France … a country famous for making an art form out of ridicule …(Le Carré 2016: 249)
1.Introduction
Bill Nash is the author of a comic novel, a book on the
language of humour, and a book on rhetoric (Nash 1982, 1985, 1992). I will
discuss some sources of humour in a book which I am sure he would have
enjoyed: a comic novel whose zany plot involves the search for a manuscript
which holds the secret of ultimate rhetorical power.
My chapter is a (slightly) satirical discussion of a (very)
satirical novel, La Septième Fonction du Langage by Laurent
Binet (2015),1 henceforth SFL. A
productive methodological strategy for investigating a topic is to use an
extreme example as a case study, and SFL is extreme in
several ways. First, since its pervasive mixture of fact and fiction has
left some readers uncertain about which is which, it provides good material
for a case study of fictional worlds. Second, since this pervasive mixture
involves extravagant caricatures of a large number of famous French
intellectuals, it illustrates ethical issues involved in parody and satire.
Third, since these extravagant caricatures demand detailed knowledge of
French cultural life in the 1970s and 1980s, it illustrates the perennial
problem of how much general and specialized knowledge readers require in
order to (fully?) understand texts.
Perhaps the simplest reason for discussing SFL
is that it’s a very funny and enjoyable novel: a tour de
force of suspense and intellectual high jinks. But satire –
along with caricatures and other forms of exaggeration – is a risky
strategy. Authors can never be sure that readers will get the joke, since
what is said is not what is meant. So, the novel illustrates many problems
of textual interpretation.
There are useful attempts to disentangle “the logical status of
fictional discourse” (such as Searle
1976), but they do not explain how readers distinguish fact from
fiction, or indeed how far you can appropriately go with outrageous
caricatures of living persons. The novel provides textual problems which
have not been solved by either literary scholars or language philosophers
(and they are not solved in this article, so don’t get too excited).
2.The plot: Spoiler alert!
Binet’s novel is a thriller / detective novel / spy story, with
an absurd / burlesque / crackpot / drôle / extravagant / farcical /
grotesque … zany plot, about a search for a lost manuscript
which holds the secret of ultimate rhetorical power: the ability to convince
anyone to do anything.
The title of the novel – and the mainspring of the action –
derives from Roman Jakobson’s famous model of language, which is summarized
in SFL (pp. 135–40). Jakobson (1960) proposed that any speech event involves six
constitutive factors. An addresser sends a message about some content to an
addressee along some communication channel, encoded in a way which both
sides hopefully understand. To each of these factors corresponds a function.
Most communication involves all factors, but one function may be
predominant. For example, an academic report may be principally concerned
with the truth value of its propositions (the referential function), rather
than with the addresser’s attitude to this content (the emotive function),
or the elegant style of its language (the poetic function). The model has
been criticized for seeing meanings too mechanically, as objects which are
packaged in words, then sent along tubes to be unwrapped by recipients.
However, all that is relevant here is that Jakobson (1960: 355) also speaks, rather vaguely,
of a “magic, incantatory function”. The plot imagines that this seventh
magical function, which gives unlimited performative power to its possessor,
has been discovered. The secret services of several countries are trying to
find an unpublished manuscript which describes how the seventh function
works.
The characters include “real people”: leading French
politicians, in particular Giscard and Mitterrand, and cultural theorists,
including Althusser, Barthes, Culler, Derrida, Eco, Foucault …
Kristeva, Sollers and many other members of the intelligentsia who created
what Americans called “French Theory”, plus a few well known linguists and
philosophers of language, including Jakobson and Searle. Of course, you will
probably agree, they are not “really” real people, but a mixture of factual
and fictional characteristics who/which exist only in the world of the
novel. This mixed ontological status has perplexed both ordinary readers and
professional critics.
The relations in the novel between fiction and reality – my
main topic in what follows – are complex. Each time I mention characters, I
could distinguish between the real world in which we live (W1) and the
fictional world of the novel (W2), for example, “W1-Searle” (the “real”
Searle) and “W2-Searle” (the fictional Searle in SFL). But
this could get tedious and pedantic, and the distinction is not always
clear. So, I will generally assume that you are paying attention and can
work out for yourself which is which.
The story takes place during the French presidential campaign
of 1980–81. In 1980, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a centrist politician, was
President. In 1981, he lost the election to François Mitterrand, leader of
the Socialist Party. The action starts in February/March 1980 with the death
of Roland Barthes, and ends after Mitterrand’s election victory in May 1981.
To get the plot started, Binet imagines a parallel world which diverges from
the real world. In February 1980, on his way home from lunch with Mitterrand
(a year before the presidential election), Roland Barthes is knocked over in
the street and dies some weeks later. This really is how he died. But
suppose it was not an accident, but murder. Suppose someone suspected that
Barthes possessed the only copy of the secret manuscript and killed him to
gain possession. That is, Binet takes an undisputed fact, adds a bit of
counter-factual speculation, and then slides into an ever more fantastic
world:
Barthes was killed in a traffic accident.But what if it was not an accident?Then someone killed him. But who? And why?
The case is investigated by Commissaire Jacques Bayard,
assisted by Simon Herzog, a young semiotician. Their pursuit of the murderer
and the manuscript takes them from Paris to Bologna to Cornell University to
Venice, then back to Paris and finally to Naples. On their quest, they meet
many leading figures of linguistics and semiotics: including, Roland Barthes
himself (dying in hospital), Roman Jakobson and Umberto Eco.
