The Seventh Function of Language

Stefano comes back behind the counter and points out the bearded man to Bayard: “That’s Umberto.”

The man with the bag leaves, forgetting it on the floor by the bar, but thankfully the other customers catch him and hand it back. The man, embarrassed, apologizes strangely, says thank you, then disappears into the night.

Bayard approaches the bearded man, who is symbolically wiping his trousers, because the piss has already soaked into the cloth, and takes out his card: “Monsieur Eco? French police.” Eco becomes agitated: “Police? Ma, you should have arrested the hippie, then!” Then, considering the clientele of left-wing students that fill the Drogheria, he decides not to pursue this line of attack. Bayard explains why he is here: Barthes asked a young man to contact him if anything happened, but the young man died, with Eco’s name on his lips. Eco seems sincerely surprised. “I knew Roland well, but we weren’t close friends. It’s a terrible tragedy, of course, ma it was an accident, no?”

Bayard realizes he is going to have to be patient again, so he finishes his drink, lights a cigarette, looks at the man in gloves waving his arms around as he talks about materialismo storico. Enzo is hitting on the young student while playing with her hair, Simon and Bianca are toasting “desiring autonomy,” and Bayard says: “Think about it. There must be a reason why Barthes expressly asked him to contact you.”

He then listens to Eco failing to answer his question: “Roland’s great semiological lesson that has stayed with me is pointing to any event in the universe and explaining that it signifies something. He always repeated that the semiologist, walking in the street, detects meaning where others see events. He knew that we say something in the way that we dress, hold our glass, walk … You, for example, I can tell that you fought in the Algerian War and…”

“All right! I know how it works,” grumbles Bayard.

“Ah? Bene. And, at the same time, what he loved in literature is that one is not obliged to settle on a particular meaning, ma one can play with the meaning. Capisce? It’s geniale. That’s why he was so fond of Japan: at last, a world where he didn’t know any of the codes. No possibility of cheating, but no ideological or political issues, just aesthetic ones, or maybe anthropological. But perhaps not even anthropological. The pleasure of interpretation, pure, open, free of referents. He said to me: ‘Above all, Umberto, we must kill the referent!’ Ha ha! Ma attenzione, that doesn’t mean that the signified does not exist, eh! The signified is in everything. [He takes a swig of white wine.] Everything. But that does not mean either that there is an infinity of interpretations. It’s the Kabbalists who think like that! There are two currents: the Kabbalists, who think the Torah can be interpreted in every possible way to produce new things, and Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine knew that the text of the Bible was a foresta infinita di sensi—‘infinita sensuum silva,’ as Saint Jerome said—but that it could always be submitted to a rule of falsification, in order to exclude what the context made it impossible to read, no matter what hermeneutic violence it was subjected to. You see? It is impossible to say if one interpretation is valid, or if it is the best one, but it is possible to say if the text refuses an interpretation incompatible with its own contextuality. In other words, you can’t just say whatever you want about it. Insomma, Barthes was an Augustinian, not a Kabbalist.”

And while Eco drones on at him, in the hubbub of conversations and the clinking of glasses, amid the bottles arranged on the shelves, while the students’ young, supple, firm bodies exude their belief in the future, Bayard watches the man in gloves haranguing his listeners about some unknown subject. And he wonders why a man would wear gloves in eighty-five-degree heat.

The professor to whom Eco was telling jokes cuts in, in accentless French: “The problem, and you know this, Umberto, is that Barthes did not study signs, in the Saussurian sense, but symbols, at a push, and mostly clues. Interpreting a clue is not unique to semiology, it is the vocation of all science: physics, chemistry, anthropology, geography, economics, philology … Barthes was not a semiologist, Umberto, he didn’t understand what semiology was, because he didn’t understand the specificity of the sign, which, unlike the clue (which is merely a fortuitous trace picked up by a receiver), must be deliberately sent by a sender. Fair enough, he was quite an inspired generalist, but at the end of the day he was just an old-fashioned critic, exactly like Picard and the others he was fighting against.”