New age spectacles: Understanding the semiotics of cricket through Roland Barthes’ ‘The World of Wrestling’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Though written in 1957, Roland Barthes’ ‘The World of Wrestling’ from Mythologies resonates with sports even today. As a choreographed fight between a pre-assigned hero and villain, wrestling plays out the archetypal moral narrative using the bodies of the participants. With exaggerated gestures and expressions, these bodies send clear messages to the surrounding audience, who aggressively cheer them on even as they know the fabricated nature of the entire event. This paper seeks to identify the semiotic structures underlying these performances using Barthes’ views on signification, denotation/connotation and ‘myth’. This framework is juxtaposed with contemporary cricket to illustrate how cricket adapts similar semiotic structures into its spatiotemporal setup, players, body politics, media representation, appearance, choreography and spectatorship. It also examines the moral ideologies governing cricket, especially notions of heroism, justice and the spectacle that can be traced back to ancient theatre. It ends with an understanding of how Barthesian wrestling can be used to analyse other contemporary sports too, suggesting directions for further research in this area.