The crazy logic of counter-factuals is illustrated when
Umberto Eco quotes his mother-in-law: “What would have happened if my
son-in-law had not married my daughter?” (p. 292). But then if he hadn’t, he
wouldn’t be her son-in-law, so she couldn’t have asked the question. But
then again, if he hadn’t, then she wouldn’t be his mother-in-law, so she
wouldn’t exist. But then again, if someone else had married her daughter,
then he would be her son-in-law, so she could have asked the question of
him. But then again, … Trying to work this out is too much for Herzog. To
add some semblance of plausibility, Binet follows a strategy common to
conspiracy theories, and stirs in a series of coincidences. In 1980, a bomb
exploded in Bologna’s train station (p. 255), Althusser strangled his wife
(p. 262), Bulgarian spies were targeting dissidents with poisoned umbrellas
tips (and two characters, Tzvetan Todorov and Julia Kristeva, are both of
Bulgarian origin). One of the final scenes is based on the television debate
between Giscard and Mitterrand on 5 May 1981. Mitterrand is “abnormally
good” (p. 441). Perhaps he had the manuscript. In an interview published in
Partisan2 Binet
noted that, “seven years before, [Mitterrand] was terrible in the debate
with Giscard, but in the 1981 debate he was good. So I connected the seventh
function to his dramatic rhetorical success”. In a conversation with Yuri
Andropov (yes, he also appears in the novel), the point is made that “a good
lie must be drowned in an ocean of truth” (p. 149).
The title of Barthes’ most famous article, “The death of the
author”, is just another coincidence (Barthes 1967a). But other events are outrageously make-believe.
In the novel, Searle – who is also searching for the manuscript – attacks
and kills Derrida. In the real world they attacked each other’s work, but
Searle certainly did not kill Derrida (Derrida died in a hospital in Paris
in 2004, not in a cemetery in Ithaca in 1980). By this point, the characters
have been joined by the entirely fictional Morris Zapp, who has wandered in
from novels by David Lodge.
3.What is the book really (sic) about?
First, it is about the relation between fact and fiction. The
opening sentence is: “Life is not a novel”. For readers who were not paying
attention, the sentence is repeated later (p. 172). For readers who still
have not got the point, Eco asks about the difference between truth in a
novel and in real life (p. 248), and Morris Zapp criticizes literary critics
who confuse life with literature (p. 312): even fictional characters can
make serious statements.
Second, it is about language, rhetoric and semiotics. This is
the focus of much of “French Theory”, the topic of the missing manuscript,
and the reason for Mitterrand’s success in the television debate. Language
and discourse are the raison d’être of the secret Logos
Club: two players debate for or against a concept, a jury judges the winner,
the loser loses a finger. Eco explains the key idea: “the person who masters
discourse […] is virtually the master of the world” (p. 222).
Third, it is an attack on the high priests of postmodernism.
Semiotics is explained in fairly straightforward ways, in a seminar on
Barthes and James Bond (pp. 38–42) and elsewhere (pp. 14–15, 18–19, 46–49,
83–84). But otherwise, ideas about the power of discourse and the discourse
of power – which are central to Foucault’s work – are reduced to a
farcically literal form. And the gurus themselves are reduced to physical
caricatures, devoid of intellectual credibility. At a party, Lacan utters
owl-like cries, Althusser and others all talk nonsense and behave badly
(pp. 152–63).
So, we have a mélange of true statements,
plausible statements, counter-factuals, coincidences, and total nonsense.
But how do readers know that some propositions in SFL are
true (Barthes was knocked down in the street and died some weeks later),
that some might conceivably be true (The driver was a Bulgarian called Yvan
Delahov), and that others are batshit crazy (The murder was masterminded by
Kristeva, who is in charge of a gang of killers from the Bulgarian secret
service)?
I assume that the proposition about “Yvan Delahov” is invented.
On 27 March 1980 Le Monde reported simply that Barthes had
died as a result of being hit by a car on 25 February. A search on the Web
for “Yvan Delahov” finds only references to Binet’s book.
4.The intertext
Tales of the irresistible persuasive power of the human voice
go back to the Greeks and Romans. Plato was suspicious of the subversive
power of rhetoric. The seductive song of the Sirens lured sailors to their
deaths.3 However, like any
post-modernist novel worth its salt, SFL is packed with
more references than any normal reader could possibly identify, to other
books, to the large world of politics, and to the “small world” of
international universities.
Some references are familiar to any reader of detective novels.
A death which appears to be an accident turns out to be murder. The death is
investigated by two contrasting characters, detective and sidekick: compare
Holmes and Watson. Jacques Bayard is a policeman with a low opinion of
left-wing intellectuals. The death has a potential connection to this
circle, and since Bayard knows nothing of “French Theory”, he recruits Simon
Herzog, a young semiotician working at the University of Paris at Vincennes,
notorious for its left-wing sympathies.
Some references are more obscure. Pierre Bayard is Professor of
literature at Vincennes, and author of Qui a tué Roger
Ackroyd? and L’affaire du Chien des
Baskerville. To call the policeman after a professor at
Vincennes, who has written books about detective stories, is presumably
Binet’s private joke.
Some references are untraceable. The name Simon Herzog does
not – as far as I know – allude to any real person, but he does have the
same initials as Sherlock Holmes. SFL plays with
oppositions and reversals. It is the sidekick Herzog – not the detective –
who performs amazing feats of rapid inference, by combining Holmes’
techniques of abductive thinking with Barthes’ techniques of semiotics. By
the end of the novel, Herzog has had a haircut and acquired a suit and tie,
and Bayard has decided that some female members of the intelligentsia are
not so bad after all.
