Semiological reading: "La Septième Fonction du Langage" by Laurent Binet

A first for Himoverthere, at least since the inception of this blog: a book in French! I have always rather thought that there were enough books in English to keep me fully occupied, so, franchement, why add a complicating factor to my leisure reading. Lazy, yes, I know... 

In this case, however, the book was a gift from a French friend. We're talking about someone with whom I almost always speak English and who, while he is irredeemably and irrepressibly French in most ways, is anything but a cultural imperialist. Consequently, I was inclined to pay heed to this unusual recommendation.  As we will see, just as well.

Parenthetically, there has actually been one non-English language book reviewed here before, Gomorra, the astounding and courageous exposé of the Neapolitan mafia by Roberto Saviano. In that case I could at least direct non-Italian speakers to a translation (and a film). Here, however, I can't find any trace of a translation into English, and indeed I wonder whether it ever will exist, given just how French this book is. So apologies in advance for any frustration I might create among those who don't have the option of reading the French original. 

OK, so the book. 

It starts with a hypothesis. The famous semiologist, Roland Barthes, was killed in a stupid and unnecessary road traffic accident (as most road traffic accidents are) in Paris in 1980. But what if it wasn't an accident? Barthes, as it happens (this is true), was fresh from lunching with then putative presidential candidate, François Mitterand. Might foul play have been involved?

From this premise follows an truly extraordinary and most diverting story. Yes, it appears, play was indeed foul. Barthes, when picked up off the road and whisked to hospital, was oddly without any personal identity document, indeed anything about his person (this, I have read, is also true). As the story unravels, we discover that a document of extreme potency was stolen from him in the course of the "accident", a document with the power to influence political and historical events, a document revealing to its readers the (hitherto hypothetical) seventh function of language.


The story which ensues mixes whodunnit, burlesque, academic satire and semiological reflection, with a glorious French panache. At the centre of the story are an odd duo, grizzled and slightly reactionary police inspector Bayard, who is charged by no less a personage than President Giscard d'Estaing with the recovery of the missing document, and the requisitioned young leftie academic Simon Herzog, who is Bayard's (and our) interface with the bizarre and febrile academic world of the period. Besides these two, whose adventures take them from the cafés des intellectuels of Paris to the ferment of the Italian anni di piombo in Bologna and Venice, from the trippy campuses of the United States to the inner sanctums of French political power, from the louche Turkish baths of a burgeoning gay scene in Paris to the curious ceremonies of a secret international society dedicated to rhetoric, we encounter a wonderfully range of dramatis personae. Many - most even - of these are real figures, some of them even still living. We meet political figures - Giscard, Mitterand, Jack Lang, Michel Poniatowski, Laurent Fabius, Jacques Attali, even Yuri Andropov - as well as luminaries of the academic world, names such as Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Sollers, Althusser, Cixous, Eco, Searle, Jakobson. As a bonus, we even encounter fictional characters from other works, notably David Lodge's gloriously posturing American deconstructionist, Morris Zapp, whose name I first remember encountering in the course of an Oxford tutorial in which my tutor looked at me quizzically over his half-moon glasses and related the academic excess embodied in this figure, adding, perhaps with a hint of professorial envy, that Zapp's world did seem to include rather a lot of sex. 

Fun-loving erudition: author Laurent Binet

Which is also true of Binet's fictional world. The characters, be they purely fictional or real historical personages, are not spared. Frankly, I'm not sure UK libel law would allow this find of thing. I am told, for example, that the critic and writer Philippe Sollers, still alive, is far from happy about the doings of his fictional alter-ego. Read the book, you will see why.  Very much so. Whatever the feelings of individuals though, this is joyously transgressive, witty, erudite, page-turning stuff. Binet pulls off the trick, one I would not have expected of one of those intimidating French books disdaining anything as superficially anglo-saxon as a cover illustration, of combining erudition and fun, profundity with almost slapstick humour. At one level we have a ribald story of skulduggery and misadventure, at another we have a deconstructionist reflection on the nature of language and narrative...

I find it hard to tell if everyone would react to this book in the same way. For me it hit the spot not only for its intrinsic merits, but also because of its evocation of a world and a period I recall well. The turn of the decade from the seventies to the eighties, the political era which saw Thatcher, Reagan and Mitterand come to power, the Cold War shenanigans, the murky political extremism in Italy, the academic excitement of the French Theory and the heyday of literary criticism, these all defined my personal period of transition from school to university and beyond, a period which, with its ideological conflicts and academic self-absorption, seems so far away now, yet so sharply recalled. I wonder in fact whether I might be the perfect reader for this... 

All I can really say is that this novel is a truly wondrous achievement. Binet had huge fun writing this - you can feel it in every page. If you read French and fancy some up-market reading fun, especially if you were around twenty in the early eighties, then it's hard to see how you could do much better than this.

The great semiologist and possibly keeper of
state secrets, Roland Barthes