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Laurent Binet, La septième fonction du langage — The seventh function of language. This looks like an interesting book — pulp meta-fiction featuring Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Umberto Eco, Noam Chomsky, Louis Althusser, Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard,  Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, John Searle, Morris Zapp, Gayatri Spivak, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Lacan, Camille Paglia, and more. There are reviews by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post ("Who killed Roland Barthes? Maybe Umberto Eco has a clue.", 8/23/1017), by Nicholas Daves in the New York Times ("A Postmodern Buddy-Cop Novel Sends Up the World of Semiotics", 8/16/2017), by Anthony Domestico in the San Francisco Chronicle ("‘The Seventh Function of Language,’ by Laurent Binet", 817/2017), etc. And there's a play, scheduled for the Théâtre de Sartrouville in November, and various other venues in France through the spring of 2018. No doubt the movie rights have already been snapped up.

Versions in French and in English are available from the usual places.

I'll probably have more to say after I've read it.

Meanwhile, I'll point readers to the work by Roman Jakobson that provides the book's title. Wikipedia has an article on "Jakobson's Functions of Language", namely the referential, poetic, emotive, conative, phatic, and metalinguistic functions. The source is Jakobson's chapter "Closing statements: Linguistics and Poetics" in Thomas Sebeok, Style in Language, 1960. I have a copy somewhere but can't for the moment locate it, so pending further search, you can rely on Wikipedia.

And here's how Binet introduces the idea. The background, as explained in the NYT review:

In February of 1980, the literary theorist Roland Barthes was hit by a laundry van while crossing the Rue des Ècoles in Paris on his way home from the Collège de France, where he held a chair in semiology. A month later he died of his injuries. […]

Laurent Binet’s “The Seventh Function of Language” imagines this event differently. Binet seizes on a historical fact: Barthes had just attended a lunch hosted by François Mitterrand, then the Socialist candidate for the French presidency. What if, Binet asks, Barthes was murdered? What if the lunch and the death were connected? In Binet’s version, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, an assassin drove the van in order to procure a document that Barthes possessed and any number of parties — Mitterrand; his opponent, the sitting president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing; the Bulgarian intelligence service; the K.G.B.; and every major intellectual figure in France (not to mention the United States and Italy) — desperately wanted. […]

A streetwise police intelligence superintendent, Jacques Bayard, is assigned the task of finding Barthes’s murderers and the missing document, despite his working-class disgust for the “filthy little lefties” of Barthes’s milieu. He dragoons into his service a young semiotician named Simon Herzog as a guide to the world of literary theory, and the two set off on a madcap chase through the high humanist academy of the early 1980s.

Their investigations lead them to a young male prostitute named Hamed, and there's a car chase through the streets of Paris at the end of which Hamed is shot by one of the mysterious pursuers after saying something about the seventh function of language, and…

Simon lui rapporte les dernières paroles d’Hamed. Bayard lui demande ce qu’il sait de cette septième fonction du langage. Éprouvé mais professoral par automatisme, Simon lui explique  : «  Les fonctions du langage sont des catégories linguistiques qui ont jadis été théorisées par un grand linguiste russe du nom de…  »

Simon tells him about Hamed's last words. Bayard asks him what he knows about this seventh function of language. Still in shock, but professorial by instinct, Simon explains: "The functions of language are linguistic categories that were once the subject of a theory by a great Russian linguist named …"

Then the lecture pauses as they go to get a book and associated notes that they recall seeing on Barthes' desk and suddenly realize might be crucial. But there's an an intruder there ahead of them who's taken the material, and after another chase, on foot this time, the thief is shot reaching into his jacket and falls off the Pont Neuf into the Seine.

Quand les plongeurs de la police repêcheront le cadavre, ils trouveront dans la poche de son blouson non pas une arme mais l’exemplaire de Barthes des Essais de linguistique générale et Bayard, à peine séché, demandera à Simon  : «Bordel, mais qui c’est, ce Jakobson?» Alors, enfin, Simon pourra reprendre son exposé.

When the police divers fish the corpse out of the water, they will find in his jacket pocket not a firearm but Barthes’s copy of Essays in General Linguistics, and Bayard, still drying himself, will ask Simon: “For fuck’s sake, who is this Jakobson guy?” And so, at last, Simon will be able to finish his lecture.