Some references are parodies of parodies. In almost every
Sherlock Holmes story, Holmes classifies people by their appearance. His
trademark skill often involves inferences so detailed as to be a totally
implausible running joke. From his behaviour and clothes, Herzog identifies
Bayard’s background, including his service in Algeria and his failed second
marriage. Elementary! (“C’est très simple”, p. 48). And he
interprets the significance of objects in Giscard’s office, including a
painting by Delacroix and a book about JFK: “The whole room is saturated
with symbols”4 (p. 83).
Some references will be recognised by any self-respecting
well-read reader. But for those who have not seen the parallel to a story of
“a lost document for which people are killed” (p. 249), Eco sees a man
carrying a bunch of roses, and a vision of a poisoned monk flashes through
his mind. (The Name of the Rose was published in Italian in
1980, the year in which SFL takes place: just another
coincidence.)
On their travels, the heroes are pursued by Bulgarian
gangsters, who drive a black Citroën DS. One of Barthes’ most famous essays
on the semiology of the bourgeois world is about this cult car:
DS = déesse = goddess (Barthes 1957). For readers who might miss this
reference it is explained – twice (pp. 54, 109). But readers have to work
out other references for themselves. When Althusser hides the manuscript, he
thinks of Poe and hides it in plain view (p. 177): The Purloined
Letter. When Searle unleashes two savage dogs on Derrida, the
scene takes place in a cemetery (pp. 354–57): The Hound of the
Baskervilles. The heroes are protected by Japanese guardian
angels: is this a reference to Barthes
(1970), L’empire des signes, on a “fictive
nation”? Could be, I’m not sure. Life is too short to trace all the
references which show off Binet’s five years of research for the book (which
he emphasized in an interview in Libération5), and he has undoubtedly packed in
more references than I have spotted, even with help from Wikipedia.
5.The lists
It is common to find real historical characters in novels. What
is different about SFL is
- there are dozens of W2-caricatures of attested W1-personalities
- some caricatures – although arguably in poor taste – seem not too far from what we know from biographies of the W1-character (e.g. Foucault)
- some caricatures embody fantasies which do not correspond in any way to the attested personality of the W1-character (e.g. Searle)
- some caricatures mix harsh evaluations – which may or may not be justified – with participation in humiliating W2-situations (e.g. Sollers: see below).
So, before I discuss the ontology of factual/fictional
characters, we need some pedestrian documentation on their sheer abundance.
Here is a list, in chronological order of birth, of the W1-scholars whose
W2-caricatures play major roles in the novel:
Roman Jakobson (1896–1982, Russian/American linguist,
literary theorist)
Jacques Lacan (1901–81, French psychoanalyst)
Roland Barthes (1915–80, French literary critic,
semiotician)
Louis Althusser (1918–90, French Marxist
philosopher)
Gilles Deleuze (1925–95, French philosopher)
Michel Foucault (1926–84, French philosopher, social
theorist)
Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930–92, French philosopher,
psychotherapist)
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004, French philosopher,
literary theorist)
Umberto Eco (1932–2016, Italian philosopher, novelist,
semiotician)
John Searle (1932–, American philosopher of
language)
Philippe Sollers (1936–, French writer and critic;
Kristeva’s husband)
Hélène Cixous (1937–, Algerian/French feminist writer,
philosopher)
Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017, Bulgarian/French
structuralist, narratologist)
Julia Kristeva (1941–, Bulgarian/French critic,
psychoanalyst, Sollers’ wife)
Jonathan Culler (1944–, American literary
theorist)
Bernard-Henri Lévy (1948–, aka BHL, French media
personality)
Judith Butler (1956–, American philosopher, gender
theorist)
Butler is named only as “Judith”, presumably because in 1980
she was a postgraduate student, and not yet world famous, but she is clearly
identified as a feminist of Hungarian Jewish origin (p. 317).
All the major figures of “French Theory” appear, sometimes in
actual lists: in the enumeration of those attending Barthes’ funeral
(p. 108), in the programme of a conference at Cornell (pp. 297–99), and in
the poll of the 42 leading French intellectuals which Herzog reads in a
magazine (pp. 432–33). This list really was published in
Lire6 on 1
April 1981, as “Référendum: Les 42 premiers intellectuels”.
Given the importance which the French attach to their intellectuals, I
suppose it was not intended as an April Fool’s joke.
Many novels contain a statement such as the following, from
Changing Places by David Lodge, the novel in which
Morris Zapp first appears:
Although some of the locations and public events portrayed in the novel bear a certain resemblance to actual locations and events, the characters, considered either as individuals or as members of institutions, are entirely imaginary (Lodge 1975: n.p).
Given the lists above and below, such a statement would make
no sense in SFL, and none occurs.
The scholars listed above will be mainly known to readers
familiar with linguistics, semiotics and literary/cultural theory. Others,
who get a brief mention, include Jean-Paul Sartre, who sits in a café with
Françoise Sagan, and Noam Chomsky, who appears at the conference, plus
Étienne Balibar, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Daniel Defert,
Jean-Edern Hallier, Hervé Guibert, Mathieu Lindon, Sylvère Lotringer,
Jean-François Lyotard, Paul de Man, Jeffrey Mehlman, Serge Moati, Camille
Paglia, Roger Peyrefitte, Avital Ronell, and Gayatri Spivak. Further writers
and politicians are likely to be immediately familiar only to French readers
(I had look several of them up in Wikipedia): Jacques Attali, Robert
Badinter, Régis Debray, Laurent Fabius, Jack Lang, Mathieu Lindon, Michel
d’Ornano, Michel Poniatowski, and many more.
