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A review by fionnualalirsdottir
La Septième Fonction du langage by Laurent Binet
On the second page of this novel, in a scene set during the Spring of 1980, the author's first person voice suddenly interrupts the omniscient narrator to wonder about a tiny detail of the scenario the narrator is in the process of setting up. The author's voice is speaking to the reader from thirty-five years after the event the narrator is describing, and since the event really happened—a famous literary figure, knocked down while crossing the street—accuracy in the setting should be important. But the detail he focuses on seems quite trivial: he wonders if the chain of shops called Vieux Camper (Old Camper) were present in Paris's Latin Quarter in 1980, which is something he could easily have looked up on Wikipedia. In any case, I didn't immediately see how that chain of shops could be relevant to the scene that was playing out...
I wondered about that for a few pages until more interesting intrusions by the author and more curious details absorbed my attention. Indeed, details caught my eye constantly in the narrative so that I soon felt like a detective looking for clues, which was apt enough as this novel quickly becomes a detective story, a policier as they say in French, but a very different policier to the usual one in that the accident that launches the fictional investigation into the whereabouts of the mysterious 'seventh function of language' really did happen on a street in Paris in 1980.
Yes, Laurent Binet has set up his investigative tent on the shifting sands between reality and fiction, and the reader needs to have a compass handy, or at least consult Safari, because more than half the characters are real figures in the literary/philosophical/political world of the 1980s, and not just in Paris university circles but in those of Bologna and Cornell too. We may be familiar with their names but we find ourselves needing to check Wiki facts against Binet 'facts' just to keep ourselves orientated:
—Ah! So Roland Barthes didn't die for a full month after being knocked down while crossing the street. I didn't know that!
And how convenient for the plot that Louis Althusser's wife was killed in 1980 too!
—Also convenient is the fact that 1980 was when Giscard d'Estaing and Francois Mitterrand were confronting each other for the second time in the French Presidential campaign, the more eloquent Giscard almost certain to win. And what a surprise when, in 1981, he eventually didn't. Around the same time as that election, Bjorn Borg confronted Ivan Lendl in Roland-Garros to another unexected outcome. Binet picked his moment in time well.
—And hey, what do you know, Roland Barthes and his colleague Michel Foucault, then in their late fifties and early sixties, used to frequent the same bathhouses. Was that where Binet was going with his 'Vieux Camper' reference, I wonder.
—Where did I hear of the American academic Morris Zapp? Aha! He's a David Lodge character from precisely the eighties!
—And how interesting that Philippe Sollers and the super sharp Julia Kristeva were a couple in real life as well as in this novel. That's another thing I didn't know. But all the same, surely Sollers never had an encounter with a pruning shears! Although, come to think of it, his prose might have benefitted from pruning given the long 'turns' he has in this book!
—Ah hah! Jacques Derrida, that master of the power of language, really did visit Cornell in the eighties, but, hold on, HE didn't die until 2004!
M Binet, vous n'êtes pas dieu, quand même!
Laurent Binet travels around the world like some Deus ex Machina, arranging and rearranging history to suit his purposes. When it comes to his fictional characters, we accept that he can do that. For them, Laurent Binet IS god. He can jump in and save them spectacularly if it suits him even at the risk of causing his readers to raise an eyebrow—a blue Renault Fuego turns up incredibly often just at crucial moments.
But being God, Binet kills as well as saves, which is ok too, except when one of those he kills is a real-life person who didn't obligingly die in 1980 as Barthes and Althusser's wife had done. La vie n'est pas un roman, we whisper in Binet's direction but he has chosen not to heed any reminders about life not being as convenient as fiction.
So yes, Laurent Binet takes liberties, and not only with life and death issues but with the private details of real people's lives. I'm guessing that among the real-life characters who were still living in 2015 when this book appeared, there were a few bruised egos, Philippe Sollers' and Julia Kristeva's, not the least.
Umberto Eco (whose 'Name of the Rose' appeared in 1980 coincidentally) was probably less upset when he read about himself in this book. I imagine him muttering, l'uomo è la misura di tutte le cose, and he wouldn't be wrong as regards how the plot of this book plays out, in any case.
There's a character who, though born in the early pages for the benefit of the plot, refuses to die when the plot ends. His name is Simon, and Simon proves himself to be more than the measure of all the various thug elements which the author contrives to place in his path, and with increasingly violent outcomes as the story progresses. Simon should be dead by the end, but like James Bond, he rises again, and again—and always gets the girl too (it's not for nothing that he was lecturing on the semiotics of James Bond films when the narrator introduced him into the story on page 38).
But if Simon survives the book, it's because the author has shared something quite powerful with his main character, a tool that Q never made available to Bond: the power of language. Simon knows how to decode the world, and he knows how to make use of his findings. As hero of his own story, he takes charge of the ending in spite of the author sending in enemy factions at the last minute. Simon remains the 'living' proof that the one who controls language controls power.
