“De son sol et de son climat:” National Sport and Landscape in Roland Barthes

Abstract

This essay considers Barthes’ notion of a national sport as an activity that emerges naturally from a country’s soil and climate, as explored in his essay from Mythologies, “Le Tour de France comme épopée” (1957) and voiceover narrative to the film, Le Sport et les hommes (1961). In these texts, Barthes explores how certain sports are born from an organic relationship between peoples and landscapes, before becoming codified into a cultural practice through the establishment of rules. He considers the Tour de France (whose playing field is all of France) and hockey in Canada (which developed from the shinny played by children on ponds), to be the two most salient examples of this phenomenon. For Barthes, a national sport is largely an ecological construct, one that reflects the environment of a country and the various ways in which its people inhabit it; national sports are natural sports. In fact, in his analysis of hockey in Canada and the Tour de France, Barthes illustrates how sport can provide a means of imagining an ecological relationship between a people and its environment in which a country’s landscape is experienced as a playing field, that is, a space in which nature can be enjoyed and mastered without being destroyed.

Keywords:

• Roland Barthes
• Mythologies
• Tour de France
• sport
• hockey
• Heidegger

Notes

1 The extent to which Barthes’ fascination with sport remains a highly neglected and overlooked aspect of his corpus is perhaps best evidenced by the inexplicable failure to include Le Sport et les hommes in his collected works, published by Seuil (Paris).

2 “Je crois que le Tour est le meilleur exemple que nous ayons jamais rencontré d’un mythe total, donc ambigu” (122).

3 See Christopher Thompson, The Tour de France: A Cultural History, U California P, 2008.

4 Throughout his essays on sport, Barthes frequently uses “l’Homme” to refer to humanity, rather than a more gender-neutral term.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roxanna Curto

Roxanna Curto is Associate Professor of French and Spanish and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa. In her research, she explores the representation of cultural elements such as technology and sports in literature from the French- and Spanish-speaking worlds. She is the author of Inter-tech(s): Colonialism and the Question of Technology in Francophone Literature (U of Virginia P, 2016). Her second book, tentatively entitled “Writing Sport: The Stylistics and Politics of Athletic Movement in French and Francophone Literature” (in progress) considers aspects of physical culture in literature written in French from Europe, Africa, North America and the Caribbean. She has also published essays exploring connections between Aimé Césaire and Latin American literature, and the role of technology in the work of twentieth-Century poets, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, and Denis Roche.