ROLAND BARTHES: MYTH TODAY – A SUMMARY

1. The essay was placed last in the volume Mythologies deliberately. Whereas the other essays in
the book were journalistic pieces on various aspects of life like wrestling, film, detergents,
advertisement, examples of analysis based on his new theory of myth, the theory itself was
pronounced last of all so that readers are not warded off. The essay makes clear at the outset that
Barthes’ theory of myth is far from the conventional sense of myth as ancient stories having
deeper significance for us. He declares that MYTH IS A TYPE OF SPEECH. The theory, we
understand, is based upon Saussurean linguistics and consequent development of semiotics. The
diagram refers to the three terms of linguistics: signifier, signified and sign. Barthes suggests that
linguistic sign (word-object or storytelling picture) becomes the signifier for myth and its earlier
meaning gets emptied, it retains only its form for acquiring the new signified of myth, which
Barthes calls concept. As a result of the relationship between form and the new concept a sign
(Barthes calls it signification) of myth is produced. Thus, for Barthes myth is a type of speech
(parole) and it uses language as signifier but belongs to a second order semiological system,
language being the first system. Just as Saussurean linguists focus on parole over langue or
language as a system, Barthes focuses on myth as parole and not on the universal aspect of myth.
The following points are made in the essay:
2. Any mode of writing or representation may become myth, e.g. Photography, cinema, reporting,
sport, shows, publicity, etc.
3. Pictures become a kind of writing as soon as they are meaningful.
4. All sciences dealing with values like psychoanalysis, structuralism, eidetic psychology,
Bachelard’s literary criticism, like mythology deal with the problem of meaning and can be
semiological systems.
5. Semiology is a science of forms. Historical literary criticism is sterile because of its fear of
Formalism.
6. Like linguistics Freudian psychoanalysis is a system of semiology. Manifest behaviour like
parapraxis (Freudian slip), dream, neurosis [signifier] has a latent or real meaning [signified];
their relation constitutes the signification or the totality of the dream, etc. Sartrean criticism is
another example: literature or discourse forms the signifier; the relation between crisis and
discourse defines the work or the signification.
7. Barthes gives two examples of myth: a Latin sentence quia ego nominor leo from Aesop’s Fables
and a picture from Paris-Match of a negro boy in uniform saluting a French flag.
8. He explains that the meaning of the sentence is kept in abeyance when it becomes an empty form
of the myth and takes up the new meaning of grammatical exemplarity of the rule of subject-
predicate agreement in Latin grammar. Similarly, the picture loses its meaning of the story of the
negro boy when it becomes the signifier of the new myth of French imperiality. The concept
[signified] fills the form [signifier] when it keeps in abeyance its already processed meaning and
the new signification is the new myth.
9. A signified can have several signifiers. Quantitatively the concept [signified] is much poorer than
the signifier; qualitatively the form [signifier] is much poorer than the concept. A whole book
 could be the signifier of a single concept; conversely, a word, a gesture could be signifier to a
concept rich in history. This disproportion is not unique to myth; even in psychoanalysis the
parapraxis is a signifier whose thinness is out of proportion to the real meaning which it betrays.
10. There is no fixity in mythical concepts which can alter, disintegrate or disappear. Concepts
mostly require neologism to describe them as they are new myths, thus giving rise to irony. The
idea of the French petit-bourgeois about China or the typical style and ethos of Basque houses has
no names and these myths may be called Sinnity or Basquity, asking for neologisms.
11. While explaining signification, the third term in myth Barthes says that in myth the meaning is
not hidden at a deeper level. Myth hides nothing but it distorts the earlier meaning of the signifier
of myth so that the new knowledge [concept] may become an extension to the signifier to become
the new myth. The concept only alienates the earlier meaning of the signifier.
12. Here Barthes introduces the metaphor of a turnstile which may open in two directions. Like a
turnstile the signifier may be read as meaning, the third term in language or as being informed of
the concept of the myth as its first term or form.
13. Barthes uses another metaphor of alibi to explain this idea; as the criminal cannot be at the scene
of crime if he has an alibi, another place where he was cited at the time of the crime similarly the
signification of the myth can be read at any one level, either of language or of myth.
14. To recapitulate, myth is a type of speech defined by its intention (grammatical example/French
imperiality) but when we read myth literally we ignore the intention which is frozen and read the
myth factually; that is, we read it at the level of language – the fact of French empire rather than
the myth of French imperiality.
