The Seventh Function of Language

“Je suis venu j’ai vu j’ai vomu.” I came, I saw, I vomited.

Sollers’s speech accelerates, becomes more fluid, almost musical: “God is really close without mystery gently oiled gently hand of mysfère glove of hell…” Then he says something that Simon and even Bayard find surprising: “The belief in tickle-wickle on the organ enables the corpse to be maintained as the sole fundamental value.” After uttering these words, Sollers licks his lips lasciviously. Bayard can now observe clear signs of tension on Kristeva’s face.

Bayard lets himself be rocked by the rhythm, like a river carrying little logs that occasionally knock against a fragile boat.

“… the whole soul of Christ did it enjoy bliss in its passion it seems not for several reasons is it not impossible to suffer and to enjoy at the same time since pain and joy are opposites Aristotle notes it does not deep sadness prevent delectation however the opposite is true…”

Sollers is salivating more and more but he goes on: “I change form name revelation nickname I am the same I mutate sometimes palace sometimes hut pharaoh dove or sheep transfiguration transubstantiation ascension…”

Then he comes to his peroration—the audience can tell, even if they cannot follow it: “I will be what I will be that means take care of what I am as much as I am in I am don’t forget that I am what follows if I am tomorrow I will be what I am at the point where I would be…”

Bayard exclaims to Simon: “Is that it, the seventh function of language?”

Simon feels his paranoia rise again, thinking that a character like Sollers cannot really exist.

Sollers concludes, abruptly: “I am the opposite of the Nazi-Soviet.”

Universal stupefaction.

Even the Great Protagoras looks gobsmacked. He hums and haws, a little embarrassed. Then he takes the stand, because it’s his turn.

Simon and Bayard recognize Umberto Eco’s voice.

“I don’t know where to start, after that. My honorable opponent has, how to say it, fired on all cylinders, si?”

Eco turns to Sollers and politely bows, readjusting the nose of his mask.

“Perhaps I might make a little etymological remark, to begin with? You will no doubt have noted, dear audience, honorable members of the jury, that the verb forcener no longer exists in modern French, its only surviving trace being the substantive forcené, which signifies a mad individual who behaves violently.

“Now, this definition of forcené might lead us into error. Originally—if I may make a little orthographical remark—forcener was written with an s, not a c, because it came from the Latin sensus, ‘sense’ (‘animal quod sensu caret’): forsener, then, is literally to be out of one’s senses, in other words, to be mad, but to begin with there was no connotation of force.

“That said, this connotation must have appeared gradually, with the orthographic renovation that suggested a false etymology and, I would say, that from the sixteenth century onward this spelling was attested to in Middle French.

“Allora, the question that I would have discussed, if my honorable opponent had raised it, is this: Is ‘forcener doucement’ an oxymoron? Is this an association of two contradictory terms?

“No, if one considers the true etymology of forcener.

“Si, if one accepts the connotation of force in the false etymology.

“Si, but … are gentle and strong necessarily opposed? A force can be exercised gently, for example when you are taken by the current of a river, or when you gently squeeze a loved one’s hand…”

The singsong accent resonates through the large room, but everyone has grasped the violence of the attack: beneath his debonair appearance, Eco has calmly underlined the insufficiencies in Sollers’s speech by conjuring, alone, a discussion that his opponent was unable to even begin.

“But none of that tells us what it’s about, no?

“I will be more modest than my opponent, who attempted some very ambitious and, I think, pardon me, somewhat fanciful interpretations of this expression. For my part, I will simply try to explain it to you: he who ‘forcène doucement’ is the poet, ecco. It is the furor poeticus. I am not sure who uttered that phrase, but I would say it is a sixteenth-century French poet, a disciple of Jean Dorat, a member of the Pléiade, because one can clearly sense here the Neoplatonic influence.

“For Plato, you know, poetry is not an art, not a technique, but a divine inspiration. The poet is inhabited by the god, in a trancelike state: that is what Socrates explains to Ion in his famous dialogue. So the poet is mad, but it is a gentle madness, a creative madness, not a destructive madness.

“I do not know the author of this citation, but I think it is perhaps Ronsard or Du Bellay, both of them disciples of a school where, giustamente, ‘on forcène doucement.’