Joseph Campbell.
Or, more precisely, the life-work of Joseph Campbell (the man himself having departed the mortal coil some years ago). But to the extent that a deceased man *is* the work by which society knows him, then Grant's essay does bury Campbell's work under his (Grant's) suppositions.
In another essay I'll be covering other aspects of Grant's essay on mythology, but here I'll just focus on the one part of his essay where he brings in Campbell as support for positions that don't accurately represent Campbell. Here's the relevant section:
'A lot of people at that time were fixating on mythology as storytelling, prodded on by Joseph Campbell's work deconstructing heroic myths into a 12 step "hero's path. Little did I know George Lucas had tapped into the Campbell "formula" (not to mention Kurosawa films) as a structural tool for STAR WARS, quickly rendering the "Hero's path" a Hollywood gimmick used (mostly badly) in film after film after film after film, in the delusion it lent the material meaning and resonance. Obviously, almost no one using the "Campbell structure" had ever actually read Campbell, or they would have gleaned his important but widely overlooked caution that it only has meaning as unconscious structure – and conscious application voids it of meaning and resonance. But that's the result of most formal structures. If that's what you focus on, you end up with material whose only meaning if what it draws via reference. It's ultimately dead-end nostalgia, replicating form without content or context.'
As I've read most of Campbell's work, Grant's paraphrase of this "caution" sounds more than a little "off." On the PERMANENT DAMAGE message board, I asked Grant if he could tell me where Campbell said what Grant said he said, and Grant replied:
"I could if I wanted to spend three weeks rereading his books. It should be somewhere in MYTHS TO LIVE BY..."
I reread MYTHS TO LIVE BY.
I didn't find it.
Now, it's possible that Grant rephrased something from MTLB that I just don't recognize, or that Campbell actually said something closer to the "caution" in some other sourcework. The way Grant phrased the "caution," it's not in agreement with other themes in Campbell's work, but it's a given that from Aristotle to Wittgenstein there's never been any philosopher who has been able to keep his observations free from inconsistency. Given this inescapeable condition, one has to evaluate any philosopher -- even a "popular philosopher" like Joseph Campbell-- according to his dominant themes. For reasons I'll be getting into, the "caution" seems at odds with Campbell's dominant themes, but I'm less interested in sussing out whether that's Grant's fault or Campbell's than in examining the nature of Campbell's dominant themes and why Steven Grant take on mythology is not supported by them.
In rereading MTLB the closest thing I foound to Grant's "caution" appears on page 88.
"A distinguished professor in psychiatry at the University of California, Dr. John W. Perry, has characterised the living mythological symbol as an 'affect image'. It is an image that hits one where it counts. It is not addressed first to the brain, to be there interpreted and appreciated. On the contrary, if that where it has to be read, the symbol is already dead."
At first glance, this sounds a great deal like Grant's comment about modern literary myths being "dead-end nostalgia." But it isn't, for in Campbell's very next sentence, he makes clear that he expects that the affect image will pass through what Grant calls "conscious application:"
"An 'affect image' talks directly to the feeling system and immediately elicits a response, after which the brain may come along with its interesting comments."
Certainly there's nothing in this passage to suggest that Campbell thought that he thought that conscious apprehension of a myth-image or myth-structure was voided of "meaning and resonance." Campbell's point here is rather that the "feeling system" must be the first mode through which one understands the image/structure, or else all you've got is a dead symbolism. I suggested in this essay that intellect and emotion (an oversimple dichotomy, but one that can be used without compromising the main point) enjoyed more of a struggle in the production of art than one imagines they did in the production of archaic myth. Clearly Campbell's observation about the brain's "interesting comments" indicates some rapprochement between thinking and feeeling, and as such this quote, like many others I find in Campbell, do not much support Steven Grant's notion that once the conscious brain comes in, all meaning and resonance bids a fond adieu.
Now, Grant doesn't quite so far as to suggest that Campbell supports his position that "stories are not myths," so I can't very well refute what Grant doesn't claim. But in general Campbell makes strong associations, if not conflations, between myth and art, so I think it unlikely that he would have agreed with Grant's demythologization of stories. Campbell does warn his readers against taking the content of myths too literally, but as I noted in the earlier essay he believes that myth can only be comprehended "with the artist's eye" rather than the scientist's.
As memory serves, Campbell expressed pleasure with Lucas' supposed translation of the "hero's journey" paradigm into the STAR WARS films. There seems to be no reason to assume that Campbell's approbation was insincere; that he really thought any mythic resonance had flown out the window because it had been "consciously applied." One may cavil that Campbell was not a literary critic, and so anything he says about art has to be examined in that light. But whatever inconsistencies about the roles of art and myth may appear in Campbell's published works, as a whole they really don't say what Steven Grant thinks they do.
Stay tuned for Part 2.
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