When you teach an Introduction to Literature or Introduction to Creative Writing class, your first task is to confront students with a challenging fact: life has no plot. Plot-shapes belong to literature, not to life. The syllabi of such courses usually have a built-in bias towards contemporary realism and irony, the latter being realism with an emphasis on the darker end of the spectrum of human experience. Realism presents, or seems to present on the surface, ordinary life as we experience it, which is as a continuous flow which may have crises and conflicts but which has no shape, no crafted beginning, middle, and end. In a college course on how to read literature, the examples are normally going to be modern, usually nothing before the 19th century except maybe a token Shakespeare, and the first things students are likely to notice is that so-called serious literature in modern times is not plot-driven. An anthology I used to use distinguished between stories of resolution, which have a plot that resolves, and stories of revelation, which are driven by character and theme. You get to the end of a Hemingway story, and just as you are expecting something to happen, it ends. The paradigm of such a story is Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, which consists entirely of the banal conversations, pointless and yet endless, of two bewildered characters who are waiting for Godot, who on one level is God. Godot never comes.
This is in contrast with the kind of fiction (or film) that students are likely to be fond of if they read outside of class at all: popular formula fiction, about which we spoke in a previous newsletter. Creative writing instructors may tell students in an introductory class that they have to try to learn to write literary fiction, not commercial category fiction, which is often looked down on. The same is true, only more so, in film. It is a rare action film that is going to be nominated for Best Picture, as Black Panther was, and the proposal to establish a Best Popular Film category invariably causes a furor, led by realists such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Instead, the awards are dominated by realistic and ironic films that most people never go to see. What is not often talked about academically is that this plotless purism did not exist before the ascendency of realism and irony in the late 18th century. An unexpected advantage of a career like mine teaching early-period literature is that I can appeal to untutored students with a love for a good plot. They can be difficult in other ways, especially language, but the profundities of Homer, Greek tragedy, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare are all carried by the vehicle of a solid plot. As Aristotle in the Poetics, the first great work of literary criticism, is the first to tell us. The Poetics makes plot the most important aspect of any literary work.
Aristotle’s word for plot is in fact interesting: mythos. It meant narrative, but suggests what Northrop Frye later made explicit, that the myths are a kind of comparative anatomy of plot patterns that recur later in literature. Whether literature is “derived from” mythology is a pseudo-question: first because there is no way to answer it one way or the other, and second because that is not the point. The patterns are there in the myths, on clear display because “undisplaced,” to use Frye’s adaptation of a Freudian term—nakedly on display and not cloaked with a respectable realistic surface covering. If students give up on the creative writing workshops and consult one of the innumerable self-help books for writing plot-driven fiction, they will likely be told that plot, boiled down to its essence, is “conflict and resolution.” All the typical features of a formula plot unfold from that. Conflict implies the need for protagonist and antagonist—hero and villain in conventional stories—and also the need for an object to the contest, or agon, to use the traditional term, whether a prize or some kind of achieved goal, possibly a love interest. The story may be further fleshed out with secondary characters such as a sidekick or helping figure, possibly also with a temptation figure to balance the love interest, and so on.
In folktales, which are told for entertainment and are more undistorted by the ideological pressures afflicting myth, the patterns are even more starkly on display, so much that they have been tabulated in famous books such as Morphology of the Folktale (1928) by Vladimir Propp and the motif indexes of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson (a motif is a smaller unit within the larger plot pattern). Propp assures us that there are exactly 31 “functions,” building blocks of all folktales. There is a precision here that makes us wonder a bit, especially when we see that some of the functions are not as obvious to us as they apparently were to Propp. His very first function, for example, is “absentation”: a member of the hero’s family leaves the safe home environment. We halfway expect that the second function will be “Forgets to turn on security alarm as he leaves.” But quibbles are always possible: we do not need to be folklorists to see that structural analysis of myths and folktales not only results in commonly repeated patterns but answers our original question about why stories have plot shapes and ordinary life doesn’t. The plot patterns do not come from life but from the imagination, and the “conflict” they are concerned with is that of human desire with the limitations and antagonisms of reality, which are “resolved” either comically or tragically, happily or unhappily ever after. In our culture, with its traditional gender roles and conditioning, emphasis on the conflict produces the kind of action story (or film) most popular with conventional males, while emphasis on the attainment of desire produces the love story, driven by the woman’s determination to get her man. These are mostly escapist entertainment for a mass audience, and by this point in these newsletters I hope it is obvious that I say that without condescension.
