"The World of Wrestling"

    Roland Barthes proclaims the “grandiloquence” of ancient theatres through their reliance on sunlight as the direct spotlighting of the emotions portrayed on stage. Barthes likens this spectacle to that of the world of professional wrestling: “The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess,” and “Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles” (15). The campiness and theatricality (Is it rigged?) of professional wrestling is secondary to this spectacle, what Barthes calls the art’s “primary virtue.” The “primary” quality he writes of is “to abolish all motives and all consequences.” Wrestling disconnects the responsibility of the audience member to any type of symbolic interference between the meaning of the theatre and its spectacle.

From the series - The Truth of Gestures -- Photographer: Douglass Dresher -- dfdresher  |  Sep 30, 2018. https://www.shutterbug.com/content/series-truth-gestures retrieved 4/3/24.

 

Susan Sontag shows how we can take the grandiloquence of theatre as shown in the world of wrestling and apply it to analysis of literature (or any art form, for that matter). This sense of immediacy is what she terms “Against Interpretation.” The method stresses the reader/viewer/listener’s immediate reaction to each moment of the artistic experience as belonging to itself, an expression of “not what it thinks but what it sees” (Barthes 15). Despite the dehumanizing of the audience member into an “it,” Barthes is respecting the visceral reaction of that audience member as having a validity in artistic expression.

 

This validity is especially significant when approaching literatures that some critics may interpret as lacking artistic value because they do not conform to norms of structuralist artistry as defined by the constructs of Modernism. Such genres as the mystery novel, the romance novel, and the horror genre may fit into this bracket. Structural artistry might be present in these genres – in fact, a certain formulaic quality of structure is undoubtedly welcomed. However the modernist construct of twisting and playing with the forms in order to achieve a certain sense of reassembly or putting the world back together in large overarching structures is not the purpose.

 

Rather, the purpose is the immediate visceral reaction. As Kristeva shows in The Power of Horror, the horror genre thrives due to its visceral reactions of disgust and revulsion, which she terms “abjection” (4). We can make the connection between abjection in horror and grandiloquence in professional wrestling by connecting Kristeva to Sontag’s sense of immediacy as aesthetically valuable to Barthe’s use of wrestling in the sphere of grand theater. Such a connection intersects with contemporary interpretations of gothic literature that emphasize the immediacy of the moment, even as the innocent victim slowly lurks down the spooky hallways, each moment an exercise in suspense for what is to come behind the locked door.

 

By turning to the figure of the innocent in gothic literature, we can circle back to Barthes. His interpretation of wrestling as grand theater becomes dependent on “the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest” (17). The audience, seeing the first image of the wrestler as he enters the arena, sets up an expectation, usually grotesque and conforming to the anticipation of the spectacle to come. The body of the wrestler becomes a part of the immediacy of the grand moment.

 

By focusing on the body as the initial sign, Barthes points out that the entirety of viewing the wrestling experience becomes one of symbol, even though what we have initially thought is that the value of the theatre of wrestling is the absence of symbolic interference. But Barthes makes his conclusions based on the symbology of what the audience expects, both by the event itself and by the body of the wrestler that is at its center: “…what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art” (18). The paradox of Barthes is that he heralds the visceral art of a popular form like professional wrestling by showing that even this sense of immediate gratification depends on symbols that occur between the audience member and the event. The world is dependent on symbols even as we delight in experiences that attempt to eliminate a symbology that would put itself between the event and the viewer.

 

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Barthes, Roland.  “The World of Wrestling” in Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers.  NY: Hill     and Wang, 1972, pp. 15-25.

            Kristeva, Julia. “Powers of Horror: Approaching Abjection.” The Portable Kristeva. Editors Julia                         Kristeva and Kelly Oliver.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, pp. 95-104.