Mythologies April 9, 2008

Mythologies

In Myth Today, Barthes describes myth as a type of speech chosen by history; it is a system of communication that cannot possibly evolve from the nature of things (p. 109). The elements of its form are related to place and proximity (p. 122). Myth belongs to the province of semiology; it is defined not by the object of its message but by the way in which it utters this message (p. 111). Semiology postulates a relation between two items—a signifier (image) and a signified (concept). The third item, the sign, is the associative total of the other two items.

Barthes compares the trilogy of semiology to that of Freud’s theory of dreams: a dream, to Freud, is the functional union of manifest meaning (signifier) and latent meaning (signified). In Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), he states:

What has been called the dream we shall describe as the text of the dream or the manifest dream, and what we are looking for, what we suspect, so to say, of lying behind the dream, we shall describe as the latent dream thoughts. Having done this, we can express our two tasks as follows: We have to transform the manifest dream into the latent one, and to explain how, in the dreamer’s mind, the latter has become the former [p. 8-9].

We ask the dreamer to free himself from the impression of the manifest dreams, to divert his attention from the dream as a whole on to the separate portions of its content and to report to us …what associations present themselves to him if he focuses on each of them separately [pp. 9-10].

Freud goes on to state that associations are not the same as latent meaning. To discover the latent meaning, one has to uncover the fixed meaning of symbols within the dream. Likewise, Barthes speaks about the meanings we attach to certain symbols. For example, the image of a Black soldier saluting the French flag on the cover of Paris Match symbolizes the greatness of France as an empire where all men serve faithfully regardless of their race (p. 116).

According to Freud, in a dream, as in the formation of a neurotic symptom, there is a compromise between the unconscious wish and the prohibition of the unacceptable wish. The dream work creates a situation where the unacceptable wish gets expressed but in a disguised form. Behind every manifest content there is a latent content. Thus, the manifest content is always in the service of a defense against the underlying wish or affect. For example, a man develops paralysis of his arm without any physical evidence for it. Investigation reveals that the man intended to hurt someone. The paralysis is the compromise formation. The paralyzed arm shows the wish and the restraint.

Barthes notes that in mythology, unlike in psychoanalysis, signifier and signified are both manifest; one is not hidden behind the other. Myth hides nothing; there is no need of an unconscious to explain myth (p. 122). Barthes states that the function of myth is to distort: “Just as for Freud the manifest meaning of behavior is distorted by its latent meaning, in myth the meaning is distorted by the concept” (p. 122).

The myth is a double system—“a language-object and a metalanguage, a purely signifying and a purely imagining consciousness” [p. 123]. In myths there are two semiological systems, one embedded in the other. The system of language, or myth as a language-object, results in a sign, which serves as the signifier for the system of myth. (See p. 115.) The signifier can be looked at two ways, as (1) the final term of the linguistic (language) system, and (2) the first term of the mythical system. On the plane of language, Barthes calls the signifier “meaning”; on the plane of myth, he calls it “form.” Signifed means “concept” in both systems. In the mythological system, the “sign” or “signification” has two functions: to point out and notify us, and to make us understand something by imposing it on us.

Barthes states that, in myth, meaning and form coexist but will never be at the same place. He compares this situation to looking out a car window at the passing landscape. The viewer can focus either on the window or on the passing scenery, never on both at the same time. “At one moment I grasp the presence of the glass and the distance of the landscape; at another, on the contrary, the transparence of the glass and the depth of the landscape; but the result of this alternation is constant: the glass is at once empty and present to me, and the landscape unreal and full” (pp. 123-124). It is this constant game of hide-and-seek between the meaning and the form which define myth (p. 118).