Professional wrestling—often derided as a pastime for young children, illiterate yokels, and basement-dwelling neckbeards—is as deep as the finest literature, steroids and steel cages notwithstanding. In a lengthy and byzantine essay titled S/Z, French literary theorist Roland Barthes put forth five narratology codes that exist within all literature. These codes may seem heady and academic, but they aren’t limited to obscure texts lining bookshelves in the ivory tower. All five codes exist within the art of professional wrestling—an art as narratively complex and multilayered as anything else in the canon.
Professional Wrestling in the US: Past and Present
Most people have some basic understanding of what pro wrestling is—even if they think the feared cross-face chicken wing submission hold is something that comes in a bucket at KFC. There are body slams, sleeper holds, and more angry, shirtless men than you can shake a metal folding chair at. Professional wrestling is an entertainment product where performers engage in choreographed and scripted matches, diatribes, and backstage antics. Think gymnastics, bodybuilding, theater, and stunt work thrown into a blender. Adorn the result with spandex and face paint and you’ve got wrestling.
Professional wrestling’s American roots stretch back to vaudeville acts post-Civil War. Legitimate tough guys like William Muldoon—one of the top wrestlers of his day—would take on all-comers for a fee. It didn’t take long for promoters to realize they stood to make far more money staging fights than hosting real ones. As wrestling historian Jonathan Snowden noted in Shooters: The Toughest Men in Professional Wrestling, “the real secret is that from Muldoon’s time forward, professional wrestling was never a legitimate sport. Very early on, powerful promoters took hold of the sport, and money became the primary motivator…The Brooklyn Eagle contends that wrestling bouts were being scripted all the way back in the 1870s.”
Athletes would “compete,” and one would “win” the big match. Except unlike prizefighting where one errant left hook from an underdog could send a promoter’s dreams to the canvas, wrestling’s results were predetermined to maximize profits. Wrestling continued like this for decades, with matches playing out in national guard armories or bingo halls—or occasionally a grander venue for a hot feud. Then television was invented. Citing Snowden again, “the demands of television changed wrestling dramatically, taking an already over-the-top spectacle to the next level.” The personas (or “gimmicks” to use wrestling parlance) became more exaggerated, like the flamboyant “Gorgeous George” in the 1950s or the larger-than-life “Superstar” Billy Graham in the 1970s. Television allowed wrestling promotions to reach wider audiences, too. A system of loosely affiliated territorial promotions evolved, airing their shows on local stations. But the emergence of national cable networks signified the death of the territory system. By the 90s, Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment (then called the World Wrestling Federation, but hereafter using the WWE abbreviation) ruled the airwaves with Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW) a distant second…but that distance closed as the 90s progressed.
Enter the famed “Monday Night Wars” where the two promotions went head-to-head Monday nights with their flagship television programs, WWE Monday Night Raw and WCW Monday Nitro. The rival promotions fought tooth-and-nail (or chair-and-ladder, I suppose) for ratings throughout the back half of the 90s. Many factors, including the doomed merger between AOL and Time Warner, led to WCW’s downfall. McMahon acquired WCW in 2001 and WWE has had undisputed hegemony over the wrestling world ever since. The promotion now belongs to Ari Emanuel’s TKO Group Holdings, who also owns the UFC. Though thanks to the internet, a diverse independent wrestling scene exists. And, of course, there’s also billionaire Tony Khan’s AEW in the mix.
Roland Barthes, Narratology, and Modules
Roland Barthes was a French literary academic and essayist whose body of work discussed literary theory, narratology, structuralism, and other fields. You know the whole “Death of the Author” thing people online have, to some extent justifiably, never stopped talking about the last few years? That comes from Barthes 1967 essay by the same name. Barthes is also famous for his collection Mythologies, but we’ll be looking at a book-length essay of his titled S/Z.
