The Seventh Function of Language

Around the pool table, two boys of about twenty are facing off, watched by a girl who looks barely legal. Simon automatically identifies what’s going on: the more smartly dressed boy desires the girl, who desires the more disheveled-looking boy, with his long hair and slightly grubby appearance, whose faintly arrogant detachment makes it difficult to tell whether he is interested in the girl—and is simulating a tactical indifference as a mark of his superiority, a statutory indifference linked to his condition as the dominant male who takes it for granted that the girl will be his by right—or if he is waiting for another girl, more beautiful, more rebellious, less shy, more suited to someone of his standing (the two hypotheses obviously not being incompatible).

Poirot-Delpech goes on: “If Barthes, along with Bachelard, is one of those who have done most to enrich criticism during the last thirty years, it is not as a theoretician of a still-hazy semiology but as the champion of a new pleasure in reading.” The semiologist in Simon Herzog emits a grunt. Pleasure in reading, blah blah blah. Still-hazy semiology, my arse. Even if, well … “More than a new Saussure, he would have been a new Gide.” Simon slams his cup into its saucer and the coffee spills over onto his newspaper. The noise is drowned out by the sound of the pool balls, so no one notices, except for the girl, who turns around. Simon meets her eye.

The two boys are both obviously bad pool players, but this does not prevent them from using the table as a sort of stage, frowning, nodding, bending to bring their chins close to the balls, phases of intense thinking leading to innumerable circuits of the table, technical and tactical calculations regarding the white ball’s point of impact on the colored ball (itself chosen according to changeable criteria), repetition of practice shots with hard, jerky, too-fast movements evoking both the game’s erotic stakes and the players’ inexperience, followed by a shot whose speed cannot mask its clumsiness. Simon turns back to Le Monde.

Jean-Philippe Lecat, the minister of culture and communication, declared: “All his work on writing and thought was motivated by the deep study of mankind in order to help us know ourselves better and to live better in society.” Another, better-controlled slamming of the cup into the saucer. Simon checks to see if the girl turns around (she does). Apparently no one at the Ministry of Culture could be bothered to come up with anything better than this platitude. Simon wonders if it is based on some sort of formula that, with minor variations, can be applied to any writer, philosopher, historian, sociologist, biologist … The in-depth study of mankind? Oh yes, bravo, my good sir, what a sterling effort! And you can trot it out again for Sartre, Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, and Bourdieu.

Simon hears the smartly dressed boy contesting a rule: “No, you don’t get two penalty shots if you pot a ball with your first shot.” Sophomore law student (though he probably had to repeat his first year). Analyzing his clothes, jacket, shirt, Simon would plump for Panthéon-Assas University. Emphasizing each word, the other boy replies: “Okay, no problem, cool, whatever you want. I don’t care. It’s all the same to me, man.” Sophomore psychology (or repeating his first year) at Censier or Jussieu (he’s on home turf, clearly). The girl gives a faux-discreet smile that is intended to be knowing. She has two-tone Kickers, electric-blue turn-up jeans, a ponytail held in place by a scrunchie, and she smokes Dunhill Lights: modern literature, first year, Sorbonne or Sorbonne Nouvelle, probably having skipped a year of school.

“For an entire generation, he blazed a trail in the analysis of communication media, mythologies, and languages. Roland Barthes’s work will remain in everyone’s heart like a vibrant call to liberty and happiness.” So Mitterrand is not very inspired either, but at least he gestures toward Barthes’s fields of expertise.

After an interminable endgame, Assas wins haphazardly with an improbable shot (potting the black in off the cushion, following the imaginary rule invented by Breton drunkards to prolong the pleasure) and lifts his arms in imitation of Borg. Censier tries to compose himself with a mocking expression, Sorbonne goes over to Censier and consoles him by rubbing his arm, and all three pretend to laugh, as if it were merely a game.

The Communist Party also made a statement: “It is to the intellectual who devoted the lion’s share of his work to a new way of thinking about imagination and communication, the pleasure of the text, and the materiality of writing, that we pay tribute today.” Simon isolates the most important element of this sentence immediately: “It is to” that intellectual that we pay tribute, not, the implication being, to the other one: the neutral, uncommitted man who ate lunch with Giscard and went to China with his Maoist friends.