Aristotle’s word mythos, however, implies something deeper, and takes us to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), one of the most popular works in the history of comparative mythology and a book that academics love to dismiss. Campbell’s book has a few limitations, such as an inadequate, by current standards, treatment of the feminine side of the picture, but most attacks on the book use the game plan that academic studies tend to follow when they need a Bad Example: they produce a reductive reading of the book and assert that the book is really as limited as the reduction. It is often not clear whether the critics are incompetent readers, ideologically driven, or both at once. The opening of Hero presents a model that Campbell calls the Monomyth, a circular pattern followed by the hero’s quest, of separation, initiation, and return. This model has been known to produce an allergic reaction on the part of some readers. Many years ago, when I was living in Buffalo, I was asked whether I wanted to lead a discussion of a video on the hero’s quest at a chapter of the Analytical Psychology Society. The person who asked me admitted that other potential moderators did not want to undertake the task because some members of the discussion group were irritated by the subject of the “myth of the hero.” Although the eventual conversation actually proceeded quite peaceably, the irritation, then and now, is provoked by two perceptions: (1) that the myth of the hero glorifies male violence and the subjection of women; (2) that the quest myth replaces the irreducible differences and variations of mythology with one oversimplified diagram—in short, it is a cliché, popular with those types who love clichés and least common denominators.
The two are really versions of the same objection. As for the first, the hero as warrior is only one type, a type that in our time is subject to ideological kidnapping. Yes, hero stories can be power fantasies for an immature audience, largely male, in which case they may indeed glorify violence and a sexist attitude towards woman. They can be even worse than that: the Nazis identified themselves with the Germanic hero Siegfried as interpreted by the twisted idea of a “superman” based on a distortion of Nietzsche. The Arthurian stories have been put to service rationalizing British imperialism. But in real myths (as opposed to mere constructions of propaganda) there is an imaginative kernel separate from the ideological message that has been attached to it. It is an important task of criticism to distinguish between the two, and to defend the genuine vision from those who would reduce it to mere ideology.
As for the second objection, the charge of oversimplification, The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a large and complex book, and partly so because of its emphasis on the thousand faces, an emphasis further expanded in Campbell’s later work by the significant title of his magnum opus, The Masks of God. Hero overflows with a profusion of heroic types: the hero as sacrificial god, as lover, as saint or savior, as artist—and the hero as Trickster or anti-hero. The contempt in the voices of some people who pronounce the word Monomyth as if it were a thin disguise for “monomania” or “monolith” is undeserved. There is an irony here, for where did that word come from? Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, about which Campbell had just co-written a Skeleton Key. The whole point of the Wake, on which one of the most important Modernist writers spent 17 years, is serious satire on mythology. The “hero” is Finnegan, and who is Finnegan? Either the traditional Irish hero Finn McCool—or Tim Finnegan from a popular Irish drinking song, a manual laborer who fell off a ladder, was declared dead, had whiskey splashed on him during his wake, and “resurrected.” The song’s refrain is, “Lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake.” Joyce’s title leaves out the apostrophe and makes “Finnegans” plural. Thus we are all Finnegans, and we all wake, even if some of us need a little alcoholic assistance. In the text of the Wake, through punning, shifting, metamorphic dream language, all things turn into all other things, all characters into all other characters. Finnegan has an “offspring” going by the initials HCE who is related to him somewhat as the Son is related to the Father in Christianity, which is to say consubstantially, of one substance. He does what Bottom wants to do in the rude mechanicals’ theatrical production in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—plays all the parts himself. One theory is that HCE has a baseline identity as a Dublin tavern keeper named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Another theory is that no such real-world grounding ever occurs: Earwicker is just one more illusion of the stuff that dreams are made on. So the “hero” of Joyce’s book, a book that is about a hero with a thousand faces and about the masks of God, is either an archaic Irish warrior, a drunken construction worker, or a tavern keeper, or none of the above. It’s lots of fun, and Joyce intended it to be so.
