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Craig Bernardini Abstract Swimming
and diving are the complementary halves of an evolving American myth, two sports
whose juxtaposition is both mutually illuminating and illustrative of
contemporary American culture. A diver transforms the body into a symbol; all
diving is an allegory of death and transcendence, as well as an attempt to
enact the dream of a natural language. Swimming, by contrast, is
anti-allegorical and absurd, a failed attempt at bodily transformation. Diving
is a purely conventional construct that masquerades as nature; swimming is a
physical activity that fails to adopt a set of conventions that would enable it
to speak clearly. In terms of their place in American culture, swimming is the
privileged term in the binary, since it is associated with the values of
capitalism, while diving is denigrated as theater, as play. Although in this
regard diving may appear as a disruptive or potentially revolutionary activity,
it more likely inoculates (in Roland Barthes’s sense
of the term, whose Mythologies form the counterpoint for this
discussion) American society against the possibility of radical transformation.
Or, has capitalism evolved beyond the point that such a mythical inoculation is
necessary? I. For the years I swam and attended
swim-meets, it never occurred to me to pair my sport with that other activity, diving, beyond the need of sharing a facility. Swimmers and
divers always competed as a team; beyond that, we were as little integrated as
the black and white communities of the city where I attended college. In hindsight, what strike me are our
defining differences: power and grace, space and time, surface and depth, x and
y axes. They were always there, present in the conjunction which at once joined
and divided us, diving always the afterthought. They were just never legible. How appropriate, then, or just plain
irresistible, are the tenets of structuralism—the grammar of opposites, what
Roland Barthes called the paradigmatic imagination—in
the face of two conjoined sports that wear their differences so much upon their
sleeves. Swimming and diving, reticent by themselves, lose all reserve in each
other’s company. If my desire to write about swimming
and diving is nostalgic, my methodology is no less so. A generation after its
poststructuralist burial, structuralism, which would pretend to make me a
transcendent observer, only deepens and colors my nostalgia. For the poststructuralist mind, nostalgia, the
womb of desire, is the condition of subjectivity. That the new dinosaurs of the
American academy (nimble, birdlike and vicious, like velociraptors)
have grown nostalgic for the heyday of deconstruction is case in point. But
time, however contaminated by desire, gives dimension to form. And structuralism, however compromised—by its refusal
to acknowledge that the distance between the interpreter and the object is
another axis, perhaps the axis,
along which interpretation unfolds: readability is a function of diachronicity—is not fatally compromised.1 It is,
rather, a faltering step toward making form-in-history legible. In my case, swimming and diving,
invariably flat (when I swam) or blurry (for years after), resolve, via the structuralist’s superimposing glasses (you remember the
kind: square, cheap plastic, cellophane lenses rose and blue), into a
three-dimensional image, each sport projected against the other so as to illuminate
both, both projected against the landscape of American culture which is itself
illuminated by their juxtaposition.[*] II. If we define diving by the
relationship between a body and gravity, then it follows that water, which
diminishes the effect of gravity, must be incidental to it. Water is an
expedient, not an essential, element. In the oracular (and thoroughly American)
jargon of noun phrases: diving is an “air sport,” not a “water sport.” A diver dies the moment her body
hits the water. The water’s surface means the same thing that the “touch” that
finishes a race means to a swimmer. And this is paradoxical, because whereas a
diver (as the name suggests) goes “deeper” than a swimmer, nothing is plumbed,
or discovered, or retrieved—no sunken treasure, anyway. For a diver, the water
has no depth; it exists merely as surface. Diving, like the ether it inhabits,
must be understood indirectly. It is above all a symbolic activity, the diver’s body is a speaking body (to use
Barthes’s phrase), and the dive is as pure a gesture
as a cheerleader’s throwing out her arms to make the letter “T.” There is a
moment when a diver’s leap and the force of gravity cancel each other, and she
hangs suspended, enthralled, and the audience with her. Invisible
to the spectator’s eye, but a theoretical necessity, an intellectual certainty.