Simon lectures him at length on metaphor and metonymy, the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes, the functions of language, etc. 

Jacques Bayard s’allume une cigarette et dit  : «Ça fait six.
—  Pardon  ?
—  Ça fait six fonctions.
—  Ah oui, tiens.
—  Il n’y a pas de septième fonction  ?
—  Hum hum, eh bien… apparemment, si.»
Simon sourit bêtement. Bayard se demande à haute voix pour quoi on paie Simon. Simon rappelle qu’il n’a rien demandé et qu’il est là contre son gré, sur ordre exprès d’un président fasciste à la tête d’un État policier. Néanmoins, en y réfléchissant, ou plutôt en relisant Jakobson, Simon Herzog trouve trace d’une potentielle septième fonction, désignée sous le nom de «  fonction magique ou incantatoire  », dont le mécanisme est décrit comme «  la conversion d’une troisième personne, absente ou inanimée, en destinataire d’un message conatif  ». Et Jakobson donne comme exemple une formule magique lituanienne  : «  Puisse cet orgelet se dessécher, tfu tfu tfu tfu  ». Ouais ouais ouais, se dit Simon.

Jacques Bayard lights a cigarette and says, “That’s six.”
“Sorry?”
“That’s six functions.”
“Ah … yes. Quite.”
“Isn’t there a seventh function?”
“Well, uh … apparently, there is, yes…”
Simon smiles stupidly.
Bayard wonders out loud what Simon is being paid for. Simon reminds him that he did not ask for anything and that he is there against his will, on the express orders of a fascist president who sits at the head of a police state.
Nevertheless, after thinking about it, or rather after rereading Jakobson, Simon Herzog does come up with a possible seventh function, designated as the “magic or incantatory function,” whose mechanism is described as “the conversion of a third person, absent or inanimate, to whom a conative message is addressed.” And Jakobson gives as an example a Lithuanian magical spell: “May this stye dry up, tfu tfu tfu tfu.” Yeah yeah yeah, thinks Simon.

For linguistic lagniappe, here's a passage from the first few pages of the book (the English version, as throughout this post, is from the translation by Sam Taylor):

La sémiologie est un truc très étrange. C’est Ferdinand de Saussure, le fondateur de la linguistique, qui, le premier, en a eu l’intuition. Dans son Cours de linguistique générale, il propose de «  concevoir une science qui étudie la vie des signes au sein de la vie sociale  ». Rien que ça. Il ajoute, en guise de piste pour ceux qui voudront bien s’atteler à la tâche  : «  Elle formerait une partie de la psychologie sociale, et par conséquent de la psychologie générale  ; nous la nommerons sémiologie (du grec sēmeîon, “signe”). Elle nous apprendrait en quoi consistent les signes, quelles lois les régissent. Puisqu’elle n’existe pas encore, on ne peut pas dire ce qu’elle sera  ; mais elle a droit à l’existence, sa place est déterminée d’avance. La linguistique n’est qu’une partie de cette science générale, les lois que découvrira la sémiologie seront applicables à la linguistique, et celle-ci se trouvera ainsi rattachée à un domaine bien défini dans l’ensemble des faits humains.  » J’aimerais que Fabrice Luchini nous relise ce passage, en appuyant sur les mots comme il sait si bien le faire, pour que le monde entier puisse en percevoir, sinon le sens, du moins toute la beauté. Cette intuition géniale, quasi incompréhensible pour ses contemporains (le cours a lieu en 1906), n’a rien perdu, un siècle plus tard, ni de sa puissance ni de son obscurité.

Semiology is a very strange thing. It was Ferdinand de Saussure, the founding father of linguistics, who first dreamed it up. In his Course in General Linguistics, he proposes imagining “a science that studies the life of signs within society.” Yep, that’s all. For those who wish to tackle this, he adds a few guidelines: “It would form a part of social psychology and, consequently, of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeion, ‘sign’). It would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since it does not exist yet, no one can say what it will be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of this general science; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics, and the latter will circumscribe a well-defined area within the mass of anthropological facts.” I wish Anthony Hopkins would reread this passage for us, enunciating each word as he does so well, so that the whole world could at least grasp all its beauty if not its meaning. A century later, this brilliant intuition, which was almost incomprehensible to his contemporaries when the course was taught in 1906, has lost none of its power or its obscurity.

