About the Work
Mythologies is a collection of short essays by the French critic Roland Barthes, followed by a long theoretical essay that supplies the method behind them. The book was translated into English by Annette Lavers and published by The Noonday Press, with the translation issued by Jonathan Cape Ltd. The essays themselves were written across the mid-1950s and first appeared in French periodicals: “The World of Wrestling” was published in Esprit, “The Writer on Holiday” in France-Observateur, and the remainder in Les Lettres Nouvelles. The volume opens with two prefaces, one written for the original French edition and one added for a later edition, in which Barthes reflects on what the project had become and why he could not simply continue it in the same form.
The book’s first and larger half consists of a series of brief, sharply observed pieces on the everyday material of French popular culture. Their subjects are deliberately miscellaneous: a wrestling match, a film adaptation of Julius Caesar, a magazine photograph of a writer on holiday, a cruise ship, soap powders and detergents, a charity campaign, margarine advertising, a murder trial, the face of a film star, wine and milk, steak and chips, the design of a new car, toys, plastic, an exhibition of photographs, a guidebook to Spain, ornamental cookery in a women’s magazine, a striptease act. Each piece takes some object, image, slogan, or ritual that its audience takes for granted and asks what it is saying—what assumptions it carries, what it makes to seem natural, and whose interests that naturalness serves.
The second half, “Myth Today,” is a sustained attempt to give this practice a theoretical grounding. Drawing on the linguistics of Saussure, Barthes treats the materials of mass culture as sign-systems and works out, step by step, how a myth is constructed, how it is read, what it does to the meanings it borrows, and why it is politically consequential. The two halves belong together: the essays are the demonstrations, the theoretical essay is the account of what the demonstrations were doing. The book is thus at once a collection of cultural criticism and a founding document of semiology, the study of signs and signifying systems.
Context
The book belongs to a particular moment in French intellectual life. Barthes had studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris, taught French in Rumania and Egypt, and joined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted himself to sociology and lexicology; he later became a professor at the Collège de France. His teaching and writing were bound up with a rediscovery of ancient rhetoric, which supplied him with a vocabulary of “figures” that he could apply to cooking or to wrestling, and with the new intellectual currents of his time—Sartrean and Marxist vocabulary, psychoanalytic discoveries about the relation between the abstract and the concrete, and above all linguistics.
In the preface to the later edition, Barthes explains that the book had a double theoretical framework. The first was an ideological critique of the language of mass culture: the project of unmasking the ways in which the culture of the petty bourgeoisie passed itself off as universal nature. The second was a first attempt at a semiological analysis of that language’s mechanics. He had just read Saussure and had become convinced that treating “collective representations” as sign-systems might go further than piously unmasking them—that it could account in detail for the mystification by which a particular class culture is transformed into something that looks like nature itself.
Barthes also explains why he did not update the book. The two attitudes could no longer be maintained unchanged, not because their causes had disappeared but because ideological criticism, at the very moment it was needed again—he refers to May 1968—had become more sophisticated, while semiological analysis, begun in the final essay of this book, had developed and become more precise, complicated, and differentiated, turning into the theoretical locus for a liberation of “the significant” in France and the West. He could not write a new series of mythologies in the old form. What remained, beside the essential enemy—the bourgeois norm—was the task of continuing the analysis in other terms.
The translator’s note adds a useful observation about the book’s language. The style of Mythologies, at first highly poetic and idiosyncratic, later reveals a quasi-technical use of terms, partly from the effort to account for mass culture through new models. Foremost among these is linguistics, seen in the extension of words normally reserved for speech and writing to other fields: a wrestling match is “transcribed,” a detergent “retorts,” plastic is “deciphered,” wine is “univocal.” Other terms belong to philosophical vocabulary, whether traditional, Sartrean or Marxist—a paradox, a car, or a cathedral may be said to be “consumed” by the public—or more recent, such as “closure,” which heralds semiology’s combinative approach. The translator notes a humorous plea for reasoned neologism, and distinguishes the author’s footnotes from her own.
Structure of the Book
The volume falls into two clearly distinct halves. The first, and much the longer, is the series of mythologies proper: short essays, each taking a single object or episode from French daily life and reading it as a sign-system. They range across sport, cinema, advertising, journalism, food, design, tourism, and spectacle. The sequence is not organized by theme or argument; it is a gallery, and its cumulative effect comes from the repetition of a single operation performed on very different materials. A reader moves from the theatre of wrestling to the capillary signs of Roman-ness in a film, from a magazine’s photographs of writers on holiday to the psychoanalysis of detergents, from a murder trial to the iconography of a popular priest, from toys to the face of Garbo, from wine to the brain of Einstein, from the jet-man to the Blue Guide, from ornamental cookery to striptease, from the new Citroën to plastic, and finally to an exhibition of photographs and a stage heroine.
The second half is a single continuous argument titled “Myth Today.” It opens with the question of what a myth is and proceeds through a series of linked sections: myth as a type of speech; myth as a semiological system; the form and the concept; the signification; reading and deciphering myth; myth as stolen language; the bourgeoisie as a joint-stock company; myth as depoliticized speech; myth on the Left; myth on the Right; and finally the necessity and limits of mythology. This is not a collection of separate essays but a single piece of theorizing, moving from the most elementary definition of myth to its political function and to the conditions under which the mythologist’s own work is possible.
The two halves are related as practice to theory. The essays in the first half are the analyses; the second half explains what those analyses were doing, why they were necessary, and what difficulties they face. The book therefore has something of the shape of a demonstration followed by its own methodological commentary—a form that would become characteristic of Barthes’s later work.
Inside the Book
The Critic Who Reads Everything as a Sign
Edward Said opens the edition by praising Roland Barthes as a critic who never wrote a dull page, and by naming what makes Mythologies so distinctive: Barthes treats practically everything as capable of “signification.” Not only books and paintings but slogans, toys, food, cruises, striptease, eating, and wrestling matches all share an organized capacity to say something. As signs, they carry a “bad faith”: they present themselves to the consumer as natural, eternal, and necessary, when in fact they are arbitrary, manufactured, and contingent. Said points to the essay on Einstein’s brain, where a genius is made to seem so lacking in magic that his thought becomes a functional labour, like the mechanical making of sausages. Each short essay wrenches a definition out of some common but constructed object, forcing it to speak the hidden reservoir of manufactured sense it carries.
The front matter establishes the book’s provenance. Barthes was born in 1915, studied literature and classics in Paris, taught in Rumania and Egypt, joined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique to work on sociology and lexicology, and held a chair at the Collège de France until his death. This edition, selected and translated by Annette Lavers, is published by the Noonday Press; the essays were translated from the 1957 Seuil edition, with three pieces first appearing in Esprit, France-Observateur, and Les Lettres Nouvelles. The contents run from the wrestling match and the Romans in film through soap-powders, toys, Garbo’s face, steak and chips, the new Citroën, and plastic, before arriving at the long closing essay, “Myth Today,” which moves from myth as a type of speech through its semiological system, its stolen language, and its place on the Left and the Right.
