The pseudoscience of the heroic narrative
The summer of superhero movies brings about a lot of pseudo-intellectual crap about "hero's journey"
With the Superman and Fantastic Four movies out, reviews are everywhere. As a writer of science fiction (and, sometimes, comics), I often receive links for (or copies of) reviews of a kind that can be called, perhaps, “insider/technical” — like, say, a commentary on a building written by an engineer, with special attention to technical and strucural details that would be invisible for a “layperson".
Technical reviews can sometimes isolate single aspects of a work for analysis. The technical reviews of superhero movies that find their way to me usually have a very definite focus. They are not, say, about the lighting or the acting, but about the narrative: how the story is put together.
What irks me — in my capacity as critical thinker and science communicator — is that, nine times out of ten, these “technical” reviews of narrative structure are steeped in a theoretical framework which, not to make too fine a point of it, is unadulterated bullshit: that insufferable Jungian/Campbellian archetype/hero's journey nonsense.
You may have stumbled on that stuff elsewhere. The general idea is that every “successful” heroic tale follows a template supposedly shared by all human cultures, with well-defined stages (call to adventure, reluctance, etc.). Also, what makes the tale successful is exactly the universal resonance of such a structure: it touches on archetypes of the collective unconscious.
As Joseph Campbell's (more on him presently) evangelist Christopher Vogler writes in his “The Writer's Journey”:
Such stories are accurate models of the workings of the human mind, true maps of the psyche. They are psychologically valid and emotionally realistic even when they portray fantastic, impossible, or unreal events.
This accounts for the universal power of such stories. Stories built on the model of the Hero's Journey have an appeal that can be felt by everyone, because they well up from a universal source in the shared unconscious and reflect universal concerns.
Not a single sentence of the above quotation has any basis in verifiable fact.
As the rules of civil engineering are applications of the laws of physics, this narrative engineering purportedly is an application of the laws of deep psychology, mythology, and folklore. The belief in this crap is so strong that I once met a documentary producer who wanted to structure a living scientist's biography (obviously, a non-fictional endeavor) as a hero's journey. I almost asked him whether we should substitute swords for syringes (the “hero” was a medical doctor).
The problem is that things like “hero's journey” and “archetype” are much more like phlogiston and luminiferous ether than, say, inertia and conservation of energy. “Narrativology” is, in fact, nothing like applied science. It's mostly applied superstition.
“I believe there is no single idea promulgated by amateurs that has done more harm to serious folklore study than the notion of archetype”, writes folklorist Alan Dundes in his essay Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century. “I find it invariably cited by ignorant students, as well as equally uninformed members of the general public.”
Dundes is especially scathing with literary scholar Joseph Campbell, whose book from 1949, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” launched the idea that there’s a “hero archetype” with a universal “hero’s journey”.
About the whole “hero's journey” conceit, Dundes is unforgiving: “Part of the problem stems from the fact that Campbell does not really know what a myth is”, he accuses. “It has long been a popular fantasy among amateur students of myth that all peoples share the same stories. This is clearly an example of wishful thinking.” And: “Campbell plays fast and loose with folklore data to illustrate his so-called hero pattern.”
Folklorist Barre Toelken, in his book “Dynamics of Folklore”, elaborates further:
“Based on early Jungian theories on the nature of ‘archetypes,’ Campbell’s works tried to demonstrate that many recurrent themes and plots were part of the human psychological inheritance and were therefore susceptible to cross-cultural interpretation. The problem is, of course, that irrespective of the universality of archetypal images, different cultures organize and interpret (and thus understand) the symbols quite differently. Campbell could construct a monomyth of the hero only by citing those stories which fit his preconceived mold, and leaving out equally valid stories.”
One of the main functions of superstition is to help people to contain uncertainty and anxiety, but it can backfire badly. As psychologist Stuart Vyse exemplifies in his book “Believing in Magic”, a student may feel comfort in finding a penny on the sidewalk before going for an exam, and this comfort may give him the ease of mind he most needs. On the other hand, a student may obsess with the need to find the penny before entering the exam room, thinking that, without it, he’s doomed to fail. And, because of it, arrive too late and be stopped at the door.
The archetype/hero’s journey/character arc superstition works similarly. It gained popularity after George Lucas credited Campbell's ideas as instrumental to the success of “Star Wars", much like the student who believes the lucky penny saved his grades. In the high-stakes world of blockbuster moviemaking, it became both a crutch and a cop-out: you can't be wholly blamed for a box-office flop if you did “everything right” (ie, followed the Campbellian “rules” to the letter). Lucas’ promotion of Campbell's baseless ideas mainly turned Hollywood scriptwriting into a massive Jungian-Industrial Complex.
Of course, there are good stories that follow the hero's journey mold, playing with archetypes (whatever you take that word to mean) and submitting their characters to “transformation” arcs. But there’s also a lot of garbage out there that ticks all the same boxes. And many, many great stories don’t give a damn.
To say that a story has “structural problems” because it fails to be Campbellian is like saying that a poem is bad because it happens not to have alternating rhymes, or that a beautiful, solid building can't possibly stay up because no goats were slaughtered over the foundations.
The Campbellian superstition can be as helpful, for some, as the student's lucky penny, or as damaging; it can also be a quick-and-dirty tool to generate plots that will convey any message you want (your “hero” can be anything from a communist trans woman to a genetically engineered neo-Nazi, the “journey” will take anyone). What it isn’t is a foolproof, “scientific” template for engaging storytelling, nor a projection of the collective unconscious, and most certainly not an aesthetic bar to measure the intrinsic worthiness (or lack thereof) of pieces of narrative art, popular or otherwise.