Morgan Blackledge's Reviews > The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Mythology helps us experience the rapture of being alive. I think this is the central takeaway from Campbell's work.

Modern academics have (absolutely correctly) criticized Campbell's work, e.g. his broad sweeping assertions and shaky (at best) methodologies. But on this basic point Campbell was (and maybe still is) nonpareil.

You can dismiss Campbell on many levels. But on this one point. I don't think you can easily dismiss him or this impactful text - which is pretty much his master work.

I know people get overly reverent about the man and his work, and overlook a lot of flaws that make serious scholars scream. So yeah. I get it. It's a 70 year old text. It's got some flaws and the field has progressed.

But I think you can throw the baby out with the bath water if you don't get that one key insight - mythology helps people experience the rapture of being alive.

If you fail to get that one -really important- takeaway, you have wasted your time reading this text. Start over from page one. Watch the Bill Moyers PBS thing. Do what ever you have to do. But get that nugget.

Beyond that, I actually don't have anything more to contribute to the volumes of rightful praise this book has already received.

But I can feel an overwrought, really pretentious, crabby, and potentially even dickish rant bubbling up from the depths of my soul.

So consider yourself warned.

I'm ranting because another GR user gave this brilliant text a 1 star review, which is not so special, but 43 other GR users liked that POS review, and it is now ranked at #3 based on said likes.

1 star?

Really?

1 star......like 1 star.

For real......

You (and 43 other geniuses) think Joseph Campbell's utterly original, ground breaking, world changing, comprehensive comparative survey of world mythology, and subsequent discovery of a meta-framework (i.e. the mono-myth) that underlies just about all of the worlds mythological systems, and the additional absolutely astounding achievement of integrating this insight with Jungian psychoanalytic theory, written in the 1940's, on a manual typewriter, and researched in books, before google, and adopted by popular culture and highbrow literature alike in the form of the 'heroes journey', which provided the basis for films like Star Wars, and well, just about every other piece of modern story telling......that's a 1 star achievement.

Hmmmm....

That same GR user refered to Campbell's staggeringly important text as 'a total piece of tripe'.

Wow......

Total tripe?

Meaning, nonsense, or rubbish.

That seems a little ungenerous.

So what are the reviewer's (let's call him Lone Star) complaints?

I'm assuming it's is a dude because....we'll....1 star.

Anyway....

Lone Star quips that [Joseph Campbell] 'failed to logically plan the layout of the text' and didn't 'work on the the chapter section/scale.'

That same user gave an (admittedly cool af looking) graphic novel 5 stars.

Ok.

So would Lone Star have given Campbells masterwork an additional star or two if it were limited to 30 pages, and illustrated with Manga style pictures and word bubbles?

Would Lone Star also complain that Henry Ford's (first ever) 1913 assembly line was crappy because it only produced 1 car every 12 hours?

Would Lone Star assert that Mozart's music has too many notes, or that Lincoln's Gettysburg address is too long, and should have been a TED talk, or that Shakespeare says old sounding words and should talk normal, or that the Sistine Chapel would be better if it was animated, or that the film adaptation of Streetcar Named Desire should have been in color, or that the sermon on the mount should have been shortened to 140 characters and dropped on Twitter?

Get it?

I just provided an ironic list of examples of important works of culture, and then gave intentionally banal critiques of them, based on a comical (fictional) misunderstanding of the historical context of the work, that would have to be considered in order to to properly understand it.

Get it?

LOL right?

Anyway.......

Lone Star continues: [Campbell's peerless work of scholarship contained] 'horribly hacked and detached bits of myth, scattered all over the place seemingly stochastically.'

Stochastically?

Touché......

Did Lone Star select that little zinger of a word from the thesaurus feature on the smart phone he was working on?

Maybe he originally put random, but looked it up and picked 'stochastically' because it sounded smarter.

Damn!

To bad Campbell didn't just do that kind of thing when he wrote his visionary text that changed everything.

Anyway......

Here's a couple of quotes from another DWM that express my feelings far better than I myself am able:

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see."
-Arthur Schopenhauer

"or appreciate."
-Me

"Every man takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world."
-Arthur Schopenhauer

"particularly college undergrads."
-Me

So how lame is it for a 50 year old man (me) to troll a random 20 year old on GR.

Exceedingly lame.

Admittedly.

But 1 star, and 43 likes?

Dude!!!!!