In this essay drawn from his book entitled Mythologies, Roland Barthes’s goal is to effect a "dialectical" (163) fusion of semiology (what more recent Saussureans would call Semiotics) and the ideological criticism practised by Marxists. His goal is to demonstrate the indispensability of an understanding of Saussure’s notion of the sign to any act of interpretation, including that performed by Marxists, a school of thought very much situated within the mimetic or realist paradigm of interpretation. In their desire to understand the connection between any given social object and history, Marxists must, given Saussure’s demolition of referential models of the sign, rethink their own simplistic and flawed notions of the relationship between the sign and the Real.

In a series of essays for which "Myth Today" acts as something of a theoretical statement, Barthes applies Saussure's model of the sign to a wide variety of French cultural products (e.g. wrestling, soap-powder, an advertisement for cars, an exhibition on the evolution of mankind) in an effort to understand their ideological function in perpetuating the economic and political hegemony of the bourgeoisie. Barthes describes the function of ideology in this respect as one of transforming the "reality of the world into an image of the world, History into Nature" (154) and making "contingency appear eternal" (Mythologies 155):

What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined . . . by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality. (Mythologies 155)

Ideology functions, in other words, to ‘naturalise’ what is in fact ‘humanly constructed.’ (Humans have long used the adjective ‘natural’ to justify their own fabrications.) By myths, Barthes intends all the interpretations (these may take several forms: narratives, pictures [themselves narratives in that each is worth, as they say, a thousand words], etc.) which humans in general and the Bourgeoisie in particular impose upon events that are in and of themselves neutral in an effort to bolster their own social dominance. By mythology, Barthes means both the process by which these neutral events are made to connote something beyond their overt meaning and the process of studying all such interpretations in such a way as to underscore their ideological functions.

Barthes summarises Saussure’s position that any sign consists of a signifier and a signified. However, where Saussure as a linguist is interested purely in verbal signs, Barthes is interested in other kinds of signs (e.g. the interpretations or ‘constructions’ imposed upon flowers, clothes, cars, etc.). For a semiotician, any object becomes a sign once it is subject to interpretation. For Barthes, any such object has two levels of signification or, as Bathes puts it, "in myth there are two semiological systems" (165). At the first level, the sign ‘rose’ consists of a signifier (r-o-s-e) attached to the mental concept of a particular kind of flower (the signified). The sign ‘rose’ produced thereby becomes, at the second level, a signifier to which a particular signified (passion) has come by convention to be attached. The sign produced thereby is the result of the process which Barthes terms "signification" (166). Roses are often used to "signify" (164) someone’s passion. In and of itself, that is, a rose is just a rose but humans have come to attach a particular signification to an inherently insignificant flower (they become "‘passionified roses" [164]).

Hence, the following schema which I have changed slightly from Barthes’s model:

Sr (r-o-s-e)

---

Sd (flower called a rose) = Sr' (rose)

---

Sd' (passion)

Language-Object/Denotation/Meaning Myth/Connotation/Signification

In other words, a given flower becomes the parole of a lover who draws upon an inherited langue which is comprised of the different significations attached to various flowers (other flowers may signify death, for example). This is how a small portion of the langue of flower symbolism might appear schematically:

Rose (Sr)         Lily (Sr)

---------------- … ------------------- … etc.

Passion (Sd)     Death

Barthes’s point is that there has evolved an entire ideology of love involving a series of practices and a whole host of objects loaded with particular significances: for example, sending one’s loved one flowers as a sign of one’s love. Although this is merely one culture’s interpretation of what it means to be in love, a beloved immersed in this ideology might be forgiven for not believing that she were loved by her would-be lover if he failed to send her the required flowers.

Barthes terms the first level of signification a "linguistic system" (165), the "language (or the modes of representation which are assimilated to it" (165) or, more precisely, the "language-object" (165) because "it is the language which myth gets hold of in order to build its own system" (165). Significantly, Barthes argues that the "semiologist is entitled to treat in the same way writing and pictures" (165). They are "both signs" (165) in that they "constitute, one just as much as the other, a language-object" (165). He terms the second level, what he describes as the "myth itself" (165), the "metalanguage" (165) because "it is a second language, in which one speaks about the first" (165).

