by Jon Lackman | 26 January 2009 | Books
In the New Statesman, Marina Warner explains why Gombrich’s Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Barthes’ Mythologies are “the books that changed my life”:
Hobby Horse is an exuberant book – exuberant with a certain solemnity, like a very large man executing eightsome reels with great seriousness but wonderfully light feet all the same. There, Gombrich passionately reveals that history, politics, philosophy can be condensed into the most ordinary artefacts … The book that truly gave me my “Eureka!” moment was Mythologies by Roland Barthes – in a bookshop in Washington, DC in 1972. I was writing my study of the Virgin Mary, which would appear four years later, and was fumbling towards understanding her cult. Here, in Barthes’s essays about the relations of myth and ideology, and especially in the closing, extended essay, “Myth Today”, he was expressing the ideas I was trying to shape for myself. I reeled and my pulse raced as, standing up in the shop, I began reading it.
To my mind now, Barthes is too swingeing, too implacable, too much of the French revolutionary pur et dur in his denunciation of myth’s collusion with power. But the book did clear the horizon for me then in an utterly elating way. However, I could never have grasped his arguments or even recognised what he was saying without the ground laid by the iconographical decoding work that I’d encountered before, through Wind and, far more importantly, through Gombrich, from whom I learned that there is no stroke of the pen or brush that can be innocent of meanings reaching out into the world.
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