A Troubling Double-Body: Roland Barthes' Relationship with Ancient Greek Mythology and Bunraku

<p>This article provides an analysis of Roland Barthes' conception of the ideal acting body within different forms of theatre through a consideration of his theories on semiotics. It comparatively discusses his writings on Greek tragedy and Japanese <em>Bunraku</em> in order to outline his ideas about the body's ‘ideal function’ in dramatic performance and its role as signifier to an underlying signified. His reading of the performing body of Greek tragedy within the tradition of doubling and masking leads him to view its meaning as fragmented and its mythology as lacking clear signification. Barthes’ views on Greek tragedy are compared to his views on the Japanese puppet theatre <em>Bunraku</em>. In his article ‘On <em>Bunraku</em>’ Barthes describes how the body is turned into a surface producing endless signifiers that can relate to a clear signified without being disturbed by an actor’s inherent corporeality. The article demonstrates how the two strands of his work, performance and semiotics, are inevitably linked. It shows how using the vocabulary of signifier and signified to distinguish the ‘natural’ from the ‘performing’ body, led Barthes to reject Greek tragedy in favour of Japanese <em>Bunraku</em>.</p><p align="LEFT"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span lang="en-GB"><br /></span></span></span>