Mythologies

Myth is a type of speech

(p. 109) Myth is a system of communication, that it is a message.

Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message.

Everything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this, for the universe is infinitely fertile in suggestions.

(p. 110) One can conceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones.

Myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the “nature” of things.

Speech of this kind is a message. It is therefore by no means confined to oral speech.

Myth as a semiological system

(p. 111) They are all sciences dealing with values. They are not content with meeting the facts: they define and explore them as tokens for something else.

Semiology is a science of forms, since it studies significations apart from their content.

(p. 112) This is the case with mythology: it is a part both of semiology inasmuch as it is a formal science, and of ideology inasmuch as it is an historical science: it studies ideas-in-form.

Let me therefore restate that any semiology postulates a relation between two terms, a signifier and a signified.

(p. 113) For what we grasp is not at all one term after the other, but the correlation which unites them: there are, therefore, the signifier the signified and the sign, which is the associative total of the first two terms.

(p. 114) It is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second.

(p. 115) Myth itself, which I shall call metalanguage, because it is a second language, in which one speaks about the first.

This is why the semiologist is entitled to treat in the same way writing and pictures: what he retains from them is the fact that they are both signs.

(p. 116) I conclude that I am faced with a particular, greater, semiological system, since it is coextensive with the language: there is, indeed, a signifier, but this signifier is itself formed by a sum of signs, it is in itself a first semiological system (my name is lion). Thereafter, the formal pattern is correctly unfolded: there is a signified (I am a grammatical example) and there is a global signification, which is none other than the correlation of the signifier and the signified; for neither the naming of the lion nor the grammatical example are given separately.

I am therefore again faced with a greater semiological system: there is a signifier, itself already formed with a previous system (a black soldier is giving the French salute); there is a signified (it is here a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness); finally, there is a presence of the signified through the signifier.

(p. 117) On the plane of language, that is, as the final term of the first system, I shall call the signifier: meaning (my name is lion, a Negro is giving the French salute); on the plane of myth, I shall call it: form. In the case of the signified, no ambiguity is possible: we shall retain the name concept. The third term is the correlation of the first two: in the linguistic system, it is the sign.

I shall call the third term of myth the signification. This word is here all the better justified since myth has in fact a double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us.

The form and the concept

The signifier of myth presents itself in an ambiguous way: it is at the same time meaning and form, full on one side and empty on the other.

(p. 118) But the essential point in all this is that the form does not suppress the meaning, it only impoverishes it, it puts it at a distance, it holds it at one's disposal.

Let us now look at the signified: this history which drains out of the form will be wholly absorbed by the concept. As for the latter, it is determined, it is at once historical and intentional; it is the motivation which causes the myth to be uttered.

(p. 119) Unlike the form, the concept is in no way abstract: it is filled with a situation.

Truth to tell, what is invested in the concept is less reality than a certain knowledge of reality.

One must firmly stress this open character of the concept; it is not at all an abstract, purified essence, it is a formless, unstable, nebulous condensation, whose unity and coherence are above all due to its function.

In this sense, we can say that the fundamental character of the mythical concept is to be appropriated.

(p. 120) A signified can have several signifiers: this is indeed the case in linguistics and psychoanalysis.

Poverty and richness are in reverse proportion in the form and the concept.

As I said, there is no fixity in mythical concepts: they can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear completely. And it is precisely because they are historical that history can very easily suppress them. This instability forces the mythologist to use a terminology adapted to it, and about which I should now like to say a word, because it often is a cause for irony: I mean neologism.

The signification

(p. 121) However paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear.

(p. 122) The elements of the form therefore are related as to place and proximity: the mode of presence of the form is spatial. The concept, on the contrary, appears in global fashion, it is a kind of nebula, the condensation, more or less hazy, of a certain knowledge. Its elements are linked by associative relations: it is supported not by an extension but by a depth (although this metaphor is perhaps still too spatial): its mode of presence is memorial.

The relation which unites the concept of the myth to its meaning is essentially a relation of deformation.

But this distortion is not an obliteration

(p. 123) Myth is a value, truth is no guarantee for it; nothing prevents it from being a perpetual alibi.

(p. 124) Its form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full.

We now know that myth is a type of speech defined by its intention (I am a grammatical example) much more than by its literal sense (my name is lion); and that in spite of this, its intention is somehow frozen, purified, eternalized, made absent by this literal sense (The French Empire? It's just a fact: look at this good Negro who salutes like one of our own boys).

Myth has an imperative, buttonholing character: stemming from an historical concept, directly springing from contingency (a Latin class, a threatened Empire), it is I whom it has come to seek.

