‘What’s it about?’
The bouncer looks like every other bouncer in the world except that he is wearing a thick wool scarf and he is white, ageless, grey-skinned, with a cigarette stub in his mouth, and his gaze is not expressionless, staring behind you as if you weren’t there, but malignant and staring right into you, as if trying to read your soul. Bayard knows he cannot show his card because he must remain incognito in order to see what happens behind this door, so he gets ready to invent some pathetic lie, but Simon, struck by sudden inspiration, beats him to it and says: ‘Elle sait.’
The wood creaks, the door opens. The bouncer moves aside and, with an ambiguous gesture, invites them in. They enter a vaulted cellar that smells of stone, sweat and cigarette smoke. The room is full, as if for a concert, but the people have not come to see Boris Vian and the walls have forgotten the jazz chords that once ricocheted from them. Instead, amid the vague hubbub of pre-show conversations, a voice like a circus ringmaster’s declaims:
‘Welcome to the Logos Club, my friends. Come demonstrate, come deliberate, come praise and criticise the beauty of the Word! Oh Word that sweeps away hearts and commands the universe! Come attend the spectacle of litigants jousting for oratory supremacy and for your utmost pleasure!’
Bayard gives Simon a puzzled look. Simon whispers into his ear that Barthes’ last words were not the beginning of a phrase, but two initials. Not ‘elle sait’ (‘she knows’), but ‘LC’ for ‘Logos Club’. Bayard looks impressed. Simon shrugs modestly. The voice continues to warm up the room:
‘My zeugma is beautiful, and so is my asyndeton. But there is a price to pay. Tonight you will know the price of language once again. Because this is our motto, and this should be the law of the world: None may speak with impunity! At the Logos Club, fine words are not enough. Are they, my darlings?’
Bayard goes up to an old, white-haired man who has two phalanxes missing on his left hand. In a tone he hopes sounds neither professional nor like a tourist, Bayard asks: ‘What’s going on here?’ The old man stares at him without hostility: ‘First time? Then I would advise you just to watch. Don’t rush to join in. You have plenty of time to learn. Listen, learn, progress.’
‘Join in?’
‘Well, you could always play a friendly, of course – that won’t cost you anything – but if you’ve never seen a session before, you’d be better off staying a spectator. The impression your first combat leaves will be the basis of your reputation, and reputation is important: it’s your ethos.’
He takes a drag from a cigarette held between his mutilated fingers while the invisible ringmaster, hidden in some dark corner of the stone vaults, continues at the top of his voice: ‘Glory to the Great Protagoras! Glory to Cicero! Glory to the Eagle of Meaux!’ Bayard asks Simon who these people are. Simon tells him that the Eagle of Meaux is Bossuet. Bayard again feels an overriding desire to slap him.
‘Eat stones like Demosthenes! Long live Pericles! Long live Churchill! Long live de Gaulle! Long live Jesus! Long live Danton and Robespierre! Why did they kill Jaurès?’ At least Bayard knows those people. Well, apart from the first two.
Simon asks the old man what the rules of the game are. The old man explains to them: all the matches are duels; they draw a subject; it is always a closed question to which the answer is either yes or no, or a ‘for or against’ type of question, so that the two adversaries can defend their opposing positions.
‘Tertullian! Augustine! Maximilien! Let’s go!’ yells the voice.
The first part of the evening consists of friendly matches. The real matches come at the end. There is always one, sometimes two. Three is rare, but it does happen. Theoretically, there’s no limit to the number of official matches but, for reasons that the old man thinks obviously don’t need explaining, there is not exactly a long queue of volunteers.
‘Disputatio in utramque partem! Let the debate begin! And here are two smooth talkers, who will do battle over the lively question: Is Giscard a fascist?’
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 fantasise 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 the 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 duellist’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 re-election, 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 Semprún 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 curtsey.
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 meta-subject! 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, oh thinkers, oh 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-memoire. 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.
‘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, who are the words addressed to? 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, the author’s situation and the recipient’s will both 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 speeches, 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, and which the written word is only the pale symbol of, 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 legitimises 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 personalised 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 afterwards, 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 postman. 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, greying 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 honourable 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 defence of the spoken word in Phaedo, which my honourable 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 towards 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 an axe 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 labelled jars revealing the date and subject of the debate.
The voice rings out once again: ‘Praise to the duellists!’ The audience chants back: ‘Praise to the duellists!’
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.’
