Ross Blocher's Reviews > The Hero with a Thousand Faces

It's hard for me to know how to feel about The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell's construction-and-deconstruction of the "monomyth" has hugely influenced storytelling, and rightly earned its central position in any discussion of story structure and cultural analysis. At the same time, it is replete with Jung- and Freud-infused speculation on psychology. Nonsense, really. I would fault the book less for these long tracts of commentary if they weren't stated so definitively. Here's an example:

...They are sent on a long journey to neighboring and distant clans, imitative of the mythological wanderings of the phallic ancestors. In this way, "within" the Great Father Snake as it were, they are introduced to an interesting new object world that compensates them for their loss of the mother; and the male phallus, instead of the female breast, is made the central point (axis mundi) of the imagination. The culminating instruction of the long series of rites is the release of the boy's own hero-penis from the protection of its foreskin, through the frightening and painful attack upon it of the circumciser: [He goes on to quote a Dr. Roheim] "What is cut off the boy is really the mother... The glans in the foreskin is the child in the mother."

and...

Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time.

This kind of fiddle faddle is excruciating for me to read (or have read to me: I listened to the audiobook version and then perused a physical copy). I want to absorb what is being said at the same time I am resisting the formation of wasted neural connections in my head. I found myself regularly exclaiming, "You couldn't possibly know that!" It's hard to say which percentage of the book is useless blather. Perhaps a quarter? The rest of the book proves more useful...

My favorite pieces were recountings of the myths themselves: Joseph Campbell's expertise was in collecting myths from around the world, and it was fascinating to hear wide-ranging stories from Native American, Indian, Chinese, Norse, African and other cultures. As far as I could discern from previous knowledge and works cited, he's a reliable narrator when it comes to sharing this class of information. I found myself wanting to re-read Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, which I recall having similar cultural depth without the added speculation... though that recollection is roughly 16 years old.

The business end of Hero with a Thousand Faces is the monomyth, or "Hero's journey". The hero, pulled away from the home he knows, faces adventure and crises that he ultimately conquers, then returns home with wisdom and mastery of both worlds. Campbell fleshes this structure out with various steps and figures along the way: the call to adventure, refusal of the call, supernatural aid, crossing of the first threshold, the belly of the whale, meeting with the goddess, the woman as temptress, apotheosis, the magic flight, and so on. The idea is that this monomyth is the one story that all religions and myths encapsulate, and that singular story speaks deeply on an archetypal level to us as human beings. While he can provide a couple examples from various cultures for each stage of his journey, I would point out that no one myth perfectly matches the complete template. In fact, many of the myths are simply bad storytelling, and that is never allowed as a possibility in this book. Many elements of these ancient tales are absurd and lazy (the dropped comb becomes a mountain... Why? What?), and I think Campbell often misses that we had no Rotten Tomatoes back in the day to weed out the "Delgo"s and "Battlefield Earth"s of the past. Storytelling is a skill that has been refined and improved over the centuries, and there's a reason fairy tales must be "Disneyfied" in retelling: the original stories are unbelievable, uncompelling, and have terrible messages. This is a sign of progress. The monomyth is a useful amalgamation, however, in that it has directly inspired so many of our modern stories that even more closely match the template: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, The Lion King, Harry Potter, and so on. The Hero's Journey is a fantastic way to organize a structure, and it is truly compelling. Perhaps it has become a bit too pervasive, but that's another discussion and not Joseph Campbell's fault.

Campbell is not confused about the veracity of the stories themselves: he knows there were no giants who were slain and whose various body parts formed the mountains, rivers, and clouds. The point he is making is that the fact we have these stories points to elements of human psychology. I agree with this, and yet take exception to some of the interpretations. There is a long section devoted to the "Cosmogonic cycle" (a phrase you will never encounter so many times as you will in this book), the over-arching story of the birth-and-death of the universe. This is another example of a story that does indeed play out in myth. While there is likely an inborn urge to explain where all things come from and how they will eventually be destroyed and reborn... I can't help but note none of those stories have borne out in actuality.

It's worth reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but do so with a healthy dose of perspective handy. Joseph Campbell is a fascinating figure, and I'm sure he would have been a delight to talk to. The audiobook is a good way to go: there are three narrators who take turns, and that helps separate the breaks between commentary and the myths themselves.