A 10-minute read with storytelling enshittification and pan-galactic quizzifications such as:
- The Monomyth is literature’s cryptid;
- Why it’s not a good model, actually;
- Is there no alternative?
Sooner or later, I will (probably!) have to write an essay that, for the purposes of balance, treats Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth as a Serious Theory with Serious Evidence. I’m not looking forward to it.
Some still treat it as a Theory of Everything for literature, even when we take ourselves aside to agree, “We’re only pretending it’s sound because it’s a good model, alright?” Key word here is “some.” I don’t have numbers for how many scholars or academics take the Monomyth seriously, nor how many recognise it for the literary tchotchke that it is. What I do know is that it keeps fucking coming back, not just in academic circles, and it needs to be reburied and sealed away in concrete.
But before that, an aside on cryptids. As a Scottish person, I find it utterly baffling the sort of creatures that people travel from far and wide to see. What do folks actually believe about Nessie, for example? It’s as real as any hoax, and yet that bastard apparently reels in over £40m every year:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/627436/loch-ness-monster-tourism-in-scotlands-economy
Sure, Nessie is not the only reason people travel to Loch Ness, but suffice it to say for many a one who goes, even if you know for a fact it’s not real, your imagination begs you, kicking and screaming, to believe it is, just for a bit. You can tell by the way people talk about Nessie whether their imagination shows through or not. It’s not good irony if everyone agrees it’s not real1.
The Monomyth is literature’s cryptid. As long as we continue to concede that it’s “at least a good model,” it remains in that liminal state between being a universal measurement for stories, or the overgeneralisations of a man who, as he admitted himself, was just spitballing. That is, the effect of the Monomyth has on our studies is to learn to compare stories by stripping them down to their symbols, and what they have in common. Curiously, on symbols, Campbell wrote:
[They] are only the VEHICLES of communication, they must not be mistaken for the final term, the TENOR, of their reference. No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding… no-one should attempt to read or interpret [them] as the final thing.
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 518-9 (emphasis my own)
And in the epilogue:
There is no final system for the interpretation of myths, and there will never be any such thing.
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 767-8
Models, insofar as I understand, are structures defining simple rules for analysing a single work, and or comparing several works in tandem. Like metaphors, they are not an actual, objective representation of something. They’re not meant to be detailed; if it makes comparison easier to work through in our heads, or in dialogue, as many argue the Monomyth does, then it follows that it’s a good model, doing its job – and many follow that no further inquiry is required.
Comparing one story to another isn’t the problem. The Monomyth lens can shine a light on a thousand stories with a thousand supporting protagonists, young and male, who join the main protagonist after they’ve crossed the first threshold. The lens cannot tell you that there is one, and only one, Junpei Iori from Persona 3 (“DA MAN”). The best it can do is shrug and go “Idonfuckinknow, he’s the Romeo to Chidori’s Juliet, I mean, have you SEEN West Side Story? Same story.”
For whatever reason, we seem to keep passing thought experiments – like the Monomyth – down the telephone game, and arriving a priori at the conclusion that, given enough data (or stories), they can be proven a fait accompli. We do this in spite of Campbell’s self-waiver above, an extremely safe, and conservative conclusion. We’ve done this before with Hobbes and Rousseau. The structure of conclusion is the same. Maybe there are angles we’re missing.
Perhaps the most fetid and swollen elephant carcass in the room is that, even by the standards of what was politically acceptable in the 1940s, Campbell’s politics were weird. Randian-weird. Hobbesian-weird. As Joel Christensen and Sarah E. Bond write in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Monomyth blends in and aligns with Ayn Rand’s interpretation of ethical egoism in her Fountainhead:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-behind-the-myth-should-we-question-the-heros-journey
If Campbell’s theories are a tuning fork, then what resonates when you strike it are the frequencies of rugged individualism, as Christensen and Bond write2; there’s also harmonies with Hobbes; Great Men theories of history; it’s libertarian in broad strokes. But let’s be very clear: Campbell consistently repeated, time and again, that Monomythic heroes must always be male; they are destined to inherit power, supernatural or otherwise; they are born to bring order, and to rule.
You might say that “must always be” is a bit too strong, for in the eighth step of the journey (“Meeting with the Goddess”), he appends the notion that there can be heroines. For this, I would like to retell the arguments from Spencer McDaniel’s “The Hero’s Journey is Nonsense,” as I understand them:
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/
When the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth, but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed – whether she will or no.
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 299-300
If your protagonist is female, then forget the whole ‘Woman as Temptress’ step that comes next – she will be tempted here and now, and deep within her psyche and yours is the inability to think otherwise, because she is destined to be the chattel of the divine. What an incredibly weird way of framing it, Campbell!
Well, OK. What about stories where the protagonists aren’t white–
This, folks, is Campbell’s opening. It is his ‘dark and stormy night;’ his ‘best of times, worst of times;’ his Greek chorus who foreshadows everything that is going to happen in the play; he might not have flat-out compared these cultures to primates in this quote3, but he makes it very clear that not only are they not Western, he finds their stories amusing, bizarre, mystical, and on the whole, “it’s all the same.“
This is cultural imperialism. It is not amusing, it’s wrong; and as a white, reasonably middle-class Scottish person, I strive to call it out as I see it. It doesn’t matter what Campbell believed – these words have all the cadence of your extremely egalitarian Uncle Greg. He’d never speak ill of immigrants in public – met a few, ‘imself – but at family gatherings, he’ll regale you with patter like, “they should fuck off back to their own country and see to their own.”
