The Seventh Function of Language

His opponent is absolutely not obliged to accept. But Simon’s gamble is as follows: the Italian will not want his refusal to be taken the wrong way; he will not want people to see in it a sort of contempt, ill grace, rigidity, or, worst of all, fear.

The Italian must be a player, not a spoilsport. He cannot begin by refusing to pick up the gauntlet, even if the gauntlet that has been thrown down looks more like a baited hook. He accepts.

Based on that, Simon has no doubt about which position he will choose to defend. In Venice, any politician will praise the Baroque.

So that when the Italian begins to remind his audience of the origin of the word Barocco (which, in the form barroco, refers to an irregular pearl in Portuguese), Simon believes himself at least one step ahead.

To start with, the Italian is rather scholarly, rather sluggish, because Simon has unsettled him by handing him the initiative and also, perhaps, because he is not a specialist in art history. But he has not reached the rank of tribune by chance. Gradually, he pulls himself together and grows in confidence.

The Baroque is that aesthetic trend that sees the world as a theater and life as a dream, an illusion, a mirror of bright colors and broken lines. Circe and the Peacock: metamorphoses, ostentation. The Baroque prefers curves to straight lines. The Baroque likes asymmetry, trompe-l’oeil, extravagance.

Simon has put his headphones on, but he hears the Italian cite Montaigne in French in the line: “I do not paint its being, I paint its passage.”

The Baroque is elusive, it moves from country to country, from century to century, the sixteenth in Italy, the Council of Trent, the Counter-Reformation, the first half of the seventeenth century in France, Scarron, Saint-Amant, second half of the seventeenth century, return to Italy, Bavaria, eighteenth century, Prague, St. Petersburg, South America, Rococo … There is no unity to the Baroque, no essence of fixed things, no permanence. The Baroque is movement. Bernini, Borromini. Tiepolo, Monteverdi.

The Italian lists generalities in good taste.

Then, suddenly, by who knows what mechanism, what path, what detour in the human mind, he finds his guiding principle, the one he can ride like a surfer on a wave of rhetoric and paradox: “Il Barocco è la Peste.”

The Baroque is the Plague.

The quintessence of the Baroque is to be found here, in Venice. In the bulbs of the San Marco basilica, in the arabesques of the façades, in the grotesque palaces that reach out toward the lagoon, and, of course, in the Carnival.

And why? The Italian knows his local history. From 1348 to 1632, the plague comes and goes and comes again, tirelessly delivering its message: Vanitas vanitatum. In 1462, 1485, the plague strikes and ravages the Republic. In 1506, omnia vanita, it returns. In 1576, it takes Titian. Life is a carnival. The doctors have masks with long white beaks.

The history of Venice is essentially a long dialogue with the plague.

The Serenissima’s response was Veronese (Christ Arresting the Plague), Tintoretto (St. Roch Curing the Plague), and, at the point of the Dogana, Baldassare Longhena’s church without a façade: the Salute, of which the German art critic Wittkower would say: “an absolute triumph in terms of sculptural form, baroque monumentality, and the richness of the light within it.”

In the audience, Sollers takes notes.

Octagonal, no façade, filled with emptiness.

The strange stone wheels of the Salute are like rolls of foam petrified by the Medusa. The perpetual movement is a response to the vanity of the world.

The Baroque is the Plague, and therefore it is Venice.

Pretty good, thinks Simon.

Swept along by his own momentum, the Italian goes on: what is the Classique? Where have we ever seen the “Classical”? Is Versailles Classical? The Classical is always postponed. We always name something as Classical after the event. People talk about it, but no one has ever seen it.

They wanted to transpose the political absolutism of Louis XIV’s reign into an aesthetic current based on order, unity, harmony, in opposition to the period of instability of the Fronde, which had preceded it.

Simon thinks that, all things considered, this southern peasant with his too-short trousers knows quite a bit about history, art, and art history.

He hears the simultaneous translation in his headphones: “But there are no classical authors … in the present … The label classical … is just a sort of medal … awarded by school textbooks.”

The Italian concludes: The Baroque is here. The Classical does not exist.

Prolonged applause.

Bayard nervously lights a cigarette.

Simon leans on his lectern.

He had a choice between preparing his speech while the other man was speaking or listening attentively so he could turn his words against him, and he preferred the second, more aggressive option.