Month: March 2018

The Hero with a Thousand Faces – The Departure Part 2: Now we’re getting to the good stuff

I’ve finished the Departure chapter of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and I’m ready to give it my seal of approval. But before I analyze the chapter as a whole, let’s finish looking at the last three stages of the arc: Supernatural Aid, the Crossing of the First Threshold, and the Belly of the Whale.

 

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3) Supernatural Aid

Once the hero commits to their journey, they receive assistance from forces within the world of adventure.

Campbell says that this aid usually comes directly after the hero accepts the call to adventure, and writes:

“Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, our hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task.” (Campbell, 72)

There seem to be three main forms the assistance can take, and the hero can receive them in any combination.

The first form is a direct mentor, someone who’s been down the hero’s path before and can guide the young adventurer. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Morpheus are good examples.

The second is a benevolent, usually supernatural or otherwise powerful being who does not directly take the hero as an apprentice, but has a vested interest in their success. This is the role of the Fairy Godmother or Dumbledore.

The third form is the granting of talismans, weapons, or other objects of power that will aid the hero. This is Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, and the string that allowed Theseus to escape the labyrinth after defeating the Minotaur.

Campbell is correct that the hero nearly always receives aid before trying to cross the first threshold, but I’ve noticed that heroes can receive aid later in the story, usually just before tackling additional difficult tasks. Harry Potter leaps to mind; his first supernatural aid is granted in Diagon Alley, where he receives a wand, Hedwig, books on magic, and other useful tools before crossing the first threshold on platform 9 & 3/4. But later on, when he faces a new challenge that his current boons are unable to overcome (namely sneaking around the school), he’s given additional aid in the form of the invisibility cloak.

This suggests to me that the Supernatural Aid and Crossing a Threshold events may exist as a pair, and their appearance in the Departure arc of a hero’s journey is simply the first instance of a more fundamental narrative building block. I’m going keep an eye out for this as I explore other hero’s journey stories, and try to get a measure of how often receiving supernatural aid immediately precedes overcoming a major obstacle.

 

4) The Crossing of the First Threshold

The hero must cross the barrier between the known and unknown worlds.

The barrier between the ordinary world and the world of adventure is not easy to navigate.  There may be a test, obstacles, or enemies that Campbell calls the Threshold Guardians which bar the hero’s way. There’s no avoiding these challenges: to continue on their adventure, the hero must earn the right to pass into the unknown.

The most interesting point Campbell makes in this section is that the barrier should be a test of the hero’s character. The hero will face tests of skill, strength, and cleverness later – the point of the first ordeal is to prove they have the grit and determination to survive in the world of adventure. It’s an easy point to overlook, and I’m sure I’ve made this exact mistake in the past. The first thing that every hero must have is will, and this is where they prove it.

The threshold guardians don’t have to be evil or malevolent, and often serve as representatives of the established order. An overprotective mother could easily fulfill this role, as could a police officer determined to keep things quiet in his little town. Their attempts to keep the hero in the ordinary world may be understandable or even justified, but to become heroes our characters must overcome them all the same.

 

5) The Belly of the Whale

The hero undergoes a transformation, changing from the person they were into a nascent version of the hero they will become.

I have a somewhat tense relationship with symbolism, so I found this final part of the Departure tricky because it’s almost purely symbolic. As best I can tell a belly of the whale event does not need to happen for a story to make sense; the narrative could skip this element entirely and the hero’s journey would still be completely coherent. However, it’s a good way of indicating to the audience that the hero has severed their connection to the ordinary world – or to say it another way, that the hero’s old self has died and been reborn in the hero’s role. Campbell says:

“The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown and would appear to have died. (Campbell, 90)

And adds on the next page:

“This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation…. But here, instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again.” (Campbell, 91)

Can we ground this with any practical examples? Well, in Star Wars I believe the Belly of the Whale happens when Luke and everyone else in the Millennium Falcon hide in Han’s smuggling compartments. Luke’s still a farm boy when he gets into those compartments, but from the moment he climbs out all his actions take on a heroic character.

The Hogwarts Express in Harry Potter is a less stressful example. It’s a transition from the muggle to the wizarding world, where Harry is given a crash course in wizard culture and his entire social group is replaced by wizards. From that moment on, the Dursleys and the rest of the muggle world are literally not mentioned again until the final two pages.

Neither of these events had to happen to keep the story moving forward. There were other ways for Luke to get aboard the Death Star, and the Hogwarts Express could have been a brief and uneventful train ride. But they’re a great pivot point for the reader, and I think it would have been unwise for George Lucas or JK Rowling to skip over them. Because symbolism comes unnaturally to me the Belly of the Whale will probably be a weak point of mine, so I’m going to give it some extra attention in my studies going forward.

 

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The Departure: Conclusions

Throughout the chapter on the Departure, Campbell draws examples liberally from dreams, myth, religion, and psychoanalysis, and makes an unspoken assertion that all of these are essentially interchangeable. While I think this thesis needs a great deal more support than Campbell provides, the structure he describes for the Departure part of a story is tangible enough that I accept most all of it as correct. The steps he describes can be found, in order, in almost any heroic story one would care to name, and at the risk of dipping into psychoanalysis myself, this implies to me that the structure reflects a genuine component of the human experience.

Here’s what I mean: anything which disrupts our daily lives can be viewed as a call to adventure, and we see so little of the world that there will always be unknown lands of adventure we could potentially cross into. Going to college, changing careers, even just starting a hobby can take the form of a tiny adventure, and will likely contain most or all of the elements Campbell describes. The call to adventure occurs when a new opportunity first attracts our attention. Then we have to decide if we will accept the call or turn away in favor of the safe and familiar. Deciding to pursue the opportunity will often put us in touch with allies we would never have met otherwise, but we may need to overcome obstacles or threshold guardians that work against the change. Finally, committing to the new opportunity will transform us, and with any luck we’ll end up slightly more heroic than when we started.

If you accept this portrayal then readers will find the structure of the Departure intimately familiar, and I think an author should only risk changing it if they have an extremely clear idea of why they are doing so. A master of the storytelling art may be able to create a truly memorable story by twisting or shattering a reader’s expectations for the Departure, but I’m certainly not there yet. For the time being I’m going to treat it as established fact that this is how a hero’s journey story should begin.

Up next, we’ll look into the second stage of the hero’s journey: the Initiation. Thank you for reading, and if you have any comments about this post or the Practice Write project in general I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment below or send me a message through the Contact page.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces – The Departure Part 1: Add two parts knowledge to one part crazy and mix thoroughly

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.