Shouting and whistling in the crowd. “May the gods of antithesis be with you!”
A man and a woman take their places on the stage, each behind a lectern, facing the audience, and start scribbling notes. The old man explains to Bayard and Herzog: “They have five minutes to prepare, then they make a presentation where they set out their point of view and the broad outlines of their argument. After that, the dispute begins. The duration of the contest varies and, like a boxing match, the judges can call a halt whenever they like. The person who speaks first has an advantage because he chooses the position he will defend. The other one is obliged to adapt and to defend the opposite position. For friendly matches featuring two opponents of the same rank, they draw lots to see who will begin. But in official matches between opponents of differing ranks, it is the lower-ranked player who goes first. You can tell from the kind of subject they get; this is a level-one meeting. Both of them are speakers. That is the lowest tier in the hierarchy of the Logos Club. Private soldiers, basically. Above that, there are the rhetoricians, and then the orators, the dialecticians, the peripateticians, the tribunes, and, at the very top, the sophists. But here, people rarely get past level three. I’ve heard there are very few sophists, only about ten, and they all have code names. Once you get to level five, it becomes very sealed off. I’ve even heard it said that the sophists don’t exist, that level seven has been invented to give people in the club a sort of unreachable goal, so they’ll fantasize about the idea of an unattainable perfection. Personally, I’m sure they exist. In fact, I reckon de Gaulle was one of them. He might even have been the Great Protagoras himself. That’s what president of the Logos Club is called, so they say. I’m a rhetorician. I made it to orator one year, but I couldn’t hold on to it.” He lifts up his mutilated hand. “And it cost me dear.”
The duel commences, everyone falls silent, and Simon is unable to ask the old man what he means by a “real match.” He observes the audience: mostly male, but all ages and types are represented. If the club is elitist, its criteria are apparently not financial.
The first duelist’s melodious voice rings out, explaining that in France, the prime minister is a puppet; that Article 49-3 castrated Parliament, which has no power; that de Gaulle was a benevolent monarch in comparison with Giscard, who is concentrating all the power in his own hands, including the press; that Brezhnev, Kim Il-Sung, Honecker, and Ceausescu were at least accountable to their parties; that the president of the United States possesses far less power than our own leader, and that while the president of Mexico cannot stand for reelection, the French president can.
He is up against a fairly young speaker. She responds that all one need do to verify that we are not in a dictatorship is read the newspapers (like Le Monde, earlier this week, which ran a headline about the government reading: “Failure across the board”; and there have been more severe criticisms than that…), and she offers as proof the attacks by Marchais, Chirac, Mitterrand, etc. For a dictatorship, there is a healthy amount of freedom of expression. And, talking of de Gaulle, let’s not forget what was said about him: de Gaulle is fascist. The Fifth Republic is fascist. The Constitution is fascist. The Permanent Coup d’Etat, etc. Her peroration goes on: “To say that Giscard is a fascist is an insult to history; it is to spit on the victims of Mussolini and Hitler. Go and ask the Spanish what they think. Go and ask Jorge Semprun if Giscard is Franco! Shame on rhetoric when it betrays the past!” Prolonged applause. After a brief deliberation, the judges declare the young woman the victor. Looking thrilled, she shakes her opponent’s hand, then gives the audience a little curtsy.
There is a series of debates. The candidates are happy or unhappy, the audience applauds or boos, there is whistling, there is yelling … and then we come to the climax of the night: the “digital duel.”
Subject: The written word versus the spoken word.
The old man rubs his hands: “Ah! A metasubject! Using language to discuss language, there’s nothing better. I adore that. Look, their levels are shown on the board: it’s a young rhetorician challenging an orator so he can take his place. So it’s the rhetorician who goes first. I wonder which point of view he’ll choose. There is often one argument that’s harder to make but if you want to impress the jury and the audience it can be a good idea to choose the difficult one. With the more obvious positions, it can be harder to shine, because what you say is likely to be more straightforward, less spectacular…”
The old man stops talking. The match is about to start. There is a fevered silence as everyone in the room listens intently. The aspirant orator begins his speech confidently:
“Religions of the Book forged our societies and we made their texts sacred: the Tablets of Stone, the Ten Commandments, the Torah scroll, the Bible, the Koran, and so on. To be valid, it must be engraved. I say: fetishism. I say: superstition. I say: dogmatism.
“It is not I who affirms the superiority of the spoken word, but he who made us what we are, o thinkers, o rhetoricians, the father of dialectics, our common ancestor, the man who without ever writing a single book laid the foundations of all Western thought.
“Remember! We are in Egypt, in Thebes, and the king asks: What is the point of writing? And the god responds: It is the ultimate cure for ignorance. And the king says: On the contrary! In fact, this art will breed forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it because they will stop using their memories. The act of remembering is not memory, and the book is merely an aide-mémoire. It does not offer knowledge, it does not offer understanding, it does not offer mastery.
“Why would students need professors if they could learn everything they need from books? Why do they need what is in those books to be explained? Why are there schools and not just libraries? Because the written word alone is never enough. All thought is alive on the condition that it is exchanged; if it is frozen in place, it is dead. Socrates compares writing to painting: the beings created by painting stand in front of us as if they were alive; but when we question them, they remain petrified in a formal pose and don’t speak a word. And the same goes for writing. One might believe that the written word can speak; but if we question it, because we wish to understand it, it always repeats the same thing, down to the last syllable.