Structuralism and Myth
Forty years after the publication of Course in General Linguistics came Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1956). Like Lévi-Strauss, Barthes also worked to understand myth in culture. However, they understood myth in two very different ways. Lévi-Strauss worked to develop a set of rules through which all myths could be understood. He took myths to be a kind of language that could be broken into individual units called mythemes, which acquired meaning in relation to other mythemes. There were rules allowing the combinations of certain mythemes, similar to grammar, and beneath the surface of the narrative created by these combinations was the true meaning of the myth. These “relations…were inherent in the human mind itself, so that in studying a body of myth we are looking less at its narrative contents than at the universal mental operations which structure it. These mental operations, such as the making of binary oppositions, are in a way what myths are about: they are devices to think with, ways of classifying and organizing reality, and this, rather than recounting any particular tale, is their point” (Eagleton 1996:104). Therefore, myths can essentially disregard human thought since they operate with their own logic, and as such we can see the general decentering of the individual subject that has come to be one of the hallmarks of structuralism.
Barthes on the other hand understood the creation of myth to be a “radically semiotic act” (Gunster 2004:190), where “myth is a system of communication…a message… [not] possibly an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form” (Barthes 1957:93). Interestingly, and against much of semiology and structuralism, for Barthes mythology can only have a historical foundation. In much the same way that the sign is the associative total of the signifier and signified, the myth is also a sign constructed of a signifier and signified, only it is a second-order semiological system – it is made up of the semiological chain that came before it. This means that the sign from the first-order system becomes the signified in the second. In the first semiological order we have an equation similar to: (signified1) + (signifier1) = sign1; in the second order we have sign1 equal to signifier2 thus the second order looks something like (signifier2(this is the same as sign1)) + (signfied2) = signification (the equivalent of sign2), where in the first order sign1 is the language-object in a language system, the sign as we usually think of it, and sign2 is the myth itself, which Barthes calls metalanguage “because it is a second language, in which one speaks about the first” (Barthes 1957:100). Importantly, in myth the signifier has two aspects: “one full, which is the meaning (history of signifier1), one empty, which is the form (signifier1 as it is usually consumed, a word or image). For example: the letters in ink spelling c-l-o-v-e-r is signifier1, the concept of the clover is signfied1, and the word “clover” is sign1. This is the first order – the language system. In the mythical system signifier2 is “clover”, signified2 is “good luck”, and signification (or sign2) is the myth that clovers bring good luck. Barthes’ examples are more complicated in content (Black soldier saluting French flag, pp. 101-110), but the content is not important since it is the structure that is to be understood. Once the structure is understood anything can be substituted for content (e.g. “horseshoe” – good luck – myth of horseshoes being lucky, Black man saluting French flag – glory of France and allegiance of all its sons – myth of France’s equality, power, unity, etc.).
Myth can be received in three general ways, according to the mythic signified (signifier2). First, if we focus on the empty signifier as form the signification becomes literal. For Barthes (1957) the Black man who salutes is an example of French imperiality, he is a symbol for it. This type of focusing is “that of the producer of myths, of the journalist who starts with a concept and seeks a form for it” (115). Second, if we focus on the mythical signifier’s meaning, or the full signifier, it is possible to see the distorting effect that the form and meaning have on one another, such that the Black man saluting the flag is no longer a symbol of French imperiality, but an alibi of it. “This type of focusing is that of the mythologist: he deciphers the myth, he understands a distortion” (115). Third, if we focus on the mythical signifier as a whole, constructed of both the meaning and the form, we receive an ambiguous signification: “I respond to the constituting mechanism of myth, to its own dynamics, I become a reader of myths” (115). Here the Black man is the very presence of French imperiality (115). It is this third type that is most familiar to us, as it is the way that we usually consume myths. The first two are able to unmask the myth, but in the third type of reception “the reader lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal” (115). This third type of reception is also what allows the myth to transcend from semiology to ideology – through the transformation of history into nature. Everything that happens in the myth, when received in this third way, appears natural. To receive the myth of the luck of clovers in this way makes it appear that there is some natural bond between luck and clovers – history becomes nature. As Barthes writes, “the myth exists from the precise moment [it] achieves the natural state: myth is speech justified in excess” (117). It is this naturalness of the myth that makes it so efficacious. It does not appear as anything other than innocent speech.
Understanding that there is more at play than just naturalness or innocence, Barthes points out that “what allows the reader to consume myth innocently is that he does not see it as a semiological system but as an inductive one. Where there is only an equivalence, he sees a kind of causal process: the signifier and the signified have, in his eyes, a natural relationship. This confusion can be expressed otherwise: any semiological system is a system of values; now the myth consumer takes the signification for a system of facts: myth is read as a factual system whereas it is but a semiological system” (118). Finally, myth gives intention a natural justification, while making contingency appear eternal and Barthes understands this process to be exactly the same as the process of bourgeois ideology. It is by “naturalizing the historically contingent, [that] myth proves fundamentally supportive of the social status quo” (Milner and Browitt 2002:105). Thus, what we should see from the work of Barthes is that his perspective is still wrapped up in the semiological, just as Saussure, however Barthes’ structuralism differs in that he was interested in the textual conventions of myth and the types of reception of myth that allowed the reader to access and interpret it. Still, Barthes maintains an antihumanism that is so common to structuralism. The myth reader (compared to the myth maker or the mythologist) has almost no agency when it comes to how the myth will be adapted or the influence that it will have on the individual or society at large. This is important because Barthes believes that “ideology consists of the deployment of signifiers for the purpose of expressing and surreptitiously justifying the dominant value of a given historical period” (Silverman 1983:27)
[1] Saussure: langue/parole, signifier/signified; Barthes: connotation/denotation, language system/mythical system, etc.
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