The Seventh Function of Language

Mitterrand must record his statement of principle. He has prepared his little speech: it is dreary, formulaic … it’s just crap. It talks about stasis and the dangers of not changing. No passion, no message, no inspiration, just hollow, bombastic phrases. The cold anger of the eternal loser, palpable on the screen. The recording takes place in gloomy silence. Fabius’s toes writhe nervously inside his slippers. Moati chews his Savane like it’s cement. Debray and Badinter look blankly at each other. Attali watches through the window as a traffic cop puts a parking ticket on Moati’s R5. Even Jack Lang looks perplexed.

Mitterrand grits his teeth. He wears the mask he has worn all his life, walled up inside that morgue where he always goes to conceal the anger gnawing at him. He gets to his feet, picks up his scarf, and leaves without saying goodbye to anyone.

The silence drags on for a few minutes longer.

Moati, pale: “Well, that’s it, then … We’d better call a spin doctor. It’s our only hope.”

Lang, behind him, mutters: “No, there is another one.”

57

“I don’t understand how he could have missed it the first time. He knew he was looking for a document about that Russian linguist, Jakobson. He sees a book about Jakobson on the desk and he doesn’t even glance at it?”

Yes, it has to be said, that does seem implausible.

“And just by chance, he’s there exactly when we arrive at Barthes’s place, when he’d had weeks to go back to the apartment, ’cause he had the key.”

Simon listens to Bayard while the Boeing 747 crawls over to the runway. Giscard, that horrible bourgeois fascist, finally agreed to pay for their airfare, but was still too mean to book them on Concorde.

The investigation into the Bulgarians led them to Kristeva.

Now Kristeva has gone to the United States.

So … it’s hot dogs and cable TV for our heroes.

Naturally, there is a kid crying in their row.

A stewardess comes over and asks Bayard to extinguish his cigarette because smoking is prohibited during takeoff and landing.

Simon has brought Umberto Eco’s Lector in Fabula to read on the journey. Bayard asks him if he’s learning anything interesting from his book, and by interesting he means useful for the investigation, though maybe that’s not all he means, actually. Simon reads out loud: “I live (I mean: I who write, I have the intention of being alive in the only world I know), but at the moment when I create a theory of possible narrative worlds, I decide (based on the world of which I have direct physical experience) to reduce this world to a semiotic experience in order to compare it to narrative worlds.”

Simon gets a hot flush while the stewardess moves her arms to mime the safety instructions. (The kid stops crying; he is fascinated by this traffic-cop choreography.)

Officially, Kristeva has gone to Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, for a conference whose title and subject Bayard has not even attempted to understand. All he needs to know is that John Searle, the American philosopher mentioned by Eco, is also among the guests. The aim is not to kidnap the Bulgarian woman in an Eichmann-style raid. If Giscard had wanted to arrest Barthes’s murderer (because everything suggests she is involved), he would have prevented her from leaving the country. The aim is to understand what’s going on. Isn’t that always the way?

For Little Red Riding Hood, the real world is the one where wolves speak.

And to recover that bloody document.

Bayard tries to understand: Is the seventh function a set of instructions? A magic spell? A chimera provoking hysteria in all those little political and intellectual cabals who see in it the ultimate jackpot for whoever can get their hands on it?

In the seat next to his, separated by the aisle, the kid takes out a cube with multicolored sides that he starts twisting in different directions.

When it comes down to it, Simon wonders, what is the fundamental difference between himself and Little Red Riding Hood or Sherlock Holmes?

He hears Bayard thinking aloud, or maybe he’s talking to him: “Let’s assume that the seventh function of language really is this performative function. It enables whoever masters it to convince anyone to do anything in any circumstances … okay. Apparently, the document fits into a single page. Let’s say it’s written on both sides, in small letters. How can the instructions for something so powerful fit into such a tiny space? All user manuals, for a dishwasher or a TV or my 504, are pages and pages long.”

Simon grinds his teeth. Yes, it’s hard to understand. No, there is no explanation. If he had even the tiniest intuition of what that document contains, he would already have been elected president and have slept with every woman he wanted.

While he is speaking, Bayard keeps his eyes fixed on the kid’s toy. From what he can observe, the cube is subdivided into smaller cubes that must be arranged by color using vertical and horizontal rotations. The kid is going at it frenetically.