The translator’s note explains that the book’s style shifts from the highly poetic and idiosyncratic to a quasi-technical vocabulary borrowed largely from linguistics, as words normally reserved for speech and writing—transcription, retort, reading, deciphering—are extended to wrestling, plastics, and wine. Barthes’s teaching is linked to a rediscovery of ancient rhetoric, so that “figure” can describe cooking or wrestling, while spectacle and gesture name the interplay of action, representation, and alienation. Other terms come from philosophy, from Sartre and Marx, or from the new vocabulary of semiology, with a humorous plea for reasoned neologism. In the preface to the 1970 edition, Barthes describes the book’s double framework: an ideological critique of mass-culture language and a first attempt at a semiological analysis of its mechanics. Having just read Saussure, he believed that treating collective representations as sign-systems could go further than piously unmasking them, accounting in detail for the mystification that turns petit-bourgeois culture into universal nature. He declines to update the book: ideological criticism has grown more sophisticated, and semiology has developed into the theoretical locus for a liberation of “the significant”—so a new series of mythologies in the old form is no longer possible.
The World of Wrestling
Wrestling, for Barthes, is a spectacle of signs rather than a genuine contest of suffering. The wrestler’s physique is itself a basic sign containing the whole fight, and this sign proliferates through the match as the body casts a magical entertainment of temperament through gesture. Different strata of meaning illuminate one another, forming an intelligible spectacle—a kind of diacritic writing in which the wrestler arranges episodic comments above the fundamental meaning of the body: a repulsive sneer while kneeling on the good sportsman, a conceited smile foreboding revenge, an ostentatious fall when pinned. This is a real Human Comedy where socially inspired passions—conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, paying one’s debts—find their clearest sign. It does not matter whether the passion is genuine; the public wants the image of passion, not passion itself. Wrestling, like theatre, offers an intelligible representation of usually private moral situations, and this emptying of interiority for exterior signs is the principle of triumphant classical art. Each moment works like an algebra unveiling cause and effect, and fans take intellectual pleasure in watching the moral mechanism function perfectly. Great comedic wrestlers impose an immediate reading of inner nature, like a Molière character; Armand Mazaud delights audiences by the mathematical rigour of his transcriptions, carrying gestures to their furthest meaning with the vehemence of a scholastic disputation.
Wrestling displays Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Suffering is amplified like a tragic mask: a wrestler in a reputedly cruel hold offers an excessive portrayal, a primitive Pieta with contorted face, because reserve would be out of place. Suffering without an intelligible cause would not be understood; concealed cruelty would transgress the unwritten rules and have no sociological efficacy. The “hold” immobilizes the adversary indefinitely, preparing the spectacle of suffering, and the vanquished’s inertia lets the victor settle into cruelty and convey the terrifying slowness of the torturer certain of the outcome. Only the image is involved—the spectator does not wish actual suffering but enjoys the perfection of an iconography. The forearm smash, with its loud slap and exaggerated sagging, brings catastrophe to maximum obviousness, ultimately appearing as no more than a symbol. This transgresses the moral rule that signs must be excessively clear but must not let their intention of clarity be seen; the crowd shouts “He’s laying it on!” condemning artifice, not regretting the absence of real suffering.
Defeat is unfolded through physical style: the flaccidity of tall white bodies collapsing, the inertia of massive wrestlers rebounding off elastic ropes, signify exemplary abasement. Deprived of resilience, the wrestler’s flesh becomes an unspeakable heap soliciting reviling and jubilation, a paroxysm of meaning recalling Roman triumphs. Another ancient posture is the suppliant, on bended knees with arms raised, slowly brought down by the victor’s vertical pressure. Unlike judo, Defeat is not a conventional sign abandoned once understood; it is a duration, a display, taking up ancient myths of public Suffering and Humiliation—the cross and the pillory. The wrestler is crucified in broad daylight; one stretched on the ground was called “He is dead, little Jesus, there, on the cross,” revealing hidden roots enacting ancient purifications.
Above all, wrestling portrays justice. “Paying” is essential; the crowd’s “Give it to him” means “Make him pay.” This is immanent justice: the baser the villain’s action, the more the public delights in the blow he justly receives. If the coward takes refuge behind the ropes, claiming a right by brazen mimicry, he is inexorably pursued and caught, and the crowd jubilates at rules broken for deserved punishment. The pattern of Justice matters more than its content: wrestling is a quantitative sequence of compensations, eye for eye and tooth for tooth, and sudden reversals have a moral beauty enjoyed like an inspired episode in a novel. Justice embodies a possible transgression; from the Law the spectacle of infringing passions derives its value. Out of five matches, only about one is fair—fairness is itself a role or genre, a conventional appearance rather than a real constraint, an exaggeratedly polite confrontation conducted with zeal rather than rage.
The Romans in Films
The insistent fringes of hair on actors’ foreheads are the label of Roman-ness, the open mainspring of the spectacle—the sign. This frontal lock makes the setting undeniably Ancient Rome, and the certainty is permanent: actors may speak, act, and debate questions of universal import without losing historical plausibility. Their general representativeness can cross oceans and centuries and merge into the Yankee faces of Hollywood extras, since everyone is reassured in a universe without duplicity where Romans are Romans by the most legible sign. A Frenchman, to whom American faces still seem exotic, finds the combination of gangster-sheriff morphologies with the little Roman fringe comical, because for him the sign overshoots its target and discredits itself by revealing its aim. But the same fringe, combed on the only naturally Latin forehead in the film, Marlon Brando’s, impresses without laughter; part of his European success may come from perfectly integrating Roman capillary habits with his usual characters’ morphology. Conversely, one cannot believe in Julius Caesar, whose physiognomy is that of an Anglo-Saxon lawyer, a face known from a thousand bit parts, with a compliant skull on which the hairdresser has raked a lock of hair.
Among capillary meanings there is a sub-sign of nocturnal surprises: Portia and Calpurnia, wakened at dead of night, have conspicuously uncombed hair. The young Portia expresses disorder by flowing locks, unreadiness of the first degree; the middle-aged Calpurnia exhibits a more painstaking vulnerability, a plait wound round her neck and resting on her right shoulder, imposing the traditional sign of disorder, asymmetry. These signs are excessive and ineffectual: they postulate a nature they lack the courage to acknowledge fully. All faces in the film sweat constantly, and closeups show that sweat is an attribute with a purpose—a sign of moral feeling. Everyone sweats because everyone debates something within himself; the locus is horribly tormented virtue, the very locus of tragedy. The populace, upset by Caesar’s death and then by Mark Antony’s arguments, sweats, combining economically the intensity of its emotion and the simplicity of its condition. The virtuous men—Brutus, Cassius, Casca—perspire ceaselessly, testifying to the physiological labour produced by a virtue about to give birth to a crime. To sweat is to think, resting on the postulate, appropriate to a nation of businessmen, that thought is a violent, cataclysmic operation of which sweat is the most benign symptom. Only one man does not sweat: Caesar, smooth-faced, unperturbed, watertight. As the object of the crime he remains dry, since he does not know, does not think, and must keep the firm, polished texture of an exhibit isolated in the courtroom.
