First Section: The Monomyth

That stuff you said: I agree with it!

Campbell's writing, first of all: it is kind of loosey-goosey, kind of slippery, highly emotional, hypberbolic and enthusiastic, which fits his subject matter perfectly.

Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind.

Speaking of that, I agree with your qualms about the reach of Campbell's theory of "myth". For one thing, we aren't really sure what he means by it yet, but even supposing that he meant something absurdly generic and huge, like "metaphor" or or "story", I have a hard time believing that it makes sense to attribute everything that people do and have done to this one piece of being human.

(Defining "myth" as "metaphor" makes me think of the book I just read by Douglas Hofstadter, _I am a Strange Loop_, which asserts, among other things, that the richness of human consciousness is primarily attributable to the human ability to see the similarities between things as in analogy or metaphor; to talk about one thing using the symbols of another thing.)

And like you, I don't much go for the psychoanalysis and dream sequences. I find it reasonable to suppose that the stories that are fashioned by our sleeping minds borrow symbols and structures from our cultural myths, and that, on an even deeper level, the patterns of being human manifest themselves in similar forms in both our unconscious and conscious storytelling, but the connection between a particular tribe's great snake rite of passage and a particular person's dream about a snake biting his pecker is tenuous at best.

But I think there's definitely something to the idea of there being standard human patterns that manifest themselves in remarkably similar human stories. In fact, if I were going to create some sort of working definition of a "myth", only having read this far, I think that would be it: a story made entirely of these widely-shared, deep-rooted patterns and experiences. My favorite part of the book is turning out to be reading these stories.

Let's see. What other things did I find interesting about the first section?

Oh, yeah. This:

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back.

Which, given Campbell's subsequent discussion of coming-of-age rituals, leads me to believe that what he means is, "fairy tales and rituals help us grow up." To be healthy and happy adults, we must break with our parents, and these stories and rituals help us to do so. And speaking of parents, traditions and rituals are things that my dad has always been interested in and stressed the value of. Bar mitzvahs, quincenieras, graduations and baptisms, are the things that help us to know ourselves, to place ourselves in society, and help us feel like we understand who we are.

Also, his discussion of tragedy and comedy, which opens with the Karenina Principle, via Tolstoy:

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

And then, as he discusses tragedy:

Modern literature is devoted, in great measure, to a courageous, open-eyed observation of the sickeningly broken figurations that abound before us, around us, and within ... where the god is beheld curcified in the catastrophes not of the great houses only but of every common home, every scourged and lacerated face. And there is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter magesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed back from the womb only to fail. In comparison with this, our little stories of achievemnt seem pitiful.

I don't know what to say about that, really. Maybe, "ouch."

But he wraps with this:

The passage of the mythological hero ... fundamentally it is inward -- into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. This deed accomplished, life no longer suffers hopelessly under the terrible mutilations of ubiquitous disaster, battered by time, hideous throughout space; but with its horror visible still, its cries of anguish still tumultuous, it becomes penetrated by an all-suffusing, all-sustaining love, and a knowledge of its own unconquered power ... The dreadful mutilations are then seen as shadows, only, of an immanent, imperishable eternity; time yields to glory; and the world sings with the prodigious, angelic, but perhaps finally monotonous, siren music of the spheres.

Like happy families, the myths and the worlds redeemed are all alike.

Also, crap. I need to renew this book so I can keep reading it.

BTW, didn't you say something about including images and audio and stuff? I'm continuing to read the book, but I feel like there are lots more things to say about the first section. Maybe we can find some pictures or something.

Hero With A Thousand Faces: Some Introductory Facials

Reading the first sections of Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces (herein after referred to as "Hero"), several issues/concerns immediately come to mind. We discussed several of these in person, this past week, but I think it's worth rehashing them here. These concerns include Campbell's assertion of the monomyth, reliance on psychoanalysis (and its past heroes) and, finally, the decontextualization of the stories told.

