Roland Barthes read soap powder and wrestling as hidden messages
Why would a French philosopher dissect professional wrestling, detergent adverts and a new Citroen? Roland Barthes believed everyday things quietly carry a society's values, and that decoding them reveals who benefits. His short magazine essays, gathered as Mythologies in 1957, taught generations to read popular culture like a text.
Barthes was born in Cherbourg on 12 November 1915. His father, a naval officer, was killed in a North Sea battle before the boy turned one, and his mother, aunt and grandmother raised him in the southwest, around Urt and Bayonne, before the family moved to Paris in 1924. Tuberculosis dogged his student years at the Sorbonne, sending him repeatedly into sanatoria, wrecking exam plans and sparing him military service in the Second World War.
After short posts in France, Romania and Egypt, he settled in 1952 at France's national research centre. There he wrote a popular series for a literary magazine, fifty-four brief pieces mostly from 1954 to 1956. Wine, for instance, was celebrated in France as robust and wholesome, an ideal that ignored the drunkenness it causes; the Citroen became a modern cathedral of consumer desire. Using semiotics, the study of signs, he argued such myths work on two levels, turning something ordinary into a vehicle for ideology.
His unconventional methods made enemies. A Sorbonne professor, Raymond Picard, attacked the so-called New Criticism for obscurity and disrespect toward French literary tradition, and Barthes answered in Criticism and Truth in 1966, charging the old criticism with ignoring the fine grain of language. His 1967 essay The Death of the Author, which questioned traditional ways of reading literature, marked a turn as structuralism met Derrida's deconstruction. S/Z, a dense 1970 reading of a Balzac story, is often called his most ambitious analysis.
In 1977 he won a chair at the College de France, and his mother Henriette died at 85; they had shared a home for 60 years. Camera Lucida, his final major book, mixes a study of photography with a meditation on pictures of her, yet reproduces none of them. On 25 February 1980, just after lunching with Francois Mitterrand, he was hit by a laundry van near the College, and died a month later, on 26 March.
Source: Roland Barthes
