SOURCE: Manganaro, Marc. “Joseph Campbell: Authority's Thousand Faces.” In Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye, and Campbell, pp. 151-85. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Manganaro explores Campbell's approach to and use of mythology, and discusses the appeal of his work.]

READING MODERNISM, READING MYTH

Like Frazer, Joseph Campbell has achieved great popularity as a reader of comparative cultures. Campbell's corpus, like Frazer's Golden Bough, has made the difficult transition from a modest scholarly readership to a massive popular audience. By July 1989, the posthumously published version of The Power of Myth, the book fashioned from Bill Moyers's interviews with Campbell airing on Public Broadcasting, had remained on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for fifty-seven weeks. The forty-year-old Hero with a Thousand Faces also made the list that year. The famous account of the policeman reporting to Jane Harrison that The Golden Bough “changed my life” finds strong parallels in the popular reception of Campbell today. In Campbell's case, the broad appeal has much to do with the message he sends to readers: myth can change your life. The titles of a number of his many books—The Power of Myth, Myths to Live By—underline the use that individuals can make of myth. In precisely this respect Mary Lefkowitz refers to Campbell as “a priest of a new and appealing hero-cult—the religion of self-development.”¹

But of course the therapeutic uses ascribed to myth by Campbell could not be further from Frazer's conception of the essentially and pejoratively “primitive” nature of myth as an early and fumbling form of science. As Robert Segal points out, whereas Frazer types myth as “superfluous” and “impossible for moderns, who by definition have science,” Campbell views myth as “indispensable” to all humanity and especially necessary in the modern age.² Like Frye, Campbell finds it necessary to jettison Frazer's notion of mythical thinking as “bad reasoning” becoming better (becoming, ultimately, science) in order to preserve myth's autonomy from science.

And yet this important distinction between Frazer and Campbell should not blur the even more crucial bond between the two as immensely influential readers of comparative culture. Indeed, a key contention of this chapter is that grasping Campbell's popularity involves understanding the comparativist rhetorical authority, in the genealogy traced from Frazer, that organizes the myriad voices of comparative cultures into the one authorial chord. Here the parallels to Frazer can help in understanding Campbell's rhetorical authority. For example, Campbell like Frazer had a mentor whose own writings and personal magnetism had a direct impact on his development as comparativist. But the writings of Heinrich Zimmer and William Robertson Smith never grasped the public imagination like those of their pupils. In each case the bolder, extended comparative method of the pupil was welded to a conspicuously “literary” style. And in each case the pupil took great rhetorical advantage of “literary” influences, properties, and tendencies, all of which are made to augment and defend the author's agenda.

Campbell's appropriation of the literary, like Eliot's and Frye's, also involved interpreting literary texts and, more specifically, rewriting literary Modernism. Few people who pick up his monumental volumes on world myth realize that Campbell began his career by coauthoring the first important analysis of a central Modernist text. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, published in 1944 under the joint authorship of Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, was the first major full-length attempt to interpret Joyce's last and most enigmatic work.³ Like Eliot's reading of Joyce and Frye's reading of Eliot, Campbell's reading of Joyce would serve as a press release for his own authorial ends. Indeed, Campbell's reading of Joyce is significant not only because it sites the mythographer's place within the contentious arena of Modernism and Modernist interpretation, but also because it provides a blueprint for the aesthetics, semiotics, and rhetorical strategies of his later work on myth.

The purpose of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake is precisely to function as a key toward understanding Joyce's puzzling text. Such understanding is obtained, Campbell maintains, through the study's “thin line-tracing of the skeletal structure of Finnegans Wake. Here for the first time the complex and amazing narrative of Joyce's dream-saga is laid bare” (x). As he explicitly lays out in the introduction, Campbell aspires “to indicate the fundamental narrative itself” through the reduction of Joyce's text to its essentials:

From sentence to sentence we had to select and again select (among the crowding, curiously melting nuances of implication) precisely the one or two lines to be fixed and rendered. Wherever possible we have clung to Joyce's own language, but in order to stress the narrative we have freely condensed, simplified, and paraphrased the heavily freighted text. No one can be more conscious than ourselves of our numberless inept decisions. Nevertheless, even through our failures the great skeleton emerges, and clearly enough to disclose the majestic logic of Finnegans Wake.

