Book Review: The Seventh Function of Language
/The Seventh Function of Language
by Laurent Binettranslated from the French by Sam TaylorFarrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017Laurent Binet's previous novel translated into English, 2013's HHhH, was a strange and weirdly memorable thing, a fictional representation of the 1942 assassination of arch-Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich that was both powerfully impressionistic and scrupulously accurate. The book enjoyed a well-deserved success and still has what the publishing industry used to refer to as “legs.”It's tougher to imagine the same kind of long-term popularity for the newest Binet to be translated into English, 2015's The Seventh Function of Language. Instead of centering on a charismatic and thoroughly evil Nazi villain, the new book is planted deep in the watery mud of French intellectualism. And instead of hinging on the fireworks of a dramatic assassination, the new book opens with what appears to be a routine traffic accident: in 1980 Paris, the lecturer and literary theorist Roland Barthes is struck by a laundry van and eventually dies of his injuries. And Binet here is working in the full funk of post-modernist fictional gestures, the kind of look-Ma-I'm-writing meta-fictional antics that will be familiar to readers of Italo Calvino or Günther Grass. The parentheticals give it away:
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 the Rue de Étoles. But, in all honesty, I don't have a clue; you can put him wherever you want.)
But even readers sensible enough to find such stuff interminably boring would be well advised to stick around; The Seventh Function of Language is playing a much deeper game than such surface laziness would suggest. This is a wonderfully acidic and supple novel, richly provocative and, on almost every page, genuinely funny. Translator Sam Taylor is to be commended for making sense in English of what had to be a roiling, Racinian chaos in French.The postmodern addition that saves the whole thing and propels it forward is the chance that Barthes' death wasn't a random street accident. He'd just had lunch with the future French president François Mitterand, after all, and there are rumors of a lost semiotics masterpiece dealing with the “seventh function of language” – a potentially-deadly function that shadowy elements of the French government might want to harness for nefarious purposes, and that subterranean elements of the intellectual world might equally want to conceal. What did Barthes know about this secret work? What might his colleagues, both in France and in universities all over the world, know about it?If this straightaway strikes some readers as reminiscent of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, they'll be relieved to find Binet there well ahead of them. This is a novel that knows to the last decimal place the thousand people, places, and things it's perfectly, affectionately mocking – and besides, Eco himself shows up as a character in The Seventh Function of Language, mimicked so precisely that the only thing missing is an unpaid lunch bill:
“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.]
The echoes have their limits, of course, and the Barthes mystery is not tackled by the likes of the brilliant Brother William of Baskerville and his faithful Adso. Instead, readers get the delightfully hangdog – and decidedly un-intellectual – police detective Jacques Bayard, who's never heard of language theory and thinks all these pot-smoking students infesting college hallways ought to get haircuts and jobs and quit wasting their time with semiotic mumbo-jumbo. He quickly dragoons one of that number, the young semiology professor Simon Herzog, to help him navigate the rancid conceptual depths where the case is taking him, and the interplay between the two quickly becomes one of the book's most winning features as readers follow them from one historical European location after another:
The two Frenchmen move through the streets of Bologna as in a dream. The city is a theater of shadows, furtive silhouettes dancing a strange ballet to a mysterious choreography: students appear suddenly and disappear again behind pillars; junkies and prostitutes loiter under vaulted porches; carabinieri run silently in the background. Simon looks up. Two handsome medieval towers stand over the gate that used to open on the road to byzantine Ravenna, but the second tower leans like the one in Pisa, only more steeply.
The general atmosphere of The Seventh Function of Language is far more rarefied than that of HHhH, and surely many readers will initially feel as out of their depths – and mildly repulsed – as Inspector Bayard does when he first encounters the murkily self-referential world of the French intelligentsia of the previous generation. But the inspector is dogged in his pursuit of a book that can literally change minds – readers will find this last parallel isn't lost on them either.