This is a diver’s burden: to transform an eminently physical activity into an
idea; to use her body, by way of a highly formalized (and purely conventional)
somatic vocabulary, to surpass her body; to prolong that differential suspense
until it engulfs the whole time of the dive. Diving “happens” in the air, but
its essence is somewhere else. So what does the dive signify? A diver performs a series of aestheticized death-throes (read as death-throes because
they are aestheticized) which allegorize the soul’s
liberation from the body: All diving is an allegory of death and transcendence.
But for the dive to function in this way, the body must be turned into a
symbol: spirit and meaning must be liberated together. Diving recalls the
definition of sublimation—matter is annihilated and raised to the level of
spirit—and so what is allegorized in diving is allegory itself. And this is
true no matter how many twists and turns a diver executes or the degree of
difficulty ascribed to the dive—though it is true that the more spectacular and
perfectly executed the dive, the more ideal it seems to us, and the more likely
it is to be understood as allegory. This is the sport’s attraction, the reason
we watch the same thing over and over. It has little to do with competition or
physical prowess. Rather, it is the story that
diving tells, about the soul’s salvation, or about reading, about making
meaning from signs. A diver’s goal is to forge the symbolic
imagination in the mind of the audience, to transcend the impurity of the
arbitrary sign for the purity of the natural symbol, the necessary
connection—between her body and her activity, and between these (spastic motion
followed by stasis, and then disappearance) and their allegorical meaning.2 It is
this idea of purity, of a nostalgia for lost innocence (moral, linguistic) and
for plenitude, which purifies a diver’s body, and which in turn purifies not
only us—we who have come to believe we are responsible for
her martyrdom—but also the Order to which we belong. All diving takes on this
appearance of a purification ritual: body after body casting itself into the
abyss, like a crowd of martyrs making spectacles of their faith, shedding their
flesh to reveal themselves as symbols.3 The coup de grace—and here the water proves especially expedient, like
a theater curtain—is that sudden disappearance, the diver’s serene injection
into the other side, leaving the spectator with only the memory of a body. The
almost preternatural quickness of those twists and turns works in the diver’s
favor. Like an apparition, the dive is only half-believed, and the spectator
turns to his companions for corroboration (“Did you see what I saw?”). This is
also the reason why the failed dive, and even more the injured diver, is so
traumatic: without warning, a diver becomes corporeal again, and the illusion
of transcending the physical world is destroyed. In this respect, the television
cameras, which replay the dive over and over from a multitude of angles in
slow-motion, destroy, or threaten to destroy, diving’s essence. For how can we
possibly convince ourselves of a dive’s perfection, of its incarnating an
ideal, when we have it dissected before us? The feet are never quite aligned,
the pony-tail whips around ridiculously, the body is
always a bit skewed from the board. The dive becomes nothing more than an
impressive physical activity; all its potential for symbol-making is lost. One camera, however, tells another
story. Placed in an observation room beneath the level of the water, through
this camera we are able to glimpse the nether realm, in the same way that
spirits, unseen by the naked eye, are sometimes captured on photographic
plates. Although a diver dies at the surface, this marvelous device Virgils us into the underworld, following the spirit’s
decelerating descent, and then its accelerating ascent beside the plume of
bubbles that marked its sudden entry, rising all in a rush to re-enter the
world of the living, sometimes helped along by a hefty push against the
bottom—and what a relief, to know that the underworld has a bottom! A new
chapter is added to the saga: what was once only about leaving the physical
world (or entering the other) is now also about returning to this one; what was
once about death and transcendence is now also about physical rebirth; what was
once divine comedy becomes, thanks to TV’s evangelical promise, bodily
resurrection. There is yet another camera, this
one placed directly before the ladder where a diver emerges, fresh-faced and
hairless, allowing us to rub shoulders with her new innocence, however
short-lived. For her body has ceased to speak; she is corporeal again, almost
one of us. Perhaps because of the continuity between diving and emerging, the
allegory still illuminates a diver’s body: she appears canonized. Or perhaps it
is the water that reminds us of her ritual sacrifice and miraculous rebirth.
