“I Have a Question to Ask ...”
In 1975, when he was 62, Roland Barthes asked ...
Since he was himself a Protestant, a homosexual and had never taken a doctorate, his question was obviously an ironic and personal comment on himself.
More importantly, however, it underlined two of the main concerns running through the whole of his work: the need to distinguish between nature and culture; and the care we need to take in the correct use of words.
Mythologies
For Barthes, one of the greatest mistakes modern society makes is to think that its institutions and intellectual habits are good because they are in keeping with what is popularly called “the nature of things”.
The second mistake is to see language as a natural phenomenon rather than a set of conventional signs. What Barthes wanted to do, as he said when discussing his aims in his best-known book, Mythologies (1957), was to “destroy the idea that signs are natural” (battre en brèche la naturalité du signe).
There is nothing natural about being a married Catholic with a lot of university degrees, and probably a lot of children as well. It is merely a statistical accident, a way of conforming which we owe to our birth and upbringing.
“It’s Natural”
It is also a mistake, and a very frequent one, to use the word “natural” when we mean either socially acceptable, morally desirable or aesthetically pleasing – or, quite frequently, all three. The French radio station EUROPE 1 did this when it issued motorists with a sticker to put into the back of their car with an advertising slogan on it which read EUROPE 1, c’est naturel.
It is no more natural to listen to one radio station rather than another, just as it is no more natural to eat potatoes rather than spaghetti, to speak German rather than Hindi, or to prefer the theatre to the cinema.
It may well make life easier for us, if we live in a society like that of middle-class France, if we get married in church and work hard to pass examinations. But there is nothing natural about it.
All-In Wrestling
Most of the essays in Mythologies (1957) first appeared in newspaper form, many of them in the wartime Resistance publication Combat, whose first editor had been Albert Camus (1913–60). Although the essay “Le monde où l’on catche” (The world of all-in wrestling) was too long for a newspaper article, it does fit in with this aspect of Barthes’ work by talking about a popular, non-intellectual activity.
Barthes’ essay is the best introduction to what he also thought went on in the mind of the reader of fiction or the play-goer.
Barthes points out, at the very beginning, that there is a fundamental difference between all-in wrestling and a genuine sport such as boxing or tennis.
Whereas professional boxers fight, at the outside, once every three months, all-in wrestlers give several performances a week. They make no attempt to hide this fact, and it is quite easy to follow them round as they go from town to town to give their performance ...
Performance
And the word “performance” is the only way to describe what they do.
Moreover, Barthes argues, and this point is central to his argument, the audience itself knows it is all pretence.
Nobody is fooled; just as nobody was but the naive Victorian lady who leapt to her feet and shouted:
... when Othello was being driven into torments of jealousy by Iago.
This is why Barthes argues that the attitude of the spectator at an all-in wrestling match is so much like that of the reader of a novel or the spe...