I’m writing this whilst on endless hold for the Iberia helpline, whilst trying to change my flight back to the UK for the fifth time. There’s a repeated word sequence on the helpline which is “All Our Lines are Busy at Present, please Hold”. Binet’s book pertains to the various uses of language as defined by the linguist and semiotician Roman Jakobson of which there are supposedly six which he detailed and a mysterious seventh which allows the speaker to conjure his desires. Like the genie in the lamp. Giscard d’Estaing and Francois Mitterrand are in competition to obtain a copy of this supposedly discovered seventh function, which has been passed to Roland Barthes. The seventh function of language, in Binet’s hands, becomes a Maguffin, an excuse for the author to glossily incorporate key figures of post-modern thought, from Foucault to Eco, in a garish sub Dan Brown narrative which makes a lot of noise and says very little. The novel has an oddball pair of detectives, one an intellectual, the other not, who investigate the fate of the piece of paper on which the Seventh Function of Language was written, and for which Barthes was assassinated. As though aware of the flimsiness of this premise, the novelist starts to kill off figures like Derrida, who in fact had a long way to go, in a move which might or might not be perceived as irreverent. The one thing the novel does is make one want to revisit The Name of the Rose, to find out if Eco, the master semiotician, mastered the conceit of marrying high intellect to low art with more subtlety. Meanwhile the message from Iberia continues its repetitive dirge, with the clear subtext: “During the 21st century Covid dystopia, the only advisable thing to do is abandon the idea of ever flying again.” Or perhaps, I am being generous and a true semiotic interpretation would be: “Fuck off Gringo”.
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