This is not to call the water holy; it is not the agent that purifies. Purity is
achieved (or rather performed) in the dive’s acrobatics. Instead, the water,
like a halo, signifies what the body no longer can. Halos mark saintliness;
they do not make a saint. And like a halo, which floats above the saint’s head,
the water surrounds a diver without touching her. Here, a diver momentarily retains the power to
turn herself, and everything she (never quite)
touches, and everything that (never quite) touches her, into language, and
what’s more, to purify that language of its clumsy arbitrariness. To put it
differently: a diver never truly gets wet. III. But a swimmer does. For a swimmer,
water is water and only water. It gets inside his ears and nose and mouth, it
washes around his loins, it soils him, he wallows in
it. Swimming’s audience is not illiterate (it is,
after all, the same audience as diving’s), nor is the narrative especially
taxing. In swimming, there’s just nothing to read. Water doesn’t mean; it acts.
Swimming is a “water sport,” nothing more. Any resemblance between a diver and
a bird is more associative than real: a diver doesn’t expect to fly, only to
symbolize the lightness of spirit; rather than trying to adapt to her medium,
she chooses to transcend it. But a swimmer would like nothing more than to be a
fish. And so an air of desperation hangs over his whole activity: the desire to
metamorphose, and the perennial failure to do so. Ironically, in his bestial
desperation to conquer the new element, to plow a furrow in water, a swimmer
loses his ability to speak, to make symbols—his only hope. The victim of an
incomplete regression, he suffers in bestial stupidity without the pleasure of
actually turning into a beast. If there was something purgatorial about the
throes of diving—that moment when a diver gives up the ghost, incarnates the
idea, all drawn out in the mind’s eye—swimming is all the more purgatorial for
being unsuccessful. What we left unsaid for years, swimming is hell, was truer than we knew: we were there, if only in
the relatively chaste outermost circle, in the enviable company of the pagan
philosophers: those who live “in desire without hope” of salvation. To say that a swimmer can’t change
is to say he can’t do without air. Existing at the frontier of two elements,
and moving horizontally along their border, a swimmer is doomed to muddle them,
to be both-and. It is this inability to keep things separate, to maintain order, that makes swimming illegible, anti-allegorical, and
absurd. Diving’s verticality, its maintenance of a rigidly hierarchical
distinction between air and water, announces the presence of allegory. By
passing between the two with hardly a splash, the existence of that border is
secured. Borders are what allow diving to forge meaning: that between air and
water is extant, yet permeable, and so that between body and spirit, signifier
and signified; a diver passes between the latter two with the same grace and
assurance she does the former. But by eradicating the physical boundary between
two elements, two phases of matter, swimming destroys the possibility of
speech. So, while diving remains an essentially symbolic activity, swimming is
horribly literal, and physical to the last degree.
Unlike diving, everything about swimming reminds us of the body: the noise
(diving is funereally silent for the breadth of the activity), the splashing
about, apparent pain and breathlessness, etc. As a result, a swimmer is never
really at home, either in the water or on land. To spend a few hours of every
day of one’s life semi-suspended, and then to stand again on dry ground,
changes one’s perspective of the things most people take for granted: our time is not the same as their time, and gravity, it pulls harder, or seems to, until we come to
resent it. And yet for all its buoyancy, the water is never more than a foster
home. Any swimmer who has stood at poolside before sunrise, eyes half-closed,
water like a dream, waking to the dread not of the cold, but of the way the
water will feel when he takes that first plunge, that
daily parody of the birth-trauma when his environment is suddenly thickened, can tell you as much, or as little. (Will we ever
find a Kaspar Hauser of the sea?) It’s as if the bark
had stopped growing at Daphne’s hips, leaving her stranded, and Apollo there,
all out of breath and sporting an erection, wondering what on earth to do next.
And yet Ovid knew, as Apulieus knew, that no such
metamorphosis is ever really complete: something always remains, an essential
part, yearning for its “former form,” as Richard Burton translated it. Identity
resides beyond flesh and appearances. True transformation must be spiritual:
conversion, to Isis, or whomever. Or a symbol. Diving is Petrarch,
but swimming, condemned to blunt physical reality, blindly pushing the other
way, swimming, lamentably, is Ovid. IV. Yet swimming, like any other
cultural activity, does mean;
it just doesn’t present us with a single, stable meaning, as diving purports
to. Instead, meaning hops metonymically from lane to lane, among the contiguous
scribbles of six or eight bodies scrolling horizontally across the pool’s
surface. Conversely, though diving aspires to the condition of the natural
symbol, its meaning is also arbitrary: the narrative of death and
transcendence, and the penchant to read allegorically, are bound by culture and
history. If meaning in diving manages to
present itself as somehow more “natural” than in swimming, this is not due, or
not primarily due, to the more obvious differences between the way the two
activities are organized: for example, that swimmers are bound to the law of
the gun, whereas a diver leaps when he’s ready; or that swimming, an
“individual” sport, is at the same time highly social, the events taking place
in a pool full of competitors, while a diver stands alone on the board, in the
apparent absence of competition, as if the world existed only in and for him.
