Laurent Binet's Civilisations: A Review

Laurence Binet, Civilisations (London: Harvill Secker, 2021). 310 pages. Translated from the French by Sam Taylor.

I have no doubt it must be lost of fun to write fictional History while being fully aware that your reader is not to demand any verisimilitude of what you write. Art for art’s sake, I guess. Binet’s Civilisations is one such work: it’s offhand in its fun, bold in its ingenuity but invariably overambitious in its purpose and meaning.

The premise is simple: instead of the various European powers conquering the continents across the Atlantic, it is the Incas (and subsequently the Aztecs) who sail across the waters eastwards and reach Lisbon in the wake of a dreadful tsunami. Atahualpa, their king, is undefeatable in his thirst for some sort of black drink monks seem to be very good at producing; vanquishing the Spanish emperor is way too easy. The road to Europe lays expedite thereafter.

But centuries before, the Vikings had reached the north with Erik the Red’s daughter as their leader. Her descendants eventually make their way to Panama, only to be stopped by the Darién Gap (the present-day irony of this is magnificent, one must admit!).

The second part of the book takes us with Columbus in his first voyage of discovery. Unlike what actually happened, Columbus does not make it back to Spain, fails miserably in his attempts to convert the locals to what the Incas will later call the weird cult of the “nailed god”. The Spanish Court gives up on the extremely expensive adventure of crossing the ocean and loses its interest in western lands.

A couple of decades later, having been defeated by his brother, Atahualpa the Incan emperor is escaping Peru in Columbus’s ships and heads eastward. Thanks to endless supplies of gold, the emperor succeeds in conquering the lands and the minds of Castilians, Italians, Frenchs and Germans. His trick to unite the continent five centuries before actual History occurred? He does away with feudal taxation and the property of land, decrees religious freedom all over the place (the only mandatory rule is to adore the Sun) and develops the land with a view to eradicate hunger and poverty.

Atahualpa. Would he have really achieved so much in so little time?

But suddenly, another enemy from the West appears: the Aztecs arrive in England and decide to conquer France with their army (led by Cuauhtémoc). Paris is quickly taken, and a huge pyramid is bult near the Louvre, which will become the venue for their favourite pastime: human sacrifice. With the supply chains of gold interrupted, Atahualpa reacts and brings back taxation to fund the war effort. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?

Nonsensical? Maybe, but it’s good fun to read. The somewhat unexpected coda of the book brings Cervantes, El Greco and Montaigne together in the Frenchman’s castle. Their interaction prophesies modernity in all its expressions and raises the stakes even further by taking the painter and the Spanish novelist to Mexico in search of a better life.

The text was splendidly rendered by Sam Taylor into English, yet one glaring syntactic error kept nagging (quite likely the result of a overzealous proof-reader?) This is found on page 175 of the public library copy I read: “He [Atahualpa] distributed Golden Fleeces, a highly prized distinction that cost him nothing and possessed the advantage of binding him to whomever received it.” My italics.

Publicado en castellano por Seix Barral (traducido por Adolfo García Ortega). Publicat en català per Edicions de 1984 (traduït per Mia Tarradas).

Laurent Binet's HHhH: A Review

 

Laurent Binet, HHhH (London: Vintage, 2012). [unpaged] Translated from the French by Sam Taylor.

Reinhard Heydrich, who could have been strategically nurtured to become Hitler’s successor, was killed after an attack on his car in Prague in 1942. His nickname among the Czech people was ‘the Butcher of Prague’. It would seem obvious he had few friends among them. Was his assassination an event that entirely changed the course of WWII and therefore History? Perhaps it was.

Heydrich. (Photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann - Deutsches Bundesarchiv)

Speculating with what might have been seems pointless, does it not? Still, many believe the perpetrators of the attack should be praised for ridding the world of such a cruel, evil person. And I would tend to wholeheartedly agree. After all, he was one of the brains behind the so-called Final Solution. The fateful day in the streets of Prague is the subject of Laurent Binet’s novel, which won him a big literary prize in France, the Goncourt.

Binet, however, does not want to write a historical novel. Obviously, he does not want to write history either. He’s no historian. He thinks that the invention of facts or characters in a novel about a true event is nothing short of a crime: fabricating evidence, more or less. I bet he dislikes books such as Wolf Hall or Bring up the Bodies so much that he would refuse to read them point blank! Oh well: his loss.

Being such an astonishing story of bravery and self-sacrifice, the plot (i.e., the conspiracy to kill the monstrous Heydrich) should be narrated with tantalizing detail. Except that Binet does not have any verifiable new data he could use with absolute certainty. His struggle is with the limitations of the novel as a genre. HHhH, Binet decides, has to tell a story-within-a-story: the author’s obsession with how to approach and tell a story about true events for which verified information is scant or non-existent. Moreover, instead of numbering the pages, the publisher numbers the parts (you can hardly call them chapters, can you?).

The Mercedes (possibly this very car, but who knows? And who cares?). Photograph by FunkMonk (Michael B. H.) 

