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This essay
will focus on Roland Barthes' 'Myth Today' from the 1957 essay Mythologies
which examines the way in which mass-culture infiltrates our lives with
"myth." This will be discussed in relation to a number of supplementary
articles in order to link Barthes' work to the manifestation of myth upon
the national identity of New Zealand, especially with regard to advertising
and the tourism campaign in New Zealand. Particular attention will be
paid to the "100% Pure New Zealand" website.
From my research into
this topic, I will try to explain what in fact our national identity is
deemed to consist of within advertising and tourism, "mythological" as
this may be. However, I will not endeavour to provide an alternative answer
to the question of what our national identity actually is, as this is
too difficult a question to answer from the subjective view of a single
person. As well as the fact that our culture and identity is always forming
and growing and never static. As David Novitz points out in On Culture
and Cultural Identity, "The trouble is that the concept of 'culture'
is murky, and talk of cultural identity doubly so."1
An understanding
of Barthes' "myth" is necessary before any analysis of it in relationship
with any medium is undertaken. Barthes' "myth" however, is not quite
the same as the definition of myth at which one would usually arrive.
That is, Barthes' "myth" is not a fictitious tale. Rather myth is a
perpetuation of mass-culture upon the world. Barthes' definition of
myth is actually more aligned to a definition of ideology such as Terry
Eagleton's in Ideology: An Introduction:
"A dominant power
may legitimise itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it;
naturalising and universalising such beliefs so as to render them self-evident
and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it;
excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic
logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such
'mystification', as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form
of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises the conception
if ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions."2
The important ideas
from the above definition, which share an affinity with Barthes, are
those of naturalisation and masking. Both share the idea of a notion
of a socially constructed reality which is passed off as natural. This
is an important concept in relation to advertising and tourism in New
Zealand as both are utilised to create contemporary cultural myth, which
in turn leads us to construct a view of ourselves in relation to the
world around us. Barthes challenges the naturalness of cultural texts
and practices by approaching mass-culture from a semiological standpoint
and investigating how things function as signs, their connotations and
denotations. Barthes is asking what lies beyond the images we are shown
in advertisements, how this affects us ideologically and whether or
not we can break down the myths to reveal them for what they truly are:
"... the best weapon
against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an
artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology.
Since myth robs language of something, why not rob myth?"3
The underlying theme
in Mythologies is that what we accept as being natural is in
fact an illusory reality constructed in order to mask the real structures
obtaining power in society, that is, the bourgeois.4
These myths saturate our daily lives, especially through the media.
Advertisements produce knowledge, but this knowledge is always produced
from something already known that acts as a guarantee for the truth
in the ad itself.5
This is a central part of the ideology of Barthes: the constant reproduction
of ideas which are denied a historical beginning or end - referred to
as they already "exist" in society and continue to because they are
lived in everyday practice.6
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1
David Novitz, 'On Culture and Cultural Identity' in Culture and Identity
in New Zealand, Novitz, David and Wllmott, Bill, (Eds.) Wellington:
Crown Copyright Reserve, 1989, p278.
2
Terry Eagleton, Ideology - An Introduction, London: Verso, 1991,
pp5-6.
3
Roland Barthes, 'Myth Today' in Mythologies, New York: The Noon
Day Press, 27th Edition, 1993, p135.
4
Tony McNeill, 'Roland Barthes: Mythologies (1957)' @ http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~osOtmc/myth.html,
(last updated) April 1996, p2.
5
Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements - Ideology and Meaning in
Advertising, London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 1978, p99.
6
Ibid, p99.
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