More than fifty novelists, poets, translators, and editors participate in a virtual exchange of their favorite foreign-language books as part of a forum which appears in PEN America 14: The Good Books. Below are some of the contributors to the forum:

Rabih Alameddine • Maurice Berger • Michael F. Moore
Srikanth Reddy • Terese Svoboda • David Shields

Dear Reader,

I’ve taken a book for myself, and leave this one in the hope that you will find it interesting enough to take in turn. The rules of this event challenged me at first: Bring a book that is meaningful in some way, that has changed your thinking or even your life, one that must have been translated into English from another language. I am a cultural historian who studies the relationship between race and culture in the United States, and the books that occurred to me first were written originally in English: W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

But one work in translation, by the French literary critic Roland Barthes, remains among the most influential for me: Mythologies. For decades, it has served as my guidebook for understanding the way pictures and other cultural artifacts convey meaning. First published in Paris in 1957, the Mythologies I read was the eloquent 1972 English translation by Annette Lavers. I was twenty, working on my undergraduate honors thesis on the role of language in modern art. The copy I leave for you is the same slightly dog-eared volume I held in my hands thirty-five years ago.

Mythologies is a tour de force of cultural analysis, a series of twenty-nine short, erudite essays that touch on a range of subjects: the opportunistic relationship between politicians and photographers; the implications of modern society’s insatiable hunger for synthetic materials; the way children’s toys embody adult anxieties and preoccupations; the psychology of selling detergent; the Cold War metaphors of good and evil in American wrestling; the psychosexual paradoxes of striptease. What these essays have in common is their ability to expose the fabrications, distortions, and contradictions masked by what Barthes calls “contemporary myths.”

In Mythologies, Barthes helps us to see that our media and popular culture—photography, journalism, film, advertising, sports, theater, television, products, publicity campaigns—resonate with myths: messages crafted to deceive, manipulate, inspire, influence, lull, and excite desire. These myths lend an aura of “innocence” to the disquieting, underlying realities of our everyday lives, helping to mask, or make us comfortable with, our limitations, our ambivalence, our intolerance. They are the nimble co-conspirators of the businessman, the adman, the politician—agents of manipulation charged with disguising the undesirable, making bearable the unbearable, whitewashing paradoxes and conflicts that threaten to disrupt the social order.

The iconic image of the 2008 presidential campaign was Shepard Fairey’s Hopeposter, distributed independently by the artist and then adopted by the Obama campaign. The poster was one of the most celebrated and influential campaign images in recent memory, hailed by political pundits for its effectiveness and quickly acquired by the Smithsonian Institution. Whenever I encountered the brightly optimistic image, however, I was overcome by a sense of unease. I could not shake the feeling that behind the poster’s message of hope and redemption lay another, more troubling meaning.

Turn to page 116 of Mythologies. Here, in the book’s longest essay, “Myth Today,” Barthes analyzes a photograph that appeared on the cover of Paris Match in 1955, an image of an Afro-French child dressed in the uniform of the French military. His hand is raised in salute. His head is tilted upward. His raised eyes are fixed in the distance, presumably on the tricouleur, that great symbol of French militarism and civility. Beyond the literal representation of a black soldier boy giving the French salute, the cover suggests to Barthes a more calculated political message: “that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors.” Thus, in a nation then involved in the violent war of independence being fought by its colonial subjects in Algeria, the photograph communicated ideas about race and power in modern France meant to appease the magazine’s anxious or guilty white readers.

Barthes’s analysis of the cover of Paris Match has stuck with me throughout years of writing about the cultural nuances of race in America. And it haunted me during my encounters with the Hope poster. The poster’s bold, vivid portrait of the man who would soon be president radiates an aura of confidence as well as hopefulness. But the swath of white paint that rakes across Obama’s face—in a picture devoid of the color brown—propels the image into the realm of myth. This simple formal device transforms the black candidate into an icon of the “post-racial” politician: half African, half white American, unencumbered by the tortuous legacy of slavery and segregation. Obama is depicted as black and white, race-specific and race-neutral, a blank screen onto which we are invited to project our dreams and aspirations. Much like the cover of Paris Match, the poster’s mythic messages served to reassure white voters by appealing to their biases and vulnerabilities: Vote for me because I am just like you; vote for me because I am unthreatening; vote for me and claim the racial largesse that is expected of you; vote for me and assuage your guilt.

As you can see, there may be no more appropriate book than Mythologies to trade at a swap meet devoted to translation. For most of my adult life, Barthes’s formidable text has helped me to translate the almost imperceptible language of contemporary myth into its constituent language of manipulation and distortion. If myths are a “virus” that infects our reasoning and clouds our judgment, then Mythologies is a vaccine of sorts, a means of fortifying ourselves against those who have no qualms about appealing to our limitations and weaknesses. Read it carefully. Apply its lessons. It will alter the way you see and understand the world.
 

Copyright © 2011 by Maurice Berger. All rights reserved.