People accuse Campbell’s Skeleton Key to the Wake of trying to pin identities down, because it provides a simplified reading as a way of enabling a reader to get through one of the most difficult books ever written, without implying “this is all it really means.” Exactly the same is true of Hero: it is a teacher’s book, arising directly from Campbell’s classes at Sarah Lawrence, and it is driven by the teacher’s desire to give students something to hang on to, an Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth. Such a procedure has its dangers, as I can well attest: the lazy or reductive-minded students will want to reduce everything to some abstract oversimplification, either because they do not know how to do otherwise or because that beats having to do the hard work of thinking. There is nothing to be done about this except given them their B-, explain exactly why their argument says nothing but the obvious, and move on.
So the hero myth is metamorphic, and spans a whole range of examples from divine hero to anti-hero. I am sure that there is even room for the hero of Tom Disch’s children’s book The Brave Little Toaster. And yet for all the flux, there is still a paradigm, or we wouldn’t see all these works as belonging to a single category—and we do, even though it is a shapeshifter, eluding our grasp the harder we try to hold on to it, like Proteus in the Odyssey. However: like everything, according to William Blake, the hero’s quest has a Contrary. Campbell is aware of it, and calls it the Cosmogonic Cycle. The entire second half of Hero is about it—the half nobody reads.
No good to say the hero myth is a fabrication. Heroes are everywhere—in all the old epics and tragedies and romances, and still going strong in popular literature today. Northrop Frye seems clearly influenced by Campbell in his treatment of the hero in Essay 1 of Anatomy of Criticism and in “The Archetypes of Literature” the important essay that contained the Anatomy in microcosm. Still, the hero myth is the story of an active agent whose heroic will brings about the desirable ending, and that is only part of the story. Even my students often know this, in their way. When I ask for examples of modern heroes, the commonest response I get, including from male students, is not warrior heroes or athletic superstars, but the heroes of 9/11. So at least some of them know that the essence of a hero is devotion to something beyond the self and not just the euphoria of power and will. In other words, at a certain point, heroes reach a limit to their own power, their own will, the limitations of their own finite ego identity, beyond which they must surrender and say, “Thy will be done.” Campbell drew the shape of the Monomyth as a circle. The hero starts at the top, descends or falls, reaches a nadir point at the bottom of the circle, at which point there is a reversal and an ascent up the other side of the circle, until the quest ends where it began. That is the shape of the hero’s journey, a series of descents and ascents to lower and higher realms of being. But the journey is a factor in its own right, the objective counterpart to the hero’s subjective agency. It is “the way,” a powerful metaphor everywhere from the New Testament to Taoism. In a late essay, “The Journey as Metaphor,” much of which was incorporated into the second half of Words with Power, on the Bible and literature, Frye focused on the journey, the way, the pattern of descents and ascents, rather than on a heroic agent who journeys.
He is not the only one. In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, the reviewer and critic John Clute has come up with a paradigm for the narrative of the genre of fantasy that has four stages, which he names wrongness, thinning, recognition, and return or healing. But these are attempts, as I understand them, at finding an affective rather than a structural vocabulary for the same pattern. Wrongness and thinning (which refers to the failure of the texture of reality as a result of wrongness, as when magic begins to fail) imply descent to a lower state of experience; recognition and return clearly imply an ascent to higher consciousness or mode of being, but again without implying that some conquering hero has done the traveling and produced the results. The active agent is relativized—for the reason that there may in some stories, especially modern stories, be no active agent. Or the agent may be, as Frye says in another late work, a study of the genre of romance (of which fantasy is a modern version) called The Secular Scripture, someone distinctly non-heroic by conventional standards. The heroes of medieval and Renaissance romance may be aristocratic knights. But there is a counter-tradition explored in Frye’s book in which they may be women, children, slaves, animals, orphans like Harry Potter, hobbits. The virtues needed to accomplish the quest are often supposedly non-heroic virtues such as patience, endurance, compassion, wisdom, cunning, imagination—inward virtues one and all.