It is rather a matter of how each sport signifies. When swimming attempts to
speak, it is unable to do so unambiguously, and hence foregrounds
the conventionality of its language. But diving seduces us with an illusory
nature, with the dream of a natural language, even as it uses an arbitrary
combination of signs, i.e., somersaults and twists, and an arbitrary number of
each, to do so. Diving says, “Since I cannot be nature, I will settle for
signifying it; but I will signify it in such a way that my gestures are
mistaken for nature, for an ontology, for the Thing-in-itself. By fully embracing
convention, I can present the perfect illusion of nature.”4 At the
moment that nature and the body have been dispensed with—because they have
been—“nature” can appear as a concept. In semiotic terms, knowledge (or rather
ideology) replaces experience (Peirce); diving is a
myth, an impure (arbitrary) activity that wears a mask of transparency (Barthes). In effect, diving becomes natural by
declaring itself so; it straddles the nature/culture binary, while swimming,
unable to perform the signifying illusion that is essential to diving, is
doomed to muddle the two—doomed, that is, to the dual impurity of bodies and
signs. To a diver, a swimmer is a beast yoked to the law—to a diver, that is,
who also depends on the law, but who makes (us) believe that his activity
precedes all law. Diving takes advantage of swimming’s
inability to speak clearly; it speaks for swimming; by declaring itself natural, it declares that swimming, its
opposite, is compromised, conventional, that it is something less (or something
more) than natural. And this is ironic, since our inclination is to label as
natural and hence privilege the more physical, the less refined, of the two
activities. After all, a swimmer’s motions are practical: she gets somewhere,
even if that “somewhere” is the same place she started—A to A*, say, where A* means something different, just as the arbitrary “last
wall” (all walls are alike) is the same wall she might have touched two or
thirty-two times already. Swimming is too bound to its physical purpose to
signify anything stable or coherent beyond the activity itself … yet too
pregnant with meaning to be a purely physical activity. In diving, by contrast,
the terrain is the body itself; the movements have no goal beyond their own
completion: they are completed for their own sake, “for art’s sake,” for the
sake of an aesthetic ideal: grace, beauty. It may be this absence of practical
purpose—witnessed by such practical, productive people—that evacuates diving of
its literal meaning, and invites the audience to fill the space. The diver
withdraws from the realm of sport and into that of theater, where he ceases to
speak the conventional language of diving (pike and tuck and degrees of
difficulty) and begins to speak the “universal” language of allegory. On the one hand, by perfectly
fulfilling a series of conventional gestures, or by a diver’s unnaturally contorting
his body to approximate the perfection of geometric forms, diving becomes an
allegory of grace and transparency: a form that surpasses formality, that
ossifies the contingent into the determined, that incarnates or “partakes of” a
concept without a referent. On the other hand, a diver intimates freedom from
convention by making these gestures appear natural, as if they were waiting for
a body—his body—to fulfill them: an
ideal dive appears natural to the extent that a diver’s body becomes the language. For the body to speak, it has to
disappear as a body: the body is just the tool for making meaning. But the tool
is also the subject of
the allegory—either as exposition, or apocalyptic vision—and so it cannot
disappear entirely; it must be present, at least retrospectively. Diving is
always at one and the same time this return to
the body, to the prelapsarian purity of primary
narcissism, and a flight from
the body into the abstract, the ether, spirit. Diving is this dialectic between
antithetical fantasies of immediacy: body and spirit, origin and end. There are a few who view diving
without allegory, blind to everything but the law: the judges (who judge,
ironically, after the
execution: the accused is not judged for a previous crime, but according to how
well he dies: diving meets Kafka). Which is not to say that
scores and allegories are mutually exclusive, but that the symbolic imagination
depends only upon a threshold which, once crossed, transforms the dive from
physical activity into allegory. Scoring is alien to diving’s nature, an
attempt to integrate it with swimming as a “competitive” sport; in the context
of a meet, for example, diving scores are converted into points and added to
the points earned from swim races. Swimmers always felt this to be a travesty.
