Deadly words
Laurent Binet’s first novel, “HHhH,” walked a bit of a tightrope. In writing metafiction about the attempted assassination of the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, Binet almost guaranteed that he’d take a tumble. Too much selfreflexive playfulness and he’d lose the moral vision that such a story required; too much focus on Heydrich’s brutality and he’d lose the desired sense of aesthetic play, toppling instead into sententiousness. Amazingly, Binet pulled it off. “HHhH” received great reviews and was even adapted into a feature film.
In his second novel, Binet has set himself an even harder task. “The Seventh Function of Language” is a pulpy thriller, with all that designation entails. Suspicious deaths? The novel opens in 1980 with a major character, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes, being hit by a laundry van under murky circumstances.
Stolen documents? They’re present, too: Barthes is in possession of “a vital document that may pose a threat to national security.” After his death, the document goes missing, and government agents and private citizens desperately try to locate it.
Political intrigue? We’ve got that also. Just before his final walk, Barthes ate lunch with François Mitterrand, the French politician who at the time was campaigning for the presidency. The current president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, soon is involved in the investigation of Barthes’ death, too. (Here and throughout, Binet mixes history with invention. Barthes did have lunch with Mitterrand and then got hit by a laundry truck, though it’s unlikely, to say the least, that it was a political hit job.)
Yet this thrillerish content is driven by, of all things, literary theory — more specifically, by the structuralist and post-structuralist fever that had overtaken the humanities by 1980. It’s not just that Barthes is at the center of the novel’s mysteries. That “vital document” I mentioned? It relates to the work of Roman Jakobson, an influential Russian linguist who outlined the six functions of language — don’t worry if you skipped Structuralism 101: Binet includes a concise summary of all six — but whom the novel imagines as secretly having posited a seventh.
This is the “magic or incantatory function,” a use of language that enables “the conversion of a third person, absent or inanimate, to whom a connotative message is addressed.” In other words, it’s the get-anyone-to-do-anything-just-by-saying-it function of language. Master this, and you’ve mastered the world. No wonder that the French president, and his challenger, and some Bulgarian assassins, and some ambitious academics all want to get their hands on it — and no wonder Barthes is killed for it.
Even as the pages rip by and the melodrama piles up — more murders, a suicide, some ritualized disfigurements — Binet acknowledges and delights in the silliness of it all. Michel Foucault pontificates on the history of sexuality while being serviced by a gigolo, and it’s impossible to “tell if he’s abandoning himself to pleasure or to thinking.” Judith Butler engages in a threesome with a detective and Hélène Cixous.
If one strand of the novel elevates theorists to worldhistorical importance, another brings them back down into the muck. The novel is three parts Tom Clancy to two parts Theory SparkNotes to one part sex romp.
So does it all work? Not as much as one would hope. Partly it’s a problem of what Jakobson calls the “conative” function of language. Who, exactly, is the imagined audience for this book? To be sure, readers of theory will chuckle over the novel’s many cameos — there’s John Searle! there’s Jonathan Culler! — and happily identify its Easter eggs. (Umberto Eco “listens with interest to the story of a lost manuscript for which people are being killed. He sees a man walk past holding a bouquet of roses.” Thus the birth of Eco’s blockbuster novel “The Name of the Rose.”)
But the Wikipedia-level engagement with ideas — a page on signification here, a paragraph on rhetoric and semiology there — will leave such readers unmoved. The theory isn’t made new, and the theorists are delightfully absurd but also terribly onenote: Eco appears incapable of talking about anything other than semiotics, and so on.
As for those who haven’t read Derrida, their eyes likely will glaze over during the long debates at the Logos Club, a secret debating association, or when a passage on the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language is plopped down for no dramatic reason. The ideas are too thin for theory lovers and too thick for theory novices.
Binet has written a perfect beach read about semiotics — no small feat. Yet he doesn’t show why we, professors and common readers alike, should care about theory once we’ve closed the book. By making the stakes of its ideas so cheekily high, “The Seventh Function of Language” drains them of their actual excitement. Binet gives us theory as melodrama, but he doesn’t give us theory as drama — that is, as a source and subject of real significance.
Anthony Domestico is the books columnist for Commonweal. Email: books@sfchronicle.com