The Seventh Function of Language Page 15

  Prolonged applause. The old man seems excited: “Ah, ah! The kid knows his Classics. That was good stuff. Socrates, the guy who never wrote a book—a no-brainer, in this context! He’s a bit like the Elvis of rhetoric, isn’t he? And, tactically, he played safe because defending the spoken word legitimizes the club’s activity, of course; the mise en abyme! The other one will have to respond now. He has to find something solid to base his argument on, too. If it were me, I’d do it like Derrida: strip the whole thing of context, explain that a conversation is no more personalized than a text or a letter because no one, when he speaks or when he listens, really knows who he is or who the other person is. There is never any context. It’s a con! Context does not exist. That’s the way to go! Well, that’d be how I’d refute it, anyway. First you have to demolish your opponent’s beautiful edifice, and afterward, you just have to be precise. The superiority of writing is a bit academic, you see, it’s pretty technical, but it’s not exactly a bundle of laughs. Me? Yeah, I took night classes at the Sorbonne. I was a mailman. Ah! Shh, here it comes! Go on, my son, show us how you won your rank!”

  And the whole room falls silent when the orator, an older, graying man, more composed and less ardent in his body language, stands ready to speak. He looks at the audience, his opponent, the jury, and he says, lifting his index finger, one word:

  “Plato.”

  Then he says nothing, long enough to produce the feeling of unease that always accompanies a prolonged silence. And when he senses that the audience is wondering why he is wasting so many precious seconds of his speaking time, he explains:

  “My honorable adversary attributed his quotation to Socrates, but you knew better, didn’t you?”

  Silence.

  “He meant Plato. Without whose writings Socrates, his thought, and his magnificent defense of the spoken word in Phaedo, which my honorable adversary quoted for us almost in its entirety, would have remained unknown to us.”

  Silence.

  “Thank you for your attention.” He sits down.

  The entire room turns toward his opponent. If he wishes, he can speak again and engage in a debate, but, looking very pale, he says nothing. He has no need to wait for the verdict of the three judges to know that he has lost.

  Slowly, courageously, the young man walks forward and places his hand flat on the judges’ table. The whole room holds its breath. The smokers suck nervously on their cigarettes. Everyone thinks he can hear the echo of his own breathing.

  The man sitting in the middle of the jury lifts a cleaver and chops off the young man’s little finger.

  The victim does not cry out, but folds up in two. In a cathedral-like silence, his wound is immediately cleaned and bandaged. The severed phalanx is picked up, but Simon does not see if it is thrown away or kept somewhere, to be exhibited with others in labeled jars revealing the date and subject of the debate.

  The voice rings out once again: “Praise to the duelists!” The audience chants back: “Praise to the duelists!”

  In the graveyard silence, the old man explains in a whisper: “Generally, when you lose, you wait quite a while before you try your luck again. It’s a good system: it weeds out the compulsive challengers.”

  45

  This story has a blind spot that is also its genesis: Barthes’s lunch with Mitterrand. This is the crucial scene that has not taken place. And yet it did take place … Jacques Bayard and Simon Herzog will never know, never knew what happened that day, what was said. They could barely even get hold of the guest list. But I can, maybe … After all, it’s all a question of method, and I know how to proceed: interrogate the witnesses, corroborate, discard any tenuous testimonies, confront these partial memories with the reality of history. And then, if need be … You know what I mean. There is more to be done with that day. February 25, 1980, has not yet told us everything. That’s the virtue of a novel: it’s never too late.

  46

  “Yes, what Paris needs is an opera house.”

  Barthes wishes he were elsewhere. He has better things to do than make small talk. He regrets having agreed to this lunch: his leftist friends will give him hell again, although at least Deleuze will be happy. Foucault, of course, will utter a few contemptuous barbs, and make sure they are repeated by others.

  “Arab fiction no longer hesitates to question its limits. It wants to struggle out of the straitjacket of classicism, break free from the conceptual novel…”

  This is probably the price he has to pay for having eaten lunch with Giscard. “A very successful grand bourgeois”? Yes, certainly, but these bourgeois have done pretty well, too … Come on, once the wine’s been poured, you have to drink it. And actually, it is pretty good, this white. What is it? Chardonnay, I reckon.