Diving points aren’t “real” points; swimming, after all, is timed. But with their flip-books sporting enormous,
stenciled whole and half numbers between one and ten, like all “natural”
weights and measures, the judges pretend to measure diving as empirically as a
watch. By quantifying diving the way time quantifies swimming (and time is like
money in this regard, that it destroys signification—yet another reason for swimming’s aphasia), the judges threaten to shear it of its
symbolic content, of its essence as a signifying activity. Understood as a
product of convention, however, scoring may actually re-enforce the purely
conventional nature of diving on which its ability to signify depends; together
with the diver, the judges would thus assist in making the conventions of
diving appear natural. Through the judging, diving
participates in one of the constitutive features of myth according to Barthes: the reduction of quality to quantity. But because
the judges are themselves spectators, they can never be entirely blind to the
drama. It is this ineradicable subjectivism, this excess of seeing, which
comprehends a diver as a performer, as an aesthetic object, and which (to
diving’s credit) resists its integration into athletic competition. But this
raises an important question: Does the scoring of diving (like the scoring of
gymnastics) therefore threaten to undermine competitive sports, and hence the
competitive culture and society of which swimming is a microcosm? Or does it
represent, rather, the successful co-opting of diving by competitive sports, and as such a sort of
safety-valve for the Order which it affects to threaten? And a corollary which
is really the heart of the matter: Is diving, and the signifying illusion on
which it depends, myth—or does it represent the possibility (were it able to
wrest itself free of a bourgeois culture that has hijacked it) of real
transgression, of an authentic
rupture, of the irruption of the ideas of the sacred and of irreducible,
unquantifiable quality into a bourgeois world? V. Though compromised as a semiotic
activity, swimming has a monopoly on all the magic words dear to athletics,
athletics being understood as an adequate, perhaps even an ideal, reflection of
the essentials of American society: competition (the “free market” of the
rat-race, of labour-power); fairness in the field of
play (swimming’s horizontality and its muddling of
hierarchies, that is, its egalitarianism); speed—not mere usefulness or
efficiency, not as a means to an end, but as a purely self-referential value,
like justice or mercy; and work, hard work and plenty of it, as a means to
self-fulfillment. (How many rags-to-riches stories are there in the annals of
athletics? Certainly more than in business, for which they
are taken to be the prototype, or the surrogate.) In swimming’s
terms, what makes a sport worthwhile is that it builds character, instills a
good work-ethic, at once our secular religion and an indicator of our spiritual
bankruptcy. Sociologically, sports, which fall under the dubious heading of
“recreation,” are as much a vehicle for becoming a productive member of the
work world as Barthes’s bourgeois toys; and for the
culture at large, through the occasional fortunate professional athlete (and
the yet more occasional fortunate amateur), the significance of American sports
has been literalized: sport is no longer just a metaphor for how you make it,
it is how you make it. But diving? Diving is useless. As
noted, diving shares less with athletics than with theater, with the arts—those
cultural effluvia stinking of Swimming holds the higher position
in American culture, a position which (as is the case with many an elite body)
makes its vaunted egalitarianism possible, and not the other way around, and
from which, ironically, it would castigate diving precisely for its love for
hierarchies and symbol-making. Swimming needs diving to demonstrate its own
denigrating of hierarchies. Diving is admonished: would it survive in the world
of athletics, it must abandon such theatrics. But this is tantamount to asking
diving to abandon its identity. Diving’s symbol-making at once ensures its
denigration and
expresses its unhappiness with the status quo.6 Like the
allegory it speaks, diving seeks strength in its humility, in its martyrdom on
the altar of competitive sports, competitive society. The limits of our
activity notwithstanding, we swimmers were no less literate than our audience.