Here the sign is ambiguous: it remains on the surface yet tries to pass as depth. It aims to make people understand, which is laudable, but suggests spontaneity, which is cheating; it is intentional and irrepressible, artificial and natural, manufactured and discovered. This leads to an ethic of signs. Signs ought to appear in only two extreme forms: openly intellectual and so remote they reduce to algebra, as in the Chinese theatre where a flag signifies a regiment; or deeply rooted, invented on each occasion, revealing an internal hidden facet and indicating a moment in time rather than a concept, as in Stanislavsky’s art. The intermediate sign—the fringe of Roman-ness or the sweating of thought—reveals a degraded spectacle, equally afraid of simple reality and total artifice. Although it is good for a spectacle to make the world more explicit, it is reprehensible and deceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified. This duplicity is peculiar to bourgeois art: between the intellectual and the visceral sign is hypocritically inserted a hybrid, at once elliptical and pretentious, pompously christened “
The Two Languages of the Dominici Trial
The trial of Gaston Dominici, the eighty-year-old owner of the Grand’Terre farm in Provence convicted in 1952 of murdering Sir Jack Drummond, his wife, and his daughter, becomes the occasion for an argument about language and power. The two languages spoken in the courtroom are not separated by some mysterious, Kafka-like barrier; their syntax, vocabulary, and elementary analytical materials simply grope blindly without ever touching, and no one is troubled by this. A quoted exchange makes the mismatch plain: asked whether he went to the bridge, Dominici answers that there is no path, he knows, he has been there—the confusion turning on allé, “gone,” and allée, “a path.” Everyone pretends the official language is common sense and that Dominici’s is merely a picturesque ethnological variety, poor in its poverty. But the president’s language is equally peculiar, laden with unreal clichés, a language for school essays rather than concrete psychology. It may be unavoidable for most men to have the psychology of the language they were taught; still, two particular uses of language confront each other, and one has honours, law, and force on its side.
This “universal” language strengthens the psychology of the masters, letting them treat other men as objects, describing and condemning at once. It is an adjectival psychology that endows victims with epithets and knows nothing of actions except the guilty category forced onto them, its categories resembling those of classical comedy or graphology: boastful, irascible, selfish, cunning, lecherous, harsh. Man exists only through character traits labelling him for society as an object of absorption or submission. Utilitarian and ignoring any state of consciousness, this psychology nonetheless pretends to base actions on a preexisting inner person, postulating “the soul”: it judges man as a “conscience” while having already described him as an object. This psychology, in whose name one can today have one’s head cut off, comes from traditional literature—the bourgeois “literature of the Human Document.” In its name old Dominici was condemned; justice and literature allied, exchanging old techniques, revealing their basic identity and compromising each other barefacedly. Behind the judges sat writers such as Giono and Salacrou; on the prosecution side was no lawyer but an “extraordinary story-teller” with “undeniable wit” and “dazzling verve,” as Le Monde testified of the public prosecutor. Even the police practise fine writing: a superintendent calls Dominici a dissembling liar, wary gambler, witty narrator, wily trickster, lusty septuagenarian, self-assured despot, devious schemer, cunning hypocrite—an astonishing quick-change artist playing with human souls and animal thoughts, a false patriarch of the Grand’Terre with a hundred facets. Antithesis, metaphors, flights of oratory—classical rhetoric accuses the old shepherd. Justice took the mask of Realist literature and the country tale, while literature came to court to gather new “human” documents and naively seek in the accused’s face a psychology it had first imposed by law.
Against the literature of repletion, passed off as the “real” and “human,” stands a literature of poignancy; the Dominici trial was also this. Besides writers hungry for reality and brilliant narrators whose verve carries off a man’s head, there was the spectacle of a terror threatening us all: being judged by a power wanting to hear only the language it lends us. We are all potential Dominicis—not as murderers but as accused, deprived of language, or worse, rigged out in our accusers’ language, humiliated and condemned by it. To rob a man of his language in the very name of language is the first step in all legal murders.
The Iconography of the Abbé Pierre
The Abbé Pierre’s myth has a precious asset: his physiognomy, displaying signs of apostleship—benign expression, Franciscan haircut, missionary’s beard—completed by the worker-priest’s sheepskin coat and the pilgrim’s staff, uniting marks of legend and modernity. The half-shorn haircut, devoid of affectation and definite shape, seeks a style outside art and technique, a “zero degree” of haircut: hair must be cut, but this operation should imply no particular mode of existence. It becomes the capillary archetype of saintliness; the saint is a being without formal context, and fashion is antipathetic to sainthood. But neutrality ends up functioning as the sign of neutrality; the “zero” haircut becomes the label of Franciscanism, a superlative mode of signification dressing the Abbé as Saint Francis—hence its iconographic popularity in magazines and films, where the actor Reybaz need only adopt it to be identified with the Abbé.
The beard undergoes the same mythological routine. It can be the attribute of a free man detached from daily conventions, shrinking from wasting time shaving; but ecclesiastical beards have their own mythology. Among priests, being bearded is not chance: beards chiefly mark missionaries or Capuchins, signifying apostleship and poverty, withdrawing bearers from the secular clergy. Shaven priests are more temporal, bearded ones more evangelical: the wicked Frolo was beardless, the good Père de Foucauld bearded. Behind a beard one belongs less to one’s bishop and hierarchy.
The Bourgeois Status of Toys
The bourgeois character of toys appears both in their forms, all functional, and in their substances. Modern toys use graceless, chemically produced materials rather than natural ones, many moulded from complicated mixtures. Plastic has an appearance at once gross and hygienic and destroys the pleasure, sweetness, and humanity of touch. A distressing sign is the gradual disappearance of wood, despite wood being ideal for its firmness, softness, and natural warmth of touch. Wood removes the wounding quality of too-sharp angles and the chemical coldness of metal. When handled or knocked, wood neither vibrates nor grates, having a sound at once muffled and sharp. It is familiar and poetic, not severing the child from contact with the tree, table, and floor. Wood does not wound or break down; it does not shatter but wears out, lasts long, lives with the child, and alters little by little the relations between object and hand. If it dies, it dwindles, unlike mechanical toys that disappear behind the hernia of a broken spring. Wood makes essential objects, objects for all time. Yet hardly any wooden toys from the Vosges remain—fretwork farms with animals—which were only possible in the days of the craftsman. Henceforth toys are chemical in substance and colour; their material introduces a coenaesthesis of use, not pleasure. These toys die quickly and, once dead, have no posthumous life for the child.
