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''[ Mythologies ] illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes's progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life . . . For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organized capacity to say something; at the same time, since they are signs, words and objects have the bad faith always to appear natural to their consumer, as if what they say is eternal, true, necessary, instead of arbitrary, made, contingent. Mythologies finds Barthes revealing the fashioned systems of ideas that make it possible, for example, for 'Einstein's brain' to stand for, be the myth of, 'a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as a functional labor analogous to the mechanical making of sausages.' Each of the little essays in this book wrenches a definition out of a common but constructed object, making the object speak its hidden, but ever-so-present, reservoir of manufactured sense.''--Edward W. Said
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MYTHOLOGIES
Books by Roland Barthes A Barthes Reader Camera Lucida Critical Essays The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies Elements of Semiology The Empire of Signs The Fashion System The Grain of the Voice Image-Music-Text A Lover's Discourse Michelet Mythologies New Critical Essays On Racine The Pleasure of the Text The Responsibility of Forms Roland Barthes The Rustle of Language Sade / Fourier / Loyola The Semiotic Challenge S/Z Writing Degree Zero
MYTHOLOGIES Roland Barthes Selected and translated from the French by ANNETTE LAVERS
THE NOONDAY PRESS - NEW YORK FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX 2
Contents Translated from the French Mythologies (c) 1957 by Editions du Seuil, Paris Translation (c) 1972 by Jonathan Cape Ltd. All rights reserved Library of Congress catalog card number: 75-185427 Of the essays reproduced in this book, "The World of Wrestling" first appeared in Esprit, "The Writer on Holiday" in FranceObservateur, and the remainder in Les Lettres Nouvelles.
Manufactured in the United States of America Twenty-fifth printing, 1991 3
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE PREFACE TO THE 1970 EDITION PREFACE TO THE 1957 EDITION MYTHOLOGIES The World of Wrestling The Romans in Films The Writer on Holiday The 'Blue Blood' Cruise Blind and Dumb Criticism Soap-powders and Detergents The Poor and the Proletariat Operation Margarine Dominici, or the Triumph of Literature The Iconography of the Abbé Pierre Novels and Children Toys The Face of Garbo Wine and Milk Steak and Chips The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat The Brain of Einstein The Jet-man The Blue Guide Ornamental Cookery Neither-Nor Criticism Striptease The New Citroën Photography and Electoral Appeal The Lost Continent Plastic The Great Family of Man The Lady of the Camellias MYTH TODAY Myth is a type of speech Myth as a semiological system The form and the concept The signification
7 9 11 15 26 29 32 34 36 39 41 43 47 50 53 56 58 62 65 68 71 74 78 81 84 88 91 94 97 100 103 109 109 111 117 121 4
Reading and deciphering myth Myth as stolen language The bourgeoisie as a joint-stock company Myth is depoliticized speech Myth on the Left Myth on the Right Necessity and limits of mythology
127 131 137 142 145 148 156
Translator's Note
The style of Mythologies, which strikes one at first as being highly poetic and idiosyncratic, later reveals a quasi-technical use of certain terms. This is in part due to an effort to account for the phenomena of mass culture by resorting to new models. First and foremost among such models, as indicated in the Preface, is linguistics, whose mark is seen not so much in the use of a specialized vocabulary as in the extension to other fie