Semiology commentary Harcourt Studio Barthes

Mythologies

Roland Barthes

The Harcourt Actor

The Harcourt Actor is a myth exposed by Roland Barthes in his Mythologies. The first four paragraphs are more descriptive and the last three more of a criticism of the myth.

R. Barthes explains that the Harcourt Studio photograph gives to the actor divine features. Then, he makes a distinction between the actor “in town” and “on stage”. When photographed, the “in town” actor does nothing and is surrounded by a mystique aura. However, the divine features belong to the majestic mythical “in town” actor, while, when playing, the actor has to give up on his immortality, be flawed and works. R. Barthes then dwells on the suppression of legs, on making the actor “float”, which adds up to the god-like feature of the Harcourt Actor. Discovering the Harcourt photograph of an actor is said to be surprising because one is face-to-face with an actual god with no trivial feature. Finally, R. Barthes explains the Harcourt pictural myth: women are angels and men virile.

In the fifth paragraph, R. Barthes advocates the paradoxical idea that the stage is the only real place while the “in town” posture is an illusion. The Harcourt studio shows the supposedly “true face” of actors in their “in town” posture which is actually only a construction: the photographs lie by representing a mythical figure. Then, the Harcourt photograph is said to be an apotheosis in the truest sense of the word for an actor. Finally, he praises Thérèse Le Prat and Agnès Varda’s photographs which, according to R. Barthes, represent the actor without lying. However, theaters manager feel like they have to put the Harcourt pictures in their lobbies because it gives them prestige and because it is “as it is” (i.e. a bourgeois ideology).

Throughout this text, R. Barthes writes about the myth as if he were only explaining it, but several exaggeration means make the reader understand that the text actually aims at criticizing it. The isotopy of religion (“sacerdotal”, “higher truth”, “sublimate”...) that pervades the text points to this “falseness” and illusion by hyperbolizing the importance of the actor. With the ironical use of the modal “must”, he points at a so-called inevitability which he actually stresses is only a construction. Words such as “social class” or “bourgeois” points to a marxist reading. The pronoun “we” (e.g. “we must be stricken with confusion to discover”) is paradoxically used only to distance himself to criticize and debunk the myth.

To conclude, by hyperbolizing the Harcourt actor, R. Barthes reveals the illusion and debunks the myth.