(p. 125) For this interpellant speech is at the same time a frozen speech: at the moment of reaching me, it suspends itself, turns away and assumes the look of a generality: it stiffens, it makes itself look neutral and innocent. The appropriation of the concept is suddenly driven away once more by the literalness of the meaning.

(p. 126) The mythical signification, on the other hand, is never arbitrary; it is always in part motivated, and unavoidably contains some analogy.

Motivation is unavoidable. It is none the less very fragmentary.

(p. 127) A complete image would exclude myth, or at least would compel it to seize only its very completeness.

The nature of the mythical signification can in fact be well conveyed by one particular simile: it is neither more nor less arbitrary than an ideograph.

Reading and deciphering myth

(p. 128) 1. The Negro who salutes is an example of French imperiality, he is a symbol for it.

2. The saluting Negro becomes the alibi of French imperiality. This type of focusing is that of the mythologist: he deciphers the myth, he understands a distortion.

3. The saluting Negro is no longer an example or a symbol, still less an alibi: he is the very presence of French imperiality.

The first two types of focusing are static, analytical; they destroy the myth, either by making its intention obvious, or by unmasking it: the former is cynical, the latter demystifying. The third type of focusing is dynamic, it consumes the myth according to the very ends built into its structure: the reader lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal.

(p. 129) It is the reader of myths himself who must reveal their essential function.

This is but a false dilemma. Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflection.

The elaboration of a second-order semiological system will enable myth to escape this dilemma: driven to having either to unveil or to liquidate the concept, it will naturalize it.

We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature.

(p. 130) The myth exists from the precise moment when French imperiality achieves the natural state: myth is speech justified in excess.

Myth as stolen language

(p. 131) What is characteristic of myth? To transform a meaning into form.

Articulated language, which is most often robbed by myth, offers little resistance.

(p. 132) Language lends itself to myth in another way: it is very rare that it imposes at the outset a full meaning which it is impossible to distort.

When the meaning is too full for myth to be able to invade it, myth goes around it, and carries it away bodily.

(p. 133) Myth, on the contrary, is a language which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artificial reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses.

Contemporary poetry is a regressive semiological system.

(p. 134) Poetry occupies a position which is the reverse of that of myth: myth is a semiological system which has the pretension of transcending itself into a factual system; poetry is a semiological system which has the pretension of contracting into an essential system.

But here again, as in the case of mathematical language, the very resistance offered by poetry makes it an ideal prey for myth: the apparent lack of order of signs, which is the poetic facet of an essential order, is captured by myth, and transformed into an empty signifier, which will serve to signify poetry.

A voluntary acceptance of myth can in fact define the whole of our traditional Literature.

(p. 135) It thus appears that it is extremely difficult to vanquish myth from the inside.

Truth to tell, the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth.

p18 (The world of wrestling) We are therefore dealing with a real Human Comedy, where the most socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a sense of `paying one's debts') always felicitously find the clearest sign which can receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the hall. It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art. Wrestling is an immediate pantomime, infinitely more efficient than the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler's gesture needs no anecdote, no decor, in short no transference in order to appear true. p25 In wrestling, nothing exists except in the absolute, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively. Leaving nothing in the shade, each action discards all parasitic meanings and ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full signification, rounded like Nature. This grandiloquence is nothing but the popular and age-old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction. p34 (Blind and dumb criticism) All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind. One mimics silliness in order to make the public protest in one's favour, and thus carry it along advantageously from complicity in helplessness to complicity in intelligence. It is an operation well known to salons like Madame Verdurin's: `I whose profession it is to be intelligent, understand nothing about it; now you wouldn't understand anything about it either; therefore, it can only be that you are as intelligent as I am.' p35 But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic? To understand, to enlighten, that is your profession, isn't it? You can of course judge philosophy according to common sense; the trouble is that while `common sense' and `feeling' understand nothing about philosophy, philosophy, on the other hand, understands them perfectly. You don't explain philosophers, but \emph{they} explain you. You don't want to understand the play by Lefebvre and Marxist, but you can be sure that Lefebvre the Marxist understands your incomprehension perfectly well, and above all (for I believe you to be more wily than lacking in culture) the delightfully `harmless' confession you make of it. p39 (The poor and the proletariat) But it is precisely because Chaplin portrays a kind of primitive proletarian, still outside Revolution, that the representative force of the latter is immense. No socialist work has yet succeeded in expressing the humiliated condition of the worker with so much violence and generosity. Brecht alone, perhaps, has glimpsed the necessity, for socialist art, of always taking Man on the eve of Revolution, that is to say, alone, still blind, on the point of having his eyes opened to the revolutionary light by the `natural' excess of his wretchedness. Other works, in showing the worker already engaged in a conscious fight, subsumed under the Cause and the Party, give an account of a political reality which is necessary, but lacks aesthetic force.