(x)

Campbell's account of the book's methodology stresses the reduction of distracting difference to sameness, the deletion of the difficult and shifting to the simple and stable. In this condensed version, the dense, even dizzying metaphors of Joyce's text are seen as obstacles to overcome, unfortunate accidents around which one must detour. Though the multiple possibilities within Joyce's text are signs of its greatness, they are only valuable if they can be pared to their essential meanings in the neverending “struggle for the unimaginable prize of complete understanding” (SK [A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake] ix). Campbell admits to failures in deleting and interpreting, but those editorial shortcomings are absolved by the ultimate success of reducing Finnegans Wake to its primary structure: nowhere does Campbell question the motivation to cut the text down to its underlying “logic.” In fact, the desire to make “sense” of the text leads inexorably to the claim that there is nothing in Joyce's text that cannot be traced to a logical equivalent: “Amidst a sea of uncertainties, of one thing we can be sure: there are no nonsense syllables in Joyce!” (360).

Deconstructionist interpretations of Joyce's work, and especially of Finnegans Wake, for example, strongly emphasize the impossibility of rendering Joyce's highly suggestive texts into the “sensible.” Indeed, Derridean interpretation valorizes the Wake precisely because of its metaphoric elusiveness, what Shari Benstock terms “the compacted linguistic structure of Joyce's text, a stream that cannot contain the multiplicity of its own meanings, whose borders are overrun by excess of language.”⁴ From this perspective Campbell's attempt to fix the text's meaning not only is a naive effort at signification but also manages to cut against the grain of what makes the Wake so interesting. Benstock's description of the fate of a traditional literary approach to Finnegans Wake appears tailor-made to Campbell's efforts: “hard as the reader peers through the concentric rings of language that envelop the story in search of its center, its locus, the meaning that will illuminate the internal void, the more the essence of the story eludes him” (“Letter of the Law” 165).

But we hardly need to theorize what post-structural Joycean criticism would say about Campbell's approach to the Wake. Margot C. Norris provides a history of Wake criticism that isolates two strands, a “radical” and a “conservative.” The radical approach, initiated by Samuel Beckett, celebrates the text's resistance to signification and claims that it “subverts … the most cherished intellectual preconceptions of Western culture as well.” The conservative approach, on the other hand,

is characterized chiefly by a belief that the work contains fixed points of reference in the manner of the traditional novel. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, whose publication essentially initiated this critical trend, first outlined the completely naturalistic narrative level toward which the mythic elements in the novel purportedly refer. By assigning this literal level as the point of reference in the work, the mythic events … are relegated to the subordinate function of illustrating, universalizing and inflating the naturalistic events.⁵

Norris's discussion of the Skeleton Key's preeminent place in the conservative camp is well taken, though perhaps the more telling term is mythic equation, rather than subordination, to the naturalistic: what in A Skeleton Key contrasts most dramatically to a deconstructionist reading of Joyce is the ease with which the multiple signifiers can be traced to their few mythic messages or signifieds. The windowlike nature of Joyce's language is assumed, a notion that critics such as Perry Meisel roundly reject: “For Joyce, language is not a transparent instrument designed to signify alinguistic truths … but a palace of reverberations” (Myth of the Modern 127).

