The Seventh Function of Language

But while the audience starts to scatter, Bayard spots Slimane walking after the philosopher. “Herzog, look! Seems like the Arab has some questions about the perlocutionary function…” Simon mechanically notes the latent racism and anti-intellectualism. But it has to be said, behind the petit-bourgeois reactionary sarcasm of Bayard’s question, the cop does have a point: What exactly does Slimane want with Searle?

71

“‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”

[Dead Sea Scrolls, the second century B.C., the oldest occurrence of the performative function yet found in the Judeo-Christian world.]

72

Even as he presses the elevator button, Simon knows he is about to go up to heaven. The doors open at the floor for Romance Studies and Simon enters a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lit by dull, flickering neon lamps. The sun never sets on Cornell’s library, open twenty-four hours a day.

All the books Simon could desire are there, and all the others, too. He is like a kid in a candy store, and all he has to do if he wants to fill his pockets is complete a form. Simon’s fingertips brush the books’ spines as if he were caressing ears of wheat in a field that was about to become his property. This, he thinks, is true communism: what’s yours is mine, and vice versa.

At this hour of the night, however, the library is in all likelihood deserted.

Simon strides along the Structuralism aisle. Look—a book about Japan by Lévi-Strauss?

He stops at the Surrealism aisle and thrills at the sight of such wonders: Connaissance de la Mort by Roger Vitrac … Dark Spring by Unica Zürn … La Papesse du Diable, attributed to Desnos … rare books by Crevel in French and English … unpublished works by Annie Le Brun and Radovan Ivsic …

A creak. Simon freezes. The sound of footsteps. Instinctively—because he feels as if his presence in the middle of the night in a university library must be, if not illegal, at least, as the Americans say, inappropriate—he hides behind the volumes on sex on the Surrealist Studies bookshelf.

He sees Searle walk past Tzara’s collected letters.

He hears him talking to someone in an adjacent aisle. Simon delicately withdraws the folder containing twelve photocopied issues of Révolution Surréaliste to get a better view and, through the crack, recognizes Slimane’s slender figure.

Searle is whispering too quietly, but Simon distinctly hears Slimane tell him: “You’ve got twenty-four hours. After that, I sell to the highest bidder.” Then he puts his Walkman back on and returns toward the elevator.

But Searle does not walk back with him. He leafs distractedly through a few books. Who can say what he’s thinking? Simon has a feeling of déjà-vu, but he drives it from his mind.

Trying to put Révolution Surréaliste back in its place, Simon accidentally knocks a copy of Grand Jeu to the floor. Searle pricks up his ears, like a pointer. Simon decides to slip away as discreetly as possible, and silently zigzags through the bookshelves as he hears the philosopher of language behind him picking Grand Jeu off the floor. He imagines him sniffing the magazine. Hearing footsteps, he quickens his pace. He crosses the Psychoanalysis aisle and enters the Nouveau Roman aisle, but this is a dead end. He turns around and jumps when he sees Searle moving toward him, a paper knife in one hand, Grand Jeu in the other. Automatically, he grabs a book to defend himself (The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein: he’s not going to get far with that, he thinks, tossing it on the floor and grabbing another, The Flanders Road: yes, that’s better); Searle does not raise his arm in a Psycho fashion, but Simon feels certain that he is going to have to protect his vital organs from the blade, when he hears the doors of the elevator open.