Then there’s Campbell’s influences. For instance, we know he combined Freudian psychoanalysis with Carl Jung’s archetypes and collective unconscious theory. The result, applied to myths and storytelling, is the Monomyth. Jung, likewise, was a progeny of Freud’s work, and, like many conservatives post-WW2, heavily influenced by the works of Irish philosopher Edmund Burke:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke
The collective unconscious theory is, in effect, a mystical mirror-world version of sociology. Among other things, it posits the existence of archetypes – that is, through the unperceived connections everyone has to everyone else, we inherit common patterns of thought, or images, or symbols. If the collective unconscious is the cause of rhyming stories and history, archetypes are the effect.
I needn’t explain again how the Monomyth, as an analytical tool, prioritises archetypes over the actual texts being analysed. It will not tell you what makes the Aenid and Watership Down different stories, but what it will tell you is that, deep down, they are the same stories, sharing the same archetypes, because of that pesky collective unconscious at work. It’s pure tautology.
When Campbell wrote, “there is no final system for the interpretation of myths,” whatever his intention, what has manifested in the Monomyth is its structural opposite – “there is no alternative for the interpretation of stories.” You can break or subvert every trope in the Monomyth’s cycle, and its photo negative, its afterimage, yet stains your eyelids. It insists upon itself that it’s impossible for the psyche to come up with anything different.
“We are incapable of telling stories any different. It is impossible to imagine new ways of storytelling. There is no alternative.” Where have I heard these before? Suffice it to say that, insofar as we’re concerned with the success and spread of ideas, the study of myth has continued to let conservative bias go unchallenged, believing this to be apolitical; the left, so we’re to believe, has yet to offer a lucid countertheory, a challenger in the same weight class.
So, come up with something different! But what? And how? McDaniel, as a Greek and Roman historian, writes:
If you want to know what the Homeric epics meant to ancient Greek people, you can’t find the answer just by reading the epics themselves without any context and coming up with a meaning on your own… You have to study ancient Greek culture and read what other ancient Greek authors wrote about the Homeric epics.
Spencer McDaniel, “The Hero’s Journey is Nonsense”
Likewise for the ancient Romans; on this, I’d like to aside for a moment and return to Caesar Marcus Augustus Zuckerberg, who, it’s safe to say, has indulged more of the former in his idolisation of Emperor Augustus than the latter:
It’s not just Zuckerberg, of course, but there are only so many men with his status, power, and wealth who would, without a shred of irony, say Augustus is ‘just like me fr!!!!!’:
We can’t understand the nature of this resurgence without also understanding the ongoing discussions about gender roles. Bringing more and more topics to the table to explore why last year’s Tiktok trend was a different historical moment from those that came before is antithetical to the Monomyth.
One more time: the Monomyth would argue it’s perfectly possible to understand Darth Vader and a corrupt Roman statesman (as portrayed by an ancient Roman author) as the same tyranny. It’s not just that it can’t tell us the difference – we are taught to willfully ignore how Roman authors portrayed evil, and instead to look for the archetypes and symbols that supersede the text.
If Star Wars were an ancient Roman story, then, instead of building a superweapon that can destroy planets, Darth Vader would probably be constantly boasting of his own superiority, comparing himself to deities… sadistically torturing galactic Senators in all sorts of horrible ways. These things would be instantly recognizable to Roman people as signs of an evil ruler.
Spencer McDaniel, “The Hero’s Journey is Nonsense”
What I have been critiquing throughout this post is not just the Monomyth itself, but the myth of the Monomyth, the Metamonomyth, if you’d like. But we can go further. A leftist countertheory should. However, this is where I stop for now. I took over a fortnight going back and forth on writing this, and while I’m not worried about writing longform works, I am trying to keep things brief. Rest assured: the next time we meet the Monomyth, it’ll be in the court of the Stranger King…
- And it’s this cynical layer that, through the consent of both tourists and the folk who work at Loch Ness to keep Nessie alive, keeps this from being a con. In your mind, Nessie might as well be as real as the memories of the water, the glens, and the photos you take home with you. But it’s not. And you know it’s not.
Did you know that Amazon had a secret pricing algorithm project code-named ‘Project Nessie?’ I find that incredibly sardonic:
https://geekdom.social/@bigolifacks/112554754116975286
To whoever thought that was a good name: I see you, and I know what you are. ↩︎ - It may be to my detriment to have this as a footnote – RationalWiki bills Campbell as a ‘late Romantic’ – not until after it quite rightly calls him out on his anti-Semitism:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell
The focus of stories on individuals seemingly separate from the society around them intensified in the post-war period, but, a book in my postgrad reading list raises an interesting point. In Kim Wilkins’ Writing Bestsellers, she explores why some of us artists still yearn to separate our work from ‘the market’ to avoid it being tainted.
Now, book production in Britain was industrialised with William Caxton’s importing of the printing press in the 15th century, as I briefly mentioned in a previous essay:
https://brologue.net/2024/06/21/wtdwa/
But it’s in the late 18th century, where the first industrial revolution is in its heyday, the dawn of the Romantics, and with them, the modern mode of book production we’re still with today. Faced with the prospect of larger audience, the Romantics decided that they would be the writers who would not engage in such vulgarity. Their work was to champion individual experiences to be savoured, not to churn out penny dreadfuls with mass appeal! Schismogenesis strikes again…
https://brologue.net/tag/schismogenesis/
We can link Campbell to all the bootstrapping rags-to-riches anaesthesia of the post-war period, and of our neoliberal overlords, AND we can link back to the Romantics. It’s something none of my other sources have done, and I think it’s something worth pointing out.
↩︎ - As certain historians are wont to do of societies they cannot fully understand – particularly prehistoric ones, on account of any witness who could tell us what it was like being dead. ↩︎
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