Chapter 8

Fact, fiction and French flights of fancy

This chapter discusses a satirical novel: La septième fonction du langage by Laurent Binet, published in 2015. The book is a thriller with a deliberately absurd plot about a search for a lost manuscript which holds the secret of ultimate rhetorical power: the ability to convince anyone to do anything. Although the characters in the novel include some “real people”, such as two former Presidents of France, Stubbs argues that Binet’s characters in general embody an extreme mix of factual and fictional characteristics, and the merciless satire expressed in their mixed ontological status has left many ordinary readers and professional critics uncertain how to evaluate the novel. Stubbs employs various models of analysis, including John Searle’s observations on the logical status of fictional discourse, and contends that, while useful, this approach does not explain in full how readers distinguish fact from fiction, nor indeed how far writers can appropriately go with outrageous caricatures of living persons. In sum, the chapter shows how the novel provides textual problems which have not been solved by either literary scholars or language philosophers.