In the foreword to Skeleton Key, the authors write of how they were “provoked by the sheer magnitude of the work” (ix). As with Hyman's reading of The Golden Bough, the utter mass of the text attracts the critic. And yet, as is also the case with Hyman, for Campbell the gargantuan text must be contained, mapped into a recognizable and hence controllable grid. The text's size and complexity are not obstacles to understanding: indeed, “the unimaginable prize of understanding” is treasured precisely in proportion to the text's massiveness and seeming uncontrollability. Size and complexity are insisted upon in order to demonstrate the authority of the author-reader who can break them down into manageable units. Just as Frazer, and by extension Hyman, gain authority by figuring the mighty web of culture and then isolating and signifying its threads, so Campbell inscribes a Joycean tapestry whose pattern, he claims, is ultimately readable:

This complex fabric of semantics, associative overtones, and stem rhythms is merely the materia prima of Joyce's communication. To this, add an enormous freight of mythological, historical, and psychologic reference. It would be well-night hopeless to attempt to trace the design of any page were it not that a thread of logic runs through every paragraph. True, the thread always frays out into lateral associations which in turn disappear into almost inaccessible tenuities of meaning. Yet the main lines can all be followed.

(SK 359)

Just as Hyman reads Frazer's “common image for culture” as both “a great fabric” and “an orderly tangled bank,” a jungle barely capable of being tidily organized, so Campbell similarly reads Joyce's text as a wilderness that, with the expertise and doggedness of the right critics, can be plotted:

The vast scope and intricate structure of Finnegans Wake give the book a forbidding aspect of impenetrability. It appears to be a dense and baffling jungle, trackless and overgrown with wanton perversities of form and language. Clearly, such a book is not meant to be idly fingered. It tasks the imagination, exacts discipline and tenacity from those who would march with it. Yet some of the difficulties disappear as soon as the well-disposed reader picks up a few compass clues and gets his bearings. Then the enormous map of Finnegans Wake begins slowly to unfold, characters and motifs emerge, themes become recognizable, and Joyce's vocabulary falls more and more familiarly on the accustomed ear.

(SK 3-4)

The appeal of Campbell's approach has much to do with a calculated egalitarian message, later to be used, in self-help fashion, in the books on myth: you too can perform this difficult task, with a little help from friends. The authors become advance guards, scouts who first break the trail in order to make the journey as effortless as possible. In some respects the authors play the role of Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist: they take the journey first and map out the territory so that future travelers through the novel encumber the fewest difficulties and feel as close to home as possible in the strangest and most difficult of places.

Clearly Campbell's approach entails more than the interpretation of a single work by a single Modernist. Indeed, the philosophy of language articulated here and explored in later works by Campbell represents a fundamental position not only on literary Modernism but on literature itself. In opposition to post-structural approaches, Campbell's reading of Joyce holds that Modernist literary language at its best (that is, at its most comprehensive and universal) functions as a conduit through which flows mythic content. For a critic such as Meisel, Joyce's language works on the “notion of the relational buoyancy of language rather than the fixed or transparent signification of alinguistic states or objects that Arnold and Eliot, by contrast, hold language to be” (Myth of the Modern 135-36). Meisel points to Eliot in particular as the culprit in the conservative effort to tie Modernist language to signification, viewing Eliot's famous review of Ulysses (which isolates the “mythical method” as the operating principle in Joyce's novel) as an attempt to “normalize” Joyce's literary production: “It is Eliot we may thank for promoting a reading of Ulysses based on taking, without apparent irony, its wryly announced correspondences to The Odyssey as a way not simply of beginning to contextualize the novel, but as a way of decoding it” (142).

Although Eliot's semiotics clearly do more than attempt to make language transparent, still the relation between Eliot's reading of Ulysses and Campbell's interpretation of the Wake is significant. Each represents an early and highly influential reading of a Joyce masterwork. Each announces the pattern, “key,” or “method” that makes “sense” of (and makes significant) Joyce's essentially disruptive text. Each activates what Meisel calls a “mythic replication” at work in the novel that tends to freeze temporal flow (in Eliot's case, by the paralleling of epochs) and in general to minimize historical and cultural particularity. And finally, and perhaps most important, each takes the occasion of a Joyce text to promote a method that the author himself was using (in Eliot's case, in The Waste Land; in Campbell's, in the study of the Wake itself).

