Peterson has latched onto Campbell’s use of archetypes and gender roles and interprets them as the means for saving humanity from political polarization. He gave a postwar readership a seemingly timeless archetype for America’s unique brand of “rugged individualism.” He also helped to create a niche for the intersection of pop culture and pop psychology, paving the way for less savory exploitations of narrative by people like Jordan Peterson. Echoing the “ethical egoism” of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, published only a few years earlier, Campbell sold the public on a vision of the individual hero, unfettered from community or history. These sins of contextual omission allowed Campbell to weave an attractive narrative that found particular favor with his white midcentury audience. To create his hero, Campbell had to depend upon the fallacy of incomplete evidence - otherwise known as cherry-picking. Most myths with monomythic patterns can be analyzed in different ways for many different functions. Rankine recognizes that the Monomyth created a more inclusive model, but one which came at the cost of complexity. Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and others gained an entry point or foothold through such flattening.” So, it’s right in the sweet spot of a ‘Western canon.’ In this context I actually like Campbell because he elevated non-Western myth. Patrice Rankine, a Classicist at the University of Chicago, tells us that Campbell’s book emerged “in the context of the American and British Great Books movement. Unlike many of his predecessors, he engaged with numerous non-Western sources, shifting some focus from Greece and Rome. In the wake of World War II, Campbell’s Monomyth, a theory about myth and folktales, presented an attractive, simplified narrative pattern as a prescriptive tool to the public - with a global spin born in part from Campbell’s early interest in Native American mythology. Let’s go back to 1949 to trace Campbell’s own origin story. Campbell’s theory is as mythological as the stories from which it borrows.
Campbell claimed his theory, which has gone on to influence everything from Star Wars to Disney’s Aladdin, arose from a universal structure inherent in the global myths of antiquity. The “journey” in their working title was a reference to Campbell’s book, one which proposed the existence of a singular “hero’s journey” (also known as the Monomyth), as experienced by ancient heroes such as Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey.Ĭampbell’s synthetic, undeniably alluring model presented a hero who reluctantly accepts the call to adventure, using the tribulations of his odyssey to reshape himself into the savior humanity needs before returning home.
Kubrick had given Clarke a copy of Joseph Campbell’s 1949 analysis of mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Called “Journey Beyond the Stars,” this screenplay about the future had deep roots in mythologies of the past. Clarke discussed a working title for a screenplay that would eventually become 2001: A Space Odyssey. In an interview with The New Yorker in 1965, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C.
#Heros journey series
¤ Screen capture of Joseph Campbell in the popular 1988 PBS documentary series “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth” filmed at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch (Fair Use).
We will also highlight how narratives about the past influence the world we live in today, from books and movies to executive orders.
Bond, Joel Christensen, and Nandini Pandey, Pasts Imperfect is a space for addressing forgotten, manipulated, or misunderstood histories of the ancient world from South America to the Indus Valley and the ancient Mediterranean. PASTS IMPERFECT IS a new column that explores the impact of ancient pasts on the present.