MYTHOLOGIES by ROLAND BARTHES

        " Idle reader,beware:you are about to begin a corrosive,insolent,strange,cold and yet witty book."

           Louis Althusser killed his wife during one of his bouts and ,in my view,that delineates his arguments to a certain extent.Whatever were his theoretical assumptions,what they led him to is sufficient for a critical reader to rethink of them.(Of course,it may be ridiculous to attribute his periodic mental illness to his 'thoughts'.Words from a 'sound' mind need not be better than those from a mind suffering from periodic bouts either.However,if you come to know that a teacher who has moralized a lot is a lesbian,you start reviewing her words.)
         I know these are not the right words to introduce Roland Barthes' Mythologies.Its significance cannot be belittled by any distractive thoughts either.I just want to say that there is a possibility to think of the mold when you see a pot.

         I have just read Mythologies by Roland Barthes.It was my second reading.I first read it about 20 years ago.I had studied neither linguistics nor ELT then.(I do not mean that one has to learn either of them to read Mythologies).I had no better understanding of the terms like ‘sign’ and ‘signified’.What prompted me to read such a book was a kind of enthusiasm-I thought of it as an intellectual curiosity then-that was aroused from the perusal of the essays by writers like Prof.K.Sachidanandan,who introduced  new lefts and a lot of post-colonial writers to the voracious readers in Kerala.But the revolutionary youth had already  realized the whims and fancies of some of their leaders.(For instance,read these words of Charu Majumdar,a leader of Naxal movement in India): 

“By the end of 70-s Hindustan will be full of the Red Army(Indian revolutionary forces) marching forward to sabotage the bourgeois government.” 

        In reality,anti-communist marchers stormed the streets of Moscow and brought about the downfall of the U.S.S.R –though in 1991-shattering the dreams of enthusiastic communists elsewhere.

        Let us come back to ‘Mythologies’.Roland Barthes started authoring those essays in the early fifties.The English version of the book was first published in 1972.Today you get the new copy of it with its introduction to the 2009 Edition.The quoted warning to the 'idle readers' under the title above is from the beginning of the introduction.

         Reading a book like ‘Mythologies’ gives us different meanings each time we read it.

         The prose style this time reminded me of a noted critic in Kerala, Prof.M.N.Vijayan.Probably there are some similarities at least in the way facts are elucidated by the both to substantiate their points.In an article,M.N.Vijayan draws the analogy of an elephant keeping intact the hook slanted on it by its mahout while he is away for his recreations, to connote the way the state apparatus keep us loyal and servile to its power.Similarly Roland Barthes exemplifies the myth of a wrestler whose gestures signify suffering,defeat and justice.

“The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign,which like a seed contains the whole fight.But this seed proliferates,for it is at every turn during the fight, in each new situation,that the body of the wrestler casts to the public the magical entertainment of  a temperament which finds its natural expression in a gesture.”

Wrestling is ,therefore,like a diacritic writing.

       Referring to the Roman characters in films,he writes:

“The intermediate sign,the fringe of Roman-ness or the sweating of thought,reveals a degraded spectacle,which is equally afraid of simple reality and of total artifice.For although it is a good thing if a spectacle is created to make the world more explicit,it is both reprehensible and deceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified.And it is the duplicity which is peculiar to bourgeois art.”

In another article,he traces the mythological development of ‘ Holidays’.The essay titled ‘The Writer on Holidays’ analyzes the myth of being a writer in a bourgeois society.Bourgeois society liberally grants a glamorous status to its spiritual representatives so long as they remain ‘harmless’.

In ‘The Poor and the Proletariat’,Barthes analyzes Charlie Chaplin’s misconception of the poor and the proletariat.In his view,it makes Chaplin’s films like ‘Modern Times’ apolitical despite the fact that it has a proletarian theme.

         In ‘Novels and Children’ he begins with a comment on the photograph of 70 women novelists. A woman of letters is a ‘remarkable zoological species’

“Women are on the earth to give children to men;let them write as much as they like provided that they do not depart from their Biblical fate.”

These words of sarcasm bring out the attitude of the male chauvinist society.In his preface to the 1957 edition of ‘Mythologies’,Barthes writes:

“In the account given of our contemporary circumstances,I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn,and I wanted to track down,in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying,the ideological abuse which,in my view, is hidden there.”

Roland Barthes was a structuralist.His autobiographical texts suggest that he was a homosexual too.I would say that these things are associated although that is not the topic to be discussed here right now.

“There are ,in any petit-bourgeois consciousness, small simulacra of the hooligan,the parricide,the homosexual,etc.,which periodically extracts from its brain,puts in the dock,admonishes and condemns:one never tries anybody but analogues who have gone astray:it is a question of direction,not of nature,for that’s how men are.”

He examines the myth on ‘the left’ and ‘the right’.On the right,the oppressor’s language is rich, multiform,supple,with all possible degree of dignity at its disposal.When the language of the oppressed aims at transforming,that of the oppressor aims at eternalizing.

Roland Barthes analyzes tautology too.To define poetry you quote poets like William Wordsworth and P.B.Shelley.But none of those definitions is found apt and finally,you say ‘poetry is poetry’.Barthes says that tautology is a faint at the right moment,a saving aphasia.It is a death or perhaps a comedy,the indignant ‘representation’ of the rights of  reality over and above language.

I remember what one of my friends,a teacher, said about her student who asked her the question ‘Why does one use the word ‘I’ to refer to oneself,when every thing else is called in the name of its own?’In her view,the student who asked such a question was a ‘moron’.

          As Barthes says, “The usual  reply at the end of ones tether is: ‘because that is how it is.’

          It is the reply when one is at the loss for an explanation indeed.

          Whatever may be his idea of myth,as the introduction to the 2009 edition of ‘Mythologies’ indicates,an idle reader may not be able to apprehend the profundity of its content.The book demands critical perusal each time you read it.


(Kindly feel free to comment on this review,which will undoubtedly keep me going.)