And OK, one last passage, this one describing a workshop at Cornell:

Ce midi, on y retrouve la plupart des intervenants disséminés dans le réfectoire selon une géopolitique que Bayard et Simon ne maîtrisent pas encore. La salle se compose de tables pouvant accueillir six à huit personnes dont aucune n’est complètement occupée mais, Simon et Bayard le sentent dans l’air, il y a clairement des camps.

«J’aimerais bien qu’on me fasse un topo sur les forces en présence», dit Bayard à Simon en choisissant comme plat chaud une double entrecôte avec de la purée, des bananes plantain et du boudin blanc. Le cuisinier noir, qui l’a entendu, lui répond en français  : «Vous voyez la table près de la porte  ? C’est le coin des analytiques. Ils sont en territoire hostile et inférieurs en nombre, alors ils restent groupés.» Il y a Searle, Chomsky et Cruella Redgrave, qui s’appelle en réalité Camille Paglia, une spécialiste de l’histoire de la sexualité, ce qui en fait une concurrente directe de Foucault qu’elle vomit de tout son être. «De l’autre côté, près de la fenêtre vous avez une belle brochette, comme vous dites en France  : Lyotard, Guattari, Cixous, et Foucault au milieu, you know him, of course, le grand chauve qui parle fort, right? Kristeva est là-bas, avec Morris Zapp et Sylvère Lotringer, le boss de la revue Sémiotexte. Dans le coin, tout seul, le vieil homme avec sa cravate en laine et ses cheveux weird, je ne sais pas qui c’est. (Drôle d’allure, se dit Bayard.) La jeune lady avec les cheveux violets, derrière lui, non plus.» Son aide-cuisinier portoricain jette un coup d’œil et commente sur un ton neutre  : «Sûrement des heideggériens.»

It is lunchtime, and most of the conference’s speakers are scattered through the refectory in a geopolitical pattern that Bayard and Simon have not yet figured out. The room consists of tables that can seat six to eight, none of them fully occupied. But— Simon and Bayard can scent this in the air— there are clearly various camps.

“I wish I could get a rundown on the different forces here,” says Bayard to Simon, choosing a double rib steak with mashed potato, plantains, and boudin blanc. The black chef, who overheard him, responds in French: “You see the table near the door? That’s where the analytics sit. They’re in enemy territory, and they’re outnumbered, so they’re sticking together.” There is Searle, Chomsky, and Cruella Redgrave, whose real name is Camille Paglia, a specialist in the history of sexuality and a direct rival of Foucault, whom she detests with all her being. “On the other side, near the window, there’s a belle brochette, as you say in France: Lyotard, Guattari, Cixous, and Foucault in the middle— you know him, of course, the tall bald guy who’s talking, right? Kristeva is over there, with Morris Zapp and Sylvère Lotringer, the boss of the magazine Sémiotext( e). In the corner, on his own, the old guy with the wool tie and the weird hair, I don’t know who that is. [Strange-looking man, thinks Bayard.] And the young lady with the violet hair behind him? I don’t know her, either.” His Puerto Rican sous-chef glances over and remarks tonelessly: “Probably Heideggerians.”

Update — It's possible that Simon's rereading of Jakobson might have involved "Metalanguage as a linguistic problem", which apparently was the Presidential Address at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, December 27, 1956. This is from the version in Jakobson's Selected Writings, 1985:

The traditional model of language as elucidated in particular by Karl Buhler was confined to these three functions — emotive, conative, and referential — and to the three apexes of this model — the first person of the addresser, the second person of the addressee, and the "third person" proper — someone or something spoken of. Certain additional verbal functions can be easily inferred from this triadic model. Thus the magic, incantatory function is chiefly some kind of conversion of an absent or inanimate "third person" into an addressee of a conative message. "May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu" (Lithuanian spell). "Water, queen river, daybreak! Send grief beyond the blue sea, to the sea-bottom, like a grey stone never to rise from the sea-bottom, may grief never come to burden the light heart of God's servant, may grief be removed and sink away." (North Russian incantation). "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Aj-a-lon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed ***" (Josh. 10:12).

 

August 24, 2017 @ 7:39 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and culture, Language and fashion

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