  “Have you read the latest Moravia? I like Leonardo Sciascia. Do you read Italian?”

  What distinguishes them? Nothing, in principle.

  “Do you like Bergman?”

  Look at the way they stand, speak, dress … Without a shadow of a doubt the habitus of the Right, as Bourdieu would say.

  “With the possible exception of Picasso, no other artist can rival Michelangelo’s critical standing. And yet nothing has been said about the democratic nature of his work!”

  And me? Do I have right-wing habitus? Being badly dressed is not enough to get off the hook. Barthes touches the back of his chair to check that his old jacket is still there. Calm down. No one’s going to steal it. Ha! You’re thinking like a bourgeois.

  “Modernity? Pfft! Giscard dreams of a feudal France. We’ll see if the French people are looking for a master or a guide.”

  He doesn’t so much speak as plead. Every inch a lawyer. Some good smells coming from the kitchen.

  “It’s coming, it’s almost ready! And you, my good sir, what are you working on at the moment?”

  On words. A smile. A knowing look. No need to go into details. A little Proust, that always goes down well.

  “You won’t believe me, but I have an aunt who knew the Guermantes.” The young actress is quite spiky. Very French.

  I feel tired. What I really wanted was to take an anti-rhetorical path. But it’s too late now. Barthes sighs sadly. He hates being bored, and yet so many opportunities are offered to him, and he accepts them without really knowing why. But today is a little different. It’s not as if he didn’t have anything better to do.

  “I’m friends with Michel Tournier. He’s not at all as wild as you’d imagine, ha ha.”

  Oh, look, fish. Hence the white.

  “Come and sit down, ‘Jacques’! You’re not going to spend the whole meal in the kitchen, are you?”

  The curly-haired young man with goatlike features finishes serving his hot pot and comes to join us. He leans on the back of Barthes’s chair before sitting down next to him.

  “It’s a cautriade: a mix of different fish. There’s red mullet, whiting, sole, mackerel, along with shellfish and vegetables, spiced up by a dash of vinaigrette, and I put a bit of curry in it with a pinch of tarragon. Bon appétit!”

  Oh yes, that’s good. It’s chic and at the same time working-class. Barthes has often written about food: steak-frites, the simple ham sandwich, milk and wine … But this is something else, obviously. It has an aura of simplicity, but it has been cooked and prepared with effort, care, love. And also, always, a show of strength. He has already theorized about this in his book on Japan: Western food—accumulated, dignified, swollen into the majestic, linked to some prestigious operation—always tends toward excess, abundance, copiousness; Eastern food goes in the opposite direction, it blossoms into the infinitesimal: the future of the cucumber is not its piling up or its thickening, but its division.

  “It’s a Breton fishermen’s meal: it was cooked originally using seawater. The vinaigrette was meant to counterbalance the salt’s thirst-inducing effect.”

  Memories of Tokyo … To divide the baguette, pull it apart, pick at it, spread it open, instead of cutting and gripping it, as we d
o with our cutlery; never assault the food …

  Barthes does not object when his glass is filled again. Around the table, the guests eat in a somewhat intimidated silence, and he observes that little man with the hard mouth who vacuums up his mouthfuls of whiting with a light sucking sound that is proof of a good bourgeois education.

  “I declared that power was property. That is not entirely false, of course.”

  Mitterrand puts down his spoon. The silent listeners stop eating to indicate to the little man that they are concentrating on what he says.

  If Japanese cuisine is always prepared in front of the person who will eat it (a distinguishing mark of this cuisine), it is perhaps because it is important to consecrate the death of what we honor by this spectacle …

  It’s as if they’re afraid to make a sound, like the audience at a theater.

  “But it’s not true either. As I think you know better than I do, isn’t that so?”

  No Japanese dish possesses a center (an alimentary center, implied for us by the rite that consists in ordering the meal, in surrounding or coating the dish); everything ornaments everything else: primarily because on the table, on the plate, the food is always a collection of fragments …

  “The real power is language.”

