In early 80’s Roland Barthes wrote his study on the myth, ‘Mythologies’[1]. He wrote that the myth today ‘is a type of speech’, it means – special type of language, to define the myth he uses such terms as ‘metalanguage’, ‘language’, ‘discourse’, ‘speech’. He uses linguistic categories, terms to describe the myth.
But ‘this does not mean that that one must treat mythical speech like language; myth in fact belongs to the province of a general science, coextensive with linguistics, which is semiology’[2]. Semiology is also called semiotics and it deals with sighs, it is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols. Modern semiotics also deals with the cultural phenomenon as they are considered as communication (Umberto Eco).
By saying that the myth is a type of speech Roland Barthes means that that type of speech is a message. But it‘s not nessesary oral, it can not be even written. It can be a photography, cinema, video, picture or peace of art. What is similar to all these types of, let‘s say, communication?
We shall not analise the myth as a semiological system, because it‘s not the myth which is in the center of atention of this essay. I will only repeat the example of Roland Barthes, the example he gives for a mythical speech. He desribes the cover of a magazine: ‘a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed of the tricolor’[4]. That example signifies that France is a great Empire. It is visual thing, picture, which impacts thoughts on us, thoughts that we receive from this great semiological system, – a signifier (a black soldier, who is giving salute for the French flag) is already formed in a different system, the previous one. By giving this example I just wanted to show that all the types of mythical speech, whatever they are, are based on an image, picture, icon, – it’s always an image in our minds that forms one or another thought, of course, it matters in which way the images are being shown, it depends how quickly a person can get and understand them, and that effect it will give.
What else is important of Barthes’s study on the myth, while talking about an image and its impact on us? Let’s try to understand how it works. He says that ‘<…> myth has in fact a double function; it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us’. As far as the mythical speech in different ways and situations impacts us through an image or icon (these terms will be defined further), we can carefully point that one of the ways in which image works it is ‘mythical’.
[1] Barthes R., Mythologies, London, 1972.
[2] Barthes R., “Myth Today”.
[3] Barthes R., “Myth Today”.
[4] Ibid.
Žymos: barthes, imagery, message, mythical type of speech, mythologies, the way image works