Campbell begins Hero with a poetic and powerful view of the nature of myth in society and in our lives. He calls it, "the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestations." The next sentence clenches the gesture of his thought, "Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth." I must admit that I rather love the way Campbell writes, one can feel his excitement and interest pouring through the sentences themselves. Yet, even so, to reduce the whole complexity of the human thought and belief to nothing more than developed myth is suspect. Myth obviously plays an important role in the development of art and society, as well as the psyche, but surely it is not the whole of it. Campbell makes these statements without offering a real boundary or definition for what myth is. While I feel well-informed enough to read on with my own definition and idea of what myth is, Campbell's case may be stronger with something more of a crafted idea of myth at heart.

Yet, Campbell is clearly a studied scholar of many stories from many cultures. His claim that there is a basic structure that all of these stories share is not beyond conception. He claims that the most basic story is that of the hero's quest, which he parses into smaller parts, "The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation-initiation-return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth." (Campbell is appropriating the word "monomyth" from James Joyce, Finnegans Wake). While reading this, I've also been reading the book, The Power of Myth, Bill Moyer's transcribed interview with Joseph Campbell. Taking place many years after Campbell first wrote Hero, it is fascinating to read his even more developed ideas about the interconnectedness/almost-sameness of human thought, experience and religion from around the world. He makes the claim that all religions are meant to be understood in symbolic/metaphorical ways, in almost poetic ways, rather than as literal claims about factual reality.

These (the monomyth and the metaphorical nature of all religions) , in my understanding, are the most interesting claims of Joseph Campbell, and are, in fact, what he's most known for. The monomyth is handy as a literary criticism and creation device, but it also seems vaguely obvious (if that's possible to say). Similarity between stories in their structure certainly must reveal either/or or both/and a shared experience among all peoples or a shared understanding of experiences among all peoples. Both of these are vastly coherent, it just then lies to be determined to what extent. Jumping into the metaphorical understanding of religion, however, is beginning to show a concrete example of how far and deep and wide Campbell believes the sharing goes, that is, 100%.

Back to the original train of thoughts, in Hero, Campbell shows great confidence in the work of the psychoanalysts and in the deeply meaningful nature of dreams. He even calls dreams "private myths." He sees them as the personal and unique embodiment of shared myths, like the hero's quest. I'm not familiar enough with the psychoanalysts to know all of their claims or to understand their qualifications. Though, I've been under the impression, for much of my life, that their theories, particularly about dreams, are of highly questionable validity. Thus, it seems to me that Campbell is much better discussing the myths and stories of various cultures as the prime texts from which to claim the latency and penetration depth of the monomyth, rather than perusing the dreams of strangers.

Finally, though I'm enjoying Campbell's work very much and learning something about story structure and human experience, I'm sure, I still find his methods questionable. For instance, in support of his monomyth thesis and in support of showing the similarity of stories and experiences, he quotes or, sometimes, retells stories, sometimes with elaboration, to show their similarities. Yet, while I see his points about the most general attributes of the various plights of the heroes or heroines, the specifics of them are still so different that it makes me wonder about calling them similar. For instance, he compares the story of the Buddha's enlightenment to the story of Moses getting the 10 commandments from God on Sinai. I can see the similarities, there is agitation in nature (in Buddha's story it is orchestrated by divine beings trying to test and disrupt the Buddha's meditation, while in Moses' story, it is God's presence making the whole mountain quake), the transference of some divine message/enlightenment, and then a descent into the world to proclaim the word. Yet, one's the Buddha and one is Moses, one has divine beings attacking the seeker and one shows nature trembling at the divine presence. One is the reaching of self-knowledge with a goal of self-annihilation and the end of suffering, while the other is a moral code that focuses on respecting, protecting and encouraging life in a community. They are similar, yet they are different.

Also, pulling these from different sources, from different contexts and different times seems to leave out a lot that might lend to how they were understood/interpreted at the time.

Thoughts?

The hardest thing

is to begin?

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