  Mitterrand smiles. His voice has taken on a fawning tone Barthes didn’t suspect it of possessing, and he realizes that the politician is talking directly to him. Farewell, Tokyo. The moment he feared (but which he knew was inevitable) has arrived: when he must give the reply and do what is expected of him; play the semiologist, or at least the intellectual vaguely specialized in language. Hoping his terseness will be taken for profundity, he says: “Especially under a democratic regime.”

  Still smiling, Mitterrand says, “Really?” It is hard to tell whether this is a request for elaboration, a polite agreement, or a discreet objection. The whipping boy, who is clearly responsible for this meeting, decides to intervene, out of fear, perhaps, that the conversation may die a premature death: “As Goebbels said, ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver’…” Barthes does not have time to explain the significance of this quotation in its context before Mitterrand dryly corrects his underling: “No, that was Baldur von Schirach.” Embarrassed silence around the table. “You must excuse Monsieur Lang, who, although he was born before the war, is too young to remember it. Isn’t that right, ‘Jacques’?” Mitterrand narrows his eyes like a Japanese man. He pronounces “Jack” the French way. Why, at this instant, does Barthes have the impression that something is afoot between him and this little man with the piercing gaze? As if this lunch had been organized purely for him; as if the other guests were there only to allay suspicion, as if they were decoys or, worse, accomplices. And yet, this is not the first cultural lunch organized for Mitterrand: he has one every month. Surely, thinks Barthes, he didn’t have all the others just to provide an alibi.

  Outside, what sounds like a horse-drawn carriage is heard passing along Rue des Blancs-Manteaux.

  Barthes analyzes himself quickly: given the circumstances and the document folded in the inside pocket of his jacket, it’s only logical that he should be prone to surges of paranoia. He decides to speak again, partly to dilute the embarrassment of the young man with the curly brown hair, who’s still smiling, if somewhat contritely: “The great eras of rhetoric always correspond with republics: Athens, Rome, France … Socrates, Cicero, Robespierre … Different kinds of eloquence, admittedly, linked to different eras, but all unfolded like a tapestry over the canvas of democracy.” Mitterrand, who looks interested, objects: “Since our friend ‘Jacques’ decided to bring the war into our conversation, I ought to remind you that Hitler was a great orator.” And, he adds, without giving his listeners any sign of irony they might cling to: “De Gaulle, too. In his way.”

  Resigned to playing along, Barthes asks: “And Giscard?”

  As if he had been waiting for this all along, as if these preliminaries had no other purpose than to bring the conversation to exactly this point, Mitterrand leans back in his chair: “Giscard is a good technician. His strength is his precise knowledge of himself, of his strengths and weaknesses. He knows he is short of breath, but his phrasing is perfectly matched to the rhythm of his breathing. A subject, a verb, a direct complement. A period, no commas: because that would lead him into the unknown.” He pauses to give the obliging smiles time to spread across his guests’ faces, then goes on: “And there need not be any link between two sentences. Each is enough in itself, as smooth and full as an egg. One egg, two eggs, three eggs, a series of eggs, regular as a metronome.” Encouraged by the prudent chuckles offered from around the table, Mitterrand begins to warm up: “The well-oiled machine. I knew a musician once who claimed his metronome had more genius than Beethoven … Naturally, it’s a thrilling spectacle. And highly educational, into the bargain. Everyone understands that an egg is an egg, no?”

  Eager to maintain his role as cultural mediator, Jack Lang intervenes: “That is exactly what Monsieur Barthes condemns in his work: the ravages of tautology.”

  Barthes confirms: “Yes, well … let’s say the false demonstration par excellence, the useless equation: A equals A, ‘Racine is Racine.’ It’s zero degree thought.”

  Though delighted by this convergence of theoretical viewpoints, Mitterrand is not sidetracked from the main flow of his speech: “Exactly! That’s exactly it. ‘Poland is Poland, France is France.’” He puts on a whiny voice: “Go on, then, explain the opposite! What I mean is that to a rare degree Giscard has the art of stating the obvious.”

  Barthes, obligingly, concurs: “The obvious is not demonstrated. It demonstrates.”

  Mitterrand repeats, triumphantly: “No, the obvious is not demonstrated.” Just then, a voice is heard at the other end of the table: “And yet if we follow your demonstration it seems obvious that victory cannot escape you. The French people are not that stupid. They won’t fall twice for that impostor’s tricks.”

