Mythologies

Roland Barthes published Mythologies in 1957. The book consists of two parts: 53 short critical essays written monthly between 1954 and 1956, followed by a long theoretical essay titled "Myth Today." Together, the two parts form a unified project: The essays expose myths embedded in French daily life, while the theoretical essay provides the semiological framework that justifies the method behind them. Semiology is the systematic study of signs and their meanings.

In his 1957 Preface, Barthes explains that the essays originated in his impatience at seeing Nature and History confused in descriptions of everyday reality. He sought to expose the ideological abuse hidden in what "goes without saying." He defines myth as a type of language and states that even though the essays treat apparently nonliterary subjects, from wrestling to cooking, they continue his broader analysis of bourgeois culture. In a 1970 Preface, Barthes reflects that both ideological critique and semiological analysis have grown more sophisticated, yet both remain necessary. The "capital enemy" is still the bourgeois Norm: the way the dominant class presents its particular worldview as universal and timeless. He coins the term semioclasm to describe semiology's destructive, demystifying function.

The first essay, "In the Ring," establishes the book's method by analyzing professional wrestling not as a sport but as a spectacle of excess comparable to ancient theater. Barthes argues that wrestlers' bodies function as signs: An obese villain projects vileness through his very flesh, while each combatant's physique announces his role in advance, as in commedia dell'arte, the Italian theatrical tradition of stock characters. The crowd's pleasure arises not from real pain but from seeing a perfectly intelligible moral order in which transgression is punished in exact proportion. Wrestling offers its audience a euphoric, temporary world where signs correspond transparently to causes.

Subsequent essays apply similar analysis to cultural objects across many domains. "The Harcourt Actor" examines how a famous Parisian photography studio transforms working actors into gods by presenting idealized, ageless faces. "Romans in the Movies" analyzes how bangs, sweat, and braids in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film Julius Caesar announce "Romanity" without achieving genuine historical depth. Barthes identifies an intermediary sign, neither purely intellectual nor deeply rooted in experience, as characteristic of bourgeois art, which confuses sign with signified (the concept or meaning a sign conveys) and calls the result "natural."

Several essays examine how the press mythologizes exceptional figures by domesticating them into bourgeois ordinariness. "The Writer on Vacation" reads a Le Figaro feature on writers at leisure as a paradox: The more prosaic details are revealed, the more miraculous the writer's creative gift appears by contrast. "The 'Blue Blood' Cruise" shows that coverage of European royalty performing ordinary acts confirms their superhuman essence through antiphrasis, a rhetorical device in which apparent ordinariness reinforces the opposite idea, treating the mundane as a temporary disguise for divine right.

Other essays analyze consumer culture and political rhetoric. "Saponids and Detergents" distinguishes the violent mythology of chlorine bleaches from the selective mythology of powders while noting that rival brands are owned by the same corporation. "Operation Astra" identifies a homeopathic strategy in which institutions are shown with their flaws, then saved despite them, so that a small admitted evil vaccinates the public against recognizing systemic injustice.

Barthes repeatedly exposes how bourgeois mythology neutralizes genuine otherness. "The Poor and the Proletariat" argues that Charlie Chaplin portrays the proletarian as a poor man rather than a politically conscious worker, which gives his representations aesthetic force while limiting their political reach. "Martians" reads the 1954 French UFO sightings as revealing the petit bourgeois, or lower-middle-class, inability to imagine genuine difference: Mars is imagined as a mirror of Earth. "Bichon Among the Blacks" critiques a Paris-Match story about a white French infant among African tribes, arguing that the narrative reduces Africans to objects of alternating terror and amusement seen through white eyes.

The essay on the murder trial of Gaston Dominici, an elderly Alpine farmer, shows how the court reconstructed the crime using the psychology of bourgeois literature rather than evidence. The presiding judge's language and the farmer's language were mutually unintelligible, yet the court's "universal" French was imposed as common sense. "African Grammar" dissects the official French vocabulary used in North African colonial affairs, demonstrating how terms like "band," "laceration," "destiny," and "mission" function to deny the reality of colonial warfare and naturalize French domination.

The book's most extended single analysis, "The Tour de France as Epic," reads the bicycle race as a total, ambiguous myth. Racers' names function as algebraic signs of character essences. The Tour's geography undergoes epic personification, with Mont Ventoux becoming a god of Evil demanding sacrifice. Barthes identifies a fundamental ethical ambiguity in which knightly sacrifice constantly conflicts with pragmatic success, and he concludes that the Tour masks economic determinism while offering audiences a fragile vision of transparent relations between man and nature.

Other essays address alimentary myths ("Wine and Milk," "Steak-Frites"), the mythology of objects ("Toys," "Plastic," "The New Citroën"), gender myths ("Novels and Children"), and myths embedded in spectacle ("Striptease," "Garbo's Face"). Each follows the same procedure: Barthes takes a cultural phenomenon that presents itself as natural, then reveals the ideological work it performs on behalf of bourgeois values.

The concluding theoretical essay, "Myth Today," provides the systematic framework for the preceding analyses. Barthes defines myth as a type of speech, a mode of signification rather than an object or concept. He situates mythology within semiology, the science of signs postulated by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Any semiological system involves three terms: the signifier, the signified (the concept or meaning conveyed), and the sign (the associative total of the first two). Myth is a second-order semiological system: What functions as a complete sign in ordinary language becomes a mere signifier in the mythical system, emptied of its particular history and filled with a new concept. A Paris-Match cover showing a Black soldier saluting the French flag, for instance, loses its specific meaning and becomes a signifier of French imperiality.

Myth's signification functions as a constantly moving turnstile between meaning and form: The meaning anchors the form in reality, while the form outdistances the meaning. Myth hides nothing, Barthes insists, but distorts everything. Its essential function is to transform history into nature, making the intentional appear natural and the contingent appear eternal. He contends that bourgeois society is the privileged field of mythical signification because the bourgeoisie obliterates its own name, a process he calls "exnomination." Its norms spread through press, cinema, and everyday rituals until their class origin is lost.

Barthes defines myth as "depoliticized speech," understanding "political" as describing the whole of human relations in their real social structure. Revolutionary language, he argues, cannot be mythical because it is fully absorbed in transforming the world. Left-wing myth exists but is inessential and impoverished, while right-wing myth is expansive and takes hold of every aspect of life. He catalogs seven rhetorical figures of bourgeois mythology: inoculation (admitting small evils to mask fundamental ones), privation of History, identification (reducing otherness to sameness), tautology, Neither/Norism (balancing opposites to avoid choosing), quantification of quality, and the statement of fact.

In his conclusion, Barthes reflects on the mythologist's own position. Mythology participates in making the world by unveiling the false Nature in which bourgeois society immerses human relations, and this unveiling is a political act. Yet the mythologist remains excluded. His metalanguage, the analytical language used to examine signs and myths, acts on nothing directly, and the mythologist is cut off from the consumers whose pleasures he deciphers. He acknowledges that the present condition is one of perpetual oscillation between the object and its demystification. A reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge, remains to be achieved.