RPG 201, Lab #4 - Joseph Campbell

Before answering our insolvable question about narrative, it will be necessary to dispose of the habitual worship of Joseph Campbell's monomyth, which has found life in the internet age among poorly read, well-meaning amateurs who are ready to pound any number of square pegs into round holes in a flagrant attempt to make every adventure story "fit" the mold.

The theory is, of course, "The Hero's Journey," as shown on the slide.  A simplified overview of the theory can be read on wikipedia, while more materials that celebrate the man and his work can be found in many places throughout the internet.  Campbell's book, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," is available on Amazon and in quite a number of libraries.

In the book, Campbell himself makes no claim that the journey embraces all mythological narratives, only that  myths "frequently" follow a recognizable structure, the one shown in the image.  I think today it would do us good to remind ourselves not of those works that fit the mold, but rather those books that distinctly do not ~ though in many cases, as I've said, there are always efforts by pseudo-scholars to make the plots fit, by patently redefining Campbell's detailed definitions of "death and rebirth," "revelation," "elixir" (not shown on the chart), and the return home.

Our chief concern is that there are, right now, thousands and thousands of would-be writers and adventure makers who are infatuated with the above chart, who are fervently using it as an absolutist template for every work they're producing.  This vastly reduces the number of plot lines, character investigations, character types, themes, climaxes and resolutions that exist in the whole of writing, for the sake of one man with one idea collecting a small portion of fictional works.  And, we should note, most prominently that portion that was produced when most human advancements in philosophy, science, revelation, enlightenment and social engineering had not yet been conceived.  We are writing stories for modern audiences that we pretend to ourselves will appreciate them as a crowd would in the Bronze Age.

Of course, yes, there are many stories in the last 400 years that have followed, loosely, the course of Campbell's monomyth.  But there are many more that haven't.  We may, for example, discount every story that has ever had an unhappy ending.  And every story where the hero hasn't obtained a revelation or returned changed.  For example, none of the characters in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales are especially changed, and surely we can count these tales, read by generations and certainly part of the underlying fabric that influenced writers well into the 20th century, as "adventures."  Robin Hood experiences no real death and rebirth, merely setbacks; he returns to his lands when Richard returns to England, but Robin doesn't return "changed."  Surely, these are adventures that continue to inspire millions.  Likewise, we have to try really hard to fit Le Morte d'Arthur into the mold.  Granted, Arthur does experience many of the features of the monomyth, but this is but a single tale in a host of tales, ignoring that in the tales of Merlin, there is no redemption; he ends up helplessly in Vivien's arms.  We have to ignore Gawain and Gareth as well.  Where is Lancelot's redemption?  And where in the stories of Lancelot do we see him called to arms.  We have to try really hard to believe that Arthur is Lancelot's "mentor," and to do so we'd have to ignore quite a lot of detail.  Instead, to make it fit, we simply discard every part of the book, and the host of other stories surrounding Camelot, because it is more convenient for us to pretend Campbell has the final word.

When speaking of adventures, we shouldn't forget those surrounding certain women, such as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, who does achieve her "repentence" in the end; but since the theme of the book is that Moll was never evil to begin with, but was rather pressed into every crime by the purest of desperations, we must ask ourselves if Moll repents or if she finally convinces someone, that being the minister overseeing her execution, that she's never been evil.  Moreover, we have to ask ourselves, in Moll's story, at what point do we separate the "trials and failure" from the "death and rebirth"?  It is all awful.  Does the dividing line occur at the gallows?  And if so, aren't we stretching the meaning of Campbell's elixer in arguing that it was shipping her and her lost soulmate husband to the colonies?

And what of Becky Sharp in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair?  We must take this as an adventure, though clearly not the sort a modern RPGer would embrace.  Here we have a bit more of a redemption (of a sort), but where is her call to adventure?  She responds to nothing more than her poverty and her ambition.  Where is her mentor?  Where, precisely, is the abyss?  The book is abyss after abyss, all of it awful, none of it offering any rebirth; Becky's life at the end is a distinct shadow of her at the start, and though she assays to be respectable, the change is one of a horse that has been successfully beaten until it pulls the cart without complaint.