Michelangelo Antonioni debates at the Logos Club and loses;
Monica Vitti bandages his finger (pp. 234–39). Romano Prodi is in the
audience. (Why are they there? I have no idea.) Björn Borg, Ivan Lendl and
John McEnroe appear on television to contribute comparisons between tennis,
semiology and rhetoric (e.g. pp. 377–78).
6.Factual worlds and fictional worlds
So far, my SparkNotesy summaries of the plot, themes and
references of SFL cover fun reasons why linguists should
appreciate Binet’s novel. They can recommend to their first-year students
the sections which read like a very useful Pragmatics for
Dummies, on Barthes’ theory of semiotics, Jakobson’s theory of
language, and Austin’s theory of illocutionary and perlocutionary
(pp. 38–42, 135–40, 249–51, 345).
Time now for more serious stuff. SFL
illustrates unsolved problems of textual interpretation, such as the
following. The relation between fact and fiction: how do readers distinguish
which is which? The relation between text and reader: does
SFL make more sense if you’re French? Does the novel
provide new examples which a theory of fictional worlds must solve? Can a
work of fiction therefore contribute to theory?
Human languages allow us to talk about six impossible things
before breakfast. In legends and myths we can talk about things which do not
exist (such as unicorns and gods), or about any of the intersubjective
realities (such as semiotics and religion) which are created by our talk.
But it should be easy, one might think, to keep fact and fiction apart.
Shakespeare wrote Macbeth to flatter King James VI, who
believed in witches. But even James VI must have grasped the point that
three of the actors on stage were not themselves witches, but men pretending
to be women pretending to be witches. He must have understood that he and
the pretend witches belong to different worlds, as we say, and he would not
have had them burned at the stake.
So, no readers of SFL, one might think, should
get confused (except perhaps those who visit the museum in Baker Street to
see Sherlock Holmes’ pipe and deerstalker). There is the real world in which
we live (W1), which provides the geographical background for the action
(e.g. in Paris) and several events (e.g. the French presidential election).
There is the entirely fictional world (W2), in which fictional characters
(e.g. Simon Herzog) take part in fictional events (e.g. a debate at the
Logos Club). There are W2-caricatures who say things which their
W1-originals actually said or might have said (Derrida lectures on speech
acts, p. 336–40), but who are involved in entirely fictional events (Derrida
is killed by savage dogs, pp. 354–55). And there are W2-characters who say
and do things which they actually said in W2 (Morris Zapp repeats his
central principle: “every decoding is a new encoding”, p. 313).
However, it is impossible to list all conceivable combinations
of factual/fictional characters/worlds: novels with fictional creatures in
fictional settings (Hobbits in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The
Lord of the Rings), novels with fictional characters in real
historical settings (Edward Waverley in Walter Scott’s
Waverley), novels with real characters in fictional
settings (Napoleon in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace), and
fables (in which fictional animals formulate serious moral lessons), not to
mention sci-fi, myths, and religious texts (in which events violate the laws
of nature). And then many myths and religious texts used to be interpreted
as literally true, but are now regarded as, well, myths. The text has stayed
the same, but readers’ perspectives have changed. Conversely, fiction can
become reality: some countries give official religious status to the Jedi
realist movement.7 May the Farce be
with you! This list hardly starts to tackle all the fun which can be had
with the fiction/reality distinction.
7.What is this chapter really about?
It is about the concept of fictional worlds, and it is time I
dealt with the review of the literature. It is not surprising that
mainstream linguistics takes almost no interest in the concept, since it is
difficult to see how there could be any strictly linguistic features which
distinguish factual from fictional statements. It is, however, surprising
that literary theory takes so little interest in the concept. You might
think that literary scholars would have long ago worked out the exact
ontological nature of the fictional characters which inhabit almost every
work of art: Hamlet, Mr Pickwick, Godot (or does he really not exist even in
the play?) and so on. John Woods
(1974) applied concepts from the philosophy of language to
fictional texts, and argued that fictional sentences have a distinctive
logic. For example, if we insert a fictionality operator such as “according
to the story in SFL”, then the proposition “Barthes was
murdered” is true. The proposition has, as it were, fictional truth
conditions. From the 1970s on it was famously argued by Hayden White that it
is impossible to distinguish between history and fiction. Both tell
narratives, and all narratives share properties of fictionality, since their
specific point of view always entails selection and interpretation. Barthes (1967b) had himself made the
same point, so perhaps his ghost cannot complain if the facts of his death
are turned into fantasy. More recently, in the area known as “cognitive
poetics” and “text world theory”, ideas about possible worlds have been
applied to literary texts, initially by Paul Werth, and then by Gilles
Fauconnier, Joanna Gavins and others (e.g. Fauconnier & Turner 2002; Gavins 2007; Werth 1999). The basic idea is that we construct mental models
based on all the discourse – everyday conversation, newspaper reports,
novels, whatever – which we hear or read. It is in the philosophy of
language that the concept has been of greatest interest. Overviews often
start with work around 1900 on names and other noun phrases. Gottlob Frege
distinguished denotation and reference (the name “Sherlock Holmes” has a
meaning – outside the fiction – although it does not refer to any
spatio-temporal entity in W1). Bertrand Russell, Peter Strawson and others
discussed sentences such as “The (present) King of France is bald”, arguing
that this proposition is neither true nor false, but defective, since its
referent doesn’t exist and its existential presupposition therefore fails.