15. When one looks at a Basque chalet in the basque region it does not appear as a myth of basquity
because it is in its ‘natural’ factual environment. But when the author sees such a house on a Paris
rue (road) it strikes as a frozen signal or speech and appears in its basquity. It notifies itself as a
myth in its signification behind the fact. The form of anything can acquire a mythical
signification. Even disorder or absurd may become myth. In this case the absence of motivation
will become a second-order motivation.
16. There is always motivation in the formation of myth. When the meaning becomes form the image
loses some features. The basque house will keep its sloping roof and visible beams but lose the
staircase or the barn. Too complete an image cannot become myth. Barthes gives the example of
a bad painting which is always too finished as it emulates the myth of a finished painting. But a
good painting is almost always unfinished. In the case of the bad painting the form mythifies an
‘absence’ whereas in the absurd or in surrealism it mythifies a surplus.
17. Myth is in this respect like an ideograph – a picture which more and more loses its features and
being worn out comes to be equated with a sound. Growing less and less motivated it is no longer
recognisable in its full meaning of the image and appears to be arbitrary in its signification.
18. A myth may be read in three ways. 1) If one focuses on the empty signifier the literal significance
of the myth is possible. The saluting negro soldier is an example of French imperiality. This is the
reading of the producer of myth or the journalist. 2) If one focuses on a full signifier,
distinguishing the meaning and form the distortion imposed by the form on meaning becomes
clear. The saluting soldier is an alibi of French imperiality. The duplicity of the myth is clear.
This is the reading of the mythologist. 3) If one focuses on the mythical signifier as a whole made
of meaning and form one receives ambiguous signification. This is the position of a reader of
myths. The first two positions are static and destroy the myth but the last one is dynamic. The
 myth appears to be at once real and unreal. In order to pass from semiology to ideology one must
read myth in the dynamic way.
19. Myth is neither a lie, nor a confession. It is an inflexion. In the second-order semiology myth
encounters betrayal in language. Given the situation that it must either unveil or liquidate the
concept it naturalizes it; it transforms history into nature. The myth exists from the precise
moment when French imperiality achieves the natural state.
20. A new example from France-Soir: THE FALL IN PRICES: FIRST INDICATIONS,
VEGETABLES: PRICE DROP BEGINS. In the first-order of language it is a sentence. In the
second-order, the signifier of the myth constitutes of words, typography (bold font). The signified
can only be expressed by the neologism ‘governmentality’. The government presented by the
press as an efficient system. From reading this headline it seems that the government has taken a
policy decision to effectively reduce the prices of vegetables, etc. In small print the news also
states that price-fall is due to abundance of production in the season. This rational explanation
should destroy the myth of the governmental efficacy but it does not do so. Barthes says that
myth is imperfectible and unquestionable. Time or knowledge does not make it better or worse. It
also demonstrates how naturalization works. In the first order prices of fruits and vegetables fall
because they are naturally abundant in the season. In the order of myth of governmentality the
reason is artificial but it is not complicit with falsehood, rather it is innocent speech because it
naturalizes the price-fall when we focus on the level of language. Any semiological system is a
system of values and the myth-consumer takes the signification as a system of facts and finds it
innocent. The signifier and signified always appear in a natural relationship in a myth.
21. Myth is stolen language. Language can be used by myth, particularly in the imperative and
subjunctive that express meaning. The indicative is like zero degree of meaning and can resist
myth.
22. Language is abstract and always has many possible meanings. Being open to interpretation, it can
be easily appropriated by myth. When meaning is too full, as in mathematical language myth
takes it away bodily. E.g. E=mc2 can be used as myth meaning pure signifier of mathematicity.
23. Poetry also resists myth. Whereas myth aims at ultra-signification, poetry reaches for a pre-
semiological state. It aims to express the essence of things or the thing-in-itself. But its apparent
lack of order of signs is taken by myth as an empty signifier transformed to myth. Modern poetry
trying to resist myth surrenders to it completely. Classical poetry on the other hand, because of its
rules constitutes an accepted myth. Traditional literature is nothing but myth: the discourse is the
meaning or form taken up by myth as signifier. Literature is the concept or signified of myth and
literary discourse is the signification. This has been discussed by Barthes in Writing Degree Zero.
A number of writers tried to reject literature as a mythical system by attempting subversion of
writing. Style is not a form but it is a substance constantly threatened with formalization.
24. It is difficult to resist myth because resistance is itself mythified. Since myth robs language it is a
better strategy to rob myth by producing a counter-myth or an artificial myth. Flaubert’s Bouvard
and Pecuchet is an example of such an artificial myth. Bouvard and Pecuchet through their
writing (first-order semiology) express the bourgeois myth of technological unsatedness (second-
order semiology). Flaubert intervenes to create a third semiological order. By his gaze on the
myth they built he creates the myth of what Barthes calls bouvard-and-pecuchet-ity: the concept
in this third order is their natively ineffectual inclinations, their inability to feel satisfied, the
panic succession of their apprenticeship.