The Face of Garbo
Garbo belongs to the moment in cinema when capturing the human face plunged audiences into deepest ecstasy, when one lost oneself in a human image as in a philtre, when the face represented an absolute state of the flesh, neither reachable nor renounceable. A few years earlier Valentino’s face caused suicides; Garbo’s still partakes of the rule of Courtly Love, where flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition. Hers is an admirable face-object. In Queen Christina, the make-up has the snowy thickness of a mask: not a painted face but one set in plaster, protected by the surface of the colour, not its lineaments. Amid this snow, at once fragile and compact, only the eyes, black like strange soft flesh but not expressive, are two faintly tremulous wounds. Despite extreme beauty, this face—not drawn but sculpted in something smooth and friable, at once perfect and ephemeral—comes to resemble Charlie Chaplin’s flour-white complexion, the dark vegetation of his eyes, his totem-like countenance. The temptation of the absolute mask perhaps implies less the theme of the secret than an archetype of the human face. Garbo offered a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature, explaining why her face is almost sexually undefined yet leaves no doubt. In Queen Christina she is by turns a woman and a young cavalier, but Garbo performs no feat of transvestism; she is always herself, carrying without pretence, under crown or wide-brimmed hats, the same snowy solitary face. The name “the Divine” probably conveyed less a superlative state of beauty than the essence of her corporeal person, descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in clearest light. She knew this: many actresses consented to let the crowd see the ominous maturing of their beauty; not she. The essence was not to be degraded; her face was to have no reality except its perfection, intellectual even more than formal. The Essence became gradually obscured, veiled with dark glasses, broad hats and exiles, but never deteriorated. Yet in this deified face something sharper than a mask looms: a voluntary, therefore human, relation between the curve of the nostrils and the arch of the eyebrows; a rare individual function relating two regions of the face. A mask is but a sum of lines; a face is above all their thematic harmony. Garbo’s face represents the fragile moment when cinema is about to draw an existential from an essential beauty, when the archetype leans toward the fascination of mortal faces, when the clarity of flesh as essence yields to a lyricism of Woman. As a transition, Garbo’s face reconciles two iconographic ages, assuring the passage from awe to charm. Today we are at the other pole: the face of Audrey Hepburn is individualized, not only by its peculiar thematics—woman as child, woman as kitten—but by her person, an almost unique specification of the face, with nothing of the essence left, constituted by an infinite complexity of morphological functions. As a language, Garbo’s singularity was of the order of the concept; Audrey Hepburn’s is of the order of the substance. Garbo’s face is an Idea; Hepburn’s, an Event.
Wine and Milk
Wine is felt by the French nation as its very own possession, like its three hundred and sixty types of cheese and its culture. It is a totem-drink, corresponding to the milk of the Dutch cow or the tea ceremonially taken by the British Royal Family. Bachelard gave the “substantial psychoanalysis” of this fluid at the end of his essay on reveries on the theme of the will, showing wine is the sap of the sun and the earth, its basic state not moist but dry, and that water is most contrary to it. Like all resilient totems, wine supports a varied mythology untroubled by contradictions. This galvanic substance is always considered the most efficient of thirst-quenchers, or at least this serves as the major alibi for consumption.
Jules Verne: The Ceaseless Action of Secluding Oneself
Verne’s principle is the ceaseless action of secluding oneself. His imagination of travel is an exploration of closure, and his appeal to childhood stems not from adventure but from a shared delight in the finite, akin to children’s love of huts and tents.
Striptease and the Exorcism of Eroticism
The classic music-hall props of striptease—furs, fans, gloves, feathers, fishnet stockings—do not serve to reveal the body but to make it more remote, forcing it back into the ease of a well-known rite. Adornment returns the living body to the category of luxurious objects, surrounding the woman with a magical decor. Covered in feathers or gloves, she becomes a stereotyped music-hall element; shedding such ritualistic objects is not genuine undressing. Feathers, furs, and gloves pervade her with magical virtue even once removed, leaving an enveloping memory of a luxurious shell. The whole of striptease is given in the initial garment: if that garment is improbable—the Chinese woman, the woman in furs—the following nakedness remains unreal, smooth, enclosed like a beautiful slippery object withdrawn from human use. This explains the diamond- or sequin-covered G-string at the end: its pure geometrical triangle and hard shiny material bar the sexual parts like a sword of purity, driving the woman into a mineral world, the precious stone symbolizing the absolute object that serves no purpose. Contrary to common prejudice, the accompanying dance is not erotic; it exorcizes the fear of immobility, gives the alibi of Art, and constitutes the last and most efficient barrier, acting on movements as a cosmetic, hiding nudity, smothering the spectacle under superfluous yet essential gestures, relegating becoming bare to parasitical operations in an improbable background. Professionals wrap themselves in miraculous ease, remote, icy, haughtily taking refuge in technique; their science clothes them like a garment. This exorcism is verified a contrario in amateur “popular contests”: beginners undress clumsily without magic, restoring erotic power. There are fewer Chinese or Spanish women, no feathers or furs, sensible suits and ordinary coats, few disguises, gauche steps, unsatisfactory dancing, threatened by immobility and technical awkwardness—resisting briefs, dress, or bra—denying the alibi of art and the refuge of being an object, imprisoning the woman in weakness and timorousness. At the Moulin Rouge another, probably typically French exorcism tames rather than nullifies eroticism: the compere gives striptease a reassuring petit-bourgeois status. It is a sport, with a Striptease Club, healthy contests, winners crowned and rewarded with edifying prizes such as a subscription to physical training lessons, a novel—only Robbe-Grillet’s Voyeur—or useful prizes like a pair of nylons or five thousand francs. It is a career, with beginners, semi-professionals, and professionals, strippers as skilled workers, with the alibi of work and vocation, one girl “doing well” or “well on the way to fulfilling her promise,” or “taking her first steps.” Competitors are socially situated: a salesgirl, a secretary; many secretaries in the Club. Striptease rejoins the public world, familiar and bourgeois, as if the French could not conceive eroticism except as household property sanctioned by weekly sport rather than magical spectacle: thus in France striptease is nationalized.
