“Go ahead, throw it in.”
The man’s arm twitches. Bayard shivers, in spite of himself. “Wait!” He knows that this scrap of paper might solve the mystery of at least four deaths. “Let’s talk, okay? What’s your name?” Simon has joined him. At both ends of the bridge, the police have the man in their sights. Out of breath, chest wheezing from the effort, he moves his other hand to his pocket. At that precise instant, there is the sound of a gunshot. The man swivels. Bayard yells: “Don’t shoot!” The man drops like a stone, but the paper flutters around above the river, and Bayard and Simon, who have rushed to the stone balustrade, lean over to watch the graceful curves of its erratic descent as if hypnotized. At last, it lands delicately on the water. And floats. Bayard, Simon, and the policemen who have instinctively understood that this document was their real objective, all stare, petrified, breath held, as the sheet of paper drifts along with the current.
Then Bayard tears himself from this contemplative torpor and, deciding that all hope is not yet lost, yanks off his jacket, his shirt, and his trousers, steps over the parapet, hesitates for a few seconds. And jumps. Disappears in a huge splash.
When he resurfaces, he is about sixty feet from the paper and, from up on the bridge, Simon and the policemen start shouting at him, all at the same time, indicating which direction to take, like supporters at a football match. Bayard starts swimming, as hard as he can. He tries to get closer, but the paper is carried away by the current. Still, the gap is gradually reduced. He’s close now, he’s going to catch it, only another ten feet, and then they disappear under the bridge and Simon and the policemen run to the other side and wait for them to reappear, and when they reappear the shouting starts up again. Three more feet and he’ll have it, but at that moment a riverboat passes, creating little waves that submerge the paper just as Bayard is about to reach out and grab it. The paper sinks, so Bayard dives after it, and for a few seconds all they can see is the pair of underpants he’s wearing, poking up out of the water. When he resurfaces, he is clutching the soaked paper in his hand and he swims doggedly over to the bank amid cheers and hurrahs.
But when he hauls himself onto the grass, he opens his hand and realizes that the sheet of paper is now merely a shapeless paste and that the writing has been dissolved because Barthes wrote with a fountain pen. This isn’t CSI and there will not be any way of making the text reappear: no magic scanner, no ultraviolet light. The document is lost forever.
The officer who fired the shot comes over to explain: he saw the man reaching for a gun in his pocket and he didn’t have time to think, so he fired. Bayard notes that the cop has a finger missing on his left hand. He asks him what happened. The policeman replies he had an accident while he was chopping wood at his parents’ house in the countryside.
When the police divers fish the corpse out of the water, they will find in his jacket pocket not a firearm but Barthes’s copy of Essays in General Linguistics, and Bayard, still drying himself, will ask Simon: “For fuck’s sake, who is this Jakobson guy?” And so, at last, Simon will be able to finish his lecture.
32
Roman Jakobson was a Russian linguist, born at the end of the nineteenth century, who was at the inception of a movement named Structuralism. After Saussure (1857–1913) and Peirce (1839–1914), and along with Hjelmslev (1899–1965), he is probably the most important theoretician among the founders of linguistics.
Beginning with two stylistic devices taken from ancient rhetoric, namely the metaphor (replacing one word with another linked to it by some sort of resemblance, “raging bull” for the boxer Jake LaMotta, for example) and metonymy (replacing one word with another linked to it by contiguity: “having a glass” to say that one drinks the liquid in the glass—the container for the contents, for example), he succeeded in explaining the functioning of language according to two axes: the paradigmatic axis and the syntagmatic axis.
Broadly speaking, the paradigmatic axis is vertical and concerns the choice of vocabulary: each time you pronounce a word, you choose it from a list that you have in mind and which you mentally scroll through. For example, “goat,” “economy,” “death,” “trousers,” “I-you-he,” or whatever.
Then you join it to other words: “belonging to Monsieur Seguin,” “stagnant,” “with his scythe,” “creased,” “undersigned,” to form a phrase: this chain is the horizontal axis, the word order that will enable you to make a sentence, then several sentences, and finally a speech. This is the syntagmatic axis.
With a noun, you must decide if it needs an adjective, an adverb, a verb, a coordinating conjunction, a preposition … and you must choose which adjective or which adverb or which verb: you renew the paradigmatic operation at each syntagmatic stage.
The paradigmatic axis makes you choose from a list of words in the equivalent grammatical class: a noun or a pronoun, an adjective or a relative proposition, an adverb, a verb, etc.
The syntagmatic axis makes you choose the order of words: subject-verb-complement or verb-subject or complement-subject-verb, and so on.
Vocabulary and syntax.
Each time you formulate a phrase, you are subconsciously practicing these two operations. The paradigmatic axis uses your hard disk, if you like, and the syntagmatic your processor. (Although I doubt whether Bayard knows much about computers.)
But in this particular case that is not what interests us.
(Bayard grumbles.)
Jakobson also summarized the process of communication with an outline that consists of the following elements: the sender, the receiver, the message, the context, the channel, and the code. It was from this outline that he drew the functions of language.
Jacques Bayard has no desire to learn more, but for the sake of the investigation he has to understand at least the broad outlines. So here are the functions:
• The “referential” function is the first and most obvious function of language. We use language to speak about something. The words used refer to a certain context, a certain reality, which one must provide information about.
• The “emotive” or “expressive” function is aimed at communicating the presence and position of the sender in relation to his or her message: interjections, modal adverbs, hints of judgment, use of irony, and so on. The way the sender expresses a piece of information referring to an exterior subject gives information about the sender. This is the “I” function.
• The “conative” function is the “you” function. It is directed toward the receiver. It is principally performed with the imperative or the vocative, i.e., the interpellation of whoever is being addressed: “Soldiers, I am satisfied with you!,” for example. (And remember, by the way, that a phrase is hardly ever reducible to a single function, but generally combines several. When he addresses his troops after Austerlitz, Napoleon marries the emotive function—“I am satisfied”—with the conative—“Soldiers/with you!”)
• The “phatic” function is the most amusing. This is the function that envisages communication as an end in itself. When you say “hello” on the telephone, you are saying nothing more than “I’m listening,” i.e., “I am in a situation of communication.” When you chat for hours in a bar with your friends, when you talk about the weather or last night’s soccer game, you are not really interested in the information per se, but you talk for the sake of talking, without any objective other than making conversation. In other words, this function is the source of the majority of our verbal communications.
• The “metalinguistic” function is aimed at verifying that the sender and the receiver understand each other, i.e., that they are using the same code. “You understand?,” “You see what I mean?,” “You know?,” “Let me explain…”; or, from the receiver’s point of view, “What are you getting at?,” “What does that mean?,” etc. Everything related to the definition of a word or the explanation of a development, everything linked to the process of learning a language, all references to language, all metalanguage, is the domain of the metalinguistic function. A dictionary’s sole function is metalinguistic.