The Seventh Function of Language

What does he think about? Maybe he sees this or that memory flash through his mind, things that are private or insignificant or known only to him. One evening—or was it still daylight?—he was sharing a taxi with his American translator, who was over in Paris for a brief stay, and Foucault. The three of them are sitting in the backseat, the translator in the middle, and Foucault, as usual, is monopolizing the conversation. He speaks in his animated, confident, nasal voice, like a voice from days of old, and he is the one in control, as ever. He improvises a little speech to explain how much he hates Picasso, how crappy Picasso really is, and he laughs, of course, and the young translator listens politely; in his own country he is a writer and a poet, but here, he listens deferentially to these two brilliant French intellectuals’ speeches, and Barthes already knows that he’s powerless to match Foucault’s loquacity, but he has to say something all the same if he doesn’t want to be left out, so he wins some time by laughing, too, but he knows that his laughter doesn’t ring true, and he’s embarrassed because he seems embarrassed, it’s a vicious circle. It’s been like this all his life. He wishes he could have Foucault’s self-assurance. Even when he speaks to his students and they listen reverently, he shelters his shyness behind a professorial tone, but it is only when he writes that he feels sure of himself, that he is sure of himself, alone, in the refuge of his page, and all his books, his Proust, his Chateaubriand, and Foucault continues to babble on and on about Picasso, and so Barthes, in order not to be left out, says that he, too, hates Picasso, and when he says this he hates himself, because he can see exactly what’s happening, it’s his job to see what’s happening: he’s debasing himself in front of Foucault, and no doubt the young and handsome translator realizes it too. He spits on Picasso but only timidly, a small gob of spit, while Foucault roars with laughter, he agrees that Picasso is overrated, that he has never understood what people saw in him, and I can’t be certain that he didn’t think this; after all, Barthes was above all a classicist who, deep down, did not like modern life, but really—what does it matter? Even if he did hate Picasso, he knows that’s not the point; the point is not to be outdone by Foucault; the point is that as soon as Foucault makes such a provocative statement, he would look like an old fart if he disagreed, so even if he genuinely didn’t like Picasso, he now denigrates him and mocks him, in this taxi taking him God knows where, for the wrong reasons.

Perhaps that is how Barthes dies, thinking about that taxi ride, that is how he closes his eyes and falls asleep, sadly, with that sadness that has always filled him, never mind his mother, and perhaps he spares a brief thought for Hamed, too. What will become of him? And of the secret he now guards? He sinks slowly, gently into his final sleep and, well, it’s not an unpleasant sensation, but while his bodily functions give out one by one, his mind continues to wander. Where else will this final reverie lead him?

Hey, he should have said that he didn’t like Racine! “The French boast endlessly about having had their Racine (the man who used only two thousand words) and never complain about not having had their Shakespeare.” There—that would have impressed the young translator. But Barthes wrote that much later. Ah, if only he’d had the function then …

The door opens slowly, but Barthes is in his coma and does not hear it.

It’s not true that he’s a “classicist”: deep down, he doesn’t like the seventeenth century’s dryness, those heavily layered alexandrines, those finely chiseled aphorisms, those intellectualized passions …

He does not hear the footsteps approaching his bed.

Of course, they were peerless rhetoricians, but he doesn’t like their coldness, their fleshlessness. The Racinian passions? Pfft, big deal. Phaedra, sure … well, the confession scene in the pluperfect subjunctive, tantamount to the conditional past … all right, sure, that was brilliant. Phaedra rewriting the story with her in Ariadne’s place and Hippolytus in the place of Theseus …

He doesn’t know that someone is leaning over his electrocardiogram.

But Berenice? Titus didn’t love her anymore, that was blatantly obvious. It’s so simple, you’d think it was Corneille …

He does not see the figure rummaging in his belongings.

And La Bruyère, so scholarly. At least Pascal conversed with Montaigne, Racine with Voltaire, La Fontaine with Valéry … But who would want to have a conversation with La Bruyère?

He does not feel the hand delicately turning the valve of the ventilator.