The 7th Function of Language by Laurent Binet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

He’s Not the Messiah; He’s a Naughty Boy

Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the surrealist English television and film troupe, famous for among other things the hysterically funny Life of Brian, was the new wave of British comedy in the 1970’s. The focus of Monty Python’s humor was not so much human behaviour as it was the very meaning of meaning to human beings - its relativity, its conventionality, and its inherent absurdity.

Roland Barthes, the motivator of the action in The 7th Function of Language, was the French equivalent of Monty Python during the 1970’s. With considerably more seriousness, and considerably less screen time, Barthes nevertheless had the same function in life as Monty Python: ripping the guts out of language and its implicit pretensions to power. He loved his mother (dead), Mao Zedong (a French intellectual conceit), and young men (many). He was, still is, largely incomprehensible to those outside his intellectual cult. Very similar to the devotees of Monty Python therefore.

Many found, still find, Monty Python offensive. But because Barthes, an established name in French literature and linguistic philosophy, was the antithesis of a comedian, many found, still find, him merely vacuous. As the Belgian critic and sinologist, Simon Leys, put it, "Barthes has contrived—amazingly—to bestow an entirely new dignity upon the age-old activity, so long unjustly disparaged, of saying nothing at great length." As, of course, did Monty Python. Saying nothing, that is, can be very entertaining. The Belgians have a chip on their national shoulder about France, and an entirely different sense of humour. The important thing to keep in mind is that Barthes is no less a joke than Monty Python. Who said the French aren't more droll than the English? The issue is whether the joke is sick or not.

The death of an abstruse and somewhat annoying French academic like Roland Barthes presents no obviously compelling theme for a novel. Except, of course, that what any novel is about is meaning, and what meaning might mean in specific circumstances. Obvious really, once stated, but still a challenging literary venture. Especially when there are very few laughs at all to be had in French philosophy. But sarcasm is a form of comedy as well. And is there anything funnier than the meaning of a life which denies meaning?

Both Monty Python and Barthes use death to great advantage as the ultimate denial of meaning. Laurent Binet turns this philosophical/comedic trope on its head by using Barthes death in 1980 (struck down by a laundry van at a Parisian crosswalk) as an event, a ‘sign’ in semiotic terms, of infinite interpretability. As it is in many mystery novels, death is the motivation of a search for meaning. The apparent triviality of the circumstances of this death in comparison with the ostensible importance of the life whose end it meant is what drives the protagonist’s, Police Superintendent Bayard’s, search for its meaning... if any exists.

So, an intellectual mystery in the mode of Umberto Eco. Nothing is what it seems because it can seem to be so many, often contradictory, things. “Man is an interpreting machine and, with a little imagination, he sees signs everywhere,” says the narrator. And Bayard is warned about his quest by an academic colleague of Barthes, “Don’t forget that one interpretation never exhausts the sign, and that polysemy is a bottomless well where we can hear an infinite number of echoes: a word’s meaning never runs dry. And the same’s true even for a letter, you see.”

If you’ve ever been into Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Bernard-Henri Levy or other giants of modern French comedy - sorry, philosophy - or if you want an explanation of how Francois Mitterrand (or perhaps even Trump) became president , then this is your cuppa. Alternately, there is always Philip K Dick... with alternate pages from Agatha Christie.

Bjorn Borg as the Messiah, Wimbledon 1980
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