This story has a blind spot that is also its genesis: Barthes’ 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. 25 February 1980 has not yet told us everything. That’s the virtue of a novel: it’s never too late.
‘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 goat-like features finishes serving his hotpot and comes to join us. He leans on the back of Barthes’ chair before sitting down next to him.
‘It’s a cautriade: a mix of different fish. There’s red mullet, whiting, sole, mackerel, along with shellfish and vegetables, spiced up by a dash of vinaigrette, and I put a bit of curry in it with a pinch of tarragon. Bon appétit!’
Oh yes, that’s good. It’s chic and at the same time working class. Barthes has often written about food: steak frites, the simple ham sandwich, milk and wine … But this is something else, obviously. It has an aura of simplicity, but it has been cooked and prepared with effort, care, love. And also, always, a show of strength. He has already theorised about this in his book on Japan: western food – accumulated, dignified, swollen into the majestic, linked to some prestigious operation – always tends towards excess, abundance, copiousness; eastern food goes in the opposite direction, it blossoms into the infinitesimal: the future of the cucumber is not its piling up or its thickening, but its division.
‘It’s a Breton fishermen’s meal: it was cooked originally using seawater. The vinaigrette was meant to counterbalance the salt’s thirst-inducing effect.’
Memories of Tokyo … To divide the baguette, pull it apart, pick at it, spread it open, instead of cutting and gripping it, as we do with our cutlery; never assault the food …
Barthes does not object when his glass is filled again. Around the table, the guests eat in a somewhat intimidated silence, and he observes that little man with the hard mouth who hoovers up his mouthfuls of whiting with a light sucking sound that is proof of a good bourgeois education.
‘I declared that power was property. That is not entirely false, of course.’
Mitterrand puts down his spoon. The silent listeners stop eating to indicate to the little man that they are concentrating on what he says.
If Japanese cuisine is always prepared in front of the person who will eat it (a distingishing mark of this cuisine), it is perhaps because it is important to consecrate the death of what we honour by this spectacle …
It’s as if they’re afraid to make a sound, like the audience at a theatre.
‘But it’s not true either. As I think you know better than I do, isn’t that so?’
No Japanese dish possesses a centre (an alimentary centre, implied for us by the rite that consists in ordering the meal, in surrounding or coating the dish); everything ornaments everything else: primarily, because, on the table, on the plate, the food is always a collection of fragments …
‘The real power is language.’
Mitterrand smiles. Barthes’ voice has taken on a fawning tone he didn’t suspect it of possessing, and he realises that the politician is talking directly to him. Farewell, Tokyo. The moment he feared (but which he knew was inevitable) has arrived: when he must give the reply and do what is expected of him; play the semiologist, or at least the intellectual vaguely specialised in language. Hoping his terseness will be taken for profundity he says: ‘Especially under a democratic regime.’
Still smiling, Mitterrand says ‘Really?’ It is hard to tell whether this is a request for elaboration, a polite agreement, or a discreet objection. The whipping boy, who is clearly responsible for this meeting, decides to intervene, out of fear, perhaps, that the conversation may die a premature death: ‘As Goebbels said, “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver” …’ Barthes does not have time to explain the significance of this quotation in its context before Mitterrand dryly corrects his underling: ‘No, that was Baldur von Schirach.’ Embarrassed silence around the table. ‘You must excuse Monsieur Lang, who, although he was born before the war, is too young to remember it. Isn’t that right, “Jacques”?’ Mitterrand narrows his eyes like a Japanese man. He pronounces ‘Jack’ the French way. Why, at this instant, does Barthes have the impression that something is afoot between him and this little man with the piercing gaze? As if this lunch had been organised purely for him; as if the other guests were there only to allay suspicion, as if they were decoys or, worse, accomplices. And yet, this is not the first cultural lunch organised for Mitterrand: he has one every month. Surely, thinks Barthes, he didn’t have all the others just to provide an alibi.
Outside, what sounds like a horse-drawn carriage is heard passing along Rue des Blancs-Manteaux.
Barthes analyses himself quickly: given the circumstances and the document folded in the inside pocket of his jacket, it’s only logical that he should be prone to surges of paranoia. He decides to speak again, partly to dilute the embarrassment of the young man with the curly brown hair, who’s still smiling, if somewhat contritely: ‘The great eras of rhetoric always correspond with republics: Athens, Rome, France … Socrates, Cicero, Robespierre … Different kinds of eloquence, admittedly, linked to different eras, but all unfolded like a tapestry over the canvas of democracy.’ Mitterrand, who looks interested, objects: ‘Since our friend “Jacques” decided to bring the war into our conversation, I ought to remind you that Hitler was a great orator.’ And, he adds, without giving his listeners any sign of irony they might cling to: ‘De Gaulle, too. In his way.’