The New Citroén
Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of great Gothic cathedrals: the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population that appropriates them as a purely magical object. The new Citroén has fallen from the sky as a superlative object; an object is the best messenger of a world above nature, showing perfection and absence of origin, closure and brilliance, transformation of life into matter—more magical than life—a silence belonging to fairy-tales. The D.S.—the “Goddess”—has all the features of objects from another universe, fuelling the neomania of the eighteenth century and our science-fiction: the Déesse is first and foremost a new Nautilus. It excites interest less by substance than by the junction of components. Smoothness is an attribute of perfection because its opposite reveals technical human assembling: Christ’s robe was seamless, airships of science-fiction made of unbroken metal. The D.S. 19 is not as smooth as cake-icing though generally rounded; the dove-tailing of sections interests the public most: one fingers the edges of windows, feels wide rubber grooves linking the back window to the metal surround. There are beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, progressing from a world where elements are welded to one where they are juxtaposed and hold together by wondrous shape, preparing the idea of a more benign Nature. The material promotes a taste for lightness in its magical sense: a return to streamlining, new, less bulky, less incisive, more relaxed than the first period; speed expressed by less aggressive, less athletic signs, evolving from primitive to classical form. This spiritualization appears in the extent, quality, and material of the glass-work. The Déesse is the exaltation of glass; pressed metal is only a support. Glass surfaces are not windows pierced in a dark shell but vast walls of air and space, with the curvature, spread, and brilliance of soap-bubbles, a hard thinness more entomological than mineral—the Citroén emblem with arrows has become winged, proceeding from propulsion to spontaneous motion, from engine to organism. This is humanized art; the Déesse may mark a change in the mythology of cars. Until now the ultimate in cars belonged to the bestiary of power; here it becomes more spiritual and more objectlike, despite concessions to neomania such as the empty steering wheel, more homely, attuned to the sublimation of the utensil found in contemporary household equipment. The dashboard resembles a modern kitchen working surface rather than a factory control-room: slim panes of matt fl…
The Lost Continent and the Denial of History
Syncretism is identified as one of the Church’s great assimilating techniques. In the seventeenth century, in the same Orient whose Christian predispositions The Lost Continent shows, the Jesuits went far toward an “oecumenicity of forms,” producing the Malabar rites, which the Pope eventually condemned. Ethnographers hint at an “all things are alike” view: East and West are essentially identical, differing only in hue, sharing an eternal human postulation toward God; geographical considerations are paltry and contingent compared to this human nature, of which Christianity alone holds the key. Even “primitive” folklore and legends serve only to illustrate “Nature”: rites and cultural facts are never tied to a particular historical order or explicit economic and social status, but only to neutral cosmic commonplaces—seasons, storms, death. Fishermen are shown not by type of fishing but as a romantic essence, eternalized in a garish sunset—not workmen dependent on technique and gains within a definite society, but themes of an eternal condition: man far away exposed to sea perils, woman weeping and praying at home. The same applies to refugees shown descending a mountain: they need not be identified; they are eternal essences of refugees, which the East naturally produces. Exoticism’s fundamental justification is to deny any identification by History: appending a few positive signs meaning “native” immunizes Eastern realities against responsible content; superficial “situating” supplies an alibi and exempts one from accounting for the situation in depth. Faced with anything foreign, the Established Order knows only two mutilating behaviours: acknowledging it as a Punch and Judy show, or defusing it as a pure reflection of the West—in either case depriving it of its history. Thus the “beautiful pictures” of The Lost Continent cannot be innocent; it cannot be innocent to Jose the continent which found itself again at Bandoeng. A footnote notes the mystifying power of music: all “Buddhist” scenes are supported by nondescript musical treacle resembling both American crooning and Gregorian chant; it is monodic, the sign of monasticity.
Plastic
Despite names of Greek shepherds—Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene—plastic, products just gathered in an exhibition, is essentially the stuff of alchemy. At the stand’s entrance the public queues to witness the magical operation par excellence: the transmutation of matter. An ideally-shaped, tubulated, oblong machine effortlessly draws shiny fluted dressing-room tidies from a heap of greenish crystals. At one end raw telluric matter, at the other the finished human object; between them nothing but a transit, watched by an attendant in a cloth cap, half-god, half-robot. More than a substance, plastic is the very idea of infinite transformation; its everyday name indicates ubiquity made visible. This makes it miraculous: a miracle is always a sudden transformation of nature. Plastic remains impregnated with wonder—less a thing than the trace of a movement. As the movement is almost infinite, plastic is a spectacle to be deciphered: the spectacle of its end-products. At each terminal form—suitcase, brush, car-body, toy, fabric, tube, basin, paper—the mind considers the original matter an enigma, because plastic’s quick-change artistry is absolute: it can become buckets as well as jewels. Hence perpetual amazement—reverie at proliferating forms of matter and connections between the singular origin and plural effects—a pleasurable amazement, since the scope of transformations gives man the measure of his power, and the itinerary of plastic gives euphoria of prestigious free-wheeling through Nature. But the price: plastic, sublimated as movement, hardly exists as substance; its reality is negative—neither hard nor deep, content with the neutral “substantial” attribute of resistance, the absence of yielding. In the hierarchy of major poetic substances it figures as disgraced, lost between rubber’s effusiveness and metal’s flat hardness; it embodies none of the genuine produce of the mineral world—foam, fibres, strata. It is a “shaped” substance: whatever its final state, it keeps a flocculent appearance—opaque, creamy, curdled—powerless to achieve Nature’s triumphant smoothness. What best reveals it is its sound, at once hollow and flat; its noise is its undoing, as are its colours, retaining only the most chemical-looking ones. Of yellow, red, green it keeps only the aggressive quality, using them as mere names, displaying only concepts of colours. The fashion for plastic highlights an evolution in the myth of “imitation” materials. Their use is historically bourgeois in origin—the first vestimentary postiches date to the rise of capitalism. Until now imitation materials indicated pretension, belonging to appearances not actual use; they aimed at cheaply reproducing the rarest substances—diamonds, silk, feathers, furs, silver, all luxurious brilliance. Plastic has climbed down; it is a household material—the first magical substance consenting to be prosaic. Precisely because this prosaic character is a triumphant reason for existence: for the first time artifice aims at something common, not rare. Consequently the age-old function of nature is modified: it is no longer the Idea, the pure Substance to be regained or imitated; an artificial Matter, more bountiful than all natural deposits, is about to replace her and determine the very invention of forms.
The Imperative Address of Myth
Myth does not merely describe; it hails. Its speech is imperative and buttonholing, springing from a historical concept and from contingency—a Latin class, a threatened Empire—and it turns toward the reader personally, subjecting him to its intentional force. Barthes contrasts two experiences of the Basque house. In the Basque country itself, the architectural unity he notices is a complex product of a very wide history; it was there before him, without him, and it does not call out to him. But glimpsing in the Paris region a natty white chalet with red tiles and dark half-timbering, he feels an imperious injunction to name it the very essence of basquity. The concept seeks him out, obliging him to acknowledge the intentions that arranged it there as a confidence and a complicity—a real call sent by the owners. To be more imperious, the call has agreed to every impoverishment: the barn, the outside stairs, the dove-cote are dropped, leaving only a brief order not to be disputed. The adhomination is so frank that the chalet seems created on the spot, for him, like a magical object without any trace of the history that caused it.
This interpellant speech is also frozen. At the moment it reaches him, it suspends itself, turns away, assumes the look of a generality, stiffens into neutrality and innocence. The appropriation of the concept is driven off by the literalness of the meaning—an arrest in both the physical and legal senses. French imperiality condemns the saluting Negro to be nothing but an instrumental signifier; the Negro hails him in the name of that imperiality, but at the same moment the salute thickens, vitrifies, freezes into an eternal reference meant to establish it. Something has stopped moving on the surface of language. Myth is speech stolen and restored, but speech restored is no longer quite what was stolen; this brief larceny, this moment of surreptitious faking, gives mythical speech its benumbed look.