And though we may not have understood it, we could feel the primacy of diving, both physically and symbolically: air above
water, heaven above hell, spirit over body; a diver’s daily salvation, daily
transformation, daily rebirth, against a swimmer’s inability to transform or
transcend; a diver’s apparent ease, his quickness and lightness, his presence
as spirit, against the enduring body, the body-in-pain, every swimmer’s
purgatory; diver, eternal child, existing outside of convention, outside of the
law, in the pleasure and play of his own body, while the swimmer, beast, Titan,
is bound sure as Prometheus to the rock of law. It can only be with envy that
the swimmer feels this difference day in and day out, though we may not
understand it until years later, as I did not, until distance and hindsight had
resolved experience into signs: envying that the diver can mean, inhabits a plane the swimmer cannot. As always,
it is this envy and this fear—the sense that he confronts a superior
power—which compel the swimmer to subjugate, the traditional complicity of
sanctification and denigration, worship as a means of exerting control. Diving refuses to
relinquish its identity, though swimming rules by force of simple majority.
When I swam, we outnumbered the divers twenty to one, and I suspect that ratio
is representative of teams everywhere. So we banished the divers to the
three-meter board, and once we had them there, in the “tank,” across the
bulkhead, at the other end from the blocks, we learned to tolerate them. We
were always very polite to one another, swimmers and divers, in that
middle-class, suburban way which finished us, like the gold paint on our
medals, now stowed away inside innumerable shoeboxes, in innumerable attics
around the country. The diving events, always happening about halfway through a
typical swim-meet, seemed to have the same function as halftime does in
professional sports: a diversion, an entertainment, an intermission, meant to
be eclipsed by the heroic battles that we swimmers fought on either end, as if
all our sound and fury could drown them out. In truth, ours was an empty show
of power, meaningless as the activity itself. Like at a medieval feast, the
true show of power lay in the performance of the denigrated, the divers: they
opened a hole in the middle of the meet—in the middle of competition, in the
middle of sainted athletics—;
a hole in which whole bodies could get lost. Only for
moments, true. But a hole we couldn’t cover, no matter how much we
fought. Diving opened a hole that transcended athletics, in which diver and
spectators alike were freed for a moment from the earthly, from the scrabble of
competition, from the thirst for blood, the rat-race that we all knew our
parents were involved in, teaching us to smell blood, paying for our time here,
making them proud. It was what everyone wanted to escape from, though no one
could admit it. Divided from them by gravity, we watched the divers fall, and
imagined that their fall was akin to ours. But theirs was symbolically a rise.
They had inverted the natural world, the very world in which swimming exists.
How could we hope to compete with that? VI. But perhaps I’m letting my
revolutionary fervor run away from me. Whatever its status—potentially
disruptive (revolutionary) or nostalgic-seductive (mythical)—diving represents
an alternative which is presented only to be withheld—an alternative achievable
only through language. And in presenting what must be a false alternative, I suspect that diving’s real function was
to all the better bury us in the order of our soon-to-be-daily lives: diving as
inoculation, the illusion of critical distance from ideology in
order to more firmly position us inside it.7 Like Barthes’s
Blue
Guide, which reduced travel to the
consumption of monuments for previous generations of bourgeoisie, diving
appears to “abide by a partly superseded bourgeois mythology” (p. 76): the
continuance, in degraded form, of myths of religious faith and natural
hierarchy. This nostalgic vision becomes necessary to sanitize, or at least to
blunt the teeth of, an evolving predatory capitalism whose primary metaphor is,
as it was for Sade, ingestion: organs, identities,
the water and air, all ground up together in the profit-mill. In such a
culture, diving’s command of language hardly ensures its superiority; instead,
it ensures that it will be used as a mouthpiece, to purify and sanctify the
present Order. This is the ultimate meaning of the purification ritual
described earlier. Far from distancing itself from diving,
swimming uses diving to throw all its own values into relief. Diving is swimming’s New Labour England; it
is the cultured voice whose occasional, principled opposition to Order (rather
than its rupture with it) presupposes an acceptance of the terms of that Order,
and a universe in which both the reigning ideology and its opponents can
co-exist as simple “differences of opinion”—that is, as pieces of a larger,
totalizing structure in which both are embedded. There is no other option; or
rather, the only other option is annihilation. All diving can do is speak; but
the moment it speaks, its voice is taken over, used against it. So swimming
colonizes diving, ventriloquizes diving to justify its own
mute Order. But I also suspect that we are
entering a new age of myth, or perhaps better put, a post-mythic age. Call it
“the age of bourgeois illiteracy,” a kind of parody of Barthes’s
call for a more immediate language of action. Not the action of the oppressed,
not the revolutionary violence of the class-conscious proletariat. No: the
immediate, totalizing violence of the State. A reality that
can be exhaustively described in quantitative terms; a reality of brute and
blind force, of the complete absence of reflection, indeed of consciousness.