The heroes’ names were Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. They were trained in England and parachuted over Czech land. The resistance helped them prepare the assassination, which funnily enough almost failed at the last moment: Gabčík’s gun got stuck and stopped working, and therefore plan B was quickly activated. It was Kubiš who threw a hand grenade into Heydrich’s Mercedes. The infections caused by the wounds killed Heydrich about a week later. Mission accomplished?

Yes, but the Nazi retaliation was brutal, as could have been predicted. Lidice, a village near Prague, was completely destroyed. Their inhabitants were either murdered or sent to a concentration camp, where most of them eventually died. The Czech heroes hid, together with five other members of the resistance, in a Prague church. Betrayed by one of their own, they were found and attacked. They lasted many hours and drove the German soldiers and their commanders spare. None of them were captured alive.

The Lidice Memorial reminds us all of what kind of bestiality the Nazis were capable of.

The biggest objection I have in regard to this book is Binet’s obsession with his own obsessiveness. It constantly gets in the way of the story itself. That may be fanciful and fun to begin with, yes. But Binet overuses the device. His authorial presence is more than an attendance: it can become a burden! I did not think this book is as accomplished as The 7^th Function of Language, but I’m looking forward to reading his new publication, Civilizations.

Hoping to read you soon again, Laurent. Photograph by G. Garitan. 

Laurent Binet's The 7th Function of Language: A Review

Laurent Binet. The 7th Function of Language (Londres: Harvill Secker, 2017). 390 pages. Translated from the French by Sam Taylor.

Should I say I was lucky to study and read Roland Barthes at university? I believe so. I remember enjoying his Mythologies and wondering about what other product-signs we should be demythologising and deconstructing, yet at the time, most nights I would go out and I sort of ended up being interested in, well, different things.

Sort of a myth himself now, isn't he? Young Roland Barthes, Photograph by Fragolaleone

Barthes died in an accident in the streets of Paris. He was knocked down by a laundry van in late February 1980, and passed away a month later. I certainly found his work inspirational, and we could well ask ourselves what, were he still alive, he would be making of contemporary signs such as the bitten-off apple of the software and hardware giant or the M-shaped arches of the multinational you-want-fries-with-your-burger? company that has been clogging the arteries of millions of people all over the world for years.

Binet takes the fact of Barthes’ accident and makes it into a fictional murder. But why would a semiotician be murdered? Because he had with him the only copy of a text authored by Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. Allegedly, this text would identify the seventh function of language, which would be a magical performative function giving its possessor the power to make people do things. Something every politician might kill for, of course.

In a parody of detective novels, thrillers and similar, Binet constructs a big metafictional joke. The policeman in charge of the investigation into Barthes’ death, Bayard, starts by interviewing Foucault about semiotics and semiology. He understands fuck-all, obviously, so he tries to read Barthes and others, which angers him even more, and so he will seek the aid of a lecturer on semiotics: enter Simon Herzog, who impresses Bayard by revealing his background and most of his personality traits by simply looking at him and his clothes.

What happens next (and the above is just the beginning of this bizarre, hilarious and crazy fiction) is a long story. The unlikely duo are partnered in the pursuit of the mysterious document in a journey that takes them from Paris to Bologna, where they witness political vendettas, are allowed entrance to a secret Logos Club in which orators and debaters engage in rhetorical duels, with the loser getting a finger chopped off when defeated, and miraculously escape the bombing of the railway station.

They next travel to a big conference at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY. Their stay is punctuated by various strange episodes, amongst them the death of Jacques Derrida, savagely killed by dogs while a girl named Cordelia was giving him a blowjob.

No, Derrida did not die here. Binet chooses to kill him at Cornell, but only in fiction. Photograph by Laurenvhs.

The final part takes them to Venice. More Logos Club challenges, more chopped fingers (and other body parts, too!) street skirmishes and kidnappings. Outlandish events and conversations are too numerous to recap; characters come and go without rhyme or reason. And after winning his oratorial challenge at the Club, Simon is made to pay a huge price.

With The 7^th Function of Language, Binet enjoys himself a lot, and if you are game to take a refreshingly quick dip into the theory of semiotics, linguistics and metafiction, this is a novel that will make you laugh out loud. The list of real people Binet makes irreverent use of is inexhaustible: from Umberto Eco to Julia Kristeva, from Michel Foucault to Noam Chomsky, from Bjorn Borg to Vitas Gerulaitis. Presidents such as Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand, prime ministers such as Laurent Fabius, and a noticeably young Afro-American politician named Barack Obama.

There is comedy, there is Hollywood-style action, car chases, sex, hot steamy baths where old men and young gigolos meet. There are also puns, play on words and names, a constant game played between fact and fiction in which Binet deliberately shows his hand by using the first person, a bold interference in the narrative that not always pays dividends.

The volcano crater of Pozzuoli near Naples is where Simon exacts his revenge. What a scenic spot to finish the novel! Photograph by I. Shevtsov.

The 7^th Function of Language is a delicious parody, yet to me it felt more like fanciful, delightfully absurd and exhilarating entertainment than a thriller. The plot is far more sophisticated than any bestseller might ever dream of; yet underlying the playful, the profane, and the mocking the novel does offer aplenty there is also a deeply felt homage to the sciences of language and a clever invention from historical materials. And I’d bet my little finger that Barthes would have given Binet his tick of approval.