Analysis of The World of Wrestling by Roland Barthes

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Analysis of The World of Wrestling by Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes's essay on "The World of Wrestling" draws

analogically on the ancient theatre to contextualize wrestling as a

cultural myth where the grandiloquence of the ancient is preserved and

the spectacle of excess is displayed. Barthes's critique -- which is

above all a rewriting of what was to understand what is -- is useful

here insofar as it may be applied back to theatre as another open-air

spectacle. But in this case, not the theatre of the ancients, but the

Middle English pageant presents the locus for discussing the sport of

presentation, or, if you prefer, the performance of the sport. More

specifically, what we see by looking at the Harrowing of Hell -- the

dramatic moment in the cycle plays that narratizes doctrinal redemption

more graphically than any other play in the cycle -- as spectacle offers

a matrix for the multiple relationships between performance and audience

and the means of producing that performance which, in turn, necessarily

produces the audience.

The implications of the spectacle could sensibly be applied to

the complete texts of the cycle plays, and perhaps more appropriately to

the full range of the pageant and its concomitant festivities. The

direction of pseudo-historical criticism, especially of the Elizabethan

stage, certainly provides a well-plowed ground for advancing the festive

and carnivalesque inherently present in the establishment and event of

theater. Nevertheless, my discussion here is both more limited and more

expansive: its limits are constructed by the choice of an individual

play recurrent through the four extant manuscripts of what has come to

be called the Corpus Christi plays; its expansion is expressed through a

delivery that aims to implicate the particular moment of this play in

the operations of a dominant church-state apparatus, which is,

ostensibly, a model of maintaining hegemony in Western culture. The

Harrowing provides a singular instance in which the mechanisms of

control of the apparatus appear to extend and exploit their relationship

with the audience (i.e. congregation). The play is constructed beyond

the canonized operations of the sacred, originating a narrative beyond

(yet within) the authorized vulgate; it is constructed only through

church authority yet maint...

... middle of paper ...

...thorizing. It seems we are not merely to claim, as Hardin

Craig does, that the plays are "a theological intelligence motivated by

structural imagination that lasted from age to age in the development of

a great cycle of mystery plays." Instead, we should interrogate the

multiple dimensions of artistry and artificiality of the play; our task

is to ask how these plays operate as a performative moment coming

directly from the dominant arms of orthodoxy while still being

influenced by the severely limited mass culture. We may find, then, at

the center of the controlling mechanisms of the church-state apparatus,

the necessitated desire for community that even Satan validates and

proclaims:

Nay, I pray the do not so;

Vmthynke the better in thy mynde;

Or els let me with the go,

I pray the leyffe me not behynde!

The desire, of course, extends past Satan's plea, for the homogenized

desire of the congregation ultimately -- which is in history written and

yet to be -- is directed toward a different answer from Jesus: one that

affirms salvation and again confirms the church's orthodox pageantry of

performance.

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