Since we're reading Barthes in the context of deconstruction and postmodernism, it seems important to note that he wrote his collection on popular culture myths before Derrida's famous 1967 lecture at Johns Hopkins that started the deconstruction trends. Nonetheless, Barthes's analyses function similarly to "demystify" the function of wrestling here as cultural narrative, as a rite of expression, as theatre. In his brief preface, he states his goals as bringing the method of literary criticism, analysis for true meanings, to popular culture. I would suggest that a related product of Barthes's method is to defamiliarize culture, to insert a novel distance and perspective onto things we usually receive without as much interpretive effort.

Among the things we look for in postmodern culture that Barthes does here, is blending of high and low culture saying it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of sorrows in a Moliere play. It is this fixation on suffering that Barthes fixates on throughout this essay--and he aligns it with traditional theatre such as the Comedia del Arte, but clarifies that the pain is real--it is also the point. His analysis clarifies that we are wrongheaded if we approach wrestling as we would Jansenist sport, it is not true competition. In truth, Barthes work here belongs more squarely in the category of semiotics--reading the event as a collection of signs, which he then interprets for their register, for their value. The method applies then to signifiers of defeat, signifiers of pain, signifiers of evil, signifiers of fair play and dirty tricks--and ultimately, the wrestling match as a signifier of justice.

In practicing deconstruction, we may be focused more direcllty on the binary opposites and where the play is occurring, but the result of a Barthesian analysis and a Derridian analysis will both yield a sense of how the signifiers are representing values of a cultural authority, a cultural norm that has something at stake in the meanings at hand. In this regard, both methods reveal the sociopolitical power distributed through cultural texts and the elements within. Whether you call it demystification or defamiliarization, one practice of postmodern scholarship is to seek these observations in the cultural texts around us.

last updated: October 4, 2008