Central argument
Between 1954 and 1956 Roland Barthes wrote a short piece every month on something from the France of those years: wrestling, a detergent, the new Citroën, Einstein's brain, steak and chips, a tourist guide, astrology. In each one he shows how a historical fact, wanted by someone, is presented as natural, obvious, "always been this way". That is myth. The final essay, "Myth Today", gives the theory with the tools of Saussure's semiology: myth takes a sign that is already full of meaning and uses it as an empty form for a second meaning, which reaches the reader as if it were a fact. Myth hides nothing, it distorts: it turns history into nature, "making contingency appear eternal". For Barthes it is the typical language of the petite bourgeoisie, which never names itself and presents its own values as everyone's. Reading myths means giving them their history back.
Objections
- Every myth ends up in the same place, petit-bourgeois ideology. The method is brilliant, but the outcome is settled from the start: Barthes always finds what he is looking for, and the reader sees it coming after five or six pieces.
- If everything is ideology, so is the critique of ideology. Barthes admits it in the last part ("Necessity and limits of mythology") and calls the mythologist an outcast, but the book doesn't say where you stand to see other people's myths and not your own.
- The religious pieces (Billy Graham, the Abbé Pierre) treat faith only as spectacle or politics. On Graham the reading of the staging is sharp, but the conclusion, "un puro episodio maccarthista" ("a pure McCarthyist episode"), rules out that anyone in that velodrome really believed.
- Many references belong to France in 1955 (Poujade, the Dominici trial, Minou Drouet), and today you have to reconstruct them to understand the piece.
Examples / Notable passages
- The World of Wrestling. Wrestling isn't a rigged sport, it's a spectacle like Greek tragedy: the audience doesn't care who really wins, it wants to see suffering, defeat and justice acted out clearly.
- Soap-powders and Detergents. Detergent ads tell dirt as an enemy to drive out, soap ads as something the foam gently dissolves: two different myths for the same product.
- Wine and Milk / Steak and Chips. Wine as the French "totem-drink", rare steak as the food of strength and of the nation. Everyday food becomes identity, and so it can't be questioned.
- The New Citroën. "I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals": the DS at the motor show is looked at as an object fallen from the sky, with no seams and no origin.
- The Brain of Einstein. Genius reduced to an organ, an exceptional mechanism for a museum: myth takes away the mystery and puts physiology in its place.
- Fotografie-choc (Shock-Photos). Photos built to horrify don't horrify, because someone has already felt the horror in our place and leaves us only to nod.
- Billy Graham at the Vel' d'Hiv'. The 1955 evangelism campaign read as a "primitive" rite in three phases: Waiting, Suggestion, Initiation. For Barthes the aim was political: "waking" France from atheism meant waking it from communism.
- The Great Family of Man. The photo exhibition The Family of Man shows birth, work and death as the same everywhere. Barthes answers that this is exactly how it erases the differences that matter: dying of hunger isn't the same all over the world.
- Myth Today. The young black soldier saluting the French flag on the cover of Paris-Match: the literal meaning is a young man saluting, the myth is "that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag", and it reaches the reader as a fact, not as a thesis.
Highlights
Passages collected while reading. Read in Lidia Lonzi's Italian translation; quotes from Annette Lavers' English translation. "Shock-Photos" isn't in her selection, so those passages stay in the Italian, with my English underneath.
Preface: "myth is a language."
The World of Wrestling: "it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees."
Fotografie-choc: "Geneviève Serreau: non basta al fotografo significarci l'orrore per farcelo provare."
"Geneviève Serreau: it isn't enough for the photographer to signify horror to us for us to feel it."Fotografie-choc: "perché il fotografo si è sostituito troppo generosamente a noi nella formazione del suo soggetto: quasi sempre ha supercostruito l'orrore che ci presenta, aggiungendo al fatto, per contrasti o accostamenti, il linguaggio intenzionale dell'orrore"
"because the photographer has stood in for us too generously in forming his subject: almost always he has over-constructed the horror he shows us, adding to the fact, through contrasts or juxtapositions, the intentional language of horror"Fotografie-choc: "di fronte ad esse ci troviamo ogni volta defraudati della nostra facoltà di giudizio: si è fremuto per noi, riflettuto per noi, giudicato per noi; il fotografo non ci ha lasciato niente, se non un semplice diritto di acquiescenza intellettuale: siamo legati a queste immagini per un semplice interesse tecnico; caricate di superindicazioni dall'artista stesso, esse non hanno per noi alcuna storia, non possiamo più inventare la nostra personale accoglienza a tale sintetico nutrimento, già perfettamente assimilato dal suo creatore."
"faced with them we are robbed each time of our power of judgement: someone has shuddered for us, reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing but a simple right of intellectual assent: we are tied to these images by a merely technical interest; loaded with over-indications by the artist himself, they have no history for us, we can no longer invent our own way of receiving this synthetic food, already perfectly digested by its creator."Neither-Nor Criticism: "criticism must be 'neither a parlour game, nor a municipal service' which means that it must be neither reactionary nor communist, neither gratuitous nor political."
Neither-Nor Criticism: "culture will be opposed to ideologies. Culture is a noble, universal thing, placed outside social choices: culture has no weight. Ideologies, on the other hand, are partisan inventions: so, onto the scales, and out with them! Both sides are dismissed under the stern gaze of culture (without realizing that culture itself is, in the last analysis, an ideology)."