The Seventh Function of Language

They walk about thirty feet behind the policeman. Night has fallen. It’s a bit cold. Simon is still holding the nurse’s arm. If Anastasia finds his attitude strange or cavalier, she doesn’t show it. She tells him that Barthes was very popular—too popular, in her opinion. There were always people trying to get into his room. The policeman turns off toward La Mutualité. She tells him that on the day of the incident, when he was found on the floor, the three people who came in and made a scene really insulted her. The policeman goes down a small street near the square outside Notre-Dame. Simon thinks about the friendship of peoples. He explains to Anastasia that Barthes was renowned for his ability to detect the symbolic codes that govern our behavior. Anastasia nods, frowning. The policeman comes to a halt outside a heavy wooden door, set just below the pavement. By the time Simon and Anastasia get there, he has disappeared inside. Simon stops. He still hasn’t let go of Anastasia’s arm. She says nothing, having noticed the rising tension in the air. The two young people look at the iron gate, the stone staircase, the wooden door. Anastasia frowns again.

A couple that Simon did not hear approaching walk around them, open the gate, descend the steps, and ring the doorbell. The door is half-opened, and a pasty-faced man of indeterminate age, a cigarette in his mouth, wool scarf wrapped around his neck, stares at the couple and then lets them through.

Simon wonders: “What would I do if I were in a novel?” He would ring the doorbell, obviously, and walk in with Anastasia on his arm.

Inside, there would be a secret gambling den. He’d sit at the policeman’s table and challenge him to a game of poker while Anastasia sipped a Bloody Mary beside him. He would ask the man in a knowing voice what had happened to his finger. And the man, equally knowing, would reply threateningly: “Hunting accident.” Then Simon would win the hand with a full house, aces over queens.

But life is not a novel, he thinks, and they carry on walking as if nothing had happened. When he turns around at the end of the street, however, he sees another three people ring the doorbell and enter. Equally, he does not see the dented Fuego parked on the opposite pavement. Anastasia starts telling him about Barthes again: when he was conscious, he asked for his jacket several times, as if he were looking for something. Does Simon have any idea what it might have been? Realizing that his mission is over for tonight, Simon feels as if he is waking up and, finding himself standing next to the young nurse, he is disconcerted. He stammers that, maybe, if she’s free, they could have a drink together. Anastasia smiles (and Simon is unable to interpret the sincerity of this smile): isn’t that what they just did? Simon, piteously, suggests they have another drink, another time. Anastasia stares deeply into his eyes, smiles again, as if upping the ante on her natural smile, and tells him simply: “Maybe.” Simon takes this as a rejection, and he is probably right because, repeating “another time,” she leaves without giving him her phone number.

In the street, behind him, the Fuego’s headlights come on.

41

“Approach, great speakers, fine rhetoricians, deep-lunged orators! Take your place in the lair of madness and reason, the theater of thought, the academy of dreams, the school of logic! Come and hear the clamor of words, admire the interlacing of verbs and adverbs, taste the venomous circumlocutions of the duelers of discourse! Today, for this new session, the Logos Club is offering not one digital combat, not two, but three, yes, three digital combats, my friends! And now, to whet your appetite, the first joust pits two rhetoricians againsteach other with the following thorny geopolitical question: Will Afghanistan be the Soviets’ Vietnam?

“Glory to the logos, my friends! Long live dialectics! Let the party begin! May the verb be with you!”

42

Tzvetan Todorov is a skinny guy in glasses with a big tuft of curly hair on the top of his head. He is also a linguistics researcher who has lived in France for twenty years, a disciple of Barthes who worked on literary genres (fantasy, in particular), a specialist in rhetoric and semiology.