The Seventh Function of Language

In Lector in Fabula, Eco writes about the status of fictional characters that he calls “supernumeraries” because they add to the people in the real world. Ronald Reagan and Napoleon are part of the real world, but Sherlock Holmes is not. But then what meaning can there be in an assertion such as “Sherlock Holmes is not married” or “Hamlet is mad”? Is it possible to regard a supernumerary as a real person?

Eco quotes Volli, an Italian semiologist who said: “I exist; Madame Bovary doesn’t.” Simon feels increasingly anxious.

Bayard gets up to go to the toilets. Not that he really needs to piss, but he can see that Simon is absorbed by his book, so he may as well stretch his legs, particularly as he’s already knocked back all those little bottles of booze.

Walking to the back of the plane, he bumps into Foucault, who is mid-conversation with a young Arab man with headphones around his neck.

He saw the conference schedule and Foucault’s presence here should not surprise him because he knew the philosopher was invited, but all the same he cannot suppress a slight start. Foucault flashes him his predatory smile.

“Don’t you know Slimane, Superintendent? He was a good friend of Hamed’s. You haven’t cleared up the circumstances of his death, I suppose? Just another queer, eh? Or is it because he was an Arab? Does that count double?”

When Bayard returns to his seat, he finds Simon asleep, head hanging forward, in that uncomfortable position typical of people who try to sleep while sitting. It was another phrase of Eco’s, quoting his mother-in-law, that finished him off: “What would have happened if my son-in-law had not married my daughter?”

Simon dreams. Bayard daydreams. Foucault takes Slimane to the bar upstairs, to talk to him about his lecture on sexual dreams in Ancient Greece.

They order two whiskeys from the stewardess, who smiles almost as much as the philosopher.

According to Artemidorus, our sexual dreams are like prophecies. You have to establish parallels between the sexual relations experienced in dreams and the social relations experienced in reality. For example, dreaming that you sleep with a slave is a good sign: insofar as the slave is your property, that means your estate is going to increase. With a married woman? Bad sign: you mustn’t touch another man’s property. With your mother, it depends. According to Foucault, we have greatly exaggerated the importance the Greeks attributed to Oedipus. In any case, the point of view is that of the free, active male. Penetrating (man, woman, slave, family member) is good. Being penetrated is bad. The worst, the most unnatural (just after sexual relations with gods, animals, and corpses), is lesbians practicing penetration.

“Each to his own criteria, all is normative!” Foucault laughs, orders two more whiskeys, and leads Slimane to the toilets, where the gigolo graciously lets him do what he wants (though he refuses to take off his Walkman).

We have no way of knowing what Simon dreams about, because we are not inside his head, are we?

Bayard notes Foucault and Slimane climbing the stairs to go to the bar on the plane’s upper deck. Driven by intuition rather than reason, he goes back to examine their empty seats. There are some books in the pocket in front of Foucault’s seat and some magazines on Slimane’s seat. Bayard opens the overhead compartment and grabs the luggage that he supposes must belong to the two men. He sits in Foucault’s seat and goes through the philosopher’s bag and the gigolo’s backpack. Papers, books, a spare T-shirt, cassettes. No obvious sign of a document, but Bayard realizes it probably won’t have “The Seventh Function of Language” written on it in bold, so he takes the two bags and walks over to his own seat to wake Simon.

By the time Simon has emerged from his dream, grasped the situation, expressed his surprise at Foucault’s presence on the plane, become indignant at what Bayard is asking him to do, and in spite of this agreed to rummage through things that do not belong to him, a good twenty minutes have passed, so that when Simon is finally in a position to guarantee to Bayard that there is not, in Foucault’s or in Slimane’s belongings, anything that might bear any resemblance at all to the seventh function of language, the two men see Foucault coming down the stairs.

He is going to return to his seat and is bound to realize, sooner or later, that his things have disappeared.

Without any need to confer, the two men react like old teammates. Simon steps over Bayard and goes to meet Foucault in the aisle, while Bayard slips into the parallel aisle to walk back to the tail of the airplane and come around in the other direction to Foucault’s row.

Simon stands in front of Foucault, who waits for him to move out of the way. But as Simon doesn’t budge an inch, Foucault looks at him and, from behind his thick-lensed glasses, recognizes the young man.

“Well … if it isn’t Alcibiades!”