204
PARTISAN REVIEW
structs in
S I
Z, in its unveiling of the castrato Zambinella, is another
parable of the process of demystification.)
Demystification is no longer the way by which one arrives at
ultimate truth. It may itself be a strategy or tactic for a further
mystification. How can we characterize Barthes's performance in the
following passage? Is it the ultimate demystification of royalty, or is it
a kind of tribute to the inexhaustible resourcefulness of royalty in
sustaining its myth?
. . . kings have a superhuman essence, and when they temporarily
borrow certain forms of democratic life, it can only
be
through an
incarnation which goes against nature, made possible through
condescension alone:
to
flaunt the fact that kings are capable of
prosaic actions is
to
recognize that this status is no more natural to
them than angel ism to common mortals, it is
to
acknowledge that
the king is still king by divine right.
The strategy of myth, as Barthes notes, is to admit the disadvan–
tages of the value or product or institution presented. Having disarmed
the skeptic by a pretense of honesty, the myth exalts the value or the
product or the institution despite or because of the honesty. A divine
art is created by a fleshly body. "A delicious food, tasty, digestible,
economical, useful in all circumstances" is produced by the " fatty
essence of oleo-margarine." The army as an object of devotion magi–
cally emerges from the experience of its cruel discipline
(From Here to
Eternity).
Salvation comes to those who have mortified themselves by
following the letter of the law, thus justifying the bigotry of the
Church
(The Living Room,
Graham Greene). The question remains
whether the eliciting of the pattern doesn't confirm the power of the
myth rather than demystify it.
If
one simply considers the articles translated for the English
edition, ""
Mythologies
gives the somewhat misleading impression of a
playful parody of the artifacts and events of mass culture, verging on
complicity. What is excluded is a fairly substantial number of pieces in
which Barthes reveals himself to be a skillful demystifier in the Marxist
tradition. For example, his dissection of Elia Kazan's
On the Water–
front
shows how the naivete of the Branda character becomes the point
of view of the film and thus displaces our view of the source of
corruption from the capitalists to the gangsters, and the solution of the
·The recently published
The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
(Hill
and Wang; 1979) includes articles from the original edition of
Mythologies
excluded from the American edition.
