“Language produces a message, which has meaning only to the extent that it has a recipient. I am speaking to you now; you are the raison d’être of my speech. Only madmen speak in the desert. And the madman also talks to himself. But in a text, to whom are the words addressed? To everyone! And thus to no one. When each discourse has been written down for good and all, it passes indifferently to those who understand it and those who have no interest in it. A text without a precise recipient is a guarantee of imprecision, of vague and impersonal words. How could any message be suited to everyone? Even a letter is inferior to any kind of conversation: it is written in a certain context, and received in another. Besides, both the author’s and the recipient’s situation will have changed later. It is already obsolete; it was addressed to someone who no longer exists, and its author no longer exists either, vanished in the depths of time as soon as the envelope was sealed.
“So that’s how it is: writing is dead. The place for texts is in textbooks. Truth lives only in the metamorphoses of discourse, and only the spoken word is sensitive enough to capture thought’s eternal developing flow in real time. The spoken word is life: I prove it, we prove it, gathered here today to speak and listen, to exchange, to discuss, to debate, to create living thought together, to be as one in the word and the idea, animated by the forces of dialectics, alive with that sonorous vibration we call speech, of which the written word is only the pale symbol, when all’s said and done: what the score is to music, nothing more. And I will end with one final quotation from Socrates, as I am speaking under his high patronage: ‘The appearance of knowledge, rather than true knowledge,’ that is what writing produces. Thank you for your attention.”
Prolonged applause. The old man seems excited: “Ah, ah! The kid knows his Classics. That was good stuff. Socrates, the guy who never wrote a book—a no-brainer, in this context! He’s a bit like the Elvis of rhetoric, isn’t he? And, tactically, he played safe because defending the spoken word legitimizes the club’s activity, of course; the mise en abyme! The other one will have to respond now. He has to find something solid to base his argument on, too. If it were me, I’d do it like Derrida: strip the whole thing of context, explain that a conversation is no more personalized than a text or a letter because no one, when he speaks or when he listens, really knows who he is or who the other person is. There is never any context. It’s a con! Context does not exist. That’s the way to go! Well, that’d be how I’d refute it, anyway. First you have to demolish your opponent’s beautiful edifice, and afterward, you just have to be precise. The superiority of writing is a bit academic, you see, it’s pretty technical, but it’s not exactly a bundle of laughs. Me? Yeah, I took night classes at the Sorbonne. I was a mailman. Ah! Shh, here it comes! Go on, my son, show us how you won your rank!”
And the whole room falls silent when the orator, an older, graying man, more composed and less ardent in his body language, stands ready to speak. He looks at the audience, his opponent, the jury, and he says, lifting his index finger, one word:
“Plato.”
Then he says nothing, long enough to produce the feeling of unease that always accompanies a prolonged silence. And when he senses that the audience is wondering why he is wasting so many precious seconds of his speaking time, he explains:
“My honorable adversary attributed his quotation to Socrates, but you knew better, didn’t you?”
Silence.
“He meant Plato. Without whose writings Socrates, his thought, and his magnificent defense of the spoken word in Phaedo, which my honorable adversary quoted for us almost in its entirety, would have remained unknown to us.”
Silence.
“Thank you for your attention.” He sits down.
The entire room turns toward his opponent. If he wishes, he can speak again and engage in a debate, but, looking very pale, he says nothing. He has no need to wait for the verdict of the three judges to know that he has lost.
Slowly, courageously, the young man walks forward and places his hand flat on the judges’ table. The whole room holds its breath. The smokers suck nervously on their cigarettes. Everyone thinks he can hear the echo of his own breathing.
The man sitting in the middle of the jury lifts a cleaver and chops off the young man’s little finger.
The victim does not cry out, but folds up in two. In a cathedral-like silence, his wound is immediately cleaned and bandaged. The severed phalanx is picked up, but Simon does not see if it is thrown away or kept somewhere, to be exhibited with others in labeled jars revealing the date and subject of the debate.
The voice rings out once again: “Praise to the duelists!” The audience chants back: “Praise to the duelists!”
In the graveyard silence, the old man explains in a whisper: “Generally, when you lose, you wait quite a while before you try your luck again. It’s a good system: it weeds out the compulsive challengers.”
45
This story has a blind spot that is also its genesis: Barthes’s lunch with Mitterrand. This is the crucial scene that has not taken place. And yet it did take place … Jacques Bayard and Simon Herzog will never know, never knew what happened that day, what was said. They could barely even get hold of the guest list. But I can, maybe … After all, it’s all a question of method, and I know how to proceed: interrogate the witnesses, corroborate, discard any tenuous testimonies, confront these partial memories with the reality of history. And then, if need be … You know what I mean. There is more to be done with that day. February 25, 1980, has not yet told us everything. That’s the virtue of a novel: it’s never too late.
46
“Yes, what Paris needs is an opera house.”
Barthes wishes he were elsewhere. He has better things to do than make small talk. He regrets having agreed to this lunch: his leftist friends will give him hell again, although at least Deleuze will be happy. Foucault, of course, will utter a few contemptuous barbs, and make sure they are repeated by others.
“Arab fiction no longer hesitates to question its limits. It wants to struggle out of the straitjacket of classicism, break free from the conceptual novel…”
This is probably the price he has to pay for having eaten lunch with Giscard. “A very successful grand bourgeois”? Yes, certainly, but these bourgeois have done pretty well, too … Come on, once the wine’s been poured, you have to drink it. And actually, it is pretty good, this white. What is it? Chardonnay, I reckon.
“Have you read the latest Moravia? I like Leonardo Sciascia. Do you read Italian?”
What distinguishes them? Nothing, in principle.
“Do you like Bergman?”
Look at the way they stand, speak, dress … Without a shadow of a doubt the habitus of the Right, as Bourdieu would say.
“With the possible exception of Picasso, no other artist can rival Michelangelo’s critical standing. And yet nothing has been said about the democratic nature of his work!”
And me? Do I have right-wing habitus? Being badly dressed is not enough to get off the hook. Barthes touches the back of his chair to check that his old jacket is still there. Calm down. No one’s going to steal it. Ha! You’re thinking like a bourgeois.
“Modernity? Pfft! Giscard dreams of a feudal France. We’ll see if the French people are looking for a master or a guide.”
He doesn’t so much speak as plead. Every inch a lawyer. Some good smells coming from the kitchen.
“It’s coming, it’s almost ready! And you, my good sir, what are you working on at the moment?”
On words. A smile. A knowing look. No need to go into details. A little Proust, that always goes down well.
“You won’t believe me, but I have an aunt who knew the Guermantes.” The young actress is quite spiky. Very French.
I feel tired. What I really wanted was to take an anti-rhetorical path. But it’s too late now. Barthes sighs sadly. He hates being bored, and yet so many opportunities are offered to him, and he accepts them without really knowing why. But today is a little different. It’s not as if he didn’t have anything better to do.
“I’m friends with Michel Tournier. He’s not at all as wild as you’d imagine, ha ha.”
Oh, look, fish. Hence the white.
“Come and sit down, ‘Jacques’! You’re not going to spend the whole meal in the kitchen, are you?”
The curly-haired young man with goatlike features finishes serving his hot pot and comes to join us. He leans on the back of Barthes’s chair before sitting down next to him.