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  • The Myth of Mao’s China in Sonríe China
  • Miaowei Weng (bio)

Waiting at a Barber shop, Roland Barthes was offered an issue of Paris-Match. On the cover, a black soldier in a French uniform is saluting, most likely, the tricolor. Barthes writes that

I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under the flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by the black in serving his so-called oppressors.

(116)

In a sarcastic tone, the French theorist reveals that this cover image is perpetuating the myth of French imperial devotion and alleged Frenchness.

The word “myth,” or mito in Spanish, also appears over and over again in Sonríe China, a travelogue about Mao’s China published in 1958 by Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, two of the most important writers in modern Spain (38, 79, 169). Alberti and León’s use of mito refers more to its traditional meaning as something or someone imaginary and estimable. They describe, for instance, that “como de un mito, hablan los venecianos del gran Kubilai Khan al Sagrado Pontífice de Roma” (169). In the eyes of the two Spanish writers, China has been filled with myths, from its ancient time to the present under Mao’s regime. Unlike Barthes who holds a negative [End Page 275] attitude toward the myths constructed by the bourgeoisie in twentieth-century France, Alberti and León render a eulogy to the myth of Mao’s China through Sonríe China.

Drawing on Barthes’s discussions of myths as social and ideological constructs, I explore the Maoist myth celebrated by Alberti and León in their 1958 China travelogue. Specifically, I analyze the account of China observations by relating Barthes’s myth to East-West transcultural communications in general and to representations of China in the West in particular. Barthes’s conception of myth departs from Saussure’s distinction between the signifier and the signified, moving on to add a social and ideological value to the semiotic analysis. While the Swiss linguist pays attention to the signifier, the French critic stresses the importance of the signified and its added value. Barthes calls the signified “meaning” or “denotation” and its social signification, “connotation” or “second-order sign” (107). His concept of myth resides in this second-order connotation. Barthes’s theoretical and social critique focuses on the means by which the bourgeois ideologies are constantly constructed and mythified through images, objects and narratives in twentieth-century French society. He claims:

The very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions … myths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation, this insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them one day as if for all time.

(155)

In other words, myth is to be naturalized and perpetuated. I argue that the artificial naturalization and perpetuation of myth characterize the representation of Mao’s China by Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León. I examine these two prominent features of the China travelogue through the combination of generic, rhetoric and political perspectives.

Myth as a socio-historical construct is, by definition, associated with travel writings, many of which, paradoxically, provides alleged factual and objective information about the traveled territories so as to be shelved as non-fiction. Barthes approaches the factual facade of myth by criticizing that “the myth consumer takes the signification for a system of facts: myth is often read as a factual system” (131). Non-fictional travel writings bear a striking resemblance to Barthes’s myths in this deceptive appearance. Therefore, the political agenda involved in the travelogue from its origin is often neglected. Travel literature, in fact, owes its origin to European discovery and expansion and in turn serves it. In her much-quoted work, Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt demonstrates the fundamental connection between travel accounts...

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