Resigned to playing along, Barthes asks: ‘And Giscard?’
As if he had been waiting for this all along, as if these preliminaries had no other purpose than to bring the conversation to exactly this point, Mitterrand leans back in his chair: ‘Giscard is a good technician. His strength is his precise knowledge of himself, of his strengths and weaknesses. He knows he is short of breath, but his phrasing is perfectly matched to the rhythm of his breathing. A subject, a verb, a direct complement. A full stop, no commas: because that would lead him into the unknown.’ He pauses to give the obliging smiles time to spread across his guests’ faces, then goes on: ‘And there need not be any link between two sentences. Each is enough in itself, as smooth and full as an egg. One egg, two eggs, three eggs, a series of eggs, regular as a metronome.’ Encouraged by the prudent chuckles offered from around the table, Mitterrand begins to warm up: ‘The well-oiled machine. I knew a musician once who claimed his metronome had more genius than Beethoven … Naturally, it’s a thrilling spectacle. And highly educational, into the bargain. Everyone understands that an egg is an egg, no?’
Eager to maintain his role as cultural mediator, Jack Lang intervenes: ‘That is exactly what Monsieur Barthes condemns in his work: the ravages of tautology.’
Barthes confirms: ‘Yes, well … let’s say the false demonstration par excellence, the useless equation: A = A, “Racine is Racine”. It’s zero-degree thought.’
Though delighted by this convergence of theoretical viewpoints, Mitterrand is not sidetracked from the main flow of his speech: ‘Exactly! That’s exactly it. “Poland is Poland, France is France.”’ He puts on a whiney voice: ‘Go on then, explain the opposite! What I mean is that to a rare degree Giscard has the art of stating the obvious.’
Barthes, obligingly, concurs: ‘The obvious is not demonstrated. It demonstrates.’
Mitterrand repeats, triumphantly: ‘No, the obvious is not demonstrated.’ Just then, a voice is heard at the other end of the table: ‘And yet if we follow your demonstration it seems obvious that victory cannot escape you. The French people are not that stupid. They won’t fall twice for that impostor’s tricks.’
The speaker is a young man with thinning hair and pouty lips, a bit like Giscard, who, unlike the other guests, does not seem impressed by the little man. Mitterrand turns spitefully towards him: ‘Oh, I know what you think, Laurent! Like most of our contemporaries, you think that he is the most dazzling performer of all.’
Laurent Fabius protests, with an expression of disdain: ‘I did not say that …’
Mitterrand, aggressively: ‘Oh yes you did! Oh yes you did! What a good television viewer you make! It’s because there are so many good television viewers like you that Giscard is so good on television.’
Fabius does not flinch. Mitterrand gets more and more worked up: ‘I acknowledge that he’s marvellous at explaining how nothing is ever his fault. Prices went up in September? It’s the beef, by Jove. [Barthes notes Mitterrand’s use of “by Jove”.] In October, it’s melons. In November, it’s petrol, electricity, the railways and rents. How could prices not go up? Brilliant.’ His face is disfigured by a malicious grin. His voice grows husky: ‘And we are wonderstruck at being initiated so easily into the mysteries of the economy, at being allowed to follow this erudite guide into the minutiae of high finance.’ He is shouting now: ‘Oh yes, oh yes, it’s the beef! Those damn melons! The treacherous railways! Long live Giscard!’
The guests are petrified, but Fabius, lighting a cigarette, replies: ‘A bit over the top.’
Mitterrand’s smile becomes charming again, his voice returns to normal, and, without anyone knowing whether he is replying to Fabius or attempting to reassure his other guests, he says: ‘I was joking, of course. Although, not entirely. But let’s be honest: it takes a high degree of intelligence to do such a good job convincing people that governing is about not being responsible for anything.’
Jack Lang slips away.