Alexius Meinong, whom Russell much admired, is notorious for proposing an
extravagant ontology, arguing that we refer to many kinds of imaginary and
abstract objects, which all enjoy some sort of existence (e.g. Sherlock
Holmes, Godot, right-angled triangles, the number three, the average
Frenchman, Laurent Binet, etc.). From the 1960s on, Jaakko Hintikka, Saul
Kripke, David Lewis and others developed work on the semantics of proper
names, possible worlds, modal logic and counterfactual conditionals.
You may be relieved that I will not discuss this literature
further, beyond recommending the following review articles. Lahey (2014) reviews cognitive
approaches to literary stylistics. And Kroon and Voltolini (2011) and Eklund (2015) provide authoritative overviews of
work in the philosophy of language. They are excellent overviews, but can do
little more than record disagreement about the ontological status of
fictional characters. Stating the exact nature of fictional worlds turns out
to be much more difficult than my fictional James VI possibly thought (but
then he was rather confused about witches). However, W1-Searle and W1-Eco
provide helpful discussions.
8.Searle: A pragmatic approach?
One of the clearest starting points is an article by Searle (1976), who asks the
paradoxical question: how can words in a novel have their ordinary meanings
although readers do not comply with the ordinary rules for interpreting
them? The author of a newspaper article, he argues, performs illocutionary
acts of assertion that conform to four rules:
- Essential rule: the writer is committed to the truth of the proposition.
- Preparatory rule: s/he must be able to provide evidence for its truth.
- The proposition must not be obviously true to both writer and reader.
- Sincerity rule: the writer believes that the proposition is true.
But the author of a novel is not committed to any of these
rules. So, what kind of illocutionary act is performed? The answer, says
Searle (1976: 324), is
obvious:
[The author] is pretending, one could say, to make an assertion, or acting as if [he/she] were making an assertion, or going through the motions of making an assertion, or imitating the making of an assertion […] without any intention to deceive.
Searle is making four points. Words in fiction have their
ordinary meanings. The words do not have their ordinary illocutionary force.
Fiction is pretence. There is no intention to deceive. This abstract
formulation is characteristic of Searle’s approach, but odd in so far as
literary language is usually regarded as having some added value, rather
than being a use of language which has lost one of its ordinary
functions.
Searle makes two further points, both of which could arguably
be more precisely formulated. First: “[T]he identifying criterion for
whether or not a text is a work of fiction must of necessity lie in the
illocutionary intentions of the author” (Searle 1976: 325). Literary theorists talk of the “intentional
fallacy” (Wimsatt & Beardsley
1946), namely, that one can never know the intentions of an
author. Searle argues that this fallacy is a fallacy: it is absurd to ignore
the author’s intentions, since if you think that a text is a novel, you
already assume something about the author’s intentions. As a statement about
the whole text, this is surely correct. As a whole, SFL
does not refer to any reality outside the text. However, we may not know
which individual propositions are intended to be taken literally.
Second: “There is no textual property, syntactical or
semantic, that will identify a text as a work of fiction” (Searle 1976: 325). However, the
position of formal linguistic features in a text may signal fiction. For
example, some short stories and novels (only some, of course) start with
sentences containing a third person pronoun with no anaphoric referent.
Stanzel (1984: 160) argues
that this is “inconceivable in a non-fictional text”:8 perhaps not inconceivable, but unlikely. Rather
than talking of “textual properties”, it would be better to say that there
are no properties of individual sentences which will identify them as
fictional. Both of these points illustrate a problem in interpreting
SFL. It is abundantly clear that the whole text is
fictional, but often unclear which individual propositions are
fictional.
Searle (1976: 332)
also points out that works of fiction generally contain factual
propositions. For example, in SFL the sections on
Pragmatics for Dummies can be judged on their accuracy
as serious academic statements. In addition, fictional texts are an amalgam
of explicit content plus generally accepted beliefs and default assumptions
that W2 departs minimally from W1. Much of the action in
SFL happens in real streets in real places. We are
told, for example, that Roland Barthes lived in the Rue Servandoni, which is
close to the Jardin du Luxembourg, and that Cornell is five hours in the bus
from New York City. If you’re feeling pedantic, you can check this in Google
Maps.
Searle’s approach is essentially pragmatic. There need be
nothing in the text itself which signals that we are reading fiction, and no
meaning expressed in fiction is distinct from everyday meaning. We need
contextual information, such as the title or other device – what Genette
calls the “paratext” (Genette
1997) – in order to decide. On the title page of SFL
is the word “Novel”.
Finally, it takes two to tango: the reader must recognise the
author’s intention and join in the pretence. But what triggers the pretence?
How is the reader to know which aspects of SFL have a basis
in real world truth? Searle
(1976: 332), in his closing sentence, points to a serious gap in
literary theory: “[T]here is as yet no general theory of
the mechanisms by which such serious illocutionary intentions are conveyed
by pretended illocutions.” [Emphasis added.]
9.Eco: A semantic approach?
Searle asks and answers a variant of his initial question: “But
how is it possible for an author to ‘create’ fictional characters out of
thin air, as it were? […] By pretending to refer to people and to
recount events about them.” (1976: 329). This does not get us much further.
However, Eco (2001) sees the
ontology of fictional characters as follows. They are
intensional semiotic objects
(intensional with an “s”). That
is, they have no referent in the external spatio-temporal world (they have
no truth value), but are created by a bundle of semantic features (which are
its truth conditions). In W1 the name “Sherlock Holmes” only denotes. In the
W2 of the stories it both denotes and refers. Eco recommends later work by
Searle (e.g. 1995: 7–13, 2010: 17–18), which shows that the opposition
objective / subjective is ambiguous between epistemic and ontological
senses:
epistemically objective and subjective are predicates of judgementsontologically objective and subjective are predicates of entities.