Barthes draws a distinction between the "meaning" (166) produced by the first level of signification and that produced by the second order: the "signification" (166). Hence, the distinction which he draws between the ‘meaning’ of the picture of a negro soldier saluting the French flag and

what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal show by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. (my emphasis; 166)

To use Barthes’s example,

Sr (the photograph itself)

---

Sd (negro soldier saluting French flag) = Sr (negro soldier saluting French flag)

 ---

Sd (negro soldier’s loyalty qua justification for French imperialism and colonialism)

In other words, while the meaning (denotation) of the photograph is simply a negro soldier saluting the French flag, its ideological signification (connotation) is much more important: this picture attempts to justify French imperialism and colonialism. That is, if a negro soldier can salute the flag in an act of admiration, can colonialism be as oppressive an exercise as its critics claim?

As a Structuralist, Barthes’s interest in such essays as "The Structural Analysis of Narrative" was in tracing the structure of prose narratives. Prose narrative is treated, you might recall, as if it were an extended sentence to which the syntactic categories comprising a sentence are then applied. Of particular interest for Structuralists (or, more accurately, narratologists), therefore, is the syntagmatic axis of a given literary text. What arouses Barthes’s interest here, however, is the presence of descriptive details (what he calls "notations" [135]) for which "structural analysis, occupied as it is with separating out and systematising the main articulations of narrative" (135) has failed to account. Many of these descriptive details have been characterised as "fillers" (135) designed to provide an "indication of characterisation or atmosphere" (135). Barthes is of the view that some ‘notations’ do not, however, fulfill these functions and are seemingly, "superfluous" (135), allied, as it were, with a certain "narrative luxury" (135). For Barthes, the crucial question is, therefore, "what is . . . the significance of this insignificance?" (136).

Most segments of narrative perform an "essentially predictive" (136) function, that is, "ignoring the numerous digressions, delays, changes of direction, or surprises which the narrative conventions add to a this schema, it can be said that, at each juncture of the narrative syntagm, someone says to the hero (or to the reader . . .): if you act in this way . . . then this is what will happen" (136). By contrast, descriptions perform a purely "additive" function in narratives, they are "not justified by any purpose of action or communication" (136). In other words, what this emphasises is that in descriptive interludes, it is the paradigmatic axis which comes to the fore, that is, it is the relationship between the text and the world it seeks to signify which becomes important. In fact, Barthes points out that such descriptive passages underscore something that many Structuralists overlook in their focus on the structure of narratives. This is the fact that no word in the text exists in isolation: it is, rather, "placed in a syntagm that is both referential and syntactic" (136). (His use of the word ‘referential’ here does not imply that he disagrees with Saussure’s critique of referential models of language. He uses it rather, to denote that axis of language, the paradigmatic, which signifies the Real and which functions even in the less descriptive and more predictive segments of the narrative.) In other words, both axes, the paradigmatic (or as Jakobson would term it, the metaphoric) and syntagmatic, are at work in any narrative and one would do well not to ignore the former.

Many such seemingly superfluous descriptions certainly have an aesthetic function, that is, it works to beautify, to embellish. Its goal is to "excite the admiration of the audience" (137), a function of rhetoric that goes all the way back to classical times. Right up to the Middles Ages, "description was not constrained by any desire for realism; truth, or even verisimilitude, was of little moment--nobody was bothered when lions or olive trees were placed in a northern landscape" (137). A good example of this may be seen in Flaubert’s description of Rouen in one of his novels which is, as Barthes puts it, "subjected to the tyrannical constraints of what may be called aesthetic plausibility" (137). The object of description itself, Rouen, changes little despite the fact that Flaubert rewrote the passage several times. What is more important in Flaubert’s description is the metaphors which he applies to the city, leading Barthes to comment that it is "as if Rouen was only notable via its substitutions (‘the masts like a forest of needles, the islands like great immobile black fish, the clouds like aerial waves silently breaking against a cliff’)" (137). That is, Rouen itself is almost lose in the multitude of comparisons which Flaubert uses to signify it, that is, to render a particular impression of the place. Barthes’s point in all this is that this description of Rouen is perfectly "justified, if not by the logic of the work, at least by the laws of literature" (138).

The aesthetic imperative is balanced, however, by what Barthes terms the "imperatives of realism" (138), that is, by "referential constraints" (138). (One functions to temper the opposing tendency, the aesthetic to safeguard against a "downward spiral into endless detail" [138], the referential lest "realistic description" [138] be "seduced into fantasising" [138].) The goal of including realistic details is to "denote what is commonly called ‘concrete reality’ (causal movements, transitory attitudes, insignificant objects, redundant words)" (138) in an effort to render an "[u]nvarnished ‘representation’ of ‘reality’, a naked account of ‘what is’" (138). The fact that such and such an event really occurred or that such and such an object really exists/ed is justification alone to include its description. (It is not accidental, Barthes suggests, that "realism in literature should have been . . . contemporaneous with the reign of ‘objective’ history" [139] which purports to "report ‘what really happened’" [139].) The Real is "assumed not to need any independent justification, . . . it is powerful enough to negate any notion of ‘function’, . . . it can be expressed without any need for it to be integrated into a structure" (139) mainly because the "having--been-there of things is a sufficient reason for speaking of them" (139).

