A turn toward the grotesque in the late stages of The Seventh Function of Language

Entertaining, informative, and provocative as it is, Laurent Binet's novel The Seventh Function of Language takes a turn toward the grotesque toward the end - in the "Venice" section, when the characters converge for a high-level meeting of the Logic Club, in which members and "challengers" face off in one-on-one debates on various esoteric topics, the "loser" of the debate has to, gulp, put his hand on a chopping block and have a finger lopped off. We'd already witnessed a few of these debates - I suspect that this club and its gruesome competitions is a sly mockery of some academic face-offs, though I have no idea what Binet's target might be - but the big confrontation in Venice is far more graphic and disconcerting. The debates themselves: In the first, the protagonist Simon Herzog, who amusingly continues to wonder whether he's actually leading a life or if he's just a character in a novel - prevails over a higher-ranking club member in a debate about Classic and Baroque style (a good primer in this section on these two terms in art and literature); in the second, Sollers, whom we believe may be the only person in possession of the document from the late Roland Barthes on the eponymous 7th function, the document that has set this entire mystery into action, does a horrible job in his debate, speaking in fragments and seemingly in a stream of consciousness. Is this supposed to be a demonstration of the 7th function? If so, it's a useless function; Binet has hinted that the 7th function involves provoking others into action, but at this point I suspect all readers are wondering whether we'll ever know what the 7th function is, or even if there is such a thing. In any event, for some unknown reason the novel turns to the grotesque at this point. To put it bluntly, Sollers, loser of the debate (and the husband of Helene Cixous, another "real-life" character in this novel and here a supposed Bulgarian agent seeking the Barthes document) has his balls cut off; shortly after that horror, Simon is attacked by agents of the man whom he defeated in the debate - a prominent Italian politician, as Simon has correctly surmised based on various "signs" - who sever Simon's right hand and toss it into a glassblowing furnace. Why does Binet do this, and unsettle us so much? Perhaps the two short final sections of the novel will elucidate.

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