> If I might digress into something other than poo-throwing and
> bile-spewing for a bit, does anybody know whether Joseph Campbell's
> description of the hero's journey is held to have any academic
merit?
It really depends who you ask, but a the risk of over-simplifying, NO.
I've had a continuing love-hate relationship with Campbell over the years, and still find much to enjoy and illuminate in his writing, but his basic monomyth stuff is best regarded, IMNSHO, as a postsocial, literary 'mythology about mythology'.
Campbell is basically a Jungian. Jung and his disciples were among the last of the universalists, a laregly nineteenth century mode of armchair scholarship that looked for universal causes or meanings 'behind' mythology while largely ignoring their social and cultural manifestations and uses.
Jungians hold that myths are caused by universal, pan-cultural mental and psychological patterns called archetypes that 'erupt' into consciousness and that often seem to have a life of their own. What exactly constitutes an archetype involves a particular kind of circular reasoning. While the theory and its applications have varying decrees of subtlety, I think its fair to say that Jungian explanations don't have much currency in the wider academy; though with its spiritual underpinings, the corpus enjoys continuing popularity as a quasi-scientific personal philosophy.
As with Freud, Jung's basic propositions aren't falsifiable (able to be tested) and you either take them or leave them. Both systems were initially eclipsed as cultural philosophies because the treatments associated with their teachings didn't work as well as other methods. More than the academy, it was the health insurers who killed them off, though both continue in their own, more-or-less self-contained worlds. Recent discoveries in the nature of the brain, consciousness and the bodymind have left both way behind. They were insightful pioneers, but science has moved on.
I still claim a kind of libido kinship with Jung and with Campbell for this very reason. Their methods can provide a powerful, personal kind of 'shorthand' for examining one's inner life and creativity.
Both Jung and Campbell hold that myth is primarily psychological. Most of the social sciences would claim that even if the origins (or partial origins) of myth are psychological, the way they are used, communicated, added to and censored are all *social* (political, economic, environmental) processes, and that this is the dominant and determining matrix. Myths are stories used to justify social meanings, social power, and social actions. People use them for social ends. Myths change over time because of social forces. To attempt to understand them without a close examination of the societies and cultures of which they are a part is useless. Hence the anthropolgical approach to myth.
The only anthropological engagements with Campbell that I know of came with the first publication of the monomyth idea. If you've ever wandered through 'Hero With A Thousand Faces', with its curious mix of Freud and Jung, you'll note that Campbell gives lots of partial examples of the monomyth, but never actually gives a myth sequence that has all the bits. Anthropologists wanted complete examples. Campbell, as far as I know, never gave a satisfactory reply.
So most of the social sciences ignore Campbell - however, he still has a certain currency among certain types of folklorists and literary scholars - that is (at the risk of oversimplifying), people who primarily deal with myth as a story on a printed page rather than as a living, changing force in a real society. When I gave a talk a few years ago on mythology (at a fairly scholarly Arthurian convention), I was impressed by the amount of engagement Campbell received from people in these fields.
To a certain extent, the monomyth reflects basic human responses to adversity and the need to creatively engage with change. All stories are about this in the widest sense. To this extent, the monomyth can be considered 'true' - though in the same way as say, Philip K. Dick's 'A man falls in a hole' theory of story - in which Dick claims (no doubt with his usual underpinnings of humour and irony) that all stories fall into the pattern of 'a man falls into a hole, can't get out, finds a way out.' The man doesn't have to a man, the hole doesn't have to a hole, etc, etc, but all stories are about this.
In the same way, you'll have to struggle and stretch and bash things into new shapes to find Meetings with the Goddess, Belly of the Whale, Atonement with the Father etc. in lots of stories that Campbell considers examples of the Monomyth.
Its a big question, and many of the issues I've touched on are open to considerable debate and discussion. And even though I consider Campbell (and indeed Jung) to have little real world utility, both can be extremely rewarding.
I hope this helped. :)
Cheers
John
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