The Seventh Function of Language

The two men were not in Paris when it happened. Barthes and Sollers were very close … Barthes contributed to Sollers’s magazine Tel Quel, and they went to China together with Julia a few years ago … To do what? A study trip … Bloody Communists, thinks Bayard. Barthes wrote several articles praising Sollers’s work … Barthes is like a father for Sollers, even if Barthes behaves like a little boy at times … And Kristeva? Barthes said one day that if he liked women, he would be in love with Julia … He adored her … And you weren’t jealous, Monsieur Joyaux? Ha ha ha … Julia and I, we don’t have that kind of relationship … And anyway, poor Roland, he already had enough problems with men … Why? He didn’t know how to handle things … He always got taken for a ride!… I see. And you, Monsieur Lévy? I admire him greatly, he’s a great man. Did you travel with him too? I was going to suggest several projects to him. What sort of projects? A project for a film about the life of Charles Baudelaire; I was planning to offer him the title role. A project for a joint interview with Solzhenitsyn. A project to petition NATO to liberate Cuba. Could you provide any evidence to substantiate these claims? Yes, of course, I spoke to Andre Glucksmann about them—he’s a witness. Did Barthes have any enemies? Yes, lots, replies Sollers. Everyone knows he’s our friend and we have lots of enemies! Who? The Stalinists! The fascists! Alain Badiou! Gilles Deleuze! Pierre Bourdieu! Cornelius Castoriadis! Pierre Vidal-Naquet! Uh, Hélène Cixous! (BHL: Oh, really? Did she and Julia fall out? Sollers: Yes … well, no … she’s jealous of Julia, because of Marguerite…)

Marguerite who? Duras. Bayard notes down all the names. Does Monsieur Joyaux know a certain Michel Foucault? Sollers starts whirling around like a dervish, faster and faster, his cigarette holder still held between his lips, the incandescent end tracing graceful orange curves in the hospital corridor: “The truth, Superintendent? The whole truth … nothing but the truth … Foucault was jealous of Barthes’s fame … and especially jealous because I, Sollers, loved Barthes … because Foucault is the worst kind of tyrant, Superintendent: a lackey … Can you believe, Mr. Representative of Public Order—cough cough—that Foucault gave me an ultimatum? ‘You must choose between Barthes and me!’ … One might as easily choose between Montaigne and La Boétie … Between Racine and Shakespeare … Between Hugo and Balzac … Between Goethe and Schiller … Between Marx and Engels … Between Merckx and Poulidor … Between Mao and Lenin … Between Breton and Aragon … Between Laurel and Hardy … Between Sartre and Camus (well, no, not them) … Between de Gaulle and Tixier-Vignancour … Between the Plan and the Market … Between Rocard and Mitterrand … Between Giscard and Chirac…” Sollers slows down. He coughs into his cigarette holder. “Between Pascal and Descartes … cough cough … Between Trésor and Platini … Between Renault and Peugeot … Between Mazarin and Richelieu … Hhhhh…” But just when it looks as if he is about to collapse, he finds a second wind. “Between the Left Bank and the Right Bank … Between Paris and Beijing … Between Venice and Rome … Between Mussolini and Hitler … Between andouille and mashed potato…”

Suddenly, there is a noise in the room. Bayard opens the door and sees Barthes twitching and jerking, talking in his sleep, while the nurse tries to tuck him in. He is saying something about “starred text,” a “minor earthquake,” “blocks of signification,” the reading of which grasps only the smooth surface, imperceptibly bonded by the flow of phrases, the running speech of the narration, the naturalness of vernacular.