This endlessly heuristic inner - not factual - logic had come into the literary world with the French Symbolistes and Existentialists, and had stuck. If a story had no ending, they didn’t tie it all up in a bow at the end. Nor did they have the Damoclean Sword of literal logic hanging over their heads, like pop positivists. The French, you see, didn’t have the bugaboo of McCarthyism hanging over their free heads, as we did here. This great book was by one of ‘em.īarthes was my introduction to a postwar generation of writers in France who told it like it was. But the Real Prizes were the PostModernists.

What a library of French classics I was amassing back then. It’s hard to believe now for my bilingual GR friends who bemoan the high price of French translations, but back in those days expensively-bound French classics could be had for a song!Īnd because we kids were doled out extra pocket money on such expeditions, like all kids, we splurged. I, in my free time, when my Dad and Mom were separately, otherwise occupied - my mother and sister on shopping trips to the more posh haute-couture magasins, and my father and brother on walking, exploratory tours - became a frequenter of out-of-the-way libraires. When I was in my early teens up to in my junior year in high school, my family used to often take weekend-holidays in Montreal in the summer. This new edition of Mythologies, complete and beautifully rendered by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard, is a consecration of Barthes's classic-a lesson in clairvoyance that is more relevant now than ever.

What Barthes discerned in mass media, the fashion of plastic, and the politics of postcolonial France applies with equal force to today's social networks, the iPhone, and the images of 9/11. As Barthes sees it, these myths must be carefully deciphered, and debunked. They express myths of success, well-being, and happiness. They are the fabrications of consumer society.

Yet all around us, in pop culture, politics, mainstream media, and advertising, there are codes and symbols that govern our choices. We decide to like or not, to believe or not, to buy or not. We have access to boundless information and prodigious quantities of stuff. We own devices that bring the world to the command of our fingertips. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book-one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers and philosophers view the world around them. 'No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis,' Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies.

Mythologies 1957