The Seventh Function of Language

“To say that classicism does not exist is to say that Venice does not exist.”

A war of annihilation, then. Like Lepanto.

By using the word classicism, he knows that he is committing an anachronism but he doesn’t care because “Baroque” and “Classical” are ideas forged in retrospect, inherently anachronistic, summoned to support unstable, debatable realities.

“And it is all the more curious that these words should be pronounced here, in La Fenice, this neoclassical pearl.”

Simon uses the word pearl deliberately. He already has his plan of attack.

“It also means wiping the Giudecca and San Giorgio from the map rather quickly.” He turns to his adversary. “Did Palladio never exist? Are his neoclassical churches just baroque dreams? My honorable opponent sees the Baroque everywhere, and that is his right, but…”

Without any discussion, then, the two adversaries have come to an agreement on the subject’s central problem: Venice. Is Venice baroque or classical? It is Venice that will decide the tie.

Simon turns to the audience again and declaims: “Order and beauty, luxury, peace and pleasure: Is there a more appropriate line to describe Venice? And is there a better definition of classicism?” And Barthes, to follow Baudelaire: “Classics. Culture (the more culture there is, the greater and more diverse the pleasure). Intelligence. Irony. Delicacy. Euphoria. Mastery. Safety: the art of living.” Simon: “Venice!”

The Classical exists and its home is here, in Venice. Step one.

Step two: Show that your opponent has not understood the subject.

“My honorable adversary must have misheard: it is not Baroque or Classical, but Baroque and Classical. Why oppose them? They are the yin and the yang that comprise Venice and the universe, like the Apollonian and the Dionysian, like the sublime and the grotesque, reason and passion, Racine and Shakespeare.” (Simon does not dwell on this last example, as Stendhal quite obviously preferred Shakespeare—as he does, for that matter.)

“It is not a question of playing Palladio against the bulbs of the San Marco basilica. Look. Palladio’s Redentore?” Simon peers toward the back of the theater as though visualizing the bank of the Giudecca. “On one side, Byzantium and the flamboyant Gothic of the past (if I may put it like that); on the other, Ancient Greece resurrected eternally by the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.” Nothing ever goes to waste for a duelist. Sollers smiles as he looks at Kristeva, who recognizes his words, and he makes smoke rings of contentment, tapping his fingers on the gilded wood of his box.

“Take Corneille’s Le Cid. A quasi-picaresque baroque tragicomedy when it was written, later reclassified (after much debate) as classical tragedy when genre fantasies went out of fashion. Order, unities, framework? Doesn’t matter. Two plays in one, and yet the same play: baroque one day, classical the next.”

Simon has other interesting examples—Lautréamont, for instance, champion of the darkest romanticism, who transforms into Isidore Ducasse, perverse defender of mutant classicism in his incredible Poésies—but he does not want to digress: “Two great rhetorical traditions: Atticism and Asianism. On one side, the West’s rigorous clarity, Boileau’s ‘Whatever is well conceived is clearly said’; on the other, the lyrical flights and ornaments, the abundance of tropes of the sensual, tangled East.”

Simon knows perfectly well that Atticism and Asianism are concepts without any concrete geographical foundation, at most transhistorical metaphors. But by this point he knows that the judges know he knows this, so he has no need to make it clear.

“And at the confluence of the two? Venice, the crossroads of the universe! Venice, amalgam of Sea and Earth, earth on sea, lines and curves, Heaven and Hell, the lion and the crocodile, San Marco and Casanova, sun and mist, movement and eternity!”

Simon takes one last pause before closing his peroration resoundingly: “Baroque and Classical? The proof: Venice.”

Prolonged applause.

The Italian wants to strike back without delay, but Simon has deprived him of his synthesis, so he is forced to play against his nature. He says, in French, which Simon admires but interprets as evidence of his annoyance: “But Venice is the sea! My opponent’s poor attempt at dialectics makes no difference. The liquid element is the barocco. The solid, the fixed, the rigid, is the classico. Venice è il mare!” So Simon remembers what he has learned during his stay here: the Bucentaur, the ring thrown into the sea, and Eco’s stories: “No, Venice is the husband of the sea; that is not the same thing.”

“The city of masks! Of mirrored glass! Of sparkling mosaics! The city sinking into the lagoon! Venice is made of water, sand, and mud!”

“And stone. Lots of marble.”

“The marble is baroque! It is striated with veins, full of internal layers, and it breaks all the time.”