Meisel's belief that Eliot in The Waste Land attempts “an isomorphic symbolism that yokes all myths, religions, all literatures in a serene and pacifying conclusion” (Myth of the Modern 87) represents precisely what Campbell views as the triumphant principle activating Finnegans Wake. For Campbell, Joyce's preeminence as a mythic author, his mythographic authority in effect, lies in his ability to present particular cultural phenomena as universal: “Under the seeming aspect of diversity—in the individual, the family, the state, the atom, or the cosmos—these constants remain unchanged” (SK 14). As was the case for myth critics such as Hyman, mythic universalization amounts to a temporal stasis that is justified in the name of the “eternal” or “timeless.” “Amid trivia and tumult,” amid the messy particulars of history, Joyce, Campbell claims, clarifies the “eternal dynamic implicit in birth, conflict, death, and resurrection” (14).

Campbell does not deny that Finnegans Wake contains internal warring elements that produce a seeming fragmentation (after all, he refers to the book as “all compact of mutually supplementary antagonisms” [14]);⁶ his Joyce, however, like Meisel's pejoratively cast Eliot, contains conflict within a mythic form that promotes the comforting illusion of representational impermeability and completeness. Campbell would agree with Benstock that Joyce's text represents a “compacted linguistic structure”; however, the “borders” of Campbell's version of that structure are anything but “overrun by the excess of language,” as Benstock claims. Indeed, the book becomes for Campbell what Meisel and others claim The Waste Land has mistakenly come to signify: a hermetically sealed rendering of an epoch. Campbell's figuring of Finnegans Wake as “a huge time-capsule, a complete and permanent record of our age” is quite telling in this respect. This is a freeze-dried version of world culture that, through myth-induced strategies of containment, encourages readers to breathe easy, knowing that the sprawling, terrifyingly vital mess is representable and hence controllable.

Campbell's assuring mythic replication of culture, extending well beyond A Skeleton Key, often takes the form of Clifford's figure of the ethnography of salvage, which justifies other-cultural representation through the claim that a “last chance rescue operation” is underway (WC 112-13). Campbell in this respect is part of a larger legacy of authors, including Eliot, who claim cultural ruin as a pretext for authorial emergence and control. In the foreword to A Skeleton Key, Campbell holds out the comforting notion that whatever apocalyptic fears we might harbor about the future, Joyce has so well staked out the outlines of our culture that we will be eminently representable: “If our society should go smash tomorrow (which, as Joyce implies, it may) one could find all the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake. The book is a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium” (x).

Campbell's version of Finnegans Wake rehearses what Clifford describes as the trope of “the persistent and repetitious ‘disappearance’ of social forms at the moment of their ethnographic representation” (WC 112). According to Campbell, Joyce's text is sited at the point of extinction, where the glacial flow of culture has now ceased; like many a modern ethnographer, Joyce is figured as the rescuer of a civilization already disappearing from the horizons of history.

Like The Waste Land, Campbell's Wake figures the various aspects of human culture as debris that is brilliantly configured into value by the author-culture reader. The image of the “terminal moraine” fortifies the notion that the pieces of culture are scattered remains when separated from the pattern the author makes of them, just as the parts of culture represented in The Waste Land are figured as “fragments,” debris to be “shored against” the personal “ruins” of the author. Meisel's claim that Eliot's fragmentation of the world operates as self-serving figure, as “a state that really inheres largely in the history of imagination alone” (Myth of the Modern 89), proves relevant here. And yet, if we accept the “radical” reading of Finnegans Wake, it is not Joyce who gains authority through the tidy configuration of debris. Rather, Campbell, like Eliot, reads that authority into Joyce so that it is projected back upon the critic. Even if we grant that Finnegans Wake constitutes the terminal moraine of culture, it is the critic who excavates that moraine, maps it out, takes samples, and provides an analysis of its content and structure. Campbell's representation of Joyce's text as excavation site creates the need for an archaeologist-geologist, a role that the critic Campbell is only too happy to fill and, later, extend from the study of literature to mythic structures themselves.

