The Seventh Function of Language

“Allora, we can discuss the question of divine inspiration, if you like? I don’t know, because I didn’t really understand what my honorable opponent wanted to discuss.”

Silence in the room. Sollers realizes that it is his turn to speak. He hesitates.

Simon mechanically analyzes Eco’s strategy, which can be summarized very simply: do the opposite of Sollers. This implies adopting an ultramodest ethos and a very sober and minimalist level of development. The refusal of all fanciful interpretations and a very literal explanation. By falling back on his proverbial erudition, Eco simply explained without making an argument, as if to underline the impossibility of discussion in the face of his opponent’s frenzied logorrhea. He uses rigor and humility to highlight his megalomaniacal adversary’s mental disorder.

Sollers starts to speak again, less confidently: “I talk about philosophy because the action of literature now is to show that the philosophical discourse can be integrated into the position of the literary subject, if only so that its experience be taken all the way to the transcendental horizon.”

But Eco does not reply.

Sollers, panic-stricken, blurts out: “Aragon wrote a thundering article about me! About my genius! And Elsa Triolet! I have their autographs!”

Embarrassed silence.

One of the ten sophists makes a gesture and two guards, stationed at the room’s entrance, seize the dazed Sollers, who rolls his eyes and yells: “Tickle-wickle! Ho ho ho! No no no!”

Bayard asks why there has not been a vote. The old man replies that in certain cases, unanimity is obvious.

The two guards lay the loser on the marble floor in front of the platform and one of the sophists advances, a large pair of pruning shears in his hands.

The guards strip Sollers from the waist down as he screams beneath Tintoretto’s Paradise. Some of the other sophists leave their seats to help control him. In the confusion, his mask comes off.

Only the first few rows of the audience see what happens at the foot of the platform but everyone, all the way to the back, knows.

The sophist with the doctor’s beak wedges Sollers’s balls between the two blades of the shears, firmly grips the handles, and presses them together. Snip.

Kristeva shudders.

Sollers makes an unidentifiable noise, a sort of throat-clack followed by a long caterwaul that ricochets off the paintings and reverberates throughout the room.

The sophist with the doctor’s beak picks up the two balls and drops them in a second urn, which Simon and Bayard now realize was put there for that very purpose.

Pale-faced, Simon asks his neighbor: “Isn’t the penalty normally a finger?”

The man replies that it is when one challenges a duelist of a rank just above yours, but Sollers wanted to cut corners. He had never participated in a single duel and he directly challenged the Great Protagoras. “In that case, the price is higher.”

While the attendants attempt to give first aid to Sollers, who squirms and makes horrible moaning noises, Kristeva takes the urn containing the testicles and leaves the room.

Bayard and Simon follow her.

She quickly crosses Piazza San Marco, cradling the urn in her arms. The night is still young and the square is packed with tourists, stilt-walkers, fire-eaters, actors in eighteenth-century costumes pretending to duel with swords. Simon and Bayard push their way through the crowds so as not to lose her. She rushes down narrow alleyways, crosses bridges, does not turn around once. A man dressed as Harlequin grabs her by the waist to kiss her, but she emits a piercing cry, escapes his clutches like a small wild animal, and runs away carrying her urn. Crosses the Rialto. Bayard and Simon are not certain that she knows where she is going. From far off, in the sky, they hear fireworks exploding. Kristeva trips on a step and almost drops the urn. Her breath hangs in the air. It’s cold, and she has left her coat at the Doge’s Palace.

All the same, she does make it somewhere: to the basilica Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, home, in her husband’s own words, to “the glorious heart of the Serenissima,” with Titian’s tomb and his red Assumption. At this time of night, the basilica is closed. But she doesn’t want to go inside.

It is chance that has brought her here.

She advances over the little bridge that straddles the Rio dei Frari and stops in the middle. She puts the urn on the stone ledge. Simon and Bayard are just behind her, but they dare not set foot on the bridge, nor climb the handful of steps to join her.

Kristeva listens to the murmur of the city, and her dark eyes stare down at the little waves formed by the nocturnal breeze. A fine rain wets her short hair.

From within her blouse, she takes a sheet of paper folded in four.