Myth and the Everyday

"ITHINK THAT CARS today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

"It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen from the sky..."

Thus Roland Barthes's essay on "The New Citroen" and the magic of its attraction, in Mythologies. A smooth, silent, seamless object, the modern automobile speaks the myth of a nature which is miraculous and benign. No longer does the automobile express mere speed, but speed with natural grace. Its surface and shape defy the sense of touch, make it seem already in motion, and imply a nature which is orderly and self-coherent. It is like a goddess who brings the order of heaven down to earth--and prostitutes herself to every petit-bourgeois who can afford the monthly payments.

And such is Barthes's language and technique--an investigation of contemporary myths, hiding, as myths always have, in the nooks and crannies of everyday life. The style is lively and talkative, despite a vocabulary drawn from Marx, Sartre and the structuralists. The subjects covered by the short essays making up most of the volume are fascinating and immediate: professional wrestling, Garbo's face, soap powders and detergents, ornamental cookery, strip-tease, plastic.

Originally published in French in 1957, these essays are an attempt to apply to everyday myth the tools of semiology, the science of signs sketched out in Barthes's earlier works and the works of his mentor, the linguist Saussure. Viewing all the products of culture as systems of signs, Barthes has created a kind of "pan-criticism" which, although it has made him best known as a literary critic, takes in anything from Racine to underground film to popular magazines.

THE MYTHS DISCUSSED here are myths of bourgeois culture, and particularly of petit-bourgeois popular culture. Myth, for Barthes, is "true" in the sense that it expresses a real intention or desire, but always distorts it in an effort to convert the intentional into natural fact. Barthes finds several specific processes by which this distortion is accomplished: "The Writer on Holiday," for instance, describes how the romantic image of the writer as "super-human" is given viability by "inoculating" it with a bit of reality--the writer taking a vacation like other mortals. Or, in "The Brain of Einstein," Barthes sees the myth of a universal formula for the cosmos, signified by the formula E =MC 2, located by the popular mind in the real physical organ which is Einstein's brain.

Following the essays on specific myths is a longer piece called "Myth Today," which sets forth a theory of mythology far more complex and profound than the ideas Barthes applies to specific cases. Here, he describes myth as a form of speech whose particular function is to distort psychological intentions into a form which makes them seem natural and universal. The target of Barthes's investigation is the bourgeois, who tries to escape from history into myths such as "the nation" or "the human condition"--mythical universals which actually correspond only to changing, human creations.

But Barthes also realizes the tendency of myth to take over all speech, creeping into words and making them say things they were never intended to say. Myth can set up its meanings almost anywhere: because it works by making form and meaning coincide, it can even give meaning to the meaningless and the absurd, as it does in surrealism. The only language which is safe from its infiltration, according to Barthes, is the language of overt intentions--political language.

Political language belongs to the Revolution, of course, and is of a wholly different type from bourgeois language. A worker can say "I cut down this tree"--between him and the tree there is only the change which his labor has caused. But the bourgeois, separated from direct action, speaks intransitively, of the world as it already is. His language is the breeding ground of myths, which by their very nature resist change.

THIS IS BRILLIANT intellectual acrobatics, but Barthes is simply incorrect in saying that "the speech of the oppressed" avoids myth. In fact, how could the oppressed ever bear their burdens without myth--and especially without the myth of the Revolution. Myth invades even the writing of the mythologist. The critic must have someplace to stand--for Barthes the someplace is a Marxism which casts the functioning of bourgeois myth into high relief--but that standpoint is itself necessarily a myth, which history and self-criticism will wash away.

Because he has to speak out of myth, the mythologist can never interpret his object fully. Barthes himself speaks of a similar danger--that the mythologist may lose sight of the real object under all the interpretation. He may forget that the Citroen "is a technologically defined object: it is capable of a certain speed, it meets the wind in a certain way, etc." The total object, the sum of all its meanings, remains finally unreachable.

The Mythologies sometimes leave this object several thick layers beneath the interpretation, but their importance lies in Barthes's originality in making the investigation in the first place. For a work of this significance it is not feeble and temporary answers which make the ultimate difference, but the questions themselves.