25. Flaubert’s merit is that he gave a semiological solution to the problem of realism. Flaubert’s
ideology was not realistic because to him the bourgeois was only an aesthetic eyesore. But at least
he avoided the major sin of confusing ideological with semiological reality. Literary realism can
be mythical or counter-mythical (as in Bouvard and Pecuchet) There is no antipathy between
realism and myth. The wise thing is to define the writer’s realism as essentially ideological
problem.
26. The critic may either treat the writer’s realism as ideological (For example, Marxist themes in
Brecht’s works) or as semiological value (the props, the actors, the colours in Brechtian
dramaturgy). The ideal would be two combine these two types of criticism.
27. As Barthes focuses on society as a privileged field of mythical signification, he finds that the
bourgeois class does not want to be named because bourgeois has got a bad name. It is therefore a
class that does not want to be named. It ex-nominates itself through the process of imposing its
literature, art, all forms of representations as well as dreams on the other sub-classes and thus
creates a myth that these representations and dreams belong to man universally. Politically it
camouflages itself by using the term ‘nation’, which was originally used to free people from the
power of aristocracy. Now, having abrogated all power to it the bourgeois parties call themselves
national parties.
28. Revolts against bourgeois ideology can be found in avant-garde arts but they revolt against the
philistine, the shop-keeper in the field of aesthetics but there is no political contestation in avant-
garde art. Bourgeois art endorses ‘derelict man’ (as in Ionesco) but derelict man is still Eternal
man.
29. The bourgeoisie dictates our taste and consumption in an anonymous fashion. “The whole of
France is steeped in this ideology: our press, our films, our theatre, our pulp literature, our rituals,
our Justice, our diplomacy, our conversations, our remarks about the weather, a murder trial, a
touching wedding, the cooking we dream of, the garments we wear, everything, in everyday life,
is dependent on the representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes us have of the relations
between man and world.” (p.166) Thus the bourgeoisie dominate other classes through the myth
of Eternal Man, who is neither proletarian nor bourgeois. The petit-bourgeois wants to be like the
bourgeois. When a typist dreams of a big wedding, it is an example of the bourgeois ex-
nominating itself to the full effect.
30. The flight from the name bourgeois is not an illusion. It is an example how the bourgeois
transforms the reality of the world into an image of the world; it transforms History into Nature.
But the image of the world is inverted as Barthes quotes Marx: “If men and their conditions
appear throughout ideology inverted as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon follows from their
vital process...” (German Ideology). “The basic idea of a perfectible mobile world, produces the
inverted image of an unchanging humanity, characterized by an indefinite repetition of its
identity.” (p.168)
31. MYTH IS DEPOLITICIZED SPEECH. In this section Barthes explains that myth by making the
political appear as natural depoliticizes speech. In human communication the anti-physis or the
anti-natural (political) is made to appear as pseudo-physis or pseudo-natural that is ideological.
Myth makes the historical quality of bourgeois experience disappear and appear as natural
through mythification. The function of myth is to empty reality, a haemorrhage, an evaporation.
In the case of the negro soldier the contingent, historical reality of colonialism is made to
disappear and is present as natural acceptance of the situation or naturalization of history.
32. According to Marx the most natural object contains a political trace, however diluted. “The
language-object which speaks things, can easily exhibit this trace; the metalanguage which speaks
of things, much less easily.” In strong myths the political quantum is immediate; in weak myths
the political quality of the object is faded like a colour. Some mythical objects are left dormant
for a time; they appear as vague schemata whose political load seems almost neutral. The
grammatical example is such a case. But if you ask it from the perspective of a lion (the signifier)
it would claim that the political priority of the lion has been forgotten.
33. MYTH ON THE LEFT: Political speech is opposite to myth. A woodcutter ‘speaks the tree’. But
one who is not a woodcutter can only speak about or on the tree. The woodcutter speaks the real
language, the other person speaks a second-order language or a metalanguage. This second-order
is entirely mythical. The language of revolution is not mythical. Revolutionary denomination
identifies revolution and the absence of myth. “The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the
bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and
thereby abolishes myth. ... Left-wing myth supervenes precisely at the moment when revolution
changes itself into ‘the Left’, that is when it accepts to wear a mask, to hide its name, to generate
an innocent metalanguage and to distort itself into ‘Nature’.” Socialism defined the Stalin myth.
