“Today, we are going to study figures and letters in James Bond. If you think of James Bond, which letter comes to mind?” Silence, as the students consider the question. At least Jacques Bayard, sitting at the back of the classroom, is familiar with James Bond. “What is the name of James Bond’s boss?” Bayard knows this! He is surprised to find himself wanting to say the answer out loud, but several students get there before him, giving the response simultaneously: M. “Who is M, and why M? What does M signify?” A pause. No answer. “M is an old man, but is a feminine figure. It’s the M of Mother, the nurturing mother, who provides and protects, the one who gets angry when Bond does something silly but who always indulges him, who Bond wants to please by succeeding in his missions. James Bond is a man of action but he is not a lone gunman, he is not on his own, he is not an orphan (he is biographically, but not symbolically: his mother is England; he is not married to his homeland, he is its beloved son). He is supported by a hierarchy, an organization, an entire nation that assigns him impossible missions—which the country takes great pride in him carrying out (M, the metonymical representation of England, the representative of the queen, often repeats that Bond is his best agent: he is the favorite son)—but that provides him with all the material means necessary to accomplish them. James Bond, in fact, has his cake and eats it, too, and that is why he is such a popular fantasy, an extremely powerful contemporary myth: James Bond is the adventurer-functionary. Action and security. He commits offenses, misdemeanors, even crimes, but he is permitted, he has the authority; he won’t be punished because he has the famous ‘license to kill’ signified by his identification number. Which brings us to those three magic figures: 007.
“Double 0 is the code for the right to commit murder, and here we see a brilliant application of the symbolism of figures. How could the license to kill be represented by a figure? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? A million? Death is not quantifiable. Death is nothingness, and nothingness is zero. But murder is more than mere death, it is death inflicted on another. It is death times two: his own inevitable death, whose probability is increased by the dangers of his job (we are often reminded that the life expectancy of double 0 agents is very low), and that of the other. Double 0 is the right to kill and to be killed. As for 7, it was obviously chosen because it is traditionally one of the most elegant numbers, a magical number charged with history and symbolism; but in this case, it complies with two criteria: it is an odd number, of course, like the number of roses we give to a woman, and prime (a prime number is divisible only by one and by itself) in order to express a singularity, a uniqueness, an individuality that confounds the whole impression of interchangeability suggested by an identification number. Let’s cast our minds back to the series The Prisoner, with its protagonist, Number 6, who desperately, rebelliously repeats: ‘I am not a number!’ James Bond, on the other hand, is perfectly comfortable with his number, all the more so as it confers upon him extraordinary privileges, making him an aristocrat (in Her Majesty’s service, naturally). 007 is the antithesis of Number 6: he is satisfied with the extremely privileged place society gives him, he works devotedly for the preservation of the established order, without ever questioning the enemy’s nature or motivation. Where Number 6 is a revolutionary, 007 is a conservative. The reactionary 7 here opposes the revolutionary 6, and as the meaning of the word reactionary supposes the idea of posteriority (the conservatives ‘react’ to the revolution by working for a return to the ancien régime, i.e., the established order), it is logical that the reactionary figure succeeds the revolutionary figure (to put it as plainly as possible: that James Bond is not 005). The function of 007 is, therefore, to guarantee the return of the established order, threatened by a menace that destabilizes the world order. The end of each episode coincides always with a return to ‘normality,’ i.e., ‘the old order.’ Umberto Eco calls James Bond a fascist. In actual fact, we can see that he is, above all, a reactionary…”
A student raises his hand: “But there’s also Q, the guy in charge of gadgets. Do you see a meaning in that letter too?”