The Cosmogonic Cycle is Campbell’s version of “the way.” In some religions, Neoplatonism and some versions of Gnosticism in the West, with suggestive analogies in Eastern religions, the entire universe is the emanation from some spiritual source, often one so beyond human conception as to be characterized only as the One. Christianity personifies this One as the Father, but the Father is the transcendent, unknowable aspect of God, even as he is the source of our being. Everything in the universe emanates from the spiritual source, achieves its level of differentiation and individuality in what is a “descent” from an infinite mode of being yet not necessarily a Fall, and then returns in an ascent that culminates in a mystical union with the One, “a drop of water into the ocean,” as a common metaphor of both Christian and Islamic mystics has it. This emanation and return pattern is the Monomyth, conceived differently, as a transformative power that creates, decreates, and recreates endlessly.
The mythos or plot pattern of the hero myth has now grown more complicated. We have two elements on our hands, the hero and the “way” on which the hero journeys. The “way” can be represented as the will of a higher being, a One or spiritual Father; it can be represented as fate, destiny, wyrd, a compelling design informing the hero’s story; it can be represented as the fabric of reality itself, as with tao—a word often translated “way.” Whatever the case, heroes, or those who aspire to become heroes, have to align themselves in relation to some mystery beyond their own will, desires, and understanding. One possible choice, the conventional one, is that the hero chooses to become the instrument and emissary of that transcendent power. We are all its instruments, but the hero wills it—wills to surrender his will. Once again, “thy will be done.” And yet not just “thy will,” for “I and the Father are one.” Campbell explicitly says that the relationship of the hero to the Cosmogonic Cycle is the relationship of the Son to the Father, but that is a Christian symbol for something much more comprehensive. Jungian depth psychology speaks of “the ego-Self axis”: for all people, heroes or otherwise, the task of individuation is to detach from simple identification with the ego. There is a larger Self, with which we are at once identical and not identical, which people may experience as a deeper level of the psyche, as some kind of fate or destiny, or as the will of God, as Paul did when he spoke of “I, yet not I, but Christ in me.”
However, there is another possibility: the hero may choose the role of the rebel and Trickster who defies the Father: sons and fathers do not always get along, as Oedipus can attest. This is the revolutionary possibility, embodied in the figure of Prometheus, in Blake’s fiery-haired Orc, symbol of both liberated sexual desire and political revolution against tyranny. That does not make him any less of a chip off the old block: the electrifying moment in the original Star Wars series was when Darth Vader said to Luke, “I am your father.”
At this point we return to our original perception of the discrepancy between ordinary experience, which simply flows on indefinitely, and the plots of literature, which are shapes with beginning, middle, and end, conflict and resolution. The characters in a work of literature are living in a story, a narrative with a meaningful shape, even if they do not know it. The question arises: are we too living in a meaningfully shaped story? This is the theme of one of the great fantasies of our time, John Crowley’s Little, Big (1982). The protagonist, a mortal named Smoky Barnable, marries a fairy woman, Tiny Alice. Although the family accepts the marriage, Smoky inevitably remains an outsider, because the fairies do belong to a story, and in fact they know it. At the end of the book, they leave our reality and return to the fairy world, because that is part of the story, and Smoky is left behind, dying of a heart attack in the process. Are we characters in a story, even if, not being fairies, we are not aware of it? For in fact we long to be part of a story, and this is anything but an eccentric wish. It is the desire that life have shape and meaning, even if tragic and full of suffering, that it is not Macbeth’s tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The function of traditional mythology was to provide assurance that we are part of a larger story. Perhaps we are called to be heroes, but, even if not, we have our meaningful part to play. But Campbell’s work on mythology, like that of Frye and Jung in the same generation that came to maturity during the Modernist crisis after World War I, arose as a response to the crisis produced by widespread perception that the traditional story that gave meaning to Western culture had failed, had died. At the outset in Hero, Campbell makes clear that he writes not just for students but for all the typical denizens of modernity, who have lost their living myth, who have no story:
The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved—by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through milleniums. It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight is truly desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. (23)
A recent newsletter concerned the goal of liberal education. The present way of understanding liberal education was in fact a direct response to the crisis of modernity, to the perception that large masses of people no longer had a myth, a living story that gave meaning to their lives. Christianity has not wholly died, but secularization is widespread, especially in Europe, and increasing. Moreover, much of what purports to be Christianity, the right-wing “Christian nationalism” of both Europe and the United States, is demonic and toxic, not real Christianity at all but a form of nihilism occurring as the collective unconscious is increasingly inflated by the will to power.
Perhaps the sentiment “I need to have or be in a story” sounds like New Age whining, but “story” is shorthand for the imagination, and the imagination really is the home of human life—it’s not just a slogan. Evicted from their home, large numbers of lost souls are looking for a story to inhabit, and if they cannot find it through liberal education they will find it in mass culture. The idea of “grooming” is real—the lie is about where it occurs, not in “woke” circles but in right-wing militias and websites, on Fox News, in the Republican party. Empty people are being groomed exactly as Islamic terrorists are groomed, and there is in fact little difference between them beneath the labels. Those who are not radicalized politically radicalize themselves—and they do so by creating a story with themselves at its center. Mass shooters are not really trying to get revenge—they do not even know the people they kill. They are creating a drama with themselves in the lead role, and in fact often use social media to publicize the drama ahead of time. They know they are going to die: they intend to die, for that is part of the story, its climax. This is also true of those who stalk celebrities. Unable to become famous themselves, they will become part of the story of someone who is, even if it means playing the role of Judas. Think of how you will always be remembered as the one who assassinated John Lennon.
There are also more harmless versions of trying to live in a story. This is what Trekkies do; this is the purpose of a lot of cosplay, especially involved in dressing in Star Wars or Harry Potter outfits, dueling with light sabers or competing in quidditch. It is also what Renaissance fairs and Creative Anachronism activities are, or were, all about. In Stories about Stories, fantasy critic Brian Attebery, who was trained as a folklorist, speaks of the folklore concept of “memorates,” personal experiences which resemble miniature initiation rites, giving people a sense that they not only believe in a certain story but are part of it, because they have actually experienced it. In traditional Christianity, such was the function of miracles. These days, it may take the form of having an encounter with a UFO (as I write this, the film Nope has just been released).
Liberal education tries to present students with the full range of meaningful stories produced by their culture. It also provides instruction in how to compare and critique the stories, including comparing them to the stories of other cultures. It tries, however imperfectly, to distinguish the imaginative visions from the ideologies invariably attached to them—all of which not only provides help in deciding “what myth am I living? what myth may I want to live instead?” but also in deciding “what myth is my society living? how may I work towards participating in or opposing and changing that myth?” Conservatives complain about liberal education that instead of being presented with one set of true values—theirs, of course—students are presented with a smorgasbord from which they may self-indulgently, relativistically pick and choose. But the great conflicts of the world are conflicts between competing stories, and what story you choose to identify with is a fateful choice. In Words with Power, Northrop Frye adopts from Biblical scholarship the notion of kerygma, which traditionally meant “proclamation,” as if by a herald. Something in the language of the Bible reaches out and possesses a reader—it may be only a single passage—so that the reader’s
+response is “That’s for me.” This is not necessarily the same as conversion, if conversion means belief. Belief is only assent to the ideology attached to a story. But the Bible has possessed people who can neither accept it as belief or make it go away, so that they are condemned, or liberated, depending upon your point of view, to a lifetime of wrestling with it like Jacob with the angel. Frye’s examples are Emily Dickinson and William Blake. For what it is worth, it is true of me. Frye is willing to grant literary works a comparably kerygmatic capacity. It does not matter that literary works are fictional and do not seek to compel belief, because possession is something apart from belief anyway. Liberal education works to enable a kerygmatic experience in students’ lives, and at the same time to teach students how to critique that experience rather than merely being taken over by it. There are those who say that such an ideal, because contradictory, shows liberal education’s incoherence and bankruptcy. There are also those who say that all stories are comforting illusions, protecting people from the truth that life is existentially absurd.
But of course those too are stories, and need to be critiqued in their turn.
References
Attebery, Brian. Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XVII, 1949.
Clute, John. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. See the entry “Fantasy” as a starting point. Accessible as a link at www.sf-encyclopedia.com.
September 9, 2022
Since I have been religiously reading these newsletters with pleasure, I thought I should throw out a B-comment at some point. Imaginative vision may be distinguished from ideology but not disentangled from it. In the West, the myth of democracy, the myth of the American way of life, or even, the myth of the madrassa referred to directly in this newsletter, come advertised with the images as packaging and emblems. And then, often, we get a professional wrestling match between right wing and left wing versions of these which paints the other side with the demonic version of itself.
So instead of plot and probability (Aristotle's eikos) we now have character and relatability.