The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a tough book to get through.
I tried to read it several years ago, but was left cold by its immediate plunge into Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis. I’m willing to follow Freud’s and Jung’s work down to a certain depth, but once we hit the point that every female relationship relates to Oedipus and every object longer than a square is a phallus I think it’s time to come up for air. Campbell, however, is more than happy to keep swimming all the way down, so I didn’t make much progress in my first attempt.
However, if I’m going to study the hero’s journey there’s no avoiding its seminal work. So on a lark I took a through Audible’s catalogue, and it turns out, The Hero with a Thousand Faces is available as an audiobook. “Ah ha,” I thought. “I’ve discovered a shortcut. The book will be easier to understand when read aloud, and I always listen to audiobooks on the walk to work. I’ll get through it no time.”
How wrong I was. The first day I tried listening to it I spent half the trip stopped on the sidewalk, furiously typing notes into my phone. I spent the rest of the walk rewinding and listening to sections over again, certain that I missed something in Joseph Campbell’s sudden non-sequitur. As an audiobook, The Hero with a Thousand Faces is like a lecture delivered by a genius on mushrooms. It contains genre-defining wisdom, but its insights are hidden among bizarre tangents and I feel like I have to take notes on everything because I’m not sure what will be on the test.
Here’s a good example. Early on in the book Campbell tells the fable of the frog prince in its original version, wherein the princess meets the frog prince after dropping a golden orb into a lake. When describing the symbolism surrounding their meeting, Campbell says:
“The frog, the little dragon, is the nursery counterpart of the underworld serpent whose head supports the earth and who represents the life-progentitive, demiurgic power of the abyss. He comes up with the golden sun ball, his dark deep waters having just taken it down: at this moment resembling the great Chinese dragon of the East, delivering the rising sun in his jaws, or the frog on whose head rides the handsome young immortal, Han Hsiang, carrying in a basket the peaches of immortality.” (Campbell, 52)
Boy, that escalated quickly. On first reading the chain of association seems absolutely absurd, moving from frog to serpent to dragon, and from western to eastern mythology, over the course of just two sentences without any connecting explanation. But despite my initial incredulity I can’t help but think that Campbell was into something. The idea of an unsettling being bringing something of value from unknown depths strikes an emotional chord I can’t bring myself to ignore, and my uncomfortable half-understanding quickly made it clear that even the audiobook demands one’s full attention. As a result, so far I’ve only made it about a third of the way through the book.
With that in mind, my initial opinion is this: Joseph Campbell assumes that the reader accepts religious and psychoanalytical ideas as true in ways I’m not ready to concede, but he’s not talking about nothing. It’s like getting a map from a cartographer with peculiar ideas about geology; he seems to be correct about where the mountains and valleys are, but for the time being I’m maintaining some healthy skepticism about his explanations for the topography.
Campbell starts by breaking the hero’s journey into three acts: Departure, Initiation, and Return. These three acts are further subdivided into 17 possible stages, and I’ll discuss each of these in the coming posts. Not every myth has to contain all of the stages, and some shorter stories (particularly fables and fairy tales) focus on just one or two. The structure Campbell presents is one that’s familiar to people around the world: a hero leaves behind their familiar world, travels through an unfamiliar land of grave risk and great reward, then finally returns to bring the benefits of their adventure to the community they left behind.
There are already several well-written summaries of Campbell’s work, so I’ll start with just a brief explanation of the stage to ground the conversation, then focus on what stood out to me and how we can apply Campbell’s work to our writing. If you’re completely unfamiliar with the concept of the hero’s journey I’d recommend starting by reading the Wikipedia entry or the tvtropes listing.
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Part 1: Departure
The first of the Hero’s Journey’s three acts, the Departure is when the hero leaves their old life behind and steps into an unfamiliar world of danger and opportunity.
Campbell explains that at the start of a hero’s journey the world must be deficient in some way. The problem can be very large, such as the rule of a tyrant king, but some stories feature small or even petty problems, such as the hero desiring a certain golden ring. I suspect that it’s easier to hold a reader’s attention when the problem is a major one, so as newer writers we may want to build our worlds with more blatant deficiencies until we’re skilled enough that our characters alone are enough to keep the pages turning.
By the end of the story this deficiency should be either addressed or transcended by the hero. This choice of words stuck with me – addressed or transcended. Campbell explains that while the story may end with the hero directly resolving the problem, it’s also possible or even appropriate for the hero and the world to be so changed by the adventure that the initial deficiency is simply irrelevant. When I think about the deficiency that got, say, Harry Potter to enter the world of adventure – in his case, abuse by the Dursleys – I wonder if the hero transcending the initial deficiency may be more common than straightforwardly addressing it.
