Some follow-up thoughts from yesterday on the creation of patriotic mythic heroes, and on Buffy's return from the dead.
Campbell's (I think it's fair to say) condemnation of the cult of the individual is probably the most politically useful aspect of the book. The casting of the state as an individual is a common mental slip, like trying to use psychology to analyse an entire species (although Campbell does eventually back off of psych, which is a smart move considering his subject).
Embodying a state within an individual, and an Althusserian capital-S 'Subject' at that (I.e., a patriotic superhero), is all part of the process of turning a nation into a person, thus endowing the nation with the (perceived) freedoms of the person, and yet somehow removing all of the requisite responsibilities (which is ironic, given Stan Lee's most famous contribution to pop philosophy, "With great power..."). I haven't quite figured out how that last part is rationalised yet.
And then there's Buffy's literal return from the dead. I'm not sure what to make of that yet, although I suspect someone has beaten both of us to the punch! Her resurrection is unwanted, and she doesn't spread all that much wisdom when she gets back, but we do get the awesomely powerful message in "Once more, with feeling!" that "The hardest thing in this world is to live in it," which sounds an awful lot like the 'veil of tears' imagery we get from almost all world religions. Although that message comes from Dawn, we could hand-wave it into a holistic part of Buffy's narrative, and thereby show that her journey, if not she herself, eventually spreads that message.
One of the really smart things Campbell does is stress that the hero is not to be simply emulated. We can't just ask "What would Jesus do?" (so to speak), but "Why would Jesus do that?" He (Campbell) is at base advocating that people should simply pay a lot more attention to myths, and read them a lot less literally. I've had this thought myself, on several occasions.
If we read myths--Classical, contemporary, whatever--as realist drama (as we've been trained to do, by our literary institutions), we end up reading about people who kill, maim, rape, betray, and generally act extremely badly to each other all the time. Read literally, the story of Job is bloody horrifying. But if we read Job as a signifier for a principle of Christian thought, it all comes together. The same could be said of the Story of Abraham and Isaac (so wonderfully rendered by Leonard Cohen!). The idea that God would actually force a father to kill his son is atrocious, literally an atrocity, but if we look for the abstraction, then we can find a meaning that is useful to the everyday life. Similar examples abound in Classical myth, where they were a-killin' and a-rapin' all the damn time.
Now, this leads to a very important question: does the contemporary fantasy/sci-fi audience read realistically or mythically? Do they take the situations a models for action, or food for thought (for lack of a better phrase)? If it's the latter, and I'll have to find some way to find out, then we know why fantasy nerds are some of the gentlest, most non-violent people in the world, and why it's really difficult to be a racist Star Trek fan (if Kirk's hitting on green chicks with funky ears, what's the big deal about a black guy dating your sister?).
Posted by orion at May 8, 2006 10:48 AM