I hesitate to suggest Justine, by the Marquis de Sade, which is the tale of an innocent who is tossed from evil villain to evil villain throughout the novel, remorselessly, until with relief to the reader she finally dies ... with the stink of what she's been through suggesting she's won't be welcomed in heaven.  And where is Anna Karenina's redemption from the novel by Leo Tolstoy?  At the end of all her adventures, she commits suicide by throwing herself under the carriage of a passing train.

We can say the same for the adventurer Peter from War and Peace.  If there is an abyss, surely it is the death of Natasha; but Peter's only rebirth is that he realizes that all the meaning and purpose and direction he has sought has all been mere chance.  And Tolstoy spends more than a hundred pages at the end of the novel hammering that point home, that there is no redemption, for anyone, because we are all wrapped in a destiny controlled by time and our perception of it.  Rebirth and redemption are illusions.

Next we may consider Jules Verne.  Phileas Fogg of Around the World in 80 Days calls himself to adventure; he has no mentor but himself; there are endless setbacks, but there is no "death and rebirth."  Even Fix's last minute intervention of arresting Fogg in England, mere hours from success, is not more than just one last setback for the intrepid adventurer.  There is a moment when Fogg regrets his adventure ~ when he thinks he has failed, and he is broke, but Aouda and he fall in love and ultimately, since he does succeed, the regret evaporates.  Has Fogg come home changed?  There's no real suggestion of that in the book.

We can find similar consistencies of character in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Robur the Conqueror.  The heroes are plunged into the adventure, there are setbacks, but there is never an ultimate crisis and usually they extricate themselves through their knowledge, not their re-evaluation of self.

And if we think this lack of changed character is found only in Verne, consider Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.  None of the characters, including the young boy Jim Hawkins or Long John Silver, change very much.  What kindness Silver shows at the end is clearly there all along; and what lessons Hawkins learns through the adventure do not suggest his enthusiasm is soured.  Things just go along, work out a certain way, we are given a good story, no elixir is drunk and we're not taught a lesson about character.  Not unless, of course, we've got the mallet out and we're definitely going to fit this peg into its hole.

Stevenson doesn't provide a lot of redemption in his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde either.  It is deliberately depicted as a life mis-spent.

Adventure writing throughout the 19th century was about solving problems, surviving, and most of all discovering amazing things and amazing places.  There's no startling change in Samuel Butler's narrator in Erewhon, except that he's observed a startling satire on Victorian society.  Jonathan Swift's character Gulliver experiences no grand change in outlook, except that perhaps he is more educated at the end than at the beginning.  This is hardly a "redemption;" he has nothing to regret about his earlier existence.  The heroes of H.G. Wells, even as the world burns around them from alien invasion, or as they destroy the world with their abilities, as The Man Who Could Work Miracles does, realize no more than that they are dwarfed by the possibilities presented by science; this is not presented as rebirth.  Rather, it is intended to give cause for dread.

We can go around and around with this.  Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth.  Richard McKenna's The Sand Pebbles.  Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.  Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, where people just get on with living (though the movies always ignore the book and stuff in a redemption theme to please audiences).

We can write books about rebirth and redemption, of course.  But we're not limited to that, not even in the realm of adventure.  Certainly less so in the realm of romance, drama and comedy.  We'd be hard pressed to argue that "boy loses girl" is the equivalent of death and rebirth.

We have other theories that address the science of stories that are far less limiting that Campbell's.  And admit that if there is a common theme to the creation of stories, it is that they are created by humans, who have a peculiar interest in a certain process of introduction, conflict and resolution ... which in no way differs from the principles we've discussed already relating to rupture, oscillation and reconstruction.  Campbell's theory is equivalent to Alfred Wegener's recognition that Africa and South America shared characteristics that were both biological and physically suggestive that the continents were once joined.  Wegener did not comprehend anything like the explanation of plate techtonics ... and since Campbell wasn't a psychologist, he did not comprehend the fundamentals underlying the human biological response to mental rupture and repair.  Campbell, like Wegener, merely noticed something; it has been others, in a completely different field, who have begun to explain it.

Hopefully, then, we can seek another means of establishing a narrative than being harnessed to this one theory.  Until we begin again.  I leave the class with this enjoyable video from Kurt Vonnegut.