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Essay on Roland Barthes' Mythologies
Roland Barthes died in 1980 at the age of 65; he was a professor at the College de France, the highest position in the French academic system. He had become famous for incisive and irreverent analyses of French culture but was now himself a cultural institution. His lectures attracted huge, diverse crowds, from foreign tourists and retired schoolteachers to eminent academics; his reflections on aspects of daily life were featured in newspapers; his Fragments d'un discours amoureux, ‘rhetoric’ of love, became a bestseller and was adapted for the stage.
Outside France, Barthes seemed to have succeeded Sartre as the leading French intellectual. His books were translated and widely read. A critical antagonist, Wayne Booth, called him ‘the man who may well be the strongest influence on American criticism today’, but his readership went far beyond the company of literary critics. 1 Barthes was a figure of international stature, a Modern Master. But what is he master of? What is he celebrated for?
The demystifying mythologist of 'Myth Today' defined his position (somewhat unhappily) as a purely critical one, excluding him from any compensatory reward, and above all from the very future of the history in the name of which he had written so negatively:
It is forbidden to him to imagine what the world will concretely be like, when the immediate object of his criticism has disappeared. Utopia is an impossible luxury for him: he greatly doubts that tomorrow's truths will be the exact reverse of today's lies. History never ensures the triumph pure and simple of something over its opposite: it unveils, while making itself, unimaginable solutions, and unforeseeable syntheses. The mythologist is not even in a Moses-like situation: he cannot see the Promised Land. For him, tomorrow's positivity is entirely hidden by today's negativity....
