Refusing the Call

An anti-monomyth lil rant

The monomyth (Hero's journey) appeals to our insistent anchoring in a linear, clockwork universe. It is the shoe-horning of a complex, ambiguous, messy, recursive, paradoxical, and often random-seeming reality into a coherent, progressive cycle with beginnings, exalted ends, and a middle that ties the two together and makes sense of the inevitable suffering "in between" those two poles.

The monomyth is a template for retrospective coherence, so that we might mythologize the past as a series of sensible cycles with neatly categorical chapters and characters. Nice, comforting fictions to reassure us that what we are presently experiencing must be some prelude to a "call to adventure" or perhaps “the abyss” scheduled for 8am on every go around the mythological wheel. The monomyth reduces the irreducible mess that is life to a series of finite games, telling us that we are who and where we are because of what happened, and all of that can somehow be known and classified in fixed, preordained and universal categories. But as my favorite quote from Carse reminds us...

“Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.”

James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

I think about that quote (from one of my favorite books ever) a lot--about the past always changing, and our tendency through mythologizing to arrest that change--to classify and categorize, kill and capture the past and pin it to the wall. Once we've drained the past of all vitality so that it stops wriggling in our grasp, we can position and posture it to wield as an illustration of the actual unchanging nature of the universe… and it becomes a tool to justify what should happen in the present.

From a brief article about the monomyth:

Keith Dickson, a professor of Classics at Purdue University, says Campbell's work gives people the wrong idea about the purpose of mythology.

"Despite the pretense that these are ancient stories conveying what Joseph Campbell would call 'boons from the transcendent deep,' these are basically stories that are told by those in power in order to convince others that they should have power."

Dickson cites the story of Pandora's Box, the ancient Greek myth about the creation of woman, which depicts women as bottomless containers of nothing but evil and despair. 

"Ancient Greek society considered women a threat to the integrity of families, a subject of uncontrollable sexual desire," he said. "Urban Greeks tended to sequester their women, to lock them up."

As a relevant side-note, I want to blame Jordan Peterson for turning Carl Jung into a red flag for me, as his application of Jungian and other myths does exactly what Dickson is describing here—justifying power structures as inherent and universal using contrived, unempirical fictions.

I feel about the monomyth the way I feel about the Great Man Theory of History. It is a fiction, and perhaps a damaging one. People often, often, often emerge from what was supposed to be “the abyss” not changed or reborn but broken. They “return home” not with an elixir, not enhanced or exalted but diminished. And that is not a failure on their part, as diminishment and death are just as much a part of life as birth and growth are (they kinda have to somewhat even out at some point if you think about it). “Allies”, “enemies”, and even “mentors” are often grossly broad categorizations that urge us to treat individuals around us as Non Player Characters—instruments of our own “journey” rather than whole-ass, multi-faceted human beings with just as much complexity as we who love to consider ourselves protagonists. The imposition of ham-handed fictions upon their humanity to try and box them up in ways that serve our narrative might be classified as symbolic violence. The world and our experience in it is not divided into “ordinary” and “extraordinary” as objective truths rooted in a particular time or condition or chapter. These are subjective experiences that can emerge and change in retrospect, having nothing to do with their role in any kind of journey.

I’m not here to tell you that there aren’t possible advantages or uses for myths or specifically the monomyth. I’ve used it plenty myself for various purposes. Like any-shaped instrument wielded in a complex context, it might do the trick for you. It might get you through tough times or even help you confront and learn from a changing past. What worries me is the universality of its adoption and application. Its fingerprints are all over the place. I’m honestly just tired of the popular stories that saturate our culture right now, because I think there are cultural constructs like this with too much influence. These psychological, single-player narratives keep us, as a collective, from grasping sociological concepts whose base-level unit is not the individual but the group. We need more stories about groups—complex, non-reductive ones that might help equip us to actually confront the complexity we face.