S/Z is a strange and opaque work. In the simplest terms, S/Z is Barthes’ analysis of Honoré de Balzac’s short story Sarrasine, where Barthes takes apart chunks of the story line-by-line and discusses any inherent symbolism or other meanings. S/Z is more complex than this, however. Sarrasine is just an example that Barthes uses to put forth a greater theory about narratology: That “there are 5 major codes under which” all aspects of a text can be grouped and that there are “no other codes…but these five.” Barthes also states that the reading of a text is “a traversal of the codes.” The codes ultimately “constitute a braid…each thread, each code, is a voice. These braided—or braiding—voices form the writing.” Put briefly, S/Z lays out ways to identify and examine the raw materials that are used to create meaning within narrative.
This summary, of course, makes Barthes’ work sound simple. Frank Whitehead encapsulated the byzantine nature of S/Z when writing for The Cambridge Quarterly. He wrote “S/Z is indeed unique; it is also uniquely difficult to get to grips with. Barthes has cut up Balzac’s text into 561 consecutively numbered fragments” which “are interrupted periodically by a series of 93 ‘divagations’” about a subject in one of the fragments.
What are the codes? There’s the hermeneutic code, the proairetic code, the semantic code, the symbolic code, and the cultural code. Let’s define each one, and then discuss an example not from Didion or Shakespeare, but from the squared circle. To keep things cohesive, let’s focus on one storyline.
It’s time to go back to the 1990s. It’s time to talk about the nWo.
But first, we need a little more WCW.
WCW, a Crash Course
How did a billionaire like Ted Turner come to own a podunk wrestling promotion that would grow large enough to nearly bring squared circle kingpin WWE to its knees? The story is too lengthy to go into extensive detail, but it’s important to contextualize the specific wrestling storyline (or “angle” as they would say in wrestling) we’ll be applying Barthes’ codes to.
WCW started out as Jim Crockett Promotions in 1931, a company founded in North Carolina that ran wrestling shows under multiple names such as Georgia Championship Wrestling and Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling. The company enjoyed success throughout the decades. But by the 1980s, Jim Crockett Promotions financially exhausted itself trying to compete with WWE, which had become a nationally syndicated wrestling juggernaut. Ted Turner, an early advocate of televised wrestling for its strong ratings, purchased the company from Jim Crockett Jr. in 1988 and rebranded it to World Championship Wrestling.
What followed was a revolving door of WCW presidents—businessmen with no sense for wrestling or wrestlers with no sense for business—which sent the brand into a tailspin. In 1994, an increasingly impatient Turner gave on-screen announcer and behind-the-scenes executive producer Eric Bischoff, future producer of Scott Baio is 45…and Single, control of the company. Bischoff convinced Turner he could change WCW’s fortunes if Ted Turner opened up the corporate pocketbook to allow Bischoff to sign big-name talent, with intent to poach the most popular wresters from WWE. Perhaps most importantly, Bischoff asked for a prime-time television slot opposite WWE’s flagship television program WWE Raw, which aired on Monday nights. Turner agreed.
In 1994, WCW signed wrestling mega star Hulk Hogan, who’d just left the WWE to distance himself from WWE’s recent steroid and sexual abuse scandals. WCW also signed “Macho Man” Randy Savage and several other performers from WWE. Bischoff’s shopping spree went so far it included famed WWE interviewer “Mean” Gene Okerlund and manager and commentator Bobby “The Brain” Heenan.
The prime-time television slot took longer to materialize. But WCW finally launched Nitro—their answer to Raw—in September 1995 on Turner’s TNT network. The stage was set for the most popular (by viewership numbers) era in the history of professional wrestling: The Monday Night Wars. A twilight of the wrestling gods, with heels and faces on both sides doing anything to their opponents (or to themselves, or to their employees, or to wrestling) to eke out a ratings win.
The New World Order of Wrestling
The initial surge in brand awareness from signing Hulk Hogan didn’t translate into booming ratings for WCW. In his exhaustively researched book Nitro: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Fall of Ted Turner’s WCW, wrestling historian Guy Evans wrote that by the mid-90s, “Hogan’s influence and ability to interest casual viewers had waned…it soon became evident that Hogan’s all-too-familiar act failed to resonate with WCW’s television audience.” Evans noted that, “Hogan’s shtick came across as tired, formulaic, and far too identified with the style of his former employer, the WWF.”