Throughout A Skeleton Key Campbell projects his own methodological and ideological program onto Joyce, and in the process creates a gap that only he can fill. Perhaps nowhere is that tactic so conspicuous as in the book's concluding pages: “Joyce early understood that unless we transcend every limitation of individual, national, racial, and hemispherical prejudice, our minds and hearts will not be opened to the full stature of Man Everlasting. Hence his zeal to shatter and amalgamate the many gods. Through the lineaments of local tradition he sends an X-ray, and on the fluorescent screen of Finnegans Wake projects the permanent architecture of all vision and life” (362).

The figure Campbell provides for Joyce's activity actually describes his own: the radiologist is not so much Joyce, making transparent the outer differentiated trappings of local cultures, as Campbell, piercing the thick layers of Joyce's language to get to the very skeleton of the corpus. As such, the X-ray, shot through the myriad local signifiers, is sent not by Joyce but by Campbell, and projects onto the novel Campbell's version of a permanent architecture, his own map of ultimate, universal meaning. What Campbell claims through the analogy of the X-ray is nothing less than the capability to make the opaque medium of signification transparent, and in the process to enable the leap from local to universal, from common many to transcendent One.

Campbell's books after A Skeleton Key fan out from the study of literature to world myth, as Campbell himself moves into progressively more powerful positions, from literary critic to mythologist to self-styled guru.⁷ Still, the methodology inscribed in the figure of the X-ray and the conception of semiotics at the base of his rhetoric remain constant. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's second and most influential book, the analogy of the X-ray is again applied but this time the ostensible subject is not a single novel, but the hero as he is revealed in world myth:

Mythology … is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology. The modern psychologist can translate it back to its proper denotations and thus rescue for the contemporary world a rich and eloquent document of the profoundest depths of human character. Exhibited here, as in a fluoroscope, stand revealed the hidden processes of the enigma Homo sapiens—Occidental and Oriental, primitive and civilized, contemporary and archaic. The entire spectacle is before us. We have only to read it, study its constant patterns, analyze its variations, and therewith come to an understanding of the deep forces that have shaped man's destiny and must continue to determine both our private and our public lives.⁸

The similarities to the rhetoric of A Skeleton Key are patent. Note, for example, how the psychologist, like Joyce the author, functions as proxy for Campbell the culture-hero. And yet in a sense the mythological approach to a literary work (Finnegans Wake) reverses itself to become a literary approach to mythology. Like Finnegans Wake, mythology becomes text, an assemblage of cultural-racial characters to “translate,” “read,” or “misread” in the effort to come to a fuller understanding of the ways of the human spirit.

Campbell's “reading” of mythology as text of course hardly aligns with post-structural notions of “world as text,” as a realm of constantly shifting signifiers having no provable reference to a ground of signified meaning (transcendental or otherwise). On the contrary, Campbell's trope of “text,” in line with the semiotics at work in A Skeleton Key, functions as a shell that covers the true interior of myth. “Reading” the text involves simply making transparent the signifier of the outer body in order to get to the signified, the mythic message or content represented by the body's interior. The title The Hero with a Thousand Faces perfectly illustrates Campbell's notion of the semiotic. Like the later Masks of God, Campbell's figure for mythic essence presupposes the essential substitution of myriad names (of peoples, cultures, religions) for the transcendental signified, the heroic or divine spirit or vitality that animates the earthly and divine realms.

