A wrestling match, a vampire story, a set of slogans meant to indoctrinate a troop of young fascists, a popular tearjerker penned by a reactionary author who knows her audience’s base instincts all too well. In all these things there’s a grain of mythology  — the use of certain familiar archetypes, of majestic “big ideas,” of narrative forms that are presented as naturally meaningful but, if prodded more carefully, prove emptier and more outdated than they might appear.

The French philosopher Roland Barthes was one of the first left-wing theorists to grapple with the theme of myth and mythology in a way that was transparent and openly accessible to a wider audience. In his 1957 book, Mythologies (which collects several analyses of contemporary French cultural and pop-culture phenomena), he explains he resented how journalists attributed a patina of “naturalness” to things that were “undoubtedly determined by history.” “Myth is a language,” he asserts — and as such, we must learn its rules and inner workings to reveal what is hidden behind the code.

One of the most insightful explorers of the theory of myth and mythology on the Left was the Italian writer and scholar Furio Jesi (1941–1980). Much like Barthes, he believed myth to be a language hiding historical and political phenomena behind a patina of “naturalness” that grants them a false idea of universal validity. And like Barthes, Jesi believed that myth needs to be studied in all of its representations, disregarding any value judgements that might lead the historian or the literary scholar to shrug off populist culture as meaningless and too crass, the unworthy lumpenproletariat of the cultural realm.