Mythologies

Roland Barthes' Mythologies is one of the books which looked guiltily at me from my bookcase, demanding why I had purchased it and yet failed to finish reading it. And yet, I was always sneakingly pleased he was there, waiting to be read, the spine on display hinting that I have. As an undergraduate his name would be brandished by better read folk than I, rolling his R's and coughing up his final syllables with a French accent I can only approximate in jest. I was intrigued and awed by the mere mention of his name, but the content of his writing was never discussed. He defined my interlocutors like a Facebook favourite music list: "I love R(rrr)oland Barthes". Conversations would gesture towards him, but never quite bring him in, and his relevance to these discussions would remain a mystery to me to be solved only by actually reading the book itself. I was too embarassed by my ignorance to ask.

Last week I finally picked it up. My sense of intellectual inferiority was compounded by having to retrieve my dictionary three times in one page ('The Occid ent', 'oecumenicity', 'syncretism'), but I (with a sense of pride) confess to quite enjoying the book. With trepidation I will try to paraphrase 159 pages in a paragraph, for those in my undergraduate shoes. In the first half Barthes describes 'myths of French daily life', he critiques everyday cultural entities which have been elevated by the petit-bourgeois from their everyday reality to the status of myth. Examples include wrestling, wine and milk, Einstein's brain, detergent. In the second half, Barthes unpacks the notion of myth. A myth is a mode of signification, it has symbolic status which is not defined by the object of its message (the sign) but what it refers to (the signified) in social usage.

I can think of no better example of myth than the intellectually insecure undergraduate invoking Roland Barthes. It doesn't matter what Barthes said, it doesn't matter what relevance his ideas has to the conversation, Barthes could have been Goedel for all the content of his work mattered to the use of his name. The important thing was what was signified by loving Barthes: that one was well read, intellectually superior, literate in subversive continental philosophy, possibly one even spoke French. Loving Roland Barthes was as symbolic as wearing a black polo neck and smoking rolling tobacco in a cafe: he was the myth of our chain-smoking, whisky drinking, petit bourgeois undergraduate days.