Campbell's drive to strip away the linguistic peel to get at the metaphysical fruit, witnessed in both A Skeleton Key and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, overtly typifies the logocentric search for origins that post-structural efforts condemn. Indeed, Michel Foucault's description of how the search for absolutes “necessitates the removal of every mask to ultimately disclose an original identity” not only aptly assesses Campbell's efforts but echoes his metaphor for the procedure. Campbell's fluoroscope functions like the X-ray machine in A Skeleton Key: both are required to close the gap between word and spirit, between signifier and signified, and hence reach what Derrida calls the “lost presence.” The last words of the recent Public Broadcasting interviews with Bill Moyers make only too clear the metaphysics of presence at work:

MOYERS:
The meaning is essentially wordless.
CAMPBELL:
Yes. Words are always qualifications and limitations.
MOYERS:
And yet, Joe, all we puny human beings are left with is this miserable language, beautiful though it is, that falls short of trying to describe—
CAMPBELL:
That's right, and that's why it is a peak experience to break past all that, every now and then, and to realize, “Oh … ah.”(9)

Eric Gould in Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature emphatically asserts that “there can be no myth without an ontological gap between event and meaning,” and that “a myth intends to be an adequate symbolic representation by closing that gap, by aiming to be a tautology” (6). In Campbell's semiotics of myth, event and meaning become the various manifestations of mythic signifier and signified, respectively—mythic narrative and message, profane and sacred, symbol and meaning, text and experience. Through the fluoroscopic capacities of the mythographer-psychologist, the gap between signifier and signified is closed and the lost presence recalled.

Gould solidly anchors his discussion of the mythicity of Modernist writing in the semiotic, but his structural orientation prevents him from substantially considering the issues of authorial power involved. Rather, for him when the truly “mythic” operates in the Modernist text (say, of Eliot or Joyce), then “the presence of an author is incidental” (Mythical Intentions 135), as authorial intention disappears into the larger structural intention of mythicity. He does not sufficiently consider (and the absence of Foucault as a source underlines the absence) that the author who shuttles between the mythic signified and signifier in the effort to recover the “power of myth” is necessarily involved in a complex play of dominations, often propelled by the drive toward authorial command and usually expressed through the shaping of mythic message into cultural-ideological allegory.

To understand Campbell's semiotics of myth, we must consider the role of Jungian psychology, which played a major role in Campbell's notion of the transcendental signifier, and the part played by Adolph Bastian, whose notion of Elementary Ideas to which all the world's spiritual manifestations can be reduced was central to Campbell. But for the rhetoric that inscribes those semiotics and, importantly, garners its authority from them, we must look elsewhere, to Frazer of course, but also to the literary Modernists. Campbell himself attests that Modernist writings were central to his development. As he states in The Power of Myth, James Joyce and Thomas Mann were his real “teachers” in his early years (“I read everything they wrote”) because “both were writing in terms of what might be called the mythological traditions” (4). More specifically, these two Modernists exemplify the artist, who, in our century, “is the best prototype of the Modern Hero.”¹⁰ The artist in the modern world has stepped into the role of hero because, in the absence of belief in traditional myths, he has “created a new mythology.”

Campbell refers to this new heroism as Creative Mythology, a restructuring of myth that first emerged in the Middle Ages, characterized by “expressions of individual experience” as opposed to a statement of “dogma.”¹¹ The author's supplanting of the traditional hero, who “ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder” (HTF [The Hero with a Thousand Faces,] 30), says much for the power of the Modern text. The traditional hero returns from his quest “with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (30); Campbell views the heroes of the narratives of Joyce and Mann as “persons daring enough not only to venture forth to a strange new world but also to return” (Segal, Joseph Campbell 138), and the applicability of this description of the hero to narrative has had a tremendous impact upon literary studies in the past forty years. But more germane to the issue of authorial control: what is the nature of the power wielded by the author who returns with a “new” mythology in hand?