Epistemology concerns knowledge. Compare two propositions:
(1)
Herzog works at the University of Vincennes.
(2)
Herzog is a better detective than Bayard.
(1) is epistemically objective. It is not a matter of personal
opinion. You can check it in the text of Binet’s novel. (2) is epistemically
subjective. It is a matter of personal opinion.
Ontology concerns existence. Compare the referents in two
subject noun phrases:
(3)
Cornell University is situated about 200 miles from New
York city.
(4)
The Logos Society meets in Venice.
The referent in (3) is ontologically objective. You can check
it on Google maps. The referent in (4) is ontologically subjective. It is a
product of the human mind which created the text.
Woods (1974)
proposed that fictional sentences have a distinctive logic, which makes them
“bet-sensitive”. If I bet that (1) and (4) are true, and you bet the
opposite, then I will win the bet. This distinguishes them from notorious
cases such as “The King of France is bald”. There is no point in betting
whether this proposition is true or not (unless you put him in a story and
preface the proposition with a fictionality operator: “According to the
story … the King of France is bald”). Note also that (1) and
(4) would be true (in the fictional world) even if no-one had ever read
Binet’s novel. This immediately refutes extreme versions of Reader Reception
Theory.
One approach to these ontological questions is to say that
there are many different kinds of things in the world. As Eco says (p. 247),
events which seemed credible to readers of a medieval encyclopedia now seem
legendary. Gabriel (2013) develops
the view that there is no single reality to which all real things belong. A
purely materialist view that the real world consists of the totality of
spatio-temporal things misses everything which is not spatio-temporal, but
conceptual, including all properties of things, all relations between them,
and so on. The Federal Republic of Germany, he points out (he’s German), is
not a thing which can be identified with the physical bit of land where it
has been located since 1990. It includes its organization into federal
states, its concept of democracy, which is enshrined in its Constitution
(Grundgesetz), a written document of around 100 pages,
and so on.
For Gabriel – and presumably for W1/W2-Eco – it makes no sense
to talk of the world as a whole. Existence is a property of a realm or
domain. Gabriel therefore talks of a plurality of domains, only one of which
is the spatio-temporal domain studied by the natural sciences (which is
itself not a unified domain). Lots of other things exist in their own fields
of sense: numbers, citizens, republics, money, marriages, toothache,
unicorns in fantasy literature, witches in Faust. It would
be very strange to argue that there are no witches in Faust
(or Macbeth). But there are none in Germany (or Scotland).
For something to exist it has to be part of a context. Existence is always
relative to particular fields of sense.
Very different kinds of objects, concrete and abstract, are
referred to in the subject noun phrases in the following sentences:
- François Mitterrand was President of France from 1981 to 1995.
- The President of France cannot serve more than two consecutive terms.
- The average Frenchman eats almost a whole baguette every day.
- The Logos Club is a secret society.
- The Logos Club was created by Laurent Binet.
In (a) the subject noun phrase refers to a spatio-temporal
entity. In (b) and (c) the subjects are different kinds of abstract things.
In (d) the Logos Club is referred to from inside the story, whereas in (e)
it is referred to from outside. In terms of “bet-sensitivity” (Woods 1974), adding a fictionality
operator (“according to the story”) to (d) would not change the conditions
of the bet, but this operator would make no sense for (e). Anyone can
understand such sentences, but philosophers of language cannot explain how
they work.
10.Searle and Eco (and Gabriel)
So, in a word or two:
Searle argues that authors of fiction make statements, but
only pretend to make true statements. This seems rather obvious, but
usefully relates to standard positions in the philosophy of language. In the
terminology of Speech Acts (Searle 1969), the utterance act is real, but the
illocutionary act is pretended. Works of fiction also contain sentences
which are intended to be taken literally. But the puzzle remains: how do
readers know which is which?
Eco argues that fictional characters are created by words in
texts. This seems rather obvious, but usefully relates to standard positions
in semantics, concerning the reference and denotation of proper names. In
addition, Gabriel proposes that many different kinds of things exist in
different contexts: the Logos Club is an abstract entity which exists only
in SFL. But the puzzle remains: how do readers know which
context to invoke on any given occasion?
Since there need be no textual markers of fiction, it all
seems to come down to the reader’s knowledge, either specialist knowledge
about “French Theory”, or historical/political knowledge about French
presidents, or what anyone on the Clapham omnibus knows about this and
that – which brings us back to Searle’s gloomy admission that we have no
general theory of the mechanisms involved.
Let us call Searle’s view the “pretence theory” and Eco’s view
the “creation theory”. The first says nothing about the purpose of the
pretence. The second says nothing about the extent of the creation. The
resulting problems of interpretation have been noted by both ordinary
readers and also by professional critics of SFL.
11.Ordinary readers
SFL contains material to please both a mass
audience and a Bildungsbürgertum (who understand words such
as Bildungsbürgertum). On the one hand, it contains clichés
from a pot-boiler: several murders, a car chase through Paris, killer dogs,
a secret society, mustachioed thugs who look like mustachioed thugs, and a
mafia boss who gets thrown into boiling mud. On the other hand, it contains
a lot of semiotic theory, intertextual references, and quotes from French
intellectuals.
A relatively new kind of empirical evidence about how books
are interpreted is available on websites9 which allow readers to post ratings and reviews of books which
they have read. They can contain dozens and sometimes hundreds of
commentaries, from a few lines to short essays.
