EUGENE GOODHEART
203
ing Flaubert's intention in
Bouvard et Pecuchet
in
S IZ,
Barthes
describes precisely the nature of his relation
to
the myths of contempo–
rary culture. "The writer's only control over stereotypic vertigo (this
vertigo is also that of 'stupidity,' 'vulgarity,') is
to
participate in it
without quotation marks, producing a text, not a parody. "
Before examining Barthes's complicity, a few examples of his
method in treating contemporary myths would be useful.
But what strikes one first in the mythology of the
jet man
is the
elimination of speed: nothing in the legend alludes to this experi–
ence. We must here accept a paradox, which is in fact admitted by
everyone with the greatest of ease, and even consumed as a proof of
modernity. The paradox is that an excess of speed turns into repose.
The paradox rests on the semantic trick of implicitly identifying speed
with strenuous exertion. The important thing to note is' the difference
between demystification and paradox. In demystification, the thought
moves from an illusory appearance to an opposite or subversive
underlying truth. What Barthes gives us, however, is something quite
different: two facts, or rather a fact (of speed) and an impression (of
repose), are held together in an unresolved tension or in a perspective
of alternative views.
The mythology of Einstein shows him as a genius so lacking in
magic that one speaks about his thought as of a functional labour
analogous to the mechanical making of sausages, the grinding of
corn, or the crushing of ore.
Barthes provides us here with the sarcasm he earlier noted as the
modern condition of truth. Having reduced Einstein to the antimagic
of the machine, however, he restores magic to the machine, at once
demystifying and mystifying the process. "Paradoxically" (a favorite
word which Barthes understands in its primary meaning as
counter
doxa,
against received belief), "the more the genius of the man was
materialized under the guise of his brain, the more the product of his
inventiveness came
to
acquire a magical dimension, and gave a new
incarnation to the old esoteric image of a science entirely contained in a
few letters" (the letters of the equation).
Still another instance, the article on strip tease, provides us with a
parable for the resistance to demystification that has become the
paradoxical outcome of the logic of demystification. "Woman is de–
sexualized at the moment when she is stripped naked." The shedding
of clothes yields emptiness. (Balzac's
Sarrasine,
which Barthes decon-