It is not so hard to imagine such a time, when predatory capitalism no longer
needs any justification beyond itself, when it has become another name for
virtue, is enthroned politically and socially, and the myth of diving has been
entirely superseded. When we were swimmers, we couldn’t
link our cultural inferiority to our social superiority. We never could have
understood that swimming and diving were two halves of a single, evolving myth,
the former depending on the latter for its power, American society depending on
their association to at once lay bare and smooth out (bare and smooth, like our
bodies) the contradictions and inequities on which our society was built.
Probably we weren’t meant to understand. Probably it wouldn’t have much
mattered if we had. It was easier just to watch, enthralled, jealous, imagining,
maybe, that what we were watching was a way out. Endnotes 1.
Not because, as Levi-Strauss contended, history yields a set of invariants;
here, time is invoked only to be discounted. And not because there is always an
element of dynamism in any synchronic abstraction (Jakobson);
every tool of analysis yields, at bottom, a synchronic granule; it is only the
size of the granule that varies. And certainly not because
history has some Lamarckian purpose or systemic order (Jakobson
again). Rather, our historical moment forms the other, ineradicable pole
of a binary which subsumes semiologist and object
alike. Roland Barthes was already fully aware of this
in the original preface and conclusion (“Necessity and limits of mythology”) to
the Mythologies; it is also the ostensible
subject of “Neither-Nor Criticism.” Hence the appeal to sarcasm, the conscious
anti-mythologies of Flaubert, etc., as a means of escaping this positional
double-bind (“Since myth robs language of something, why not rob myth?”). See Barthes, ps. 11-12, 81-84, 135-6. 2.
I am using allegory, symbol, and natural sign interchangeably to refer to what
Angus Fletcher (1964) calls the “participation
mystique of the Symbol with the idea symbolized …. With Symbol the mind
perceives the rational order of a thing directly, by an ‘unmediated vision’” (ps. 17-18); and to distinguish these, as Saussure and others do, from an arbitrary linguistic
system. In this regard, any Romantic formulation about the relationship between
the temporal and the eternal (e.g., “the translucence of the eternal through
and in the temporal” (Coleridge, as cited in Fletcher, 1964, p. 16)) suffices.
The operative question about allegory seems to be not whether the literal level
can be read in the absence of its secondary meaning, but rather, once the
secondary meaning has been grasped, whether the literal level ceases to
“matter”—that is, whether it becomes, as in Barthes’s
marvellous metaphor of the window-pane through which
we view the landscape, “at once present and empty to me …. Its [myth’s] form is
present but empty, its meaning is absent but full” (ps.
123-124). 3.
Between Christian allegory and signification, the latter is probably
primary: the body is understood as a natural sign, which in turn naturalizes
Christianity: the true purity here belongs not to religious conviction, but
signification. Cf. Barthes (1957): “[Wrestling] offers to the public a pure and
full signification, rounded like Nature …. What is portrayed in wrestling is
therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised
for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed
before the panoramic view of a universal Nature, in which signs at last
correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction”
(p. 25). Alternatively, it is the reading of the sign as Christian allegory
which naturalizes it—the supposed ahistoricity of
religion purifies the sign. For a discussion of the historical imbrication of religion and allegory, see Fletcher, p. 21. In terms of the spectacle of
martyrdom, Barthes (1957) offers this: “Wrestling
holds the power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to
Religious Worship” (p. 25); “Defeat … takes up the ancient myths of public
Suffering and Humiliation: the cross and the pillory. It is as if the wrestler
is crucified in broad daylight and in the sight of all. I have heard it said of
a wrestler stretched on the ground: ‘He is dead, little Jesus, there, on the
cross,’ and these ironic words revealed the hidden roots of a spectacle which
enacts the exact gestures of the most ancient purifications” (p. 21). Unlike
wrestling, however, diving does not present the spectator with a narrative of
just desserts. Neither does diving preoccupy itself with creating individual
characters: each smooth body is the same as the last, and the activity—the
narrative—exhausts itself with each dive. Similarly, because a diver’s body
takes the form of a single, cumulative gesture, that gesture cannot be the
equivalent of diacritical writing, as Barthes
describes the gestures in wrestling. The body-as-sign is taken as a totality;
there is no remainder in the reading
process. 4.