Opinions are divided on whether readers can understand
SFL without expert knowledge of “French Theory”. Some
readers think that the book remains readable even if not all references are
recognized, and/or that readers can be expected to do their own research on
unfamiliar characters (most readers would have to consult Wikipedia
frequently). Some think that the humour fails if jokes have to be explained
all the time, and/or that all these references to French intellectuals are
too difficult for non-French readers. Others point out that central concepts
in linguistics and semiotics are explained, sometimes at length. After all,
Commissaire Bayard knows that he understands nothing of “toutes ces
conneries”. That’s why he employs Herzog to translate for him.
But – crucially – some readers ask how they can distinguish pastiche from
reality if they are not familiar with the cultural background. Neither side
seems able to provide knock-down arguments on whether and/or how much
real-world knowledge is needed to appreciate the novel.
12.Professional critics
SFL was positively reviewed in many leading
French newspapers, but not all the reactions were favourable. A popular
French television talk show10
broadcast a debate between Yann Moix and Laurent Binet. Moix (himself a
prize-winning novelist) criticized the vulgarity of the situations in which
Binet places his characters, especially Foucault and Barthes. From the
beginning of the novel, he argued, they are presented in a severely
reductionist fashion, with reference to features of their personal lives,
but with no indication of their academic importance to readers who may be
unaware of their enormous cultural influence. SFL, he
argued, fails to successfully combine popular and elitist culture, and
reduces important scholars to extreme caricatures. Binet’s defence was that
his characters speak, throughout the novel, in their own words, which are
taken from their own publications. He claimed to have pulled off the trick
of constructing a parody from the words of those who are parodied.
Foucault’s publications, he argued, are well known, as are publications by
Barthes, including the personal revelations in his Soirées de
Paris. However – one might add – this consists of diary entries
dated shortly before Barthes’ death, but published posthumously, possibly
against his intentions (Barthes
1987). It would be interesting to have Simon Herzog’s semiotic
analysis of body language and facial expression in the televised exchange
between Moix and Binet.
In the interview in Partisan published a few
weeks later, Binet agreed that some readers were shocked by his undignified
fictionalization of Foucault, but argued that the scenes are based on what
has long been public in biographies, and that they do not detract from his
theoretical work. Moix had argued – on the contrary – that this would not be
clear to readers unfamiliar with Foucault’s life and work. Again, neither
side seemed able to provide knock-down arguments on whether aspects of
SFL are legitimate satire or unacceptably
offensive.
13.On the ethical status of fictional discourse
Binet reserves his most biting satire for his French
characters, who are portrayed as the high priests of an intelligentsia who
have renounced coherent critical thought. Umberto Eco (Italian) emerges as
the dignified elder statesman of semiotics, Roman Jakobson
(Russian-American) is gently mocked for his woollen tie and strange haircut,
Jonathan Culler (American) potters around harmlessly organizing a
conference, and John Searle (American) … Oh, OK, he turns out
to be a murderer. But, apart from that, the foreigners all emerge reasonably
unscathed by Binet’s satire. Barthes and Foucault are dead, but others are
not. Binet was asked in the Partisan interview whether he
was worried about being sued by the targets of his satire. He replied that
in France fiction is well protected, that his publisher’s lawyers had
approved the book, and that his novel “reveal[s] itself as fiction page
after page”. Unfortunately for textual theory, he did not explain how this
works, saying only that he had created events which no-one could take as
even remotely true. This is true of the whole plot, but not of all the
details. For example, Deleuze has “abnormally long fingernails” and a large
collection of hats (objectively true?), is obsessed by the tennis on
television (invented?), and utters philosophical banalities (Binet’s
subjective opinion?). Though Deleuze’s banal philosophical question, about
the problem of establishing the borderline between true and false (p. 78),
is precisely the question which has led to criticism of SFL
by Moix and others.
It is Sollers who is reduced to a particularly harsh
caricature. He is described as displaying “histrionic dandyism”,
“pathological boasting” and “clown-like” behaviour (p. 152). He gives a
vacuous description of a book he is writing: “I cannot conceive of a book
better informed, many-layered […] a philosophical, even metaphysical,
novel with a cold and lyrical realism”. He is portrayed “as a child”, with a
memory span of three minutes, who enjoys Punch and Judy shows (pp. 273–78).
At a meeting of the Logos Club in Venice, he talks embarrassing nonsense
(“delirious logorrhoea […] mentally disordered […]
megalomaniac”, p. 416), loses the debate, and then loses more than just a
finger. He had an inaccurate version of the secret manuscript.
Binet – Searle might say – is only pretending to make true
statements about Sollers. But pretence is an intentional act. So, what
purpose does Binet’s pretence serve? Since we cannot access his ulterior
motive, it is unclear which individual propositions are intended to be true.
Compare two sentences:
P1. “Sollers is like a child.”P2. “Sollers is just a funny character.”
Considered as isolated sentences, they contain nothing which
indicates whether they are fictional or serious statements. But P1 is from
the novel (p. 276) and P2 is from the interview11 in Libération, where Binet was
outside the protection of fiction and carried full responsibility for his
utterances.
Genette (1991)
proposes that a criterion of fiction is that the author is distinct from the
narrator, but now author and narrator do not seem clearly distinguished.
Binet argued that, as a writer himself, Sollers respects freedom of
expression in the novel, and was therefore unlikely to go to court.
Nevertheless, it is understandable if W1-Sollers felt unhappy with the
portrayal of W2-Sollers, and aggrieved at such an ad
hominem portrayal by a fellow novelist. He might at least wish
to avoid Binet at the next publishers’ party (or perhaps a character called
Binet will receive humiliating treatment in a future novel of his own).
