ABSTRACT
Wrestling fan Roland Barthes writes that the “basic sign” in wrestling is the wrestler’s physique, “which like a seed, contains the whole fight.”1 He illustrates this with a vivid description of the grotesque, corpulent physique of the salaud (bastard) Thauvin, “a fifty-year-old with an obese and sagging body.”2 Thauvin is not only fat but literally nausea-inducing: his ugliness is “wholly gathered into a particularly repulsive quality of matter: the pallid collapse of dead flesh.”3 His hideous body exemplifies Barthes’s thesis: that professional wrestling is akin to the play of good and evil in the medieval theatre, and, among other signs, it is the body that signifies these ancient archetypes.
