The Seventh Function of Language

The superintendent enters a bookstore to buy some books but he is unused to such places and struggles to find his way among the aisles. He cannot find any works by Raymond Picard. The bookseller, who seems relatively knowledgeable, mentions in passing that Raymond Picard is dead—something Foucault had omitted to tell him—but that he can order New Criticism or New Fraud? On the other hand, he does have a copy of Enough Decoding! by René Pommier, a disciple of Raymond Picard who lays into structuralist criticism (that, in any case, is how the bookseller sells him the book, which doesn’t get him much further), and most notably, Roland Barthes Made Easy, by Rambaud and Burnier. This is quite a slim book with a green cover, a photograph of Barthes staring out severely from an orange oval. Coming out of the frame, a Crumb-style cartoon character says “hee-hee,” grinning and laughing, mockingly, one hand over his mouth. In fact, I’ve checked, and it is Crumb. But Bayard has never heard of Fritz the Cat, the countercultural cartoon strip and film, in which black people are saxophone-playing crows and the hero is a cat in a turtleneck who, Kerouac-style, smokes joints and fucks anything that moves in Cadillacs, against a backdrop of urban riots and burning Dumpsters. Crumb is famous, though, for the way he drew women, with their big, powerful thighs, their lumberjack shoulders, their breasts like mortar shells, and their mares’ asses. Bayard is no cartoon-strip connoisseur, and does not make the connection. But he buys the book, and the Pommier, too. He doesn’t order the Picard, because at this stage of the investigation dead authors don’t interest him.

The superintendent sits in a café, orders a beer, lights a Gitane, and opens Roland Barthes Made Easy. (Which café? The little details are important for reconstructing the atmosphere, don’t you think? I see him at the Sorbon, the bar opposite the Champo, the little arthouse cinema at the bottom of Rue des Écoles. But, in all honesty, I don’t have a clue: you can put him wherever you want.) He reads:

R.B. (inhis writing, Roland Barthes calls himself R.B.) appeared in its archaic form twenty-five years ago, in the book entitled Writing Degree Zero. Since then it has, little by little, detached itself from French, from which it is partially descended, forming an autonomous language with its own grammar and vocabulary.

Bayard takes a drag on his Gitane, swallows a mouthful of beer, turns the pages. At the bar, he hears the waiter explain to a customer why France will descend into civil war if Mitterrand is elected.

Lesson one: The basics of conversation.

1—How do you formulate yourself?

French: What is your name?

2—I formulate myself L.

French: My name is William.

Bayard more or less understands the satirical intent and also that in theory he ought to be on the same wavelength as the authors of this pastiche, but he is wary. Why, in “R.B.,” does “William” call himself “L”? It’s a puzzle. Fucking intellectuals.

The waiter to the customer: “When the Communists are in power, everyone with money will leave France and put it somewhere else, somewhere they won’t have to pay taxes and where they’re sure they won’t get caught!”

Rambaud and Burnier:

3—What “stipulation” locks in, encloses, organizes, arranges the economy of your pragma like the occultation and/or exploitation of your egg-zistence?

French: What is your job?

4—(I) expel units of code.

French: I am a typist.

This makes him laugh a little, but he hates what he instinctively perceives as a principle of verbal intimidation. Of course, he knows that this kind of book is not aimed at him, that it’s a book for intellectuals, for those smart-assed parasites to have a good snigger among themselves. Mocking themselves: the last laugh. Bayard is no idiot; he’s already doing a bit of a Bourdieu without even realizing it.

At the bar, the speech continues: “Once all the money’s in Switzerland, we won’t have any capital left to pay wages, and it’ll be civil war. And the Socialists and Commies will have won, just like that!” The waiter stops pontificating for a minute to go and serve someone. Bayard returns to his reading: