Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a fascinating book. It explores and compares stories from many cultures. Some people, notably George Lucas, have used the patterns he found as a template for their stories.
But the attempt to extract a “monomyth” from all the world’s heroic quest stories doesn’t impress me very much. It has an intensely Freudian focus and plays down aspects of myth which don’t fall into that scheme. I’m no folklorist, so don’t expect expert analysis here, but to me the basic formulation seems forced.
The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: Separation — initiation — return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
The pattern fits many stories. In Greek mythology, we have Orpheus descending into Hades, Perseus killing Medusa, Theseus facing the Minotaur, etc. In opera, The Magic Flute is a clear example. In modern literature, tales like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit, and The Neverending Story follow the pattern. Don Quixote parodied it centuries ago.
A lot of heroic adventures fit the pattern, but an even larger number don’t, at least not without a lot of shoving and squeezing. Many stories start with the hero at the height of his power and experience, in a world where the fantastic is already the normal. The allies and adversaries are often at least as important as the hero. Sometimes the hero doesn’t come back. There are lots of variations. You can stretch the monomyth to the universal hero-plot: “A problem arises. Someone addresses it. There’s an epilogue.” (Or perhaps: “They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat.”) But Campbell was saying more than that. His focus is on inner experience, which a lot of heroic stories don’t care about.
The variety of stories discussed is fascinating, but it gives the impression of cherry-picking. Rather than taking a few stories and showing how they follow the monomyth pattern, he discusses different stories for each step. You can make any set of commonly used tropes a pattern by this technique.
Campbell’s thesis is easier to take without the psychoanalytic trappings. Passages like this get overbearing:
The unfortunate father is the first radical intrusion of another order of reality into the beatitude of this earthly restatement of the excellence of the situation within the womb; he, therefore, is primarily experienced as an enemy. To him is transferred the charge of aggression that was originally attached to the “bad,” or absent mother, while the desire attaching to the “good,” or present, nourishing, and protecting mother, she herself (normally) remains. This fateful infantile distribution of death (thanatos: destrudo) and love (eros: libido) impulses builds the foundation of the now celebrated Oedipus complex, which Sigmund Freud pointed out some fifty years ago as the great cause of our adult failure to behave like rational beings.
I find the book fascinating not for that, but for all the myths it explores and compares. It covers stories not just from familiar European and Middle Eastern traditions, but from Polynesia, India, China, Africa, pre-colonial North America, and many other places. I think this is the reason for its continuing popularity, not its attempt to force all kinds of stories into one mold. Their variety, not their uniformity, is what fascinates readers.
Even if you don’t take Campbell’s theory seriously, the book is fun to read for the stories and comparisons.