Motivation and the Duplicity of Myth
In language the sign is arbitrary, though analogy limits the arbitrariness. Mythical signification, by contrast, is never arbitrary; it is always in part motivated and unavoidably contains some analogy. For Latin exemplarity to meet the lion there must be an agreement of the predicate; for French imperiality to seize the saluting Negro there must be identity between his salute and a French soldier’s. Motivation is necessary to myth’s very duplicity: myth plays on the analogy between meaning and form, and there is no myth without motivated form. Even a collection of objects so disordered that no meaning can be found in it does not embarrass myth—disorder itself can be given a signification, as when commonsense mythifies surrealism. The absence of motivation becomes a second-order motivation, and myth is re-established.
Motivation is unavoidable but fragmentary, and it is not natural: history supplies its analogies. The form drops many analogous features and keeps only a few—the sloping roof and visible beams of the chalet, abandoning the stairs, the barn, the weathered look. A complete image would exclude myth, or compel it to seize only its completeness, as happens in bad painting wholly based on the myth of what is “filled out.”
Resistant Languages: Mathematics and Poetry
When a meaning is too full for myth to invade, myth goes around it and carries it away bodily. Mathematical language cannot be distorted and has taken precautions against interpretation, so myth takes it away en bloc, making a formula such as E = mc² the pure signifier of mathematicity. What myth robs is something that resists, something pure; the more the language-object resists, the greater its final prostitution. Temporally, mathematical language is a finished language deriving perfection from acceptance of death; myth does not want to die, wresting from meanings a degraded survival, turning them into speaking corpses.
Contemporary poetry is another resisting language, a regressive semiological system. Whereas myth aims at ultra-signification, poetry attempts to regain infra-signification, transforming the sign back into meaning and reaching not the meaning of words but the meaning of things themselves. It clouds language, stretches the link between signifier and signified, and hopes to reach the transcendent, natural meaning of the thing. Hence its essentialist ambitions and its conviction that it alone catches the thing in itself, insofar as it wants to be an anti-language. Modern poetry asserts itself as a murder of language, a tangible analogue of silence. Poetry is the reverse of myth: myth pretends to transcend itself into a factual system; poetry pretends to contract into an essential system. Yet its very resistance makes it ideal prey—the apparent lack of order of signs is captured and transformed into an empty signifier signifying poetry. Modern poetry, fiercely refusing myth, surrenders to it bound hand and foot. Conversely, the rules of classical poetry constituted an accepted myth whose conspicuous arbitrariness amounted to perfection.
Literature, Bouvard and Pécuchet, and the Task of the Mythologist
Voluntary acceptance of myth can define traditional Literature, a mythical system with its discourse, its writing, its concept of Literature, and its signification. In Writing Degree Zero Barthes had defined writing as the signifier of the literary myth, and suggested that history had provoked a moral crisis of literary language: writing was revealed as signifier, Literature as signification, and the writer violently shifted toward an anti-nature of language. Every revolt was a murder of Literature as signification, some going as far as pure scuttling of discourse, silence appearing the only weapon against myth’s major power—its recurrence. It is extremely difficult to vanquish myth from the inside, since the very effort to escape becomes prey of myth. The best weapon is perhaps to mythify it in turn, producing an artificial myth. Literature offers great examples, notably Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, an experimental second-order myth: the rhetoric of the two clerks becomes the form of a new system whose concept is Flaubert’s own gaze upon them—their ineffectual inclinations, their inability to feel satisfied, what Barthes calls bouvard-and-pécuchet-ity—and whose final signification is the book itself.
The Bourgeoisie and Ex-Nomination
Bourgeois ideology achieves its fullest effect by penetrating the intermediate classes, thereby losing its name. Petit-bourgeois norms are the residue of bourgeois culture—truths degraded, impoverished, commercialized, archaic. The political alliance between bourgeoisie and petite-bourgeoisie determined French history for over a century, rarely broken and only temporarily. A natural varnish covers all national representations: the big bourgeois wedding, a class ritual of displaying wealth, becomes the norm dreamed but not lived by the petit-bourgeois couple. When a typist earning twenty pounds a month recognizes herself in that wedding, bourgeois ex-nomination achieves its full effect. The flight from the name “bourgeois” is not accidental: it is bourgeois ideology itself, the process transforming History into Nature. The bourgeoisie’s status is particular and historical, yet the man it represents is universal and eternal; having built its power on unlimited transformation of nature, it yields an unchangeable nature. The passage from the real to the ideological is the passage from an anti-physis to a pseudo-physis.
Myth as Depoliticized Speech
Myth gives an historical intention a natural justification and makes contingency appear eternal—exactly the process of bourgeois ideology. What the world supplies is an historical reality defined by how men produced or used it; what myth returns is a natural image of it. Things lose the memory that they were once made. The world enters language as a dialectical relation between human actions and comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. Myth’s function is to empty reality—a ceaseless flowing out, an evaporation, a perceptible absence. Its semiological definition in bourgeois society is therefore complete: myth is depoliticized speech. “Political” describes the whole of human relations in their real social structure and power of making the world; the prefix “de-” has active value, a permanent defaulting. In the soldier-Negro case, what is got rid of is not French imperiality but the contingent, fabricated quality of colonialism. Myth does not deny things; it purifies them, makes them innocent, gives them a clarity not of explanation but of statement of fact. Passing from history to nature, it abolishes the complexity of human acts, organizes a world without contradictions because without depth, establishing a blissful clarity where things appear to mean something by themselves.
Is reality always political? The most natural object contains a political trace, however faint—the more or less memorable presence of the human act that produced or used it. Myth always comes under metalanguage, and its depoliticization often supervenes against a background already naturalized. The force needed to distort a tree is much less than for a Sudanese: in the latter the political load is near the surface; in the former it is remote, purified by a century-old layer of metalanguage. There are strong and weak myths, and the slightest thing can brutally restore a faded political quality.
Rhetorical Figures of Bourgeois Myth
The myths of Order admit no fundamental differences, since myth always postulates the immobility of Nature, though there are degrees of fulfilment—myth has micro-climates. The myth of Childhood-as-Poet is an advanced bourgeois myth, barely emerged from inventive culture and just reaching consumer culture; as a myth it is still unripe. Every myth can have its history and geography; one can draw isoglosses, the lines limiting the social region where a myth is spoken, and speak of waves of implantation—the Minou Drouet myth had at least three, from L’Express through Paris-Match and Elle to France-Soir.
Unable to list the dialectal forms of bourgeois myth, Barthes sketches its rhetorical figures. The inoculation admits the accidental evil of a class-bound institution to conceal its principial evil, immunizing the collective imagination with a small acknowledged evil. The privation of History deprives its object of all History, like an ideal servant who lays out things and disappears, removing both determinism and freedom. Identification reduces all confrontation to sameness: the petit-bourgeois cannot imagine the Other, who becomes a mirror, a simulacrum, or else a pure spectacle, a clown. Tautology defines like by like, a magical refuge involving a double murder of rationality and language, a saving aphasia testifying to profound distrust of language. Neither-Norism balances two opposites and rejects both, a bourgeois figure of modern liberalism that immobilizes values so one need only endorse, not choose. The quantification of quality reduces quality to quantity, economizing intelligence—bourgeois theatre presents itself as an essence revealed to the heart yet rests on pure quantification of effects, naturalness being above all a conspicuous quantity. And the statement of fact: myths tend toward proverbs, bourgeois ideology investing interests bound to its own perpetuation in the self-evident.