Bischoff needed something more. Something different, not the same Saturday morning cartoon bullshit Hogan had been doing for the last decade. Fast forward to the spring of 1996. Fate would be kind to WCW, as the contracts of top WWE stars Kevin Nash (who wrestled in WWE as “Diesel”) and Scott Hall (who wrestled in WWE as “Razor Ramon”) expired just days apart. Bischoff signed them both and would invert wrestling dogma by having both men wrestle under their real names rather than “gimmick names” or stage names. Furthermore, Evans wrote that while “traditionally, promoters looked to exploit the signing of a new wrestler by promoting his arrival head of time,” Bischoff did no such thing. Instead, Hall made his debut on an episode of Nitro in May 1996 by emerging from the stands, interrupting an ongoing match, and challenging WCW to a wrestling war. The key, as Evans noted, was to present Scott Hall “as an outside entity, an invader.”
Kevin Nash would join Scott Hall a couple of weeks later. The company was so committed to the bit they had Hall and Nash enter from over the guard rails rather than through the entrance ramp. The team called themselves “The Outsiders” and their supposed “invasion” of WCW continued as they terrorized the roster, engaging in a guerilla warfare campaign against its top wrestlers. A WCW alliance of fan-favorite wrestlers Lex Luger, Sting, and “Macho Man” Randy Savage vowed to put the rampage to an end at the annual Bash at the Beach pay-per-view event. Not to be outdone, Hall and Nash announced in the weeks beforehand that a third man would accompany them to the match to even the odds.
Yet at the match’s start, Hall and Nash were by themselves. Despite the numerical disadvantage, they’d held their own. And just when it seemed Hall and Nash had Savage down for the count, Hulk Hogan appeared and rushed to the ring to chase them out…and then Hogan promptly delivered his signature leg drop to Savage’s face, executing the most famous “heel turn” (when a good guy goes bad) in the history of professional wrestling. Fans pelted Hogan with garbage as he delivered a scathing post-match promo where he motioned to Hall, Nash, then himself, and said “You can call this the New World Order of wrestling, brother.” And the name was born, though the company stylized the abbreviation as nWo, with only the “W” being capitalized.
The nWo would run roughshod over WCW for months as the stable grew. The storyline would continue until December 1997, when Sting would defeat Hogan (who by that point was calling himself “Hollywood Hogan” instead of “Hulk Hogan”) in an incredibly dreary match that didn’t live up to the hype. For the purposes of this essay, however, we’ll talk about the earliest moments of the storyline: The debut of Hall and Nash, and Hogan’s “heel turn” into a villain.
As pedestrian as it may seem at first, the storyline has the same depth as even the most highly regarded literature. We simply must look at it through the narrative lenses—the codes—presented to us by Barthes.
The Hermeneutic Code
Barthes defines the hermeneutic code as “all the units whose function it is to articulate in various ways a question, its response, and the variety of chance events with can either formulate the question or delay its answer; or even, constitute an enigma and lead to its solution.” Literature historian Dino Felluga summarized the hermeneutic code in a less verbose manner, writing that the code “refers to any element in a story that is not explained and, therefore, exists as an enigma for the reader, raising questions that demand explication.”
Lots of traditional narratives make more obvious use of the hermeneutic code—particularly genres like mystery or horror. The hermeneutic code can be seen through the most mundane of actions. A knock on the door elicits the question of “who knocked on the door?” which can be furthered if one’s attempt to answer the door is somehow foiled. It’s common for narratives to rely on restricting information to its audience and feeding that information strategically to build tension.
But can this level of uncertainty really be found in wrestling? Of course.
On the most basic level, there is the uncertainty over which performer is going to “win” a given match. But there are deeper narrative forces at work in wrestling. For example, let us look back at WCW Bash at the Beach 1996.
It finally seemed like Hall and Nash were on the verge of their comeuppance at the hands of Sting, Savage, and Luger. The third man who they’d been promising for weeks would wrestle alongside them at Bash at the Beach had not shown up. That man would eventually prove to be Hulk Hogan, who committed a stunning betrayal just as fans were meant to think he was coming to WCW’s aid.