The apparent answer lies in the comprehensiveness of the author-hero's interpretive strategies, his ability to “read” experience (again, the literary figure) from an angle that will not occlude any portion of the world's lively text. In Creative Mythology, the fourth volume of The Masks of God, Campbell champions Joyce over the orthodox Catholic Church because of his “ways of interpreting Christian symbols”: for Campbell, “the artist reads” these symbols nonconstrictively, “as referring to an experience of the mystery beyond theology that is immanent in all things, including gods, demons, and flies,” while “the priests, on the other hand, are insisting on the absolute finality of their Old Testament concept of a personal creator God ‘out there.’”¹²

In A Skeleton Key, Campbell's assessment of Joyce's accomplishments underlines the power of the all-incorporative text. The Wake succeeds, according to Campbell, because it is “the first literary instance of myth utilization on a universal scale. Other writers … employed mythological symbolism, but their images were drawn from the reservoirs of the West. Finnegans Wake has tapped the universal sea” (361). Similarly, the imagery of the Wake owes its complexity to Joyce's “titanic fusion of all mythologies.” Clearly Joyce's authority as hero for a new age, as creative mythologist, is not due so much to his having “created a new mythology” as it is to his comprehensively mapping out, and then reading, the world's artifacts. Much like the rhetorical authority of Frazer, the power of the creative mythologist derives from the wholesale reorganizing, recycling, and rephrasing of traditional mythic materials.

In the preface to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell articulates the methodology of his own mythographic effort in language that echoes his description of Joyce's powers: he plans “to bring together a host of myths and folk tales from every corner of the world, and to let the symbols speak for themselves. The parallels will be immediately apparent; and these will develop a vast and amazingly constant statement of the basic truths by which man has lived throughout the millenniums of his residence on the planet” (viii).

Campbell's self-proclaimed charge is nothing less than the rearticulation of the voice of the cosmos. But the tremendous authority granted to the mythographer, the power of comparativism, is given the illusion of rhetorical humility: like Frazer and like Joyce the creative mythologist, Campbell merely lets the “symbols speak for themselves.” That semiotic transparency is made possible in part through Campbell's all-inclusive organization of mythic materials; but, as he states at another point in the preface, the fluoroscopic powers of depth psychology are also essential to the process of allowing the mythic signifier to give voice to its primal message: “The old teachers knew what they were saying. Once we have learned to read again their symbolic language, it requires no more than the talent of an anthropologist to let their teaching be heard. But first we must learn the grammar of the symbols, and as a key to this mastery I know of no better tool than psychoanalysis” (HTF vii).

The mythographic text functions as a repository of voices, a version of the cosmic polyphonic whose voices are vented when the mythographer closes the gap between symbol and meaning. The humility of the mythographer's rhetorical stance (the mere “talents of an anthologist” coupled with the teaching of a simple grammar) thinly veils the mythographic authority at work, the will-to-power to become the agent of meaning for all that is primal, unconscious, “primitive.” Indeed, the humble task of translation carries with it the authority to shape the semiotics of myth to the advantage of the mythographer. For Campbell, translating as he does supplants religion's deleterious function of making myth literally factual or true. In Myths to Live By Campbell insists that myths should not be seen as “historic facts” as religion insists that we do; rather, “such universally cherished figures of the mythic imagination must represent facts of the mind.”¹³ Mythic occurrences, then, are detached from historical process and become elementary semiotic entities, symbols to be read: “Whereas it must, of course, be the task of the historian, archaeologist, and prehistorian to show that the myths are as facts untrue … it will be more and more, and with increasing urgency, the task of the psychologist and comparative mythologist … to identify, analyze, and interpret the symbolized ‘facts of the mind’” (12).

Relevant here is Campbell's claim, in Hero, that “the stressing of the historical element will lead to confusion; it will simply obfuscate the picture message” (17). The trope makes too clear that history acts as an unfortunate obstacle within Campbell's schema, much as it did for Frye. History is constituted, in Campbell's view, of pesky clumps of signifiers that dirty the lens through which we view the transcendental mythic signified. In Hero Campbell similarly claims that “we are concerned at present with problems of symbolism, not of historicity. We do not particularly care whether Rip Van Winkle, Kamar al-Zaman or Jesus Christ ever actually lived. Their stories are what concern us.”¹⁴ Campbell's denial of the role of history in myth, like Frye's, recalls Rahv's claim that myth critics fear history and change and thus “induce in themselves through aesthetic and ideological means a sensation of mythic time—the eternal past of ritual” (“Myth and Powerhouse” 114).