  The speaker is a young man with thinning hair and pouty lips, a bit like Giscard, who, unlike the other guests, does not seem impressed by the little man. Mitterrand turns spitefully toward him: “Oh, I know what you think, Laurent! Like most of our contemporaries, you think that he is the most dazzling performer of all.”

  Laurent Fabius protests, with an expression of disdain: “I did not say that…”

  Mitterrand, aggressively: “Oh yes you did! Oh yes you did! What a good television viewer you make! It’s because there are so many good television viewers like you that Giscard is so good on television.”

  Fabius does not flinch. Mitterrand gets more and more worked up: “I acknowledge that he’s marvelous at explaining how nothing is ever his fault. Prices went up in September? It’s the beef, by Jove. [Barthes notes Mitterrand’s use of “by Jove.”] In October, it’s melons. In November, it’s gasoline, electricity, the railways, and rents. How could prices not go up? Brilliant.” His face is disfigured by a malicious grin. His voice grows husky: “And we are wonder-struck at being initiated so easily into the mysteries of the economy, at being allowed to follow this erudite guide into the minutiae of high finance.” He is shouting now: “Oh yes, oh yes, it’s the beef! Those damn melons! The treacherous railways! Long live Giscard!”

  The guests are petrified, but Fabius, lighting a cigarette, replies: “A bit over the top.”

  Mitterrand’s smile becomes charming again, his voice returns to normal, and, without anyone knowing whether he is replying to Fabius or attempting to reassure his other guests, he says: “I was joking, of course. Although, not entirely. But let’s be honest: it takes a high degree of intelligence to do such a good job convincing people that governing is about not being responsible for anything.”

  Jack Lang slips away.

  Barthes thinks that what he’s up against here is a very good specimen of the manic-obsessive: this man wants power, and in his adversary he has crystallized all the rancor he might feel for a destiny that has den
ied him power for too long. It’s as if he is already raging about his next defeat, and at the same time one senses he is ready to do anything except give up. Perhaps he doesn’t believe in his victory, but it is in his nature to fight for it nevertheless. Or maybe life made him like that. Defeat is undoubtedly the best teacher. Suddenly filled by a faint melancholy, Barthes lights a cigarette as a smokescreen. But defeat can also make a man get stuck in a rut. Barthes wonders what this little man really wants. His determination can’t be questioned, but isn’t he trapped in a system? 1965, 1974, 1978 … Each one a sort of glorious defeat, for which he personally is not blamed. So he feels empowered to persevere in his raison d’être, and his raison d’être, of course, is politics. But perhaps it is also defeat.

  Fabius speaks up again: “Giscard is a brilliant orator, and you know it. Not only that, but his style is tailor-made for TV. That’s what it means to be modern.”

  Mitterrand, faux-conciliatory: “But of course, my dear Laurent, I’ve been sure of that for quite some time. I was already an admirer of his presentational gifts when he used to speak at the National Assembly. Back then, I remarked that he was the best orator I’d heard since … Pierre Cot. Yes, a radical who was a minister during the Popular Front era. But I digress. Monsieur Fabius is so young, he barely remembers the Programme Commun, so as for the Popular Front … [Timid laughter around the table.] But, if you insist, let us return to Giscard, that beacon of eloquence! The clarity of his discourse, the fluency of his delivery, studded with pauses that made his listeners feel they were allowed to think, like slow-motion replays on televised sport, even the way he holds his head … it all readied Giscard for invading our television screens. No doubt he put in a great deal of graft to supplement his natural abilities. The age of the amateur is over! But he got his reward. He makes the television breathe.”

  Fabius is still unimpressed. “Well, it seems to work rather well. People listen to him, and there are even some who vote for him.”

  Mitterrand replies, as if to himself: “I wonder, though. You talk about a modern style. I think he’s old-fashioned. Heartfelt, literary rhetoric is mocked these days. [Barthes hears the echo of the 1974 debate, still an open wound after his defeat.] And rightly so, more often than not. [Oh, how this admission must have pained him! Oh, how hard Mitterrand must have worked on his self-control to reach this point!] The affectations of language offend the ear like makeup offends the eye.”