The hermeneutic enigma is this scenario is clear: Who was the third man going to be? Hogan was the wrestling industry’s most famous babyface (wrestling slang for a good guy). Few would’ve expected him. Hogan had not wrestled as a heel since his run in the American Wrestling Association during the early 1980s. The angle gave fans an enigma to meditate on and then provided a shocking answer that would rival even the most carefully laid out whodunnits. As famed wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer wrote in his industry-leading Wrestling Observer Newsletter immediately after Bash at the Beach, “WCW had attempted to keep the identity of the third man a secret, and largely succeeded, to the point where speculation had taken up a life of its own, with every WWF wrestler missing a show…becoming fodder for the rumor mill.” Not only was an element of the story withheld from audiences, the narrative offered frustrating misdirects, an element of the hermeneutic code which Barthes referred to as “snares” and “equivocations.” Hogan’s surprise appearance and shocking heel turn tied the loose ends of the narrative together in a way that the audience found unexpected and engaging.
The Proairetic Code
In a literal sense, the proairetic code is straightforward, even if Barthes is his usual arcane self when defining it. Barthes describes the proairetic code as “the ability rationally to determine the result of an action…since these actions produce effects.” Relying on Felluga to demystify Barthes again, the proairetic code “refers to any action that implies a further narrative action.” In other words, the proairetic code is just an action that causes another action in the story. The moment between those two actions is rife with narrative potential, which an engaged audience can easily feel.
Applying this narrative code to wrestling is quite simple. There are, of course, narratives woven into individual matches—a wrestler with a signature submission hold involving the legs may target an opponent’s knee throughout the match, building anticipation that we’ll see the hold either to meet fan expectations (finishing the match with the hold) or subvert them (finishing the match another way). But wrestling stories are often much larger and more complex, with proairetic codes everywhere. Bash at the Beach 1996 was the upshot of multiple months of proairetic codes.
Scott Hall first appeared on an episode of WCW’s flagship program, Nitro, in May 1996. He emerged from the crowd in street clothes, climbed over the barrier separating fans from the ring, interrupted an ongoing match, grabbed a microphone and said, “You know who I am, but you don’t know why I’m here.” He called out various WCW wrestlers and closed his promo with the promise, “You want a war? You’re gonna get one.” The announcers all feigned shock, as if Hall was not supposed to be in the building, as if Hall was a wrestler from WWE actually invading WCW. Later in the episode, Hall accosted the announcers. He challenged the company to get their best wrestlers to fight “in the ring, where it matters…Like it or not, we are taking over.” The use of “we” startled the commentators as it implied there would be yet another fiendish interloper.
Hall showed up the next week on Nitro, promising a surprise. Later in the show, the nearly 7-foot-tall former WWE champion Kevin Nash appeared and delivered one of the more infamously flubbed lines in wrestling history. “This is where the big boys play, huh? Look at the adjective: play. We ain’t here to play.” Nash continued to antagonize the promotion, criticizing WCW’s roster and demanding that he and Hall get a match against three top WCW wrestlers. WCW President Eric Bischoff (who also played the same presidential role in on-screen storylines) promised them a match at the upcoming pay-per-view event, The Great American Bash to placate Hall and Nash. The duo agreed to the match stormed off afterwards.
Here’s a summary of what happened next: Bischoff failed to get a team of wrestlers to face “The Outsiders” Hall and Nash at The Great American Bash. Bischoff told The Outsiders he’d have a team by Bash at the Beach next month. The answer wasn’t good enough. Hall punched Bischoff in the stomach. Nash delivered his signature move—the jackknife power bomb—to Bischoff, sending him through the stage. Next week, a recovering Bischoff announced a team of WCW stars Sting, Lex Luger, and “Macho Man” Randy Savage would take on The Outsiders at Bash at the Beach. Meanwhile, The Outsiders continued to cause havoc and hinted at the appearance of a mysterious third member at the pay-per-view. The events of the actual match were discussed in the previous section, with the mystery partner being none other than Hulk Hogan.
The presence of Barthes’ proairetic code is self-evident. Each action in the early part of the story implied the next and built suspense. Was there really a wrestling war between two promotions? Who else from WWE would Hall bring with him? Who would fight Hall and Nash? Who would be Hall and Nash’s partner at Bash at the Beach? Dozens if not hundreds of other proairetic phenomena would emerge in the WCW vs. nWo storyline throughout the coming months. Alas, there is not time enough to cover them all. But we can see that “The Outsiders” challenge demanded a reaction, which could have gone in a myriad of narrative directions. Each expected reaction presented a moment of clear narrative tension for the audience. In that way, the proairetic code works hand-in-hand with the hermeneutic code in creating tension. And another way that the form of wrestling follows the form of literary narratives.
