Is the hero's journey a purely neurological effect?

So if you don't like the Hero's Journey, there's something wrong with your brain?

The Hero's Journey is just one of those models that fits enough stories that people start trying to cram every possible story into it. We've had a few of them over the centuries, and they tend to fall apart as people write more stories that don't fit the pattern. Campbell's only unique in that he folded and spindled mythology to support his pattern (to the objections of a lot of people who study myths from cultures he gave less attention to.)

 

Have you read the book? Champbell references Carl Jung more than any myths. Ignore the Hero's Journey and research Jungian "psychology", you'll find what you're looking for there.

 

Um, that wasn't supposed to be a serious statement.

To actually try to respond seriously, I'm not saying that the Hero's Journey makes stories bad, any more than the classical unities make stories bad. In fact, you can create great stories with both systems! But I think trying to apply either prescriptively is ultimately limiting.

@Steerpike: In fairness, my primary exposure to Campbell was from one of the worst English teachers I ever had, who loved the Hero's Journey and tried to fit everything under the sun into it. I will readily admit that I am biased.

P.S. To hell with it, I'll go there. I know David Brin is super over-the-top. I know some of the rhetoric he uses is, quite frankly, ridiculous. But I do think he has a point in this essay about how the Hero's Journey contrasts with more populist approaches.

Speaking personally, I come from a family that represents almost every possible way adults can abuse, exploit, or neglect their children. References to authority in my fiction tend to conflate with images of disease, decay, and bodily mutilation. I can't follow parts of the Hero's Journey, because my fiction keeps going so anti-authoritarian as to come into conflict with it.

So yeah, I don't think David Brin is completely insane. You may now proceed to throw tomatoes at me. (And if you think that one gets ridiculous with the rhetoric, you should read his essay about the anti-democratic evils of The Lord of the Rings.)

 

I don't think it is neurological in a predetermined/human nature kind of way, simply because it's not a common pattern in some parts of the world -- particularly those with little contact with the West over the millennia where they developed their cultural roots (Japan, the Americas, south and some of west Africa). But I think it could be said that, as we grow up with exposure to certain myths and stories, we grow... attuned to a certain way of telling a story. Christian or not, most Europeans and Americans know at least a few stories from the Bible by the time they can read and write. The Greek epics, Shakespeare, King Arthur -- these are stories many people are taught or see adapted on TV before they're old enough to even choose for themselves what they want to read. And even before Campbell was born, literary critics would highlight, archive, and redistribute the works that best held up to a standard they derived from the classics (which, for them, would primarily be the Greeks) -- which helped determine which works lasted long enough to become classics for us.

How much of this is a reflection of Western (male*) cultural identity and ideals, and how much of this is just the luck of what Greek epics survived and a millennia-long standard of copying 'the greats', I couldn't say.

* As an aside, I do think the Hero's Journey is a distinctly male journey. Not to say there aren't stories about female protagonists going through the same plot structure, but... I don't think it is the narrative of women in Western literature. I find that many stories that try seem just a little off in how they handle her journey. It's probably just the Jungian influence on the whole thing...

 

Vogler's Hero's Journey was based on the Monomyth described in Joseph Campbell's book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It sounds like you haven't read that book, so if you want to understand the "Hero's Journey", I'd recommend that you read Campbell's book and make up your own mind about it.

 

I've heard that "rebel fighting a tyrant" makes for a universal story despite being entirely a societal thing (since government/rebellion is a human invention) and Campbell doesn't make any extensive reference to rebellion/tyranny in his monomyth.

Psychology is a new science. We don't understand it well enough to determine if certain stories naturally appeal to people or if it's a societal thing. Or both or neither.
There's evidence that things like three-act structures or tonal consistency naturally appeal to people on some base level. That's way broader than any of Campbell's theories but it does imply that some (but not all) storytelling conventions stick around because they do naturally work.

So, draw your own conclusions.

 

I'm going to be so bold as to say the Hero's Journey is overrated, if not completely useless. Granted, almost everything I know about Campbell's most famous work comes second hand from a Star Wars documentary. But I think if you look at the actual structure he proposes... it doesn't actually exist in any real sense. It's nothing more than an abstraction. There's no myth or story out there that follows all of Campbell's steps in the order he proposes except those which are deliberately trying to. And even in stories and myths that have elements of Campbell's framework, those stories have such different aims and themes and come from such vastly different cultures as to almost defy comparison. Trying to make them all hang together under the Hero's Journey umbrella is largely missing the point, because in order to make them fit, you have to completely ignore almost all of the details that make them unique: AKA, the parts that make them what they are. It's like the early attempts at studying comparative religion: The Golden Bough and it's ilk. It's all crap. Because when you lump every storytelling tradition in the world together like that, what you get is a generic blob that doesn't really resemble any of the things you cobbled it together from. Like those archetypical cell diagrams from middle school bio that don't actually resemble any of the cells in the human body. Of course you *can* make a great story by following the Hero's Journey. A good writer *can* make a satisfying story out of almost anything. But I'm not convinced the Hero's Journey has any inherent merit of its own as a real thing that really exists.

And if one more, just ONE MORE person tries to tell me that the story of Jesus is derived from the Egyptian myth of Osiris or some other such nonsense, I will lose it.

 

Btw, reading the article Feo linked and David Brin is a nut and has completely misinterpreted several of Star Wars's major themes. And he seems to think the Skywalkers are a royal family for some reason. Incidentally, reading his article impressed me with the exact opposite of the points he was trying to make and has helped me put my finger on exactly why I almost always prefer fantasy (and cosmic fantasy like Star Wars) to actual science fiction.

His interpretation of Lord of the Rings is also mind-boggling in ways that would take too long to enumerate. Although his largest misstep by far is saying that the Ring could be used by anyone. The whole point of the book is that it can't be.

 

Read the whole thing? No. Don't have the time. Read several excerpts of it and other early comparative religion stuff in a class taught by a particularly enthusiastic professor who summarized most of the in-between parts. So my opinion on it is based more on my memory of his lectures and the class discussions than on the text itself. But since he actually was an expert in the subject matter and I paid fairly good attention and participated vivaciously in the discussions, I don't think my opinion is completely invalidated and I would deny you have sufficient grounds to declare me uninformed. Fuzzy memory perhaps. But my takeaway was that lots of people early in the study of religion drew lots of parallels where they didn't really belong. Sometimes with the end goal of debunking or at least explaining away religion entirely.

Though with Campbell, "uninformed" is a fair label. I've never had much interest in investigating his work more seriously, though I've picked up bits and pieces of it in my usual branching-paths, hyperlink-esque manner of thinking and acquiring knowledge. But Campbell's scheme is called the Monomyth is it not? Does that not literally mean "One Story"? Was his aim not to illustrate a single, transcendent framework encompassing human storytelling tradition? And does this kind of thinking, if not Campbell's work itself, lead to the creation of such crimes against the human spirit as Bill Maher's odious faux-documentary, Religulous? (The true object of my hatred. The Monomyth I mostly shrug at. But I find Bill Maher's abomination so poisonous in concept that my hate for it rubs off on Campbell merely by casual association. Yes, I know this is unfair and completely ridiculous. That's why I'm admitting it.)

 

Okay, this I'll agree with.