The Monomyth Ate This Essay
What happens when an essay about narrative structure starts using it on you.
Okay, so here’s the thing about the essay you’re about to read, and I need to tell you this now, before you’re three paragraphs deep and start feeling weird about it: I don’t fully trust it either. I wrote the thing, and I still don’t trust it. Not because I lied anywhere in it (I didn’t, I checked), but because somewhere around the middle I noticed it was doing something to you, the reader, that I hadn’t planned on and can’t undo now that I’ve noticed it. I’ll explain. It won’t help. I’m telling you anyway.
The catalog
There’s a guy — Joseph Campbell, mythologist, spent a career doing the literary equivalent of noticing that every stranger at the family reunion has the same nose — who looked at basically every myth ever told and said: these are all the same story. Not the same theme. Not “they all teach a lesson.” The same shape. Person, ordinary world, a call to leave it, a threshold, a trial, a way back. He called it the monomyth, which is a boring name for a claim that isn’t boring at all, because what he’s actually saying is that every story anyone has ever told, in every language, by people who never met each other and never read each other’s stuff, is one story. Copied by hand, over and over, by scribes who each genuinely believed they were writing something new.
I go back and forth on whether that’s the smartest thing I’ve ever read about storytelling or the dumbest. Might be both. The difference might just be which day you catch me on.
The objection, stated fairly
Now, if you’re the kind of person who’s already skeptical (and if you’re still reading this, you probably are, which — fair, I’d be too), here’s your objection, and I’m not going to pretend it’s a bad one: a shape loose enough to fit Star Wars and also somebody’s divorce, a war movie and also a cartoon about a scientist and his grandkid, isn’t really describing anything. It’s just a net wide enough to catch whatever swims into it. People do this with horoscopes. They do it with prophecy — the prediction turns out to “fit,” and everybody forgets that fitting isn’t the same as foretelling.
I bring this up not to knock it down but because I’ve started to think the objection and the claim are the same sentence, just read in opposite directions. And I genuinely don’t know anymore which direction is the original one. That’s not a rhetorical hedge. I mean I actually don’t know.
The corridor
Let’s walk through it once, straight, no tricks, and see what’s waiting at the end. (There are tricks. I’m getting to them.)
Somebody’s living inside rules they didn’t write and mostly don’t think about — that’s the ordinary world, the library before you notice it might have an edge to fall off of. Then a call shows up, and it’s almost always smaller than it should be for what it sets off: a letter, a rumor, a symptom that turns out to matter. First move is always to say no, because saying no is the correct response to a hallway you can’t see the end of. Then the ordinary world stops being an option — somebody dies, something ends, a door shuts that isn’t opening again — and the person goes anyway. Into a second hallway, built out of the same stuff as the first one, running on different rules, and that part’s the disorienting bit.
In there: allies who aren’t quite friends, enemies who aren’t quite strangers, and dead center, a room. A cave, in the old versions. A space station shaped like a moon, in a newer one. And in that room is the one thing the traveler has spent this entire trip carefully not looking at. Lucas built his version about as literally as you can build anything — a weapon shaped like the moon, and inside it, exactly the thing his hero was afraid of turning into. I’m not pointing that out because it’s a weird coincidence. I’m pointing it out because it’s suspiciously exact, like the shape had been sitting around waiting for somebody to finally build it out of steel instead of just writing it down.
The mirror that won’t resolve
I was going to write the next part now — the traveler comes home, brings something back, the hallway closes up behind them like a book going back on the shelf. Turns out I can’t write that paragraph and mean it. So instead of faking it, I’m going to tell you why I can’t.
The mentor — almost every single time — doesn’t make the trip back. Sends the traveler on, then disappears from the story, which is a polite way of saying: gone right when you’d feel it most. And “home,” once you get there, is hardly ever the place you left. It’s a third hallway, built out of whatever survived the second one, and the people who stayed don’t always recognize what’s walked back in, and the one who’s back can’t always explain — even to themselves — what got left behind to make the trip possible in the first place. Campbell’s got a phrase for this: master of two worlds. Sounds like a win. Read closely, it sounds more like admitting the traveler doesn’t fully belong to either one anymore.
I don’t think that’s a flaw in the structure. I think it’s the sentence the structure would rather leave hanging, and I’ve decided — against my own better judgment, honestly — to go ahead and finish it here.
If you want more from this catalog, subscribing’s free and the shelf keeps getting longer.
A note on the reader
I told you at the top that this essay seems to describe itself, and I’ve put off explaining that long enough that you’ve probably already figured it out without me — which, look, is kind of the whole point.
You showed up to this page inside an ordinary world of your own: the assumption, never questioned because it never needed to be, that one story is just different from another. Somewhere back there, no announcement, no fanfare, that assumption got its call. You might’ve said no to it — the way you say no to any hallway you can’t see the end of — and I built a room for that “no” a few paragraphs back on purpose, and you might’ve stood in it longer than you clocked at the time. And now you’re here, in the third hallway, holding a certainty that looks almost exactly like the one you walked in with. Close enough to mistake for it. Different in a way I’m not going to spell out, because spelling it out would put you right back in hallway two, and I think you’ve already left that one behind.
I don’t know if that makes this essay a myth or just a very patient bit. Not sure the library’s got a separate shelf for those two things anyway.