Barthes himself provides a good explication of the proairetic code and the hermeneutic code in Mythologies, where he explains how wrestling as a spectacle functions much differently than boxing as a fighting sport. He wrote:
A boxing-match is a story which is constructed before the eyes of the spectator; in wrestling, on the contrary, it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time. The spectator is not interested in the rise and fall of fortunes; he expects the transient image of certain passions. Wrestling therefore demands an immediate reading of the juxtaposed meanings…In other words, wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone.
For once, Barthes’ words do not require further explanation.
The Semantic Code
Barthes yet again relies on academically opaque language in defining the semantic code, which he refers to as “a shifting element which can combine with other similar elements to create characters, ambiances, shapes, and symbols.” In her article for College English titled Deciphering S/Z, Peggy Rosenthal put it more simply by saying “the Semantic code is what we think of as connotation.”
Wrestling, like literature, is rife with connotations and references. Looking solely at the origins of the nWo in 1996, we can see a few. For example, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash wore street clothes to connote that, in the storyline, they are incognito and attending WCW’s show upon their own free will. That they are not contracted wrestlers or else they would be in their tights. Furthermore, they didn’t enter from the entrance ramp leading to the backstage area. Instead, they came in from the stands as if they had bought a ticket and were trying to interrupt the show, again connoting that they were not official WCW employees and may in fact be “invaders” from WWE.
Hall and Nash’s words also carry connotative meanings. In Hall’s first appearance to challenge WCW, he yells, “You want a war? You’re gonna get one.” Through connotation, the audience knows that Hall does not mean a war of a physical wrestling match but implied wrestling war since Hall was meant to appear as an invader from WWE. Hogan’s appearance during the Bash is similarly connotative. Hogan had been the WWE’s top star for over a decade. Who better to join an “invasion” from that promotion than him?
The Symbolic Code
The Symbolic code is fairly similar to the semantic code. The symbolic code is, essentially, the language of symbolism. It is the semantic code but instead of merely connoting an idea, it conveys, as literary scholar Felluga wrote “a deeper structural principle that organizes semantic meanings, usually by way of antitheses or mediations…between antithetical terms.” Barthes’ own explanation states the symbolic code, “is the battle between two plenitudes set ritually face to face like two fully armed warriors…Every joining of two antithetical terms, every mixture, every conciliation…constitutes a transgression.”
The symbolic code’s function is clear in the nWo angle. Hulk Hogan wore red and yellow wrestling attire throughout the 80s and early 1990s. Yet after he committed his famous heel turn at Bash at the Beach 1996, he switched his ring attire to black and white. The black reflecting Hogan’s dark turn and the white representing the hero he’d once been.
The nWo would feud with a wrestler named Sting—one of WCW’s top stars and a member of the WCW alliance during Bash at the Beach—for nearly the entire length of the storyline. Sting initially was a bleach-blonde California surfer bodybuilder type who gave generic promos and wore multicolored face paint. But when the nWo used a Sting lookalike to frame the “real” Sting of betraying WCW, Sting vanished from television for several weeks. When he returned, black scraggly hair replaced his blonde buzz cut. And the face paint? It was black and white in the style of 1994 film The Crow. Sting would antagonize the nWo as a mysterious defender of WCW until the feud finally concluded in December 1997, with Sting defeating Hogan.
Both characters wearing the same color palette is symbolic of how Hogan and Sting were mirror images of one another. Furthermore, the black and white was symbolic of how the entire card of every show was split into the same binary: WCW versus nWo. Black and white. Good and evil, etc.
The Cultural Code
The final code is the cultural code, which Barthes defines thusly: “this code is one of the numerous codes of knowledge or wisdom to which the text continually refers; we shall call them in a very general way cultural codes.” This code is arguably the easiest to understand of Barthes’ opaque writing. The cultural code is the deeper meaning behind a text as it relates to referencing ideas, beliefs, and knowledge outside the text.