There are objects which don’t exist (e.g. W2-Sollers), but
which really do have properties. Sherlock Holmes never existed, but (it is
true that) he really was a detective. Unicorns don’t exist, but (it is true
that) they really do have just one horn. For a hundred years, philosophers
of language have been trying to solve the logical puzzles raised by
non-existent objects (Kroon &
Voltolini 2011).
14.In lieu of a conclusion
Satire and parody are risky strategies. One reason why readers
may not get the joke is that real world historical knowledge varies widely.
According to a 2008 poll of 3,000 British teenagers,12 20 per cent believe that Sir Winston Churchill
is a fictional character, and almost 60 per cent believe that Sherlock
Holmes really existed and lived at 221B Baker Street. Well, they were just
ignorant teenagers, you might say, but experts can also be misled.
In 1996, Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York
University, published a long spoof in Social Text, a
journal of postmodern cultural studies. In a jargon-ridden parody of an
academic article, with over 200 references and over 100 footnotes, he argued
that “physical ‘reality’, no less than social ‘reality’, is at bottom a
social and linguistic construct”. The hoax is well documented on the
Web.13 Just a few points are
relevant here. (a) Sokal’s article quoted many of the French intellectuals
who appear in SFL. (b) Although the article – as Binet
might say – revealed itself as a hoax on page after page, this was not
recognized by the journal editors. (c) Major scholars could not agree about
the implications. Steven Weinberg was “amused by the prank” (The New
York Review of Books, 8 August 1996), and Thomas Nagel thought
it was a “delicious hoax” (The New Republic, 12 Oct 1998),
but Stanley Fish thought it was a bad joke which can “erode the foundation
of trust on which science is built” (New York Times, 21 May
1996). (Stanley Fish was director of the press which publishes
Social Text. Biographical knowledge about an author is
not always irrelevant to understanding a text.) And SFL is
not the first time that “French Theory” has been ridiculed – in sometimes
abusive, burlesque, controversial, disrespectful, exorbitant, farcical,
grotesque, hyperbolic, … pernicious, polemical, preposterous,
provocative ways. Here, for example, is a much quoted denunciation by Paglia (1991: 204, 206, reprinted
1993), from which, believe it or not, I’ve omitted the rude bits:
… the death-by-sludge French theorists […] Lacan: the French fog machine […] a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt […] Derrida: a Gloomy Gus one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope […] Neo-Foucaldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knocking down the pins.
In 2016 and 2017, across British and American politics, an
increasing number of people had increasing problems in accurately
identifying increasingly fluid boundaries between fact and fiction,
information and entertainment, and news and satire. In 2016 a satirical poem
on German television14 triggered an
international wrangle between lawyers, media commentators and European
politicians. Many such cases demonstrate the power of language to persuade,
confuse and insult, and deserve careful case-by-case analysis by language
philosophers. Given just how confused people get about fact and fiction,
Binet’s confidence – that readers will recognize that his novel “reveal[s]
itself as fiction page after page” – is optimistic.
I hope I have encouraged you to (re)read SFL.
The novel raises fascinating puzzles about fictional worlds. And I have not
revealed everything about the plot by any means. I have not told you who
found the manuscript, what happened to it, or whether Simon Herzog and his
girlfriend (who?) live happily ever after – after the book
ends … ha! ha!
Acknowledgements
For useful comments on previous versions of this article I am
grateful to Joanna Channell, Andrew and Naomi Hallan, Gabi Keck and Julia
Wurr. I am also grateful to three literary colleagues, Ralf Hertel, Markus
Müller and Heiko Zimmermann, who discussed with me the ontology of fictional
characters.
Notes
1.Page references are to the 2016 Livre de
Poche edition. Quotations are my translations of the French
original.
3.Jim Stansfield reminded me of a modern variant: a Monty
Python sketch about a joke which is so funny that anyone who hears it
dies laughing.
4.In Revue de la Presse (August 2017) is an
analysis of Emmanuel Macron’s official photograph, which will hang in
town halls across France. He stands in front of a desk on which are a
clock and books, framed symmetrically between the flags of France and of
the European Union, an open window at his back. The author comments that
the photo is “saturé de symboles”.
6.The list is reproduced in an article by Pierre Bourdieu (who
is at place 36!): « Le hit-parade des intellectuels français ou qui sera
juge de la légitimité des juges. » Actes de la recherche en
sciences sociales. 1984. 52–53: 95–100. http://www.persee.fr/doc/arss_0335-5322_1984_num_52_1_3336.
8.Stanzel gives as an example the opening sentence of James
Joyce’s short story A Little Cloud: “Eight years before
he had seen his friend off at the North Wall.” I think it would be
possible, however, to find many newspaper articles which start thus
in medias res.
9.These two websites contain several dozen reviews of
SFL, some quite detailed:
10.The programme “On n’est pas couché” was
broadcast on France 2 on 7 November 2015. See an
extract at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcMeq_OkCY4. For another
disagreement about SFL on a French talk show, and
whether it is justifiable to ridicule a complete generation of French
intellectuals, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsrbJbn8Xlk.
11.The quote continues: « Sollers est rigolo en tant
que personnage. La façon dont il parle de lui-même dans ses livres,
dont il est le sujet principal, permanent, de sa propre œuvre, c’est
très drôle. ».
13.The original article by Sokal and a great deal of further
material, is available at http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/.
14.The poem and the subsequent political kerfuffle are well
documented on the Web. Search for “Jan Böhmermann” or “Böhmermann
affair”.