With an immediacy that surprises Bayard, the professor goes on:
“Q is a paternal figure, because he is the one who provides James Bond with weapons and teaches him how to use them. He passes on his savoir faire. In this sense, he ought to be called F, for Father … But if you watch the scenes involving Q carefully, what do you see? A distracted, impertinent, playful James Bond, who doesn’t listen (or pretends not to). And, at the end, you have Q, who always asks: ‘Questions?’ (or variations on the theme of ‘Do you understand?’). But James Bond never has any questions; although he plays the dunce, he has assimilated what has been explained to him perfectly because he is an extraordinarily quick study. So Q is the q of ‘questions’—questions that Q calls for and that Bond never asks, except in the form of jokes, and his questions are never those that Q is expecting.”
Another student speaks up now: “And in English, Q is pronounced exactly the same way as the word queue, which implies shopping. People queue outside the gadget store, they wait to be served; it is a dead time, a playful time, between two action scenes.”
The young professor waves his arms enthusiastically: “Exactly! Well observed! That’s a very good idea! Don’t forget that one interpretation never exhausts the sign, and that polysemy is a bottomless well where we can hear an infinite number of echoes: a word’s meaning never runs dry. And the same’s true even for a letter, you see.”
The professor looks at his watch: “Thank you for your attention. Next Tuesday we’ll talk about clothes in James Bond. Gentlemen, I’ll expect you in tuxedos, naturally [laughter in the classroom]. And ladies, in Ursula Andress–style bikinis [men whistling, women protesting]. See you next week!”
While the students leave the hall, Bayard goes up to the young lecturer with a discreetly malicious smile that the lecturer does not understand, but which means: “I’m going to make you pay for that baldy’s bad attitude.”
11
“Just to be clear, Superintendent, I am not a specialist in Barthes, nor strictly speaking am I a semiologist. I have an MAS in modern criticism of the historical novel, I’m preparing a linguistics thesis on acts of language, and I also run a tutorial. This semester, I’m giving a specialized course in semiology of the image, and last year I ran an introductory course on semiology for first-year students. I taught them the basics of linguistics because that’s the foundation of semiology; I told them about Saussure and Jakobson, a bit of Austin, a bit of Searle; we worked mainly on Barthes because he’s the most accessible and because he often chose his subjects from popular culture, which are more likely to pique my students’ interest than, say, his critiques of Racine or Chateaubriand, because these kids are doing media studies, not literature. With Barthes, we could spend a lot of time discussing steak-frites, the latest Citro?n, James Bond … it’s a more playful approach to analysis, and that is in a sense the definition of semiology: it applies literary criticism methods to nonliterary subjects.”
“He’s not dead.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said ‘we could.’ You were talking in the past tense, as if it were no longer possible.”
“Um, no, that’s not what I meant…”
Simon Herzog and Jacques Bayard walk side by side down the university’s corridors. The young lecturer holds his satchel in one hand and a sheaf of photocopies in the other. He shakes his head when a student tries to hand him a leaflet. The student calls him a fascist, and he responds with a guilty smile, then corrects Bayard:
“Even if he did die, we could still apply his critical methods, you know…”
“What makes you think he might die? I didn’t mention the seriousness of his injuries.”
“Well, er, I doubt whether superintendents are sent to investigate all road accidents, so I deduce from that that it’s serious, and that there’s something fishy about the circumstances.”
“The circumstances are pretty straightforward, and the victim’s condition is really nothing to be worried about.”
“Really? Ah, well, I’m glad to hear it, superintendent…”
“I didn’t tell you I was a superintendent.”
“No? I just thought Barthes was so famous that the police would send a superintendent…”
“I’d never even heard of this guy until yesterday.”
The young postgrad falls silent. He looks disconcerted; Bayard is satisfied. A student in socks and sandals hands him another tract: Waiting for Godard: A One-Act Play. He puts it in his pocket and asks Herzog:
“What do you know about semiology?”
“Um, well, it’s the study of the life of signs within society.”
Bayard thinks about his Roland Barthes Made Easy. He grits his teeth.
“And in plain French?”
“But … that’s Saussure’s definition…”
“This Chaussure, does he know Barthes?”
“Er, no, he’s dead. He was the inventor of semiology.”
“Hmm, I see.”