Wrestling practically bleeds cultural codes. For examples, let us take apart Scott Hall’s initial promo during his first appearance on WCW Nitro. Here is the full text:
Hey. You people, you know who I am. But you don’t know why I’m here. Where is Billionaire Ted? Where is the Nacho Man? That punk can’t even get in the building. Me? I go wherever I want whenever I want. And where oh where is Scheme Gene? ‘Cause I got a scoop for you. When that Ken Doll lookalike, when that weatherman wannabe comes out here later tonight, I got a challenge for him, for Billionaire Ted, for the Nacho Man, and for anybody else in [briefly mimics southern accent] WCW. Hey, you wanna go to war? You want a war? You’re gonna get one.
The promo seems fairly straightforward, but there are many layers of cultural reference happening, to the point where it’s almost daunting to count them all. Let us begin with some of the minor ones before we examine the true brilliance of Hall’s promo.
First, WCW president Eric Bischoff had been an announcer for the American Wrestling Association (a failing promotion) before working for WCW. Scott Hall had also worked there for a time. As wrestling historian Guy Evans recounted, AWA wrestlers “teased [Bischoff] for his ‘Ken Doll’-like physical appearance” thanks to his magnificently coifed hair. Hall’s words belittled Bischoff in two ways: mocking his haircut, but also mocking Bischoff’s origins in the wrestling business by reminding him of his AWA days.
Second, Scott Hall briefly adopted a stereotypical southern accent for a brief segment of the promo. WCW was based in Atlanta and primarily catered to southern sensibilities, whereas WWE was based in Connecticut and primarily catered to northern sensibilities. As Evans concisely put it, WWE “was still wrestling, but it wasn’t rasslin.” Hall was, of course, attempting to mock the fans by mimicking the local accent, while also evoking the historical mistrust between the North and the South in the United States. Also, even when Hall speaks “normally” in character, he’s affecting the Tony Montana-esque accent he used as the Razor Ramon character in the WWE—something the company would eventually sue WCW over.
The third and most impressive cultural code in Scott Hall’s promo requires some added context. As mentioned earlier, WWE’s flagship program was WWE Raw, which launched in 1993 and aired on Monday nights on the USA network. In September 1995, Ted Turner gave WCW a time slot directly in opposition to Raw on the Turner Broadcasting-owned channel TNT. Wrestling fans and historians alike referred to the next period of wrestling history as “The Monday Night Wars” since the two largest wrestling promotions in the nation were going head-to-head every Monday night. Like we discussed, WCW used Turner’s riches to bribe away top talent from WWE like Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, and even broadcast team stalwarts like interviewer “Mean” Gene Okerlund. A furious McMahon scrambled for a countering salvo. His solution? A series of desperately unfunny parody sketches lampooning both Ted Turner and the former WWE stars that left for WCW’s greener pastures.
The first sketch in a series of several aired in January 1996. The vignettes mocked Hulk Hogan as the geriatric “Huckster.” Meanwhile, Randy Savage was “The Nacho Man,” an overweight wrestler obsessed with and insecure over his bald spot. Gene Okerlund was the unscrupulous “Scheme Gene.” Meanwhile, “Billionaire Ted” was a flimsy pastiche of Ted Turner, but with exaggerated mannerisms and a cheap toupee. McMahon became obsessed with the sketches to the point where, according to wrestling journalist Shaun Assael, he was “willing to stop the company’s work to produce them” and even told employees “to drop what they were doing because extras were urgently needed in the WWF’s in-house production studios.” The sketches went from cheesy to ugly, with one titled “TV Trivia” recalling Ted Turner’s history of problematic remarks about Black people. The increasingly nasty nature of the sketches prompted the USA network to force McMahon to pull the plug on his big idea in March of the same year.
