For a presentation last year, I researched Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”. You might also have heard of it as the “monomyth”.
If not, here’s a simplified summary: the Hero’s Journey is a sequence of plot points, which are said to loosely match every story we humans tell each other, spanning from immemorial myths to modern movies. Campbell documents the various stages of an unwilling hero being drawn into some strange new world, where they must overcome obstacles and eventually master their new surroundings. JRR Tolkien and George Lucas make exemplary specimens: George Lucas even cites Campbell’s process as an direct inspiration for Star Wars.
I liked the idea of the Hero’s Journey. It’s riddled with flaws, but I did still like it. It feels universal — as if every story did boil down to the conquest and colonisation of some hero (often male, often violent). The monomyth invites us to apply one perspective to every story.
Likeable or not, I obviously needed to find a better theory. Maureen Murdock’s “Heroine’s Journey” promised to be just that, an extension of Campbell’s trail to better fit womens’ life stories. It starts with the belief that Campbell’s monomyth cuts its hero off from their feminine side, and appends more phases. A heroine finishes Campbell’s stages, and tries to recover their femininity at the expense of the masculine, and ends up surpassing the masculine-feminine dichotomy altogether.
There was one problem with the Heroine’s Journey: I didn’t like it. The Hero’s one gives a sensation of all-encompassing truthiness, to which the Heroine’s adds criteria and convolutions, by tacking things onto the end. It’s more specific, and so loses some of the universality. Does Star Wars fit the newer model? Does Avatar: The Last Airbender? What about 50 Shades of Grey? I lose my certainty.
Murdock and Campbell both tried to describe stories. They were a psychotherapist and a mythologist, respectively, with nary a novel written between them. I had the good fortune to stumble on a model created by a practising storyteller — and a great novelist at that. It was Ursula Le Guin with a Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Her essay lists three commonly held assumptions to challenge: novels must flow linearly from start to finish; they must centre around conflict; and they must have a hero. Le Guin implies that the Hero’s Journey, which is founded on those three ideas, is a simplification of what a novel is. A novel is instead a collection of words, which are collections of meanings: a ‘carrier bag’ of assorted things and connections between them.
“One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd.”
That sounds suitably broad and abstract, does it not? I wondered if Le Guin’s theory was the organisation scheme I had unknowingly been in search of, generally applicable yet feminist.
Like Campbell’s Hero’s Journey’s description, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction is told in metaphor. I’d recommend reading the three double-pages yourself to get an interpretation, but the gist is that stories collect elements together, becoming a sort of ‘bag’ that shows connections. Containers are said to be the first human inventions, giving us a supernatural ability to carry food. Le Guin writes that there is room in the bag for a hero, but they look just like everything else in there, no longer standing out as the most important part of a story.
There’s no question that the hero narrative is a thrilling one. Heroes, conflicts and triumphs get us invested. Campbell noticed that the popular stories all include them in some fashion, just like musicians notice the same chord progressions in every pop song. I’m no music buff, but even I can enjoy some of its more obscure genres, ones that set aside a couple of pop rules. A linear heroic narrative is just as much of a crutch as the major key and verse-chorus structure. Swearing by it limits the freedom of your writing.
I’ve often thought I was bad at plotlines. I’ve written poems because I don’t need to invent a protagonist or a thrilling series of events. I can simply wrap all of the best ideas up on a page, like how a forager might collect all of the tastiest berries in a bag for later. Campbell focuses on plot, and so ignores poetry, while Le Guin’s theory describes it seemingly by accident. That’s another reason I prefer Le Guin’s perspective.
Here’s the difference as I see it. The Hero’s Journey reads like a manual, a formula for writing the sort of thing the masses will get excited by — surprisingly practical for an academic. The Carrier Bag Theory tries to explain every story, with no regard for whether it’s an exciting one — and yet it was made by a novelist.
Disclaimer: this blog post may contain traces of monomythic structure. Reader discretion is advised.
Quote from No Time to Spare by Ursula K. Le Guin.