There is a meaning – the history; a signifier invoking Stalin and what is natural about him; a
signified – orthodoxy, discipline and unity appropriated by the Communist parties; and the
signification was a sanctified Stalin. Thus Barthes indicates that failure of revolution gave birth to
the myths on the Left. However, he comments that Left-wings myths are inessential unlike
bourgeois myths. It is not allied to everyday life like bourgeois myth. It is also poor and barren.
Left-wing myth is an artificial myth.
34. MYTH ON THE RIGHT: “It is essential, well-fed, sleek, expansive, garrulous, it invents itself
ceaselessly. It takes hold of everything, all aspects of the law, of morality, of aesthetics, of
diplomacy, of household equipment, of Literature, of entertainment.” The difference with the
poor is that “the oppressed makes the world, he has only an active, transitive (political) language;
the oppressor conserves it, his language is plenary, intransitive, gestural, theatrical: it is Myth.
The language of the former aims at transforming, of the latter at eternalizing.
35. The myth of Childhood-as-Poet is an advanced bourgeois myth. It has hardly come out of
inventive culture (Cocteau) to consumer culture (L’Express). The myth is yet not naturalized
enough and seems invented; the examples of Mozart, Rimbaud or a child prodigy like Minou
Drouet may be cited. The last myth evolved through three waves of amplification in 1)
L’Express; 2) Paris-Match, Elle; 3) France-Soir.
36. Attempting a classification of myth Barthes goes on to cite the following rhetorical figures of
myth: these are i) the inoculation, ii) the privation of history, iii) identification, iv) tautology, v)
neither-norism, vi) the quantification of quality and vii) the statement of fact. i) The Inoculation:
Admitting a lesser evil to hide a principal evil in the myth of bourgeois Good. ii) The Privation of
history: Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all History. The Blue Guide in Spain is
made for tourists presenting exoticism without history. iii) Identification: The petit-bourgeois
cannot imagine the Other. A Negro, or a Russian – the Other becomes objectified, represented as
a clown. The petit-bourgeois is not liberal but produces Fascism. iv)Tautology: When one is at a
loss for explanation one uses tautology: Drama is drama. Sartre deals with it in his Outline of a
Theory of the Emotions. Parents at the end of their tether explain “because that’s how it is”. It
murders rationality and it murders language by betraying it. v) Neither- Norism: It is the
 mythological figure which consists in stating two opposites and balancing the one by the other so
as to reject them both (I want neither this nor that.) As in the scales reality is reduced to analogs
and they are weighed. In astrology ill luck is followed by good luck. One no longer needs to
choose but only to endorse. vi)The Quantification of Quality: By reducing any quality to quantity,
myth economizes intelligence. Bourgeois theatre is a good example. On the one hand theatre is
believed to be an essence which cannot be reduced to language and reveals itself only to the
heart; on the other hand it rests on pure quantification of effects. One assumes equivalence
between the cost of a ticket and the tears of an actor. vii) The Statement of Fact: Myths tend
towards proverbs. Essentialist statements are appreciated in bourgeois ideology: universalism, the
refusal of any explanation, an unalterable hierarchy of the world, etc. Bourgeois aphorisms are
metalanguage. Bourgeois ideology constantly transforms the products of history into essential
types. Bourgeois morality is essentially a weighing operation; the essences will be placed in
scales of which bourgeois man will remain the motionless beam.
37. Necessity and limits of mythology: “Holding as a principle that man in a bourgeois society at
every turn plunged into a false Nature, it attempts to find again under the assumed innocence of
the most unsophisticated relationships, the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to
make one accept. The unveiling which it carries out is therefore a political act.” Mythology
unveils the false Nature presented in bourgeois society by harmonizing with the world. The
mythologist by interpreting the process vicariously lives the revolution because he cannot act it.
Uncommitted types of literature are more elegant because they have their place in metalanguage
(a major departure from Sartre). The mythologist by interpreting the myth of ‘good French wine’
or Tour de France has a connection with the world of the order of sarcasm. He is immersed in
today’s negativity and cannot see tomorrow’s positivity. Being excluded from revolution and
condemned to metalanguage the mythologist is roundly accused by Zhdanovism of ideologism.
Early Lukacs, Nikolai Marr’s linguistics or the literary criticism of Lucien Goldmann are
examples of ideologism. This is where Barthes justifies his position as a mythologist: wine is
good but the goodness of wine is also myth. Here lies the aporia or unbridgeable gap. The
mythologist is concerned with language, signification and not the thing-in-itself.