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As an anthropologist specializing among other things in myth and folk literature, and as a writer who has sat on many a con panel on myth, fairy tales, quest stories and the like, I often have to wrassle the monsters Monomyth, Universal Archetype, and their lesser-known littermates, who have been spawned by Joseph Campbell and other Jung-influenced writers.
The monomyth, a word Campbell took from James Joyce, is essentially a proposed universal structure underlying the hero’s journey, with phases that include The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, Crossing the Threshold (into the magical realm), and so on. What’s wrong with the monomyth? There’s no doubt that pieces of it are found not only in a huge percentage of fantasy fiction, but also in widely scattered mythic and folk literary traditions all over the world.
However. Is it universal?
Methodologically, what both Campbell and Jung have done is cherry-picking, and often from texts that have already been translated and/or rewritten to conform to Western notions of what makes a satisfying story. Let me start with an example of the latter. …
I just started the latest from Neal Stephenson, which I notice has already hit the remainder tables after coming out in late 2008. It’s a little slow going, in large part because Stephenson really wants you to understand what he’s making up. Opening at a random page, here’s a random paragraph:
The praxis had done it with water power. Far outside of our walls, upstream of the cataract — therefore, at an altitude well above our heads — they had carved a pool, like an open cistern, out of the river’s stony course, and made it feed an aqueduct that cut due south towards the Mynster, bypassing the cataract , the bridge and the bend. After rushing through a short tunnel and loping on stone stilts across half a mile of broken terrain, this dove into the ground and became a buried pipe that passed beneath what was now a settled neighborhood of burgers. The water in the pipe, pressurized by gravity, erupted in a pair of fountains from a pond that lay just outside of the Day Gate. A causeway ran across the middle of that pond, connecting the central square of the burgers’ town, at its northern end, to our Day Gate at its southern, passing between those two fountains.
Geez, I would have just been happy to know there were two fountains in front of the gate that flanked the town’s central square!
I was reading a newish fantasy novel the other day and every time a new character or place was introduced, the author felt compelled to lather him/her/it in opaque chunks of backstory. 
Binky “Bosco” Sorenson walked into the Taberna Generica. He was called “Bosco” because of his resemblance to [some guy named Bosco; a page or so of backstory follows]. The Taberna Generica had been established several centuries before so that parties of elves, wizards, rogues, dwarves and assassins could meet before departing on their quests. The first such meeting [was as dull as you might expect; a page or two of backstory follows].
As the door clicked shut, Binky realized he had never heard a door click shut like that before. [A page or two of exposition follows, documenting Binky’s talents in analyzing door-sounds.] He instantly realized that he was facing a danger neither he nor anyone had ever faced since the founding of the Imaginary City. [Scene break.]
I originally planned to make today’s post a review of the film version of The Land That Time Forgot. But I decided that 1) I didn’t want to pack in too much Burroughs back-to-back, and my upcoming plans would start changing my Black Gate blogging into an “All-Burroughs, All-the-Time” radio station; 2) You probably don’t want yet another post from me that requires approximately three hours to read; and 3) …well, look, I just got too busy this week and ran out of time to craft the proper tribute to that movie.
And I ran out of time because I’ve gotten productive with my revision work these last two weeks. I’ve started to write “on the clock” and “punch in” whenever I start. The technique has worked so well for me that I’ve decided I can make a blog post out of it. And have it come in under a thousand words.
A rather entertaining comment on the cross-posted version of my last week’s entry takes up the subject of women’s roller derby skating in relation to the woman warrior.
Venturing onto another tributary of the Great River that is the topic of realism, a few years back I heard Rudy Rucker give a pretty interesting GoH talk at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The talk was called called “Seek the Gnarl,” and the pdf file can be found here. (Wow, his site is blocked by the UAE government! I wonder whether it’s for “offense against religion” or “hacking and malicious codes”…)
Basically, Rucker’s talk was about predictability and lack of it in fiction, and how fiction should strive–in plot, character, setting, and so on–for the complex beauty of chaotic structures like flowing water or tree bark. Those structures are what he calls gnarl. Too much unpredictability and we don’t feel the aesthetic satisfactions of pattern; too much predictability and it’s flat and boring.
A lot of genre readers might take issue with where he puts realism in his various tables–might feel that the problem with a lot of mimetic fiction is that it’s too boring and predictable. (I’d argue RR is talking about realism as a literary technique rather than as a marketing category, and that he means certain specific things by “mimetic realism” not necessarily found in so-called mainstream fiction, but that’s a rather long digression.)
