the 7th function of language by laurent binet

Using this technique, Simon, a young academic enlisted by the detective, Bayard, coolly assesses the older man’s military service, marital status and sociocultural background: Throughout the novel, Binet invokes Barthes’s 1957 essay collection Mythologies, which looks at the way artefacts of culture – such as the Citroën DS, or red wine – accrued certain meanings in postwar French society. Reading The 7th Function, you have to ask why, for an ambitious novelist so invested in narrative ethics, does it matter who committed an imaginary crime against a real figure? Why play the game of history in reverse?Ī postmodern hybrid of other texts, blending the real and the fictional while making no attempt to distinguish between them, The 7th Function incorporates Barthes’s own writings, those of other theorists, characters from other novels, and television news reports taken from the night of his death. Writing a novel about a real person who lived and died heroically is like reducing him (as Binet puts it) “to the ranks of a vulgar character and his actions to literature”. The ethical stakes in HHhH were clear: when applied to the Holocaust, novelistic conventions feel trite, gimmicky.

Binet specifically doesn’t want us to think the events really transpired, so he loads up the novel with fake history: not only was Barthes not murdered, Jacques Derrida didn’t die in 1980, nor (we presume) did the writer and critic Philippe Sollers have his balls cut off after losing a debate to Umberto Eco.

The 7th Function works the other way round. In that book Binet was a lively authorial presence, stipulating where the historical record ended and where he, as novelist, resorted to inventing conversations or motives.

Binet’s first novel, HHhH (2010), was about the assassination of the Nazi security chief Reinhard Heydrich at the hands of two Czech resistance fighters.

The 7th function of language by laurent binet