Signs and spellsnich

On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes, the great French intellectual, was run over by a laundry van in Paris. He died from his injuries a month later. This book — Laurent Binet’s second novel — proposes that it was not an accident; that Barthes had just come from lunch with the Socialist candidate for the forthcoming French presidential elections, François Mitterrand, and that he was in possession of an extremely important document, one which gave detailed instructions on the seventh function of language.

Of course, you all know that, as defined by Roman Jakobson, there are only six functions of language (among them the Performative — ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’; the Phatic — ‘how do you do’; and the Metalinguistic — such as dictionary definitions). But imagine a seventh: this might take the form, almost, of a spell.

Binet, disgustingly young and clever, shot to prominence in 2010 as the author of HHhH, a reimagination of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazis’ security chief. He’s also disgustingly talented. All sorts of rotten novels get translated into 35 languages, but they don’t tend to get praised by Martin Amis, as HHhH was.

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In this latest book we are in much more playful territory than the second world war: we are inside the French academy (to speak metonymically; I do not mean the Académie); that is, among a cast of hugely influential and famous French thinkers: Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, Sollers, Althusser and so on, with walk-on parts from Americans such as Noam Chomsky and John Searle, as well as a very important couple of cameos from Umberto Eco.