To Campbell mythic “events” cannot be read as facts (they are “false and to be rejected as accounts of physical history,” Campbell says in Myths to Live By, 12) because, in the words of Gould, that would preclude the “ontological gap between meaning and event” (Mythical Intentions 6) that makes mythicity possible. Campbell requires the fundamental semiotic division between fact or reality versus symbol, of signified versus signifier, for without that division there would be no need for the mythographer to assume the role of the authority who closes that gap by providing what Gould calls the “adequate symbolic representation” (6) of mythic essence.

Paradoxically, although reading myths “literally” (as “facts” of “history”) is “false,” such interpretations have functioned effectively for traditional societies over the centuries: “For not only has it been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read symbolic forms have always been the supports of their civilizations. … With the loss of them there follows uncertainty, and with uncertainty, disequilibrium. … Today the same thing is happening to us” (MTLB [Myths to Live By] 8-9). Campbell's recollection of prelapsarian literalism serves the rhetorical function of making necessary a hero who will return from his perilous venture into the semiotic with an invaluable boon: a translation of the mythic text that will bring forth a bliss approximate to that which literalism had showered upon the ignorant.

Robert Segal pegs Campbell as “unabashedly elitist” in his conviction that “only the few are sensitive to the breakdown of tradition” (Joseph Campbell 149). Campbell's attitude ensures the prominence of the mythographer in much the same way that Eliot sought the recognition of a primitive substratum to experience that could revitalize modern society, but only if that “primitiveness” was welded to a civilized, and civilizing, intelligence: the literary artist, of course, was best equipped to perform that function. Campbell's semiotics of myth works much like Eliot's rhetoric of the primitive, in which, for example, the artist “is more primitive, as well as more civilized, than his contemporaries” (Eliot, “Tarr” 106).

Campbell's self-serving and self-constructed dichotomies look backward to Frazer's bifurcations of theory versus fact, artist versus fact-collector, and science versus literature. Campbell's segregations, like Frazer's divisions, enable Campbell to play both sides of the line to his advantage. Campbell's wide reputation and extensive influence, for example, like Frazer's is more integrally tied to his empirical ability to amass large amounts of raw mythic materials, sources, and “facts” than it is to creating a new system of ideas about his subject. William Doty in this respect notes that “Campbell's writings are referred to frequently in mythological criticism, but the manner of reference suggests that his works have had importance more as resources for comprehending a wide range of mythological perspectives than as contributions to a methodological posture.”¹⁵ The trope of multivocality that Campbell figures into the text, like Frazer's, promotes the notion that his work functions as a storehouse of mythological sources and facts that transparently announce themselves: see, for example, when Campbell in Hero describes “the host of myths and folk tales from every corner of the world” that are brought together and are permitted “to speak for themselves” (viii).

And yet, while his reputation benefits greatly from his role as collector, Campbell simultaneously crosses the self-created line of demarcation between disciplines when he asserts his status as translator and analyzer, much as Frazer cleaved to his role as armchair theorist while drawing upon his reputation as fact-collector. Campbell's insistence upon myths as literally untrue, for example, necessitates a mythologist with the capability to analyze “the facts of the mind.” To the historian and archaeologist are left the supportive, more onerous, but insignificant task of demonstrating that myths are factually untrue (MTLB 12).

Thus, like Frye, Campbell bolsters his authority through an accumulative method that appeals to the empirical while simultaneously finding it necessary to elevate his own activities above those of other “fact”-oriented professions. “Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science,” Campbell states in Hero, “it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky” (249). Mythology read by science, according to Campbell, is absurd—“the life goes out of it, temples become museums. … Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a greater part of the Christian cult” (249). Like Frazer, Campbell denigrates mere fact, in the process marking himself off from custodians of fact like historