Mythologies is a text which is not one but plural. It contains fifty-four (only twenty-eight in the Annette Lavers's
English translation) short journalistic
articles on a variety of subjects. These texts were written between 1954 and 1956 for the left-wing magazine
Les Lettres nouvelles and very clearly belong to Barthes's `période "journalistique"' (Calvet: 1973 p.37). They all have a brio and a punchy topicality typical of good journalism. Indeed, the fifty-four texts are best considered as opportunistic improvisations on relevant and up-to-the-minute issues rather than carefully considered
theoretical essays. Because of their very topicality they provide the contemporary reader with a panorama of the events and trends that took place in the France of the 1950s. Although the texts are very much of and about their times, many still have an unsettling contemporary relevance to us today. Although there are a number of articles about political figures, the majority of the fifty-four texts focus on various manifestations of mass culture,
la culture de masse: films, advertizing, newspapers and magazines, photographs, cars, children's toys, popular pastimes and the like. This broke new ground at the time. Barthes showed that it was possible to read the `trivia' of everyday life as full of meanings.
Mythologies, however, includes not just the fifty-four journalistic pieces, but an important theoretical essay entitled `Le Mythe aujourd'hui' (Barthes: 1970 pp.193-247). `Le Mythe aujourd'hui' is a retrospectively imposed theoretical conspectus (an overall view, summary or survey) which is an important theoretical or methodological tract in its own right, but in no way central to an understanding and appreciation of the other texts in
Mythologies. The fact that it is positioned after the journalistic articles is significant. This expressed not simply the chronological order in which they were written, but also how Barthes wished us to read the text as a whole. `Le Mythe aujourd'hui' was not intended to be seen as the
theory underpinning the
practice of the fifty-four articles which were more spontaneous and intuitive. What `Le Mythe aujourd'hui' does, however, is to make more explicit some of the concerns that underpin the fifty-four essays. There is, then, a certain amount of continuity between the two `parts' of
Mythologies.