Joseph Campbell and the Monomyth

[NobleSavage]

Joseph Campbell's monomyth, or the hero's journey, is a basic pattern that its proponents argue is found in many narratives from around the world. This widely distributed pattern was described by Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).[1] Campbell, an enthusiast of novelist James Joyce, borrowed the term monomyth from Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth

When I first started to lose my religion I came across a series on PBS with Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell. I was completely captivated and enchanted by Campbell. I went out and bought all his books. I found his books to be very tedious and plodding. I put them on the shelf and then slowly became an atheist. Now, looking back, I'm convinced that Campbell was spewing a bunch of discredited Freudian and Jungian psychology and he worked hard to make various mythologies fit whatever pattern he wanted.

Am I being too harsh? Is there anything redeeming about his ideas?

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I remember those interviews. At times they were a bit strained but I thought Campbell made his point well, that the names change but the characters remain the same.

 

[PyramidHead]

I had a similar experience. In high school, my mother bought me a sort of "best of Joseph Campbell" book called Reflections on the Art of Living. That book, and Campbell generally, shook me out of my Christianity and pointed me eastward. I became the annoying kid in class who would remark about how everything is an example of some perennial mythological theme.

J. Krishnamurti put a stop to that quickly enough.

 

[NobleSavage]

I looked up some Campblell quotes that I think illustrate his "new age" psychobabble:

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

All religions are true but none are literal

 

[Underseer]

I admit that I'm not that familiar with Campbell's work directly and mostly just know what others have said about it, but it seems like a useful vehicle for discussing narrative structure.





Does he present the monomyth as something more than that? Is the monomyth meant to tell us about something other than narrative structure?