This week: Everyone's a Hero Edited by: Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  
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When I was a boy, I always saw myself as a hero in comic books and in movies. I grew up believing this dream.
--Elvis Presley
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
--Orson Welles
Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.
--John Barth |
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Let me tell you a story. It’s about a young man’s journey, but it could be about anyone. It could even be about you. It’s a story with a thousand faces.
When people encounter new ways of doing things, strange and wonderful discoveries sometimes follow.
James Joyce certainly wrote in new, and complex ways. He endeavored to bring the ancient tradition of myth into the modern world. Novels like Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are among the most influential of the twentieth century. Their impenetrable style also makes them among the least-read novels, but that’s another story.
Our story starts when our hero read Joyce’s Ulysses as a young man, still studying literature in college. The novel challenged him, but he was determined to understand it. He recognized the novelty and the complexity of Joyce’s work, and studied the texts. He found echoes of Odysseus’ mythical journeys in Bloom’s walk through Dublin, echoes that said things about the modern world. Through friends and mentors, he learned of similar journeys in Far Eastern myths. He became a defender of Joyce against censorship and opprobrium.
Most significantly, reading Joyce changed his life. He realized that the truths that the Homer revealed in the Odyssey were the same that as those that Joyce reveals in Ulysses, except that Homer used the symbols and culture of classical Greece and Joyce used those of contemporary Dublin. The journey, whether Bloom’s walk or Ulysses’ adventures, was a metaphor for reaching those truths—a powerful myth illuminating a life’s journey of discovery, redemption, and meaning.
Joyce’s resetting of the Odyssey was an artifact, a deliberate work of art. But our hero wondered if it was more than that. If the truths and the journey to learn them were universal, then perhaps other myths, from other cultures, places, and times, might fit a similar pattern. Perhaps the connnection between the journeys on which Homer's and Joyces's heroes embarked revealed something deeper and more universal.
This became our hero’s life’s journey—to discover the interconnectedness of myths and, through that, the interconnectedness of humankind. His life's journey became a hero’s journey, a model for the universal myth that he discovered. It started with a challenge, included finding allies, went on to a quest for understanding, and finally to a transformation and lasting legacy. This life journey, this hero's journey, could be anyone's. It could be mine, or even yours.
The hero of this little story is, of course, Joseph Campbell. In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, he argued that the hero’s journey powered myths from many cultures and called it a monomyth, a term he borrowed from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. In fact, he found it in every culture he examined. He went so far as to identify seventeen steps in the hero’s journey, and to show how various myths, whether they involved Buddha, Krishna, Appolonius, or others followed the pattern.
Myths appear in all cultures, and sometimes even grow around historical figures. Not all myths involve the hero’s journey, but there is little doubt that the Campbell’s ideas have had enormous influence. All you have to do is look at movies like Star Wars or even the recent Barbie.
Myths are metaphors. They are a path to understanding living, dying, and how we fit into the world. We can imagine that the first myths arose in pre-history, perhaps even before the taming of fire. Surely, language must have given birth to myths as soon as the first humans spoke. Whatever else we are, we are a story-telling species.
Some of us tell ourselves stories about ourselves, about our lives. Indeed, psychological studies show that people who frame their lives as a journey find more significance in living, have more resilience, and are less likely to suffer from depression. There is even research supporting the notion that “re-telling” therapy that encourages people to re-tell their life story as a hero’s journey is transformative.
In their studies, the researchers used a simplified form of the Hero’s Journey rather than the seventeen steps identified by Campbell. Their “hero’s journey” involves a lead protagonist, a shift in circumstances, a quest, allies, a challenge, a personal transformation, and a legacy.
The life journey doesn't have to be epic to be a hero's journey. Imagine, if you will, someone who changes careers, or perhaps, loses a loved one. Those are changes in circumstances--ones that could be crushing. But, maybe, they find mentors in their new career or friends to sustain them in their loss. Starting a new career or a new life is certainly a challenge, but it's one that can result in a personal transformation. A life-changing transformation is epic in anyone's personal history even if it doesn't result in saving the galaxy by blowing up the Death Star.
As authors, this simplified form of the hero’s journey is surely useful: we can use it as a streamlined form the hero's journey as we write.
If the researchers are right—and their research sounds convincing—then this simplified hero’s journey speaks to something intrinsic in the human psyche. We have hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that shape our common heritage, so it’s not surprising that something like the hero’s journey could touch a deep chord. Perhaps Campbell and Jung were onto something, Campbell with his monomyth and Jung with his ideas of the collective unconscious. That’s even more reason to consider using these ideas as another writing tool.
As I consider my own life, I wouldn’t say it’s “heroic,” but it is a sequence of journeys, and each follow the basic outline that the researchers described. Whether it’s my journey as a father, a spouse, a mathematician, or an author, these journeys weave together to form the story of my life.
Everyone’s a hero of their own story. What’s the story of your journey?
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For more information on the research mentioned in this newsletter, see "To Lead a Meaningful Life, Become Your Own Hero," Scientific American, vol 330, no 1, Jan 2024, pp, 82-93. |
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