…………………………
Of course this book inevitably had me thinking about politics today and the role of language in controlling power. While Binet created a hopeful scenario near the end of the story by imagining how a young Hawaiian student in Colombia University in 1980 might have gained his famous rhetorical skills, politicians no longer need such skills today. We see leaders getting elected by endlessly repeating the same catch phrases made up of three or four simple words: Get Brexit Done, Make America Great Again.
And now that I think of it, three and four make seven...
I wondered about that for a few pages until more interesting intrusions by the author and more curious details absorbed my attention. Indeed, details caught my eye constantly in the narrative so that I soon felt like a detective looking for clues, which was apt enough as this novel quickly becomes a detective story, a policier as they say in French, but a very different policier to the usual one in that the accident that launches the fictional investigation into the whereabouts of the mysterious 'seventh function of language' really did happen on a street in Paris in 1980.
Yes, Laurent Binet has set up his investigative tent on the shifting sands between reality and fiction, and the reader needs to have a compass handy, or at least consult Safari, because more than half the characters are real figures in the literary/philosophical/political world of the 1980s, and not just in Paris university circles but in those of Bologna and Cornell too. We may be familiar with their names but we find ourselves needing to check Wiki facts against Binet 'facts' just to keep ourselves orientated:
—Ah! So Roland Barthes didn't die for a full month after being knocked down while crossing the street. I didn't know that!
And how convenient for the plot that Louis Althusser's wife was killed in 1980 too!
—Also convenient is the fact that 1980 was when Giscard d'Estaing and Francois Mitterrand were confronting each other for the second time in the French Presidential campaign, the more eloquent Giscard almost certain to win. And what a surprise when, in 1981, he eventually didn't. Around the same time as that election, Bjorn Borg confronted Ivan Lendl in Roland-Garros to another unexected outcome. Binet picked his moment in time well.
—And hey, what do you know, Roland Barthes and his colleague Michel Foucault, then in their late fifties and early sixties, used to frequent the same bathhouses. Was that where Binet was going with his 'Vieux Camper' reference, I wonder.
—Where did I hear of the American academic Morris Zapp? Aha! He's a David Lodge character from precisely the eighties!
—And how interesting that Philippe Sollers and the super sharp Julia Kristeva were a couple in real life as well as in this novel. That's another thing I didn't know. But all the same, surely Sollers never had an encounter with a pruning shears! Although, come to think of it, his prose might have benefitted from pruning given the long 'turns' he has in this book!
—Ah hah! Jacques Derrida, that master of the power of language, really did visit Cornell in the eighties, but, hold on, HE didn't die until 2004!
M Binet, vous n'êtes pas dieu, quand même!
Laurent Binet travels around the world like some Deus ex Machina, arranging and rearranging history to suit his purposes. When it comes to his fictional characters, we accept that he can do that. For them, Laurent Binet IS god. He can jump in and save them spectacularly if it suits him even at the risk of causing his readers to raise an eyebrow—a blue Renault Fuego turns up incredibly often just at crucial moments.
But being God, Binet kills as well as saves, which is ok too, except when one of those he kills is a real-life person who didn't obligingly die in 1980 as Barthes and Althusser's wife had done. La vie n'est pas un roman, we whisper in Binet's direction but he has chosen not to heed any reminders about life not being as convenient as fiction.
So yes, Laurent Binet takes liberties, and not only with life and death issues but with the private details of real people's lives. I'm guessing that among the real-life characters who were still living in 2015 when this book appeared, there were a few bruised egos, Philippe Sollers' and Julia Kristeva's, not the least.
Umberto Eco (whose 'Name of the Rose' appeared in 1980 coincidentally) was probably less upset when he read about himself in this book. I imagine him muttering, l'uomo è la misura di tutte le cose, and he wouldn't be wrong as regards how the plot of this book plays out, in any case.
There's a character who, though born in the early pages for the benefit of the plot, refuses to die when the plot ends. His name is Simon, and Simon proves himself to be more than the measure of all the various thug elements which the author contrives to place in his path, and with increasingly violent outcomes as the story progresses. Simon should be dead by the end, but like James Bond, he rises again, and again—and always gets the girl too (it's not for nothing that he was lecturing on the semiotics of James Bond films when the narrator introduced him into the story on page 38).
But if Simon survives the book, it's because the author has shared something quite powerful with his main character, a tool that Q never made available to Bond: the power of language. Simon knows how to decode the world, and he knows how to make use of his findings. As hero of his own story, he takes charge of the ending in spite of the author sending in enemy factions at the last minute. Simon remains the 'living' proof that the one who controls language controls power.
…………………………
Of course this book inevitably had me thinking about politics today and the role of language in controlling power. While Binet created a hopeful scenario near the end of the story by imagining how a young Hawaiian student in Colombia University in 1980 might have gained his famous rhetorical skills, politicians no longer need such skills today. We see leaders getting elected by endlessly repeating the same catch phrases made up of three or four simple words: Get Brexit Done, Make America Great Again.
And now that I think of it, three and four make seven...