere.”

  Giscard (tapping his index finger against his leather desk blotter): “I don’t care about the driver. I don’t care about the doctor. I don’t care about this … Logos Club. I want the document. On my desk.”