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The Hero with a Thousand Essays
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 10:58 pmIt looks like I am about to commit the heresy of teaching a course on fantasy without mentioning Joseph Campbell. For two courses on Tolkien I dutifully included the most readable text on the Hero's Journey I could find, and had students apply it to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars—the last because it's about the only epic tale that closely follows Campbell, and that's only because Lucas made it so. The Hero's Journey is like any of these structuralist templates: it works up to a point, but that point is usually nothing to make a song and dance about. After we'd diligently applied Campbell's wisdom to a variety of fairy tales and legends in addition to the above fantasy classics, I threw up my hands and said, "Well, what we can conclude here is that all stories have a beginning, a middle and an end."
The real problem, though, is that it's very hard to get any decent writing from students infected with the Hero meme. I set two choices for the second essay in the Tolkien course: the first was to compare Tolkien's view of evil with that of any other fantasy or SF author; the second, as you've probably guessed already, was to apply the Hero's Journey idea to TLOTR and any other fantasy or SF work. With a few exceptions, the essays on the first topic were better. Maybe it was self-selection, as the good students were more likely than their weaker classmates to tackle a subject which required contrasting Boethean and Manichean evilology; on the other hand, there is the possibility that Campbellism actually encourages mechanical essay-writing (not to mention script-writing).
And there you have another problem: setting students an essay about the Hero's Journey is an open invitation to low-level, cut-and-paste plagiarism. There are so many essays out there, that the temptation to take an idea from one, a sentence from another and the works cited page of a third is hard to resist. And even if you want to write an entirely original paper, you risk unwittingly reproducing the work of others. I mean it would probably be OK to apply Campbell's ideas to The Happy Hooker, but write about TLOTR and what can you say? Gandalf isn't the Herald? Moria isn't the Belly of the Whale? Those eagles have nothing to do with Magical Flight? Of course there is the most important and totally un-Campbellian point that Frodo is not on a quest to find a talisman but to destroy one, but that too has been gone over in hundreds of high school essays.
Maybe it's time to bid farewell to the Hero with a Thousand Faces. We've come a long way together, but, as Tom Shippey once said in a class I was in, we need new archetypes—even if that's an oxymoron. Perhaps the interesting fantasy heroes are the ones on a different journey.
The real problem, though, is that it's very hard to get any decent writing from students infected with the Hero meme. I set two choices for the second essay in the Tolkien course: the first was to compare Tolkien's view of evil with that of any other fantasy or SF author; the second, as you've probably guessed already, was to apply the Hero's Journey idea to TLOTR and any other fantasy or SF work. With a few exceptions, the essays on the first topic were better. Maybe it was self-selection, as the good students were more likely than their weaker classmates to tackle a subject which required contrasting Boethean and Manichean evilology; on the other hand, there is the possibility that Campbellism actually encourages mechanical essay-writing (not to mention script-writing).
And there you have another problem: setting students an essay about the Hero's Journey is an open invitation to low-level, cut-and-paste plagiarism. There are so many essays out there, that the temptation to take an idea from one, a sentence from another and the works cited page of a third is hard to resist. And even if you want to write an entirely original paper, you risk unwittingly reproducing the work of others. I mean it would probably be OK to apply Campbell's ideas to The Happy Hooker, but write about TLOTR and what can you say? Gandalf isn't the Herald? Moria isn't the Belly of the Whale? Those eagles have nothing to do with Magical Flight? Of course there is the most important and totally un-Campbellian point that Frodo is not on a quest to find a talisman but to destroy one, but that too has been gone over in hundreds of high school essays.
Maybe it's time to bid farewell to the Hero with a Thousand Faces. We've come a long way together, but, as Tom Shippey once said in a class I was in, we need new archetypes—even if that's an oxymoron. Perhaps the interesting fantasy heroes are the ones on a different journey.
