Crossover Writing (after Mythologies)

Poised by the circulation desk at the library is a pillar of books, their spines color-coordinated like crayons or a stack of miniature Barnett Newmans each with its luminous zip or packs of chewing gum beckoning the impulse buyer. Their alphabetic array recalls the encyclopedia. But the encyclopedia, as Borges taught us, promises a totality of knowledge only to seduce us into an interminable quest for missing articles, superfluous terms, for what falls between volumes. Here, instead, each "Very Short Introduction" offers the neat solution to a mystery, answers a question that had not been asked. Between Abolitionism: A Very Short Introduction and Zionism: A Very Short Introduction, there is nothing that might not eventually yield up its secrets and join the series. The pillar, revolving on a central axis, becomes a spiral, a library of Babel, where Circadian Rhythms nestles up against Citizenship, where Public Health is propped up smugly by Puritanism. Rivers, rocks, romanticism, Russell, Shakespeare's tragedies, Sikhism, slang, sleep: each deserves the dignity of its own pocket-sized volume.

Mirroring Oxford's "Very Short Introductions" (shortened, naturally, to VSIs), Bloomsbury's "Object Lessons" collection clothes its wares in black jackets emblazoned with pop-art cartoons illustrating their subjects, which range from the quotidian (Egg, Golf Ball, Phone Booth), to the phenomenological (Fake, Silence, Traffic), to the cosmic (Earth). Although its forty-plus volumes pale in comparison with the six-hundred-and-growing VSIs, it, too, celebrates infinite multiplication. "Potential topics include: rubber band, plastic bag, tornado, turpentine, wind, wall, Glock, drone, Lamborghini, flak jacket […]—the possibilities are quite literally endless" (Bogost and Schaberg). As in the VSIs, there is no subject, no thing, that cannot be accommodated within a standard format, accounted for according to a common grammar, and that does not promise to deliver a salutary lesson.

Barthes presides over the proceedings. Object Lessons, we are told, "continues the tradition" of Mythologies. One might say the same of its Oxford cousin. It is not only that the deciphering and demystification of disciplines, concepts, and things frequently operate through historicizing strategies, producing an "evolution of the subject in question" (for the VSIs) or "tell[ing] the story of how we got here, one object at a time" (for Object Lessons). (In myth, to recall Barthes, "history evaporates" [262; author's translation]). More alluring still is the claim Barthes makes in the 1957 preface to Mythologies "to live to the full the contradiction of my time" (10; author's translation).

At least one such contradiction resides in the image of a book that, as biographer Tiphaine Samoyault notes, "managed to reach two audiences," making its author both "a permanent part of the intellectual scene" and "recognized outside this limited milieu" (226). From its publication in 1957, which sold 30,000 copies in France—the 1970 reissue would sell tenfold that number—Mythologies was "presented as a book that was accessible to everyone, at least in its first part" (226). At least in its first part: inscribed in the book and its history, in other words, is a tension between its two audiences, or perhaps its two souls. This becomes evident even before the publication of Mythologies in book form: when Barthes began to publish each "little mythology of the month" in Esprit and Lettres nouvelles, where they appeared from 1952 to 1956, he became "extremely well known" and was consequently offered highly remunerative writing opportunities, which he turned down in order to focus on solidifying his academic career (204). The book form of Mythologies, of course, inscribes this division in its structural split between the first part—the essays on boxing and toys and Greta Garbo, which were seen as "accessible" and, despite their critical edge, might nonetheless be subject to what Robbe-Grillet called "recuperation" when "quoted to evoke a nostalgic exaltation of the objects discussed" (Samoyault 430)—and the second part—the less accessible and less recuperable methodological essay, "Myth Today." To live the contradiction of his time for the author of Mythologies thus also means to produce a crossover book that does not simply cross over from the "intellectual scene" to the "outside...