Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press. 1949.
The fame of Joseph Campbell outside �the academy� is almost undoubtedly because of George Lucas. He uses Campbell�s book to construct Star Wars. The premise of the book is pretty simple. All of the great myths, most of them religious, but including fairy tales and folk legends, follow a formula. There are variations, of course, but the basic structure is always the same, even though it might be a little mangled by a particular narrative. Basically, �separation-initiation-return [�] might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth (30), or in less abstract terms �A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men� (30).
Although the book�s argument is that all myths follow this structure, the major mythic heroes covered are Jesus, Buddha, and Krishna, who take up about two-thirds of the examples in the text, though of the three, Buddha is the most common example. The other third of the book takes up many of what Campbell somewhat apologetically calls �primitive� myths (I.e., those told by brown people who didn�t �discover� gun powder), Jewish mythology, including the Kabala, and Classical/Ancient texts of the West (I.e., white people who hadn�t yet �discovered� gun powder).
The whole book is quite dismissive of colonised peoples and utterly fails to acknowledge the suspect nature of the exclusively European or American sources he uses for understanding the mythology of colonised peoples, either for reasons of translation or cultural presumption on the part of the researchers. However, it consistently places those local myths and legends on the same level with the �great� tales of the Buddha or Krishna. Though Post-Colonial critics could, and probably have, found no end of methodological faults with the book, Campbell�s most basic point is that these myths, all of them, tell essentially the same story over and over again. As such, no one can be �better� or �higher� than any other. The structure of his argument occasionally betrays a greater sense of reverence for one or another set of myths, specifically the Buddhist and the Hindu, but the book attempts, with great success, to show that equal reverence is due to all, and it deserves some recognition for that. Writing in American in the late 1940s, this book puts Jesus on the same level of importance as the gods of the Maori or the Lakota.
His treatment of gender is less successful, but has a similar attempt made. In his language, he occasionally refers to the hero as �he or she,� but the overwhelming majority of the time, the hero is distinctly male and his journey and challenges are distinctly geared towards a male hero, including his encounter with a lover or queen who is an emissary of the divine and his conduit to it. That said, once again, the argument attempts to counter-act that gender presumption, at least to some degree, by arguing that the godhead is almost universally conceived of as a combination of masculine and feminine qualities. Though both genders stay �in their places� in this book, the ultimate secrets of the universe and of total enlightenment require abandoning gender entirely, though it could still be argued that by going from �male� straight to �divinely sexless� neatly removes femininity from the divine experience. Again, though, writing in 1949, we must give the book some credit for attempting, with less success than with racial assumptions, push the idea that femininity is inherently part of the divine, and even revealing the existence of things like hermaphroditic godheads, of which there are many in the traditions of the world.
Those issues aside, it�s a remarkable book. It attempts to find a universal set of generic features of myth and then analyse that meta-narrative, the genre itself, as the collective dreams of the human race. It�s all a bit too Freudian for my tastes, mind you, and it never quite argues exactly how we can be sure that it�s appropriate to analyse myths using the tools of psychoanalysis, essentially equating them with dreams; it even admits that they�re not because �they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary, their patterns are consciously controlled. And their understood function is to serve as a powerful picture language for the communications of traditional wisdom� (256), and thus the point is left dangling.
But within that logical gap is the most interesting aspect of the book, especially considering the book I�m reading right after it, The American Monomyth. The hero�s ultimate goal, according to Campbell, is to embrace the infinity of the university and lose himself, in the language of psychoanalysis, to extinguish his own ego. �The gods and icons are not ends in themselves. Their entertaining myths transport the mind, not up to, but past them, into the yonder void; from which perspective the more heavily freighted theological dogmas then appear to have been only pedagogical lures: their function, to care the unadroit intellect away from its concrete cluster of facts [�]� (180). Myth, like all literature, involves the use of subjective, intuitive, and non-logical elements to achieve metaphysical wisdom, as opposed to what Campbell calls the �cluster of facts,� theology and, at the extreme, science.
�As he [the hero] crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos� (190). The hero gives up his power to annihilate the self, while simultaneously evoking more and more power, against his enemies and (in an meta-narrative sense) even of his enemies, until that power destroys reality, as well. The hero�s narrative is a demonstration that reality doesn�t exist. It�s a set of symbols that can lead us to the truth: reality itself is an illusion. Once the hero learns this, usually by symbolically dying (crossing into the void, as Buddha does, or dying, as Jesus does), he can return to our illusory world and spread the truth, much like a Neitzschean �bermensch.
But Campbell also repeatedly points out that the hero�s journey isn�t like a recipe for making a cake, �the lesson being not �Do thus and be good,� but �Know this and be God� (319, italics are mine). At moments like this, I can�t help but read Campbell�s interpretation of the monomyth as distinctly Buddhist in its implications. None of us can actually be Jesus, even if we wanted to, and to equate ourselves with God would be blasphemy, but we can aspire to achieve what is sometimes referred to as �Buddhahood,� if we can find within ourselves the same enlightenment. The odds are fairly steep, a Buddha comes into the world once very thousand years or so, but still, it�s possible. Becoming God, then, would not seem to be a commonly-conceived Christian goal.
But the real point, the punch line, of the book, is that the monomythic hero�s purpose is to arise from the community, face his many tests, and then return to the community with a boon for everyone. He doesn�t just journey into the underworld to get a magic sword to slay the dragon, though that�s often how it turns out in more shallow texts. The boon is the experience, and it is the experience that he must explain to those who haven�t taken it. That�s the literal interpretation, anyway. What �really� happens (whatever reality is at this point in the discussion) is that we read the arguably fictional account of one of these heroes, and in the act of reading we learn the boon directly, or at least some glimmer of it. We learn, through the act of interpreting the literature, that everything is an illusion made of linguistic signifiers, or for that matter pictures and sounds. In a religious context, the literal interpretation applies if you believe that the hero actually took that journey, such as the faithful Christian or Buddhist does. In a secular context, the literary interpretation applies if you study not just the events of the hero�s journey, but the manner in which that journey is presented to us.
The book directly takes on the rugged individualism on which his country is founded. �From the stand-point of the social unit, the broken-off individual is simply nothing�waste� (385). �Individual destiny is not the motive and theme of this vision [�]� (230). �Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot [as opposed to the hero] tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumsized, barbarian, heathen, �native,� or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbour� (156).
In the book�s final section, �The Hero Today,� Campbell argues, quite directly, that individualism cuts us off from the very wisdom that myth has to teach us because it won�t let us see society as something more important than our individual selves. Instead, we project that self to the national level, using �the flag as totem� (388). Thus, nations (and tribes, churches, classes, �or what not�) act as individuals who know only how to act out of self-interest. �The community today is the planet� (388).
Posted by orion at May 7, 2006 7:50 PM