Before we start on our own original works, it’s worth taking some time to clearly articulate what the deficiencies of our various worlds will be and why they drive our hero into accepting what comes next:
1) The Call to Adventure
A hero’s journey story starts in the ordinary, deficient world. But this is quickly disrupted by an intrusion from the world of adventure that calls on the hero to leave their old life behind.
As a rule, I don’t like coincidence in stories. They’re unavoidable of course, just as coincidences are unavoidable in real life, and here’s an old writing adage which offers guidance by saying, “Coincidences that get your characters into trouble are fine, but coincidences that get them out of trouble are bad.” The idea behind this maxim is clearly correct, since unexpected problems are much easier to accept than deus ex machina, but I still I can’t entirely agree that coincidences are fine so long as they cause the characters trouble. If something happens in a story that’s completely random, with no noticeable relationship to previous events, I feel slightly cheated.
But a sudden intrusion from the world of adventure is almost by definition unpredictable. So how do we square this circle, and bring a world-changing event into the character’s life in a way that doesn’t seem like a lightning bolt from a clear sky?
Reading Campbell helped answer this. In his description of the Call to Adventure, he says that the hero will often have a seemingly random encounter with the supernatural world and develop some sort of relationship to forces within it. But he follows up with a critical point: when done correctly, this encounter is a reflection of the hero’s own internal desires and conflicts. The call isn’t pure coincidence – it’s already been foreshadowed by the struggles within the hero’s heart. With this in mind, in our original works we should make sure that we establish the hero’s desires and conflicts clearly, and that Call to Adventure flows naturally from them.
When the call finally comes, it’s usually delivered by a character Campbell terms the Herald. For a long time I made the mistake of conflating the Herald and the Mentor, and this chapter helped sort out my misconception. In Star Wars, for example, the herald is R2-D2, and the mentor is Obi-Wan Kenobi. Even though Obi-Wan is the person who suggests that Luke leave Tatooine and come with him to Alderaan, the Call to Adventure actually came when R2-D2 delivered Leia’s message. From that moment on Luke’s focus, or as Campbell describes it, his “spiritual center of gravity,” has shifted away from his old life to the world of adventure that R2 represents.
In modern stories the herald is usually benevolent or at least benign, but Campbell notes that in older tales this is not always the case. The character can be downright malevolent and still serve their purpose as the herald so long as they indicate it’s time for the hero to change from who they were into who they’re destined to become.
After receiving the call the hero may temporarily return to the ordinary world, but it will seem flat and meaningless after their tantalizing glimpse into the world of adventure. There is a narrow but deep distinction between this temporary respite and the Refusal of the Call stage we’ll talk about next. The Refusal of the Call is a choice by the hero to try to avoid their destiny, while the respite occurs before the hero chooses whether or not to accept the call.
2) Refusal of the Call
The hero resists entering the world of adventure, perhaps because of fear, a feeling of inadequacy, or lingering connections to the ordinary world.
What stood out to me most about the Refusal of the Call is it’s an invaluable opportunity to humanize our characters. It’s a strange person that, upon being exposed to a realm of chaos, danger, leaps into it with nary a look back. Showing why our nascent hero is reluctant to leave their old life reveals the attachments and flaws they’ll have to overcome to transform into a true heroic figure.
Not all heroes refuse the call, and some only make minor protests. If we’re writing a hero that’s a reckless hot-head or their previous life was so awful they’re willing to risk anything to get away, this is our place to show it.
Campbell observes that some myths (usually shorter stories, such as fables or parables) explore the dire consequences of the hero successfully refusing the call. Rather than eventually accepting their destiny in spite of some initial reluctance, these tragic figures are ruined by their unwillingness to leave their old world and old selves behind. While a novel that followed this plotline would probably not be very fun to read, I made a note of it because it could be an interesting path for a secondary character to follow, especially one serving as a foil for the hero.
Finally, Campbell says that refusing the Call to Adventure can be akin to the first step in a negotiation. An especially introspective or prudent hero won’t go running off on a harebrained adventure the moment that destiny beckons. Like recalcitrant cats, these heroes may have to be enticed by steadily more insistent, or even forceful, calls to adventure.
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In the next post, we’ll finish up the next three stages of the Departure: Supernatural Aid, the Crossing of the First Threshold, and the Belly of the Whale.