Barthes thinks that what he’s up against here is a very good specimen of the manic-obsessive: this man wants power, and in his adversary he has crystallised all the rancour he might feel for a destiny that has denied him power for too long. It’s as if he is already raging about his next defeat, and at the same time one senses he is ready to do anything except give up. Perhaps he doesn’t believe in his victory, but it is in his nature to fight for it nevertheless. Or maybe life made him like that. Defeat is undoubtedly the best teacher. Suddenly filled by a faint melancholy, Barthes lights a cigarette as a smokescreen. But defeat can also make a man get stuck in a rut. Barthes wonders what this little man really wants. His determination can’t be questioned, but isn’t he trapped in a system? 1965, 1974, 1978 … Each one a sort of glorious defeat, for which he personally is not blamed. So he feels empowered to persevere in his raison d’être, and his raison d’être, of course, is politics. But perhaps it is also defeat.
Fabius speaks up again: ‘Giscard is a brilliant orator, and you know it. Not only that, but his style is tailor-made for TV. That’s what it means to be modern.’
Mitterrand, faux-conciliatory: ‘But of course, my dear Laurent, I’ve been sure of that for quite some time. I was already an admirer of his presentational gifts when he used to speak at the National Assembly. Back then, I remarked that he was the best orator I’d heard since … Pierre Cot. Yes, a radical who was a minister during the Front Populaire era. But I digress. Monsieur Fabius is so young, he barely remembers the Programme Commun, so as for the Front Populaire … [Timid laughter around the table.] But, if you insist, let us return to Giscard, that beacon of eloquence! The clarity of his discourse, the fluency of his delivery, studded with pauses that made his listeners feel they were allowed to think, like slow-motion replays on televised sport, even the way he holds his head … it all readied Giscard for invading our television screens. No doubt he put in a great deal of graft to supplement his natural abilities. The age of the amateur is over! But he got his reward. He makes the television breathe.’
Fabius is still unimpressed. ‘Well, it seems to work rather well. People listen to him, and there are even some who vote for him.’
Mitterrand replies, as if to himself: ‘I wonder, though. You talk about a modern style. I think he’s old-fashioned. Heartfelt, literary rhetoric is mocked these days. [Barthes hears the echo of the 1974 debate, still an open wound after his defeat.] And rightly so, more often than not. [Oh, how this admission must have pained him! Oh, how hard Mitterrand must have worked on his self-control to reach this point!] The affectations of language offend the ear like make-up offends the eye.’
Fabius waits, Barthes waits, everyone waits. Mitterrand is used to people waiting for him; he takes his time before continuing: ‘But not just rhetoric – rhetoric and a half. The rhetoric of the technocrat is already worn out. Yesterday, it was precious. Now, it’s ridiculous. Who said recently: “I am suffering with my balance of payments”?’
Jack Lang comes back to sit down, and asks: ‘Wasn’t it Rocard?’
Mitterrand lets his irritation show again: ‘No, it was Giscard.’ He glares at the bespectacled young man who ruined his punchline, then goes on regardless: ‘One wants to palpate him like a doctor. Suffering with a headache? Suffering with heartburn, backache, stomach ache? Everyone knows how those things feel. But suffering with his balance of payments? Where is that, between the sixth and seventh rib? Some unknown gland? One of those little bones in the coccyx? Giscard isn’t over the line yet.’
The guests no longer know if they should laugh or not. In doubt, they hold off.
Mitterrand goes on, staring out the window: ‘He has common sense and he’s a reasonable technician. He knows and feels politics like no one else.’
Barthes understands the compliment’s ambiguity: for someone like Mitterrand, it is obviously the highest praise, but – via a schizophrenia inherent in politics, making use of a very rich polysemy – the term ‘politics’ also suggests something disparaging, even insulting, in his mouth.
Mitterrand is unstoppable now: ‘But his generation is being wiped out along with economism. Margot, who dried his eyes, is starting to get bored.’
Barthes wonders if Mitterrand might be drunk.
Fabius, who seems increasingly amused, tells his boss: ‘Watch out. He’s still moving, and he knows how to aim straight. Remember his jibe: “You do not have a monopoly on heart.”’
The guests stop breathing.
Unexpectedly, Mitterrand’s response is almost composed: ‘And I don’t claim to! My opinions concern the public man. I reserve judgment on the private man, whom I don’t know.’ Having made this necessary concession and thus demonstrated his spirit of fair play, he is able to conclude: ‘But we were talking about technique, weren’t we? And it has become so important to him that he is no longer capable of the unexpected. The difficult moment in life – his, yours, mine, the life of anyone ambitious – is when you see the writing on the wall telling you that you are starting to repeat yourself.’
Hearing this, Barthes plunges his nose into his glass. He feels nervous laughter welling up inside him, but he contains it by reciting this saying to himself: ‘Every man laughs for himself.’
Reflexivity. Always reflexivity.