Lie true? La Septième fonction du langage by Laurent Binet

Laurent Binet's novel is a game of simulation and dissimulation by its very intrigue. Who killed Roland Barthes and why? The police investigation conducted by the commissioner Jacques Bayard and the semiologist Simon Herzog is gradually transformed into questions about the relationship between fiction and reality and the nature of language. Is it knowledge or a misunderstanding? What is its noetic, ethical and political scope? What powers does it confer? The historical events of 1980 and the references to important personalities in political and scholarly life form a realistic screen that fiction manipulates, according to narrative strategies impacted by revelations and denials, by invalidated assertions and uncertain certainties. The analysis will attempt to define the axiological positioning of the narrator in relation to his characters, his narration and the status of the literary discourse between poetics and rhetoric, between the locutory and the illocutory/perlocutory. The main theoretical supports: Ch. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, K. Bühler, GROUPE μ and Lubomír Doležel.

Keywords: language functions; Jakobson's communication model; fictional status of narration; Binet; French literature