📖 The Seventh Function of Language ✍

In the End was the Word

I was so taken with Civilisations that I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to indulge in an earlier novel by Laurent Binet. Doing it this way round made a lot of sense, because I do not think I would have persevered if I had not already had a taste of Binet’s brilliance.

There is absolutely no point in trying to summarise the plot or even to understand everything. As with Civilisations, some events are undeniably fact — Roland Barthes was hit by a laundry van and did die — while others are equally undeniably fiction — Jacques Derrida was still alive at the end of the 1980s. Binet always makes me check things that seem too outlandish to believe, which is a fault in me, not him, and sometimes I feel a bit foolish for doing so.

Surely, for example, Binet knows that pizza margherita was not named for the red, white and green confection that supposedly most pleased Queen Margherita in the late 1800s. Is he toying with us? Then again, who cares; and this happened to be a “fact” that I did not need to look up. What about other readers? Maybe they didn’t need to confirm the outline of Barthes’ death like I did.

More often, though, I am simply astounded at the way he connects disparate dots.

And one of those dots pleased me enormously to find. In Civilisations, I marvelled at the bridge between El Greco and Cervantes. But here in The Seventh Function ... we find reference to “a Castilian hidalgo, an adventurer, a pennyless sword-wielding nobleman: the young Miguel de Cervantes”. Too good a nugget to use only once, but I wonder how and when the section in Civilisations came about.

There are lots and lots of excellent academic jokes and sly digs throughout, some of which made me chuckle while more, probably, passed me by entirely. The bit about a young politician from Hawaii was rather good. So was what I thought was the last sentence in the book, which would be too much of a spoiler to reveal. It was in fact the penultimate sentence, but maybe it should not have been.

As I said to a pal, “I think you need a PhD in semiotics and an encyclopaedic knowledge of 1980s French politics. I am loving it despite having neither.” Maybe you will too.