Main Arguments
The central claim of the book is that the materials of everyday life—slogans, images, objects, rituals, spectacles—are not neutral. They carry meanings, and those meanings are organized. A wrestling match, a detergent advertisement, a guidebook, a photograph of a writer on holiday: each is a system that says something, and what it says is not innocent. The essays demonstrate this claim over and over by taking something that appears to be merely what it is and showing that it is instead a construction, a set of signs arranged to produce a particular effect.
The most important of these effects is naturalness. The book argues that myth works by making the cultural appear natural—by presenting what is historical, contingent, and made as though it were eternal, obvious, and given. A sign that has been manufactured comes to seem like a fact of nature. This is what Barthes, following the epigraph from Edward Said, calls the “bad faith” of signs: they have the capacity always to appear natural to their consumer, as if what they say were eternal, true, and necessary rather than arbitrary, made, and contingent. The task of the mythologist is to wrench a definition out of these common but constructed objects, to make them speak the manufactured sense they carry.
A second argument concerns the relation between signs and what they signify. In the essay on the Roman film, Barthes distinguishes between signs that are openly intellectual—so remote from their meaning that they reduce to something like algebra, as in the Chinese theatre where a flag signifies a regiment—and signs that are deeply rooted, invented on each occasion, revealing an internal hidden facet and indicating a moment in time rather than a concept, as in Stanislavsky’s art. Between these two extremes lies the intermediate sign, the fringe of hair that means “Roman” or the sweat that means “thought.” This intermediate sign is the object of Barthes’s criticism: it is at once elliptical and pretentious, artificial and natural, manufactured and discovered, and it is hypocritically christened “nature.” The duplicity of confusing the sign with what is signified is, for Barthes, peculiar to bourgeois art.
A third argument concerns the political function of myth. In “Myth Today,” Barthes argues that myth is depoliticized speech. It takes a meaning that is historical and turns it into something that appears to be beyond history. It does not deny things; it purifies them, makes them innocent, gives them a natural and eternal justification. The bourgeoisie, he argues, is the class that does not want to be named, and myth is its instrument for achieving this anonymity: it transforms the bourgeois norm into universal nature. This is why the critique of myth is not merely an aesthetic exercise but a political one.
A fourth argument concerns the relation between language and power, developed most forcefully in the essay on the Dominici trial. Barthes argues that the two languages in the trial are not separated by mysterious barriers but by power: one language has honours, law, and force on its side. The “universal” language of the court is an adjectival psychology that endows its victims with epithets and treats them as objects, describing and condemning at once. This psychology comes from traditional literature, the bourgeois “literature of the Human Document,” and in its name an old man was condemned. Justice and literature are allied, exchanging techniques and revealing their basic identity. To rob a man of his language in the very name of language is, Barthes writes, the first step in all legal murders.
A fifth argument, running through the essays on spectacle, concerns the emptying of interiority for the sake of exterior signs. In wrestling, the public wants the image of passion, not passion itself; there is no problem of truth in wrestling any more than in theatre. This exhaustion of content by form is, Barthes suggests, the principle of triumphant classical art. The same logic appears in striptease, where the dance and the adornments act as barriers that hide nudity and relegate the becoming-bare to a parasitical operation in an improbable background. The spectacle is not erotic; it is a rite, and its function is to exorcise.
A sixth argument concerns the way myth denies history. In the essay on The Lost Continent, Barthes argues that exoticism’s fundamental justification is to deny any identification by history. Faced with anything foreign, the Established Order knows only two mutilating behaviours: acknowledging it as a Punch and Judy show, or defusing it as a pure reflection of the West—in either case depriving it of its history. The fishermen of the documentary are not shown by type of fishing but as a romantic essence, eternalized in a garish sunset; the refugees descending a mountain are not identified but presented as eternal essences of refugees. The same logic appears in the Blue Guide‘s treatment of Spain, where the country is reduced to a web of religious monuments and the reality of the land and its people is suppressed.
Key Concepts
The book’s central concept is myth itself, and Barthes defines it with deliberate simplicity: myth is a type of speech. It is a system of communication, a message; it cannot be an object, a concept, or an idea, but is a mode of signification, a form. This definition has an important consequence: discriminating among mythical objects by their substance is illusory. Everything can be a myth if it is conveyed by discourse. Myth is defined by how it utters its message, not by its object; there are formal limits but no substantial ones. Every object can pass from closed, silent existence to an oral state open to appropriation by society. A tree expressed by a poet is no longer quite a tree; it is a tree decorated, adapted to a type of consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, and images—a social usage added to pure matter. Not everything is expressed at once: some objects become the prey of mythical speech for a while, then disappear, and others take their place. There are no eternal myths, though very ancient ones can be conceived; human history converts reality into speech and rules the life and death of mythical language.
A second key concept is the sign, understood in the Saussurean sense as a relation between a form and a concept. Barthes’s analyses repeatedly isolate particular signs and show how they function. The “insistent fringes” of hair on actors’ foreheads are the label of Roman-ness, the open mainspring of the spectacle; the sweat on every face in Julius Caesar is a sign of moral feeling, of thought as a violent operation; the “zero degree” haircut of the Abbé Pierre is the sign of neutrality that ends up functioning as the label of Franciscanism. In each case, a material detail is shown to be doing semiotic work.
A third concept is the distinction between the sign and what it signifies, and the corresponding ethic of signs. Signs ought, Barthes argues, to appear only in two extreme forms: openly intellectual and so remote they reduce to algebra, or deeply rooted and invented on each occasion, revealing an internal hidden facet. The intermediate sign—the fringe of Roman-ness, the sweating of thought—reveals a degraded spectacle, equally afraid of simple reality and total artifice. It is reprehensible and deceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified.
A fourth concept is depoliticization. Myth, Barthes argues, is depoliticized speech. It takes a historical meaning and naturalizes it, making it appear eternal and innocent. This is the mechanism by which the bourgeoisie achieves anonymity: it transforms its own norms into universal nature. The concept is developed in the sections on the bourgeoisie as a joint-stock company and on myth on the Left and on the Right.
A fifth concept is the “zero degree” of a sign—a mode of signification that seeks to escape style altogether and thereby becomes a style. The Abbé Pierre’s haircut is the example: it seeks a style outside art and technique, a haircut that implies no particular mode of existence, but this neutrality ends up functioning as the sign of neutrality, becoming the label of Franciscanism. The concept recurs throughout the book as a way of describing how the attempt to be natural becomes, precisely, a sign-system.
A sixth concept is appropriation, developed in the essay on Jules Verne. Verne’s principle is the ceaseless action of secluding oneself; his imagination of travel is an exploration of closure. The ship, in his mythology, is not a symbol of departure but of closure—an emblem of perfectly enclosing oneself in a finite space. The Nautilus is the most desirable cave: enjoyment of enclosure reaches its peak when one can watch the outside vagueness through a window. The basic activity in Verne is appropriation: he sought to shrink and populate the world, to fill it to an egg-like fullness, to catalogue and possess it. The true opposite of the Nautilus is Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, which says “I” and moves from a psychoanalysis of the cave to a poetics of exploration.
