EUGENE GOODHEART
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problem from working class revolt to Christianity. Barthes's inspira–
tion in this article is Brecht, a long-held admiration, who mastered the
art of distancing the spectator from the naive hero, without alienating
his sympathy for him. His articles on Poujadism are impressive
"demystifications" of petit bourgeois thought, which is motivated by
illusory common sense standards of tautology and calculation (of
credit and debt), and which quickly settles all questions, dissolves all
doubts, and closes up the world. There is a scorn, a moral severity in
Barthes's manner in those articles, making one feel at the moment one
is reading Barthes that he is in confident possession of the truth. The
presence of these articles would seem to justify Barthes's portentous
demystifying claim in the long concl uding essay on myth that the petit
bourgeois spirit lies concealed in the myths. In phrases that echo Marx
of
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,
Barthes characterizes
bourgeois ideology as an exercise in ex-nomination in which bourgeois
reality is dissolved in a vocabulary that is universalistic. To reduce
Barthes
to
Marx, however, is
to
miss the paradoxical outcome of
Barthes's performance. He is less concerned to point a finger at the
bourgeois demon lurking in the myths that it generates than he is in
examining the process by which the very term bourgeois disappears in
the mystification. Without fully knowing it, Barthes is a participant in
the process of ex-nomination.
The myths that Barthes treats have indeed become universal. The
fact that they originated in the mind of a corporate entrepreneur and
are sponsored by the profit motive contributes little, if anything, to our
sense of the life they have in the minds of people. "When a typist
earning twenty pounds a month
recognizes herself
in the big wedding
of the bourgeoisie then [Barthes declares] bourgeois ex-nomination
achieves its full effect." But we are no longer in a situation in which the
typist's fantasy must be submitted to the perspective of pity and irony.
The bourgeois wedding is a real possibility for the typist-as is jet
travel. One continues
to
question the quality of life incarnated by
bourgeois marriage and jet travel. On what grounds do we demystify,
on what basis do we criticize? And indeed, in an essay,
"La
Mythologie
aujourd'hui," written fifteen years after
Mythologies,
Barthes belatedly
recognizes that the modern task is evaluation, not demystification. To
be sure, Barthes attributes his perception to the changing times, not to
a failure to perceive what was already the case in 1957 when he
published
Mythologies.
The role of demystification vis-a-vis capitalism has always been
marked by ambiguity. Marx understood capitalism itself as a demysti–
fying process in which the veil of illusion which so effectively masked