As wrestling journalist Wade Keller noted in his coverage of the 15-year anniversary of the first sketch, McMahon’s impromptu foray into parody “was just sour grapes over his pride and joy, Monday Night Raw, falling behind Nitro early in the Monday Night War.” Former WCW President Eric Bischoff agreed. He opined about the sketches on a 2019 episode of his podcast, 83 Weeks, saying “for Vince to be trying the way he was trying, to us, represented a victory. Because we were forcing him to do something he was philosophically opposed to doing which was recognizing the competition.” Guy Evans referred to Hall’s promo as “a brilliant inversion of the ‘Billionaire Ted’ skits.”
Thus, Hall’s promo on WCW Monday Nitro was multilayered with cultural codes. He was referencing the existence of the sketches in a literal sense—using the same insulting names against WCW talent since, in the storyline, it was meant to look like he was an invader from the WWE. But since Hall was actually WCW talent, there was another aspect to referencing these sketches: he was trying to get under McMahon’s skin and remind everyone of his previous employer’s infamously bad attempt at scoring a victory in the Monday Night Wars.
It’s worth noting that all of this meta-textuality comes from one promo at the very start of the angle. Imagine how many cultural codes an intrepid academic could find examining the entire storyline from May 1996 to December 1997.
Conclusion: Wrestling Is Good, Actually
Roland Barthes lays out definite (if dense) modes for examining how narratives function in text. His work gives us ample opportunity to expand the application of literary and structural analysis and to rethink our considerations for what is literary based on presuppositions about style, structure, and aesthetic. It is perhaps fitting for Barthes to be the theorist who engaged with wrestling as a literary form. After all, Peggy Rosenthal remarked that “Barthes’ S/Z has generally been acknowledged as ‘brilliant,’ when it has been acknowledged at all. In [the United States], acknowledgement has been slight, and usually accompanied by some degree of distrust.” And here we are, fitting Barthes less heralded writing to an artform that is also accompanied by skepticism.
Barthes devotes an entire section of Mythologies to the art of professional wrestling. As he succinctly says, “there are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.” Barthes ultimately makes a grandiose conclusion about wrestling, writing that “wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a justice which is at last intelligible.”
Wrestling, like many narratives, is transformative. It allows the performers and audiences alike to engage in a collective narrative creation, whereby the wrestlers, as Barthes puts forth, are temporarily transformed into heroes, tragic figures, villains, etc. By traversing wrestling through Barthes narrative codes, we see a creation that is vastly more than the sum of its parts. Wrestling is an art form that, while perhaps not as lyrically or structurally complex as the finest works in the canon, still contains literary merit, and we do ourselves a disservice by dismissing it as less than. There is a depth to wrestling that few people are willing to acknowledge because they find it aesthetically distasteful and culturally déclassé. But if the briefest moments of a single storyline can contain the multitudes packed into Barthes’ narratology codes, imagine how deep and imaginative the entire body of professional wrestling stories is. Leg drops may not be literature, but the narrative reasons behind the leg drops are.
References:
- Assael, Sean. “Sex, Lies, and Headlocks, Excerpt 2.” ESPN.com, 30 July 2002, http://www.espn.com/page2/s/assael/020730a.html.
- Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1991.
- Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1974.
- “Eric Bischoff Shoots on the ‘Scheme Gene’ Skit.” YouTube, 83 Weeks, 9 May 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3R_Q7SmC48.
- Evans, Guy. Nitro: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner’s WCW. 2018.
- Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Barthes: On the Five Codes.” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, Purdue University, 31 Jan. 2011,
- https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/narratology/modules/barthescodes.html.
- Keller, Wade. “BILLIONAIRE TED 15 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK – VINCE MCMAHON TAKES SHOTS AT SURGING WCW NITRO.” Pro Wrestling Torch, 12 Jan. 2011, https://pwtorch.com/artman2/publish/wadekellerdotcom/46720.shtml.
- Meltzer, David. “Wrestling Observer Newsletter.” Figure Four Weekly, 15 July 1996, https://www.f4wonline.com/newsletters. Accessed 17 Dec. 2022.
- Rosenthal, Peggy. “Deciphering S/Z.” College English, vol. 37, Oct. 1975, pp. 125–144., https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2307/375059.
- Snowden, Jonathan. Shooters: The Toughest Men in Professional Wrestling. ECW Press, 2012.
- Whitehead, Frank. “Roland Barthes’s Narratology.” The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 12, 1992, pp. 41–64., https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/42971737