A seventh concept is the distinction between the poor man and the proletarian, developed in the essay on Chaplin. Chaplin always saw the proletarian as the poor man, giving his representations human force but political ambiguity. For Chaplin, the proletarian is the man who is hungry; he is always just below political awareness, and a strike is a catastrophe for him. He achieves awareness of the working-class condition only when poor man and proletarian coincide under the gaze and blows of the police. Because Chaplin portrays a primitive proletarian outside Revolution, his representative force is immense; no socialist work has expressed the humiliated condition of the worker with such violence and generosity.
Themes
The deepest theme of the book is the opposition between nature and history. Again and again, Barthes shows how myth converts the historical into the natural—how a contingent, made, class-specific construction comes to seem like an eternal fact. The Roman fringe, the sweating of thought, the prosperity of Franco’s Spain, the eternal essence of the refugee: each is a piece of history dressed as nature. The mythologist’s task is to reverse the operation, to restore to these signs their historical character, to show that what appears given is in fact made. This is why the book is not merely a collection of witty observations but a sustained critique of the ways in which a society hides its own contingency from itself.
A second theme is the relation between sign and power. The Dominici essay makes this explicit: the two languages in the trial are not separated by mystery but by force. One language has honours, law, and force on its side; the other is treated as a picturesque ethnological variety, poor in its poverty. The “universal” language of the court is an adjectival psychology that treats men as objects, describing and condemning at once. Justice and literature are allied, exchanging techniques and revealing their basic identity. To rob a man of his language in the very name of language is the first step in all legal murders. This theme runs through the book: the analysis of signs is never merely academic, because signs are instruments of power.
A third theme is the emptying of interiority. In wrestling, the public wants the image of passion, not passion itself; there is no problem of truth in wrestling any more than in theatre. In striptease, the dance and the adornments act as barriers that hide nudity and relegate the becoming-bare to a parasitical operation. In the face of Garbo, the essence is not to be degraded; her face is to have no reality except its perfection. In each case, an interior is evacuated for the sake of an exterior sign, and the result is a spectacle that is intelligible rather than true. This is, Barthes suggests, the principle of triumphant classical art.
A fourth theme is the ambiguity of the mythologist’s own position. In “Myth Today,” Barthes asks how the mythologist is to read myth, and he distinguishes several possible attitudes: the reader who takes the myth at face value, the reader who deciphers it, and the reader who is struck by the distortion of meaning. The mythologist is condemned to live in a difficult relation to his own object: he must speak of myth without himself producing myth, and he must recognize that his own discourse is not immune to the processes he describes. This self-consciousness about the conditions of critique is one of the book’s most distinctive features.
A fifth theme is the historicity of myth. There are no eternal myths, Barthes insists, though very ancient ones can be conceived. Human history converts reality into speech and rules the life and death of mythical language. This means that the mythologies of one period are not the mythologies of another: the myths of the 1950s, which Barthes analyzes, are not the myths of the seventeenth century or of antiquity. The book is therefore also a document of its moment, a portrait of French mass culture in a particular decade, and its analyses are tied to the specific objects and images of that time.
A sixth theme is the relation between the two halves of the book. The essays are not illustrations of a pre-existing theory; they are the occasions on which the theory was discovered. The preface to the later edition makes this clear: the semiological analysis was initiated in the final essay, and it was only after writing the mythologies that Barthes became convinced that treating collective representations as sign-systems might go further than unmasking them. The book is therefore a record of a method coming into being, and its two halves are related not as theory to example but as discovery to reflection.
The Author’s Conclusions
The book does not end with a summary or a moral. It ends with the theoretical essay “Myth Today,” which concludes by considering the necessity and limits of mythology. Barthes argues that the mythologist’s task is necessary because myth is everywhere, and because the naturalization of the historical is the fundamental operation of bourgeois ideology. But he also insists on the limits of the enterprise. The mythologist cannot simply stand outside myth and denounce it; he must recognize that his own discourse is not immune to the processes he describes. The critique of myth is itself a form of speech, and it must remain aware of its own conditions.
The final sections of “Myth Today” consider myth on the Left and myth on the Right. Barthes argues that myth on the Left is possible but difficult, because the Left’s language is revolutionary and therefore historical rather than naturalizing. Myth on the Right, by contrast, is abundant, because the bourgeoisie’s project is precisely to make its own norms appear universal and eternal. The book thus ends with a political diagnosis: myth is the instrument by which the bourgeoisie achieves anonymity, and the critique of myth is a contribution to the struggle against that anonymity.
The last word of the book, in the section on the necessity and limits of mythology, is a reflection on what the mythologist can and cannot do. He can decipher myth, restore to it its historical character, show that what appears natural is made. But he cannot simply abolish myth, because myth is a form of speech, and speech cannot be abolished. What he can do is to keep the analysis going, to refuse the naturalness that myth produces, and to recognize that the struggle over meaning is never finished. The book closes, then, not on a note of triumph but on a note of continuing work—the work of a critic who has shown how much there is to be read in the most ordinary things, and who knows that the reading is never done.
Significance
Mythologies is one of the founding texts of modern cultural criticism. Its importance lies partly in its method and partly in its example. The method—treating the materials of everyday life as sign-systems to be deciphered—has become so widespread that it is difficult now to remember how novel it was. The example—the demonstration that a wrestling match, a detergent advertisement, or a guidebook can be read with the same seriousness as a novel or a painting—has been enormously influential. The epigraph from Edward Said captures something essential about the book: Barthes, Said writes, has never written a bad or uninteresting page, and Mythologies illustrates his progressive interest in the signification of practically everything around him, not only high art but also slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals. For Barthes, words and objects share an organized capacity to say something; as signs, they have the bad faith always to appear natural to their consumer.
The book’s influence extends in several directions. It helped to establish semiology as a discipline, and its analysis of myth as a second-order semiological system became a foundational move in the study of ideology. It contributed to the development of cultural studies, showing that popular culture is a legitimate object of serious analysis. It provided a model of the engaged intellectual—a critic who is not content to interpret the world but who wants to understand how meaning is produced and whose interests it serves. And it remains a work of literature in its own right, written with a wit and precision that have kept it readable long after many of its theoretical contemporaries have been forgotten.
The book also has a continuing relevance that goes beyond its historical moment. The processes Barthes describes—the naturalization of the historical, the transformation of class culture into universal nature, the depoliticization of speech—are not confined to the 1950s. They are the ordinary operations of contemporary media culture, and the tools Barthes developed to analyze them remain useful. The mythologist’s task, as he describes it, is to keep the analysis going, to refuse the naturalness that myth produces, and to recognize that the struggle over meaning is never finished. That task is as necessary now as it was when the book was written, and it is the reason Mythologies continues to be read.
