THE WORLD OF WRESTLINGby Roland Barthes

‘’The World of Wrestling’’ is an essay taken from Roland Barthes’ book Mythologies which consists of two sections, one containing a series of short essays on different aspects of French daily life written in a humorous journalistic style, and the second containing a longer theoretical essay entitled “Myth Today” that explores the methods behind the construction in greater detail. Barthes clarifies the layers of meaning that lie behind everyday texts. 

In 1957, the cultural theorist Roland Barthes wrote an essay, entitled “The World of Wrestling“ which analyzes and essentially criticizes many things from the world of wrestling. One of the first things that will draw your attention is that Barthes calls wrestling in the professional sense a spectacle and not a sport.

Barthes’ essay examines wrestling in light of the theatre, and wrestling being a theatrical act. Like theatre, wrestling is based upon a sign system. Each element of wrestling, whether the wrestler’s physique or his gestures indicate an “absolute clarity, since [the spectator] must always understand everything on the spot” (20).

In the theatre, the private becomes public; in wrestling the “Exhibition of Suffering’’ is the very aim of the fight (22). Like the theatre, the public watches wrestling for the “great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. As in the theatre, “wrestling presents man’s suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks” (23).

The comparisons to theatre continue as Barthes argues that wrestling is not a sport but a spectacle, one in which the audience is not concerned with “what it thinks but what it sees” (23).

He compares wrestling to boxing and judo, which he considers sports, but unlike sports,wrestling, has no winner (19). It is not the function of the wrestler to win, “it is to go through the motions which are expected of him” (20). 

The bastard or villain is usually the sufferer in wrestling. Barthes describes how the body of the bastard sums up all of his “actions, his treacheries, cruelties and acts of cowardice” (23). “The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight” (23). The costumes, like those of the theatre, represent the tragic play of wrestling.

According to Barthes, Defeat and Justice go hand in hand. Defeat is not an “outcome”, but a “display” (21). Defeat of the bastard “is a purely moral concept: that of justice” (21). The defeated must deserve the punishment (21) which is why the “crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken” (21) as long as it is just.

“In wrestling, nothing exists except in the absolute, there is not symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively” (25). Again, as compared, there is no question of truth, the spectator just accepts what is presented to them as the way it is and should be.

http://cltrlstdies.blogspot.com/2007/09/world-of-wrestling.html

“ Roland Barthes’ Mythologies: A Summary“. http://gcoon.wordpress.com/ 3 May 2013http://gcoon.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/roland-barthes-mythologies-a-summary/

Works Cited/ Consulted

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies France: Editions de Seuil, 1957.

“Abstract of Roland Barthes’ The World of Wrestling”. http://cltrlstdies.blogspot.com/.2 May 2013