Cf. Barthes (1957): “The rules in classical poetry
constituted an accepted myth, the conspicuous arbitrariness of which amounted
to perfection of a kind, since the equilibrium of a semiological
system comes from the arbitrariness of its signs” (p. 134). 5. Never
mind that “hard work, and plenty of it” stands behind any successful
performance. And never mind that the divers I knew always seemed so much more
mature, so much more serious, than the swimmers. I can't remember them smiling
or talking very much. They hardly ever went out drinking. 6.
Symbols are what the denigrated use to express a power they cannot
actualize: their transgressions are only semiotic. At the same time, symbols
provide the power to imagine inverting the existing hierarchy, whose foundation
is always (swimming’s) brute force. Symbols may be
used by the elite to mask or otherwise hide their actual power, though this is
not essential. In general, until a symbol’s imaginary power threatens to become
actual, elites are free to ignore symbol-making, and
to marginalize the symbol-makers. Put another way: swimming doesn’t need to
speak; it is always spoken for. 7.
“One cures doubts about the Church or the Army by the very ills of the Church
and the Army. One inoculates the public with a contingent evil to prevent or
cure an essential one. To rebel against the inhumanity of the Established Order
and its values … is an illness which is common, natural, forgivable; one must
not collide with it head-on, but rather exorcise it like a possession” (Barthes, 1957, p. 42). References Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. (A. Lavers,
Trans.). published in 1957) Fletcher,
A. (1964). Allegory. Jakobson,
R. (1990). On Language. (L. R. Waugh & M. Monville-Burston,
Eds.). Harvard. Silverman,
K. (1983). The Subject of Semiotics. [*] Dear Roland:
I hope you like my glasses. They are my plastic toy. A trifle bourgeois,
perhaps—a bourgeois trifle, certainly—but mine nonetheless. Plastic, after all, makes wood legible, makes it
“wood,” gives it a voice. Without plastic, wood would be silent—as you would
seem to prefer. That is, from the perspective of the bourgeois order from which
you were so consciously alienated: it is the evolution of plastic from wood,
and the distance between them, that permits you to read—to assemble the “symbols
of bourgeois appropriation,” your pipe and your hearth. (May I read my copy of
the Mythologies by the hearth? Because it also matters where you sit.) In fact, in an
emerging poststructuralist world, structuralism’s appeal was nostalgic already
when you began writing the Mythologies,
was it not? “Wood makes essential objects, objects for all time” (Barthes, 1957, p. 55): a perfect description of the structuralist project: intellectual objects made of wood.
Swimming and diving are my wood, my nostalgic objects … except that they are
myths, too, the plastic products of my bourgeois culture. Didn’t you love the
quaintness of those Blue Guides?
Didn’t you thrill to the jet-men? You see how much more complicated this gets,
50 years later, when the mass-produced elements of bourgeois culture themselves
become objects of nostalgia, tugging us back, warping our semiological
grids like gravity did to special relativity. And then there is the pleasure of
reading—what you came to terms with later, confronting and undermining the
“mythology of the mythologist” (p. 12). We were never pious, and hardly
selfless. Little action, much pleasure; the “surprising
compactness” of your mythologies, “which I [too!] savoured with delight” (p. 158). You might put
yourself above nostalgia, refuse to “revisit” the
mythologies. But they are my old friends. I hope you don’t mind if I do. [Editor's note: The author's express wishes included
differentiating between this footnote and the other annotations, which we have included as endnotes.]   E-mail the editors Pour écrire à la rédaction © 2007, Applied Semiotics / Sémiotique appliquée |