The Seventh Function of Language

So Simon understands only about one word in three of Morris Zapp’s speech. In his defense, it has to be said that the subject—deconstruction—is not one he’s very familiar with, and involves some difficult, or at least obscure, concepts. But still, he was hoping to find it enlightening.

Bayard did not go with him, and Simon is pleased: he would have been unbearable.

Given that the content of the speech largely escapes him, he seeks meaning elsewhere: in Morris Zapp’s ironic inflections, in the audience’s knowing laughter (each member wishing to seal his rightful sense of belonging to the here-and-now of this amphitheater—“another amphitheater,” thinks Simon, succumbing to an unhealthy structuralist-paranoiac reflex to search for recurrent motifs), in the questions of the listeners, which are never really about the matter at hand but rather attempts if not to challenge the master, at least to position the questioner, in relation to the other listeners, as a serious thinker blessed with acute critical faculties and superior intellectual capacities (in a word, to distinguish the questioner, as Bourdieu would say). From the tone of each question, Simon can guess the asker’s situation: undergrad, postgrad, professor, specialist, rival … He can easily detect the bores, the wallflowers, the asslickers, the snobs, and—most numerous of all—those who forget to ask their question, so busy are they reeling off their interminable monologues, intoxicated by the sound of their own voices, driven by that imperious need to offer their opinion. Clearly, something existential is going on in this puppet theater.

But finally he does seize upon a passage that holds his attention: “The root of critical error is a naïve confusion of literature with life.” This intrigues him, so he asks his neighbor, an Englishman in his forties, if he might be able to provide a sort of simultaneous translation, or at least summarize what’s being said, and as the Englishman, like half the campus and three-quarters of those at the conference, has very good French, he explains to Simon that according to Morris Zapp’s theory there is, at the source of literary criticism, an original methodological error of confusing life with literature (Simon redoubles his attention) whereas it is not the same thing, it does not function in the same way. “Life is transparent, literature opaque,” the Englishman tells him. (That’s arguable, thinks Simon.) “Life is an open system, literature a closed system. Life is made of things, literature of words. Life is what it seems to be: when you are afraid of flying, it is a question of fear. When you try to date a girl, it is a question of sex. But in Hamlet, even the most stupid critic realizes that it is not about a man who wants to kill his uncle—it is about something else.”

This reassures Simon slightly, as he doesn’t have the faintest idea what his adventures could be about.

Apart from language, obviously. Ahem.

Morris Zapp continues his speech in an increasingly Derridean mode; now he affirms that understanding a message involves decoding it, because language is a code. And “all decoding is a new encoding.” So, broadly speaking, we can never be sure of anything, because no one can be sure that he is using words in exactly the same sense as the person he is talking to (even when they are speaking the same language).

Sounds about right, thinks Simon.

And Morris Zapp employs this startling metaphor, translated by the Englishman: “Conversation is essentially a game of tennis played with a ball of modeling clay that changes shape each time it crosses the net.”

Simon feels the earth deconstruct beneath his feet. He leaves the lecture smoking a cigarette, and bumps into Slimane.

The young Arab is waiting for the lecture to end so he can talk to Morris Zapp. Simon asks him what he wants to ask. Slimane replies that he is not in the habit of asking anyone anything.

64