The Seventh Function of Language is the second novel by French writer Laurent Binet. His first, HHhH, was well received in France and the world over, winning him the Prix Goncourt, a prestigious prize given for the ‘most imaginative prose work of the year’. While his debut, a metafiction set in Nazi Germany, narrates the assassination of the Nazi general Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 by two Czech resistance fighters, his follow-up work is a spoof thriller centred on the death of the famous linguist Roland Barthes. The theme and the title of the book are based upon the supposed seventh function of language, which — in addition to the six functions as presented by the linguistic theorist Roman Jakobson — can enable those who know it to have absolute power over others, and there are definitely many who want to have such absolute power.

The novel begins with a historical fact: in Paris on Feb 25, 1980, the famous French literary critic and philosopher Barthes was hit by a laundry van. Earlier, he had had lunch with Francois Mitterrand, a socialist candidate for the French presidency at that time. A few weeks later, Barthes died in hospital. But was it a mere accident, or was it something more sinister? Binet doesn’t believe that such an eminent philosopher could die such an ordinary death. So, taking Barthes’s death as his starting point, he weaves a conspiratorial tale that juxtaposes real characters and incidents with fictitious incidents and even characters from other novels.

In Binet’s novel, intelligence officer Jacques Bayard is entrusted with the task of establishing the circumstances of the accident and locating an important document which was in Barthes’s possession at the time of the accident and which later went missing. This mysterious document is most certainly about the seventh function of language that Barthes had discovered.

A postmodern spoof whodunnit novel is hilarious, erudite and full of clever wordplay

But who could be the enemy of this innocuous intellectual? Apparently, there were many on the French intellectual scene who didn’t tolerate Barthes. At least this is the point made by philosopher-superstar Michel Foucault. According to him, “All he had were enemies: the reactionaries, the middle classes, the fascists, the Stalinists and, above all, the rancid old critics who never forgave him.” And why was Barthes not forgiven? As Foucault argues, “for daring to think! For daring to question their outdated bourgeois ideas, for highlighting their vile normative functions, for showing them up for what they really were: prostitutes sullied by idiocy and compromised principles!”

‘Normative functions.’ What does that mean? Officer Bayard might be very street-smart and intelligent in a conventional way, but this sort of intellectual blather is beyond his comprehension, even an obstruction in his investigation. So he enlists a reluctant young semiotician named Simon Herzog as an interpreter to decipher the arcane lingo of intellectuals. (If you don’t know, semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, especially as a means of language or communication. Don’t worry, the novel devotes good space in explaining these terms.)

Herzog’s expertise in semiotics is as good as the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes. In a manner reminiscent of the first meeting between Holmes and Dr Watson, Herzog uses semiotics to tell an impressed Bayard of the intelligence officer’s profession, past and marital status. Together, Bayard and Herzog make a cop-and-buddy detective pair and go on the trail of the murder, which takes them to the intellectual elite of almost the whole of Europe.

Thorough investigation — and a lead from another intellectual, Tzvetan Todorov — takes them to Umberto Eco in Bologna, Italy, where they escape a bomb attack. There they learn about the shadowy Logos Club, an intellectual fight club where losing a philosophical debate results in cutting off a digit of the hand.

The duo’s quest further takes them to an international conference at Cornell University where the participants include, among others, Noam Chomsky, and where they face hazards of a different kind. There, as a result of an intense intellectual controversy, Jacques Derrida is killed by attack dogs unleashed by another philosopher: John Searle.

European spies are involved, terrorist organisations are probed and an election is witnessed. In the course of the novel, in the manner of a traditional whodunnit, every clue leads to another clue and every clue results in the murder of a key player, till the mystery is resolved.

As in Binet’s earlier novel, many of the characters in this book are real. These include the heavyweights of the intellectual scene of the 1970s and ’80s, such as Derrida, Eco, Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva. Similarly, many of the incidents described are also real, especially the bombing of the central railway station in Bologna, Louis Althusser’s murder of his wife Helene, and the French election of 1980, which was won by Mitterrand. But these characters and situations are fictionalised and incorporated in the main narrative of the novel in a way that obliterates the boundary between fact and fiction. To give it authentic effect, the novel is enamelled with references and quotations from television news, press articles and events.

The most interesting feature of the novel is Binet’s lampooning of the French intellectual institution. Revered luminaries of the worlds of philosophy, linguistics and literature are irreverently parodied for their eccentricities, egotism and human failings. Some of the characters that populate the novel are still alive, and I don’t know if Binet would face any libel for this, but even this irreverence seems to come from a genuine artistic endeavour to paint the milieu.

And yet, language doesn’t say everything. The body speaks, objects speak, history speaks, individual or collective destinies speak, life and death speak to us constantly in a thousand different ways. Man is an interpreting machine and, with a little imagination, he sees signs everywhere: in the colour of his wife’s coat, in the stripe on the door of his car, in the eating habits of the people in the apartment next door, in France’s monthly unemployment figures, in the banana-like taste of Beaujolais nouveau (it always tastes either like banana or, less often, raspberry).—Excerpt from the book

In a light metafiction tradition — in which a writer draws the attention of the reader to the artificiality of his work — Binet makes his principal narrator, Herzog, step out of the novel and turn to the readers, making them aware that the story could be different. Herzog ponders questions about his own reality, and even that he is trapped in the novel. The charm of the book lies in its hilarity, its erudite and intelligent narrative and clever word-games. Of course, it is not a hardcore murder mystery so one is not supposed to get goosebumps on the trail and upon revelation of the murderer, but even then, there are enough turns and twists to satisfy the mystery craving.

The Seventh Function of Language is the latest example of postmodern detective fiction. With its mash-up of genres, fascination with the interpretation of texts, deliberate blurring of the line between fact and fiction and integrating of various theories, it reminds readers of Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose. While that was a more sombre attempt, Binet’s work is funny, irreverent and sometimes even ribald.

If one is too intellectual to be impressed by an ordinary detective thriller and whodunnit murder mystery, if the high and mighty names of French intellectual circles of the ’80s, such as Foucault and Barthes, attract one, or if one can’t read anything unless it is laced with arcane references to semiotics and other literary and linguistics theories, and if one would enjoy a hearty laugh at the expense of intellectuals, then The Seventh Function of Language is a perfect read for dull winter nights.

The reviewer is short story writer and translator

The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel
By Laurent Binet
Translated by Sam Taylor
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, US
ISBN: 978-0374261566
368pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, January 21st, 2018