On Wrestling and the Inconspicuousness of Reality
Initially, I had a hard time justifying the strained nature of this post title. What spiritual or art-of-living significance is there for sharing Roland Barthes' semiotic decoding of wrestling in his Mythologies? Well, I can think of several reasons. At the very least, Barthes models a punctilious askesis or discipline of noticing. Even if the "The World of Wrestling," be it as a theme or the actual spectacle of it, is not your thing—it certainly isn't mine—Barthes' interpretive perspicacity is nothing short of beguiling. Admittedly, I've had many preconceptions of wrestling, but none that distilled from it similes about the intelligibility of reality and the moral order of life. Wrestling as a saturnalia of elemental binaries—truth/falsehood, good/evil! Just add to it the aesthetics of the contest and you summarily find yourself in the realm of the three transcendentals—the true, the good, and the beautiful.
That is why reading (the early) Barthes on this point is so rewarding. It gives you the feeling not unlike one of being enlightened by an art connoisseur to perceive compositional elements of a painting that have escaped your analysis. Personally, I stand in need of guides who prompt you to attentiveness; who give you interpretive tools to uncover the unapprehended, the inconspicuous. (That partly explains my attraction to Iris Murdoch). A thinking concerned with "practices of everyday life" (de Certeau) must, at the very least, begin there. And wouldn't Jesus, as one who stood attuned to the symbolic actions of foes and friends, be a prime exemplar in this regard too?
In any case, in the concluding section of his essay, Barthes notes, somewhat convolutedly, but quite brilliantly, how wrestlers
who are very experienced, know perfectly how to direct the spontaneous episodes of the fight so as to make them conform to the image which the public has of the great legendary themes of its mythology. A wrestler can irritate or disgust, he never disappoints, for he always accomplishes completely, by a progressive solidification of signs, what the public expects of him. In wrestling, nothing exists except in the absolute, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively....
When the hero or the villain of the drama, the man who was seen a few minutes earlier possessed by moral rage, magnified into a sort of metaphysical sign, leaves the wrestling hall, impassive, anonymous, carrying a small suitcase and arm-in-arm with his wife, no one can doubt that wrestling holds that power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship. In the ring, and even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.