When I heard the talk, I didn’t feel the concept of gnarl was completely adequate to describe the mix of familiarity and surprise possessed by really satisfying fiction. I’ve always liked Kenneth Burke on “the arousal and satisfaction of expectations” in fiction, and what I find interesting about that concept is the way that as readers we can be so completely satisfied by something utterly unexpected. We love surprises and reversals, obstacles appearing at unexpected times or in unexpected ways, a different reality suddenly ghosting into solidity out of what have now been proved to be mere appearances. The maguffin is a fake, the villain is your father, the first-person narrator is the one who dunit. But the satisfaction arises out of the feeling that a pattern, an arc, has been completed–it’s just one we couldn’t at first perceive. We’re outraged by surprise if it we can’t fit it into an aesthetic whole. So the most satisfying “arousal and satisfaction of expectations” comes from complex flows and overlays of pattern–competing patterns that combine in unpredictable ways, or unfold and transform one into another. In other words, we’re back to gnarl.
(The last few paragraphs are taken from an from old and longer LJ post of mine.)
I just finished Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys, which, as anyone familiar with his work might expect, is thought provokingly funny. The main character, Jane Charlotte (and,yes, as fans of Ruff also know, he’s never met a literary allusion he doesn’t like) is in a detention center, has evidently killed someone, and also seems crazy. A psychiatrist seems to be trying to determine the underlying cause of her psychosis, which forms the novel’s narrative in which Jane recounts her fantastic adventures in a secret organization dedicated to the elimination of murderers, child molesters and other purely evil people. Of course, we’ve been down this road before — is she crazy or is there really some sort of alternate universe where good does triumph over evil. All through the book you’re trying to figure out how Ruff is going to turn the tables and come up with an ending that is something more than an average Twilight Zone denouement. And he manages to pull it off.
Fun stuff, though his previous book, Set This House in Order, is his best and the one I’d recommend first if you haven’t read him before. His other two novels are Sewer, Gas & Electric and the cult-classic Fool on the Hill, which was one of the first reviews I did for Black Gate publisher John O’Neil when he was helping to start the whole on-line reviewing thing at SF Site.
I recently reread Le Guin’s Language of the Night, and for a while I thought it might be a mistake. The book is a hodge-podge: printed versions of short speeches, introductions to her earlier Hainish novels, full essays with footnotes to provide that added kick, and a light frosting (in the edition I was using to reread) of Le Guin’s own second thoughts (mostly about issues of gender). Even back in my 20s I didn’t think all this stuff was equally valuable, and on my recent reread I was finding that a lot of what I had once taken as axiomatic was now useless to me.
For instance, I was struck by the way UKL made casual generalizations that were really unfounded, e.g. the idea that France “had no tradition of fantasy for the past several hundred years.” In my lost youth, I assumed she knew what she was talking about. Now I think: What about Anatole France? Jules Verne? Guy de Maupassant? Charles Perrault? The Absurdists? Of course there is a tradition of fantasy in France.
“You have read the opening paragraph, and if you are an imaginative idiot like myself, you will want to read the rest of it; so I shall give it to you here…”
I often refer to Edgar Rice Burroughs as an “excuse” author. It seems readers or critics can’t discuss him without qualifiers to excuse reading him. A typical statement: “Edgar Rice Burroughs wasn’t a good writer but he had a vast imagination.”
I not-so-respectfully object to the assessment of Burroughs as a poor writer. In his best works, he pulls me along and engrosses me far more than most bestselling “thriller” authors published today. I can pick apart objective deficiencies in his style, criticize his dips into awkward phrasing, but this ultimately doesn’t matter in his overall style, which reads fast, involving, and exciting. His prose style matches the types and tones of the stories he wants to tell, fits them so well that I can’t imagine another style that would work with them. That, in my reader’s eyes, makes Edgar Rice Burroughs a great writer.
I had thought to dive today into Joseph Campbell on the hero and the so-called monomyth–another irritant that, one could wish, might aid in the production of a pearl of wisdom. I have been distracted, however, by a self-labeled polemic on the topic of fictional women as kick-ass fighters that referenced my post of two weeks ago. Which put me in mind of a long-running, intermittent sort-of argument I’ve had with the most excellent sf writer Ann Zeddies, a long-time student of tae kwon do, as to whether women really could go up against men in combat and win before the invention of that great equalizer, the gun. My position is yes, provisionally.
Tomoe Gozen, 12th-century female samurai.
First of all, let me say that I mostly agree with the aforementioned polemic (which is not on the subject of women fighters generally). I certainly agree that Laila Ali’s physique is much more believable for a woman fighter than the lollipop figure favored in Hollywood actresses (huge head, stick neck and body). Secondly, let me say that I have no street cred as a fighter. In my 25+ years in the martial arts, I’ve never used it outside the dojo, unless you count last summer when I tripped hard on the sidewalk and actually rolled instead of landing in a bone-breaking crash. However, one of my seniors had come to our aikido school as a street fighter–in a South Philly gang, family members in the mob, etc.–and also after many years in other martial arts, so I feel free to rely on his insights and conclusions. Moreover, though this was in dojo conditions–meaning at the minimum that you know you are about to be attacked–I have many times successfully thrown and/or pinned men who are significantly taller, heavier, and stronger. So my thoughts on women fighters are not totally pulled out of a dark and hidden orifice.
All people, male or female, have physical limitations. …