Barthes reminds us of the distinction, however, between realism and verisimilitude ("‘vraisemblance’" [140]). Since Aristotle, literary theorists have drawn a distinction between what historians do (they are alleged to simply report what transpired) and that which literary writers do (the goal of all ‘imitation’ is to portray not what actually happened but what is probable or plausible). (Barthes, significantly, defines the ‘vraisemblable’ as "founded on majority, but not unanimous, opinion" [139], that is, not reality itself but human beings’s interpretations of reality.) Realism would like us to forget this distinction, however, proffering itself as reality itself rather than what humans have agreed is real. The realism which rose to dominance in the nineteenth century and of which the novel is the genre par excellent seeks to present itself as the unvarnished truth, that is, as the verbal mirror of life as it is/was actually lived. Barthes describes this as the "referential illusion" (140) because such a view of literature obscures the true nature of the sign’s relationship with the referent. Realism is predicated upon an illusory conception of the referential nature of the sign according to which the sign is thought to exist in a mimetic, one-to-one correspondence with the referent. To achieve a semblance of such a relationship, however, what Realism does is suppress the true nature of the sign which consists in the attachment of a signifier to a signified (or a concept about reality) rather than reality itself. Barthes puts it this way: the

‘concrete detail’ is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign, and along with it, of course, there is eliminated the possibility of developing a form of the signified, that is, the narrative structure itself. . . . The truth behind the illusion is this: eliminated from the realist utterance as a signified of denotation, the ‘real’ slips back in as a signified of connotation; for at the very moment when these details are supposed to denote reality directly, all that they do, tacitly, is signify it. (140)

The example drawn from Flaubert’s novel given by Barthes may be rendered in the Realist scheme of things as

b-a-r-o-m-e-t-e-r ----> barometer

when in reality, this schema should in fact appear thus:

b-a-r-o-m-e-t-e-r (Sr)

------------------------- > the real object which predicts weather

barometer (Sd)

From this point of view, Barthes argues, the "very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent, . . . becomes the true signifier of realism" (140). Hence,

Indeed, given Barthes’s notion that there exists two levels of signification, one of denotation (described above) and one of connotation, ideological significance may accrue to even a seemingly simple and apolitical object of description such as a barometer. This would need to be specified on a case by case basis. However, for Barthes, what is implicitly crucial here is less a question of searching for the mythological (Barthes’s synonym for ideological) dimension of particular objects such as barometers described in realist novels than that of the accumulation of such seemingly minor details. The crucial question for Barthes, as I mentioned at the outset, is thus what is the significance of such insignificance? Why the accumulation of so many trivial details? What is, in other words, their ideological function? Indeed, what is at stake here is the ideological signification of the suppression of the signified at the heart of this mode as a whole. Why does the Realist literary text present itself as if it were one huge sign in a one-to-one relationship with the socio-historical context which it is attempting to describe? Why does it cast itself as if it merely seeks to label reality? What is the purpose of creating such an illusion of reality, a "reality effect" (140) (rather than depicting reality itself) which can only come about through the suppression of the existence of the signified? The answer: to efface the role of ideology in the construction of reality by proffering the illusion of an unmediated re-presentation of the Real in language. In other words, the goal of Realism is to create an illusion of reality that masks the fact that this is but what one humanly-made interpretation of the world, to be precise, the outlook of a particular class, and to encourage others to accept it as natural, as a fact. (It is not accidental that the novel was the pre-eminent genre and realism the predominant literary mode in an era [the nineteenth century] which was also marked by the dominance of the middle classes in Western Europe.) Through the literary mode called Realism which rose to dominance in the nineteenth century, the Bourgeoisie sought to use the arts to perpetuate their own economic and political hegemony. Hence, the following schema:

the absence of the signified (Sr)

--------------------------------------

Realism (Sd)                                     = Realism (Sr)

                                                        ---------------------------------------

                                                        Dominance of the bourgeois world view (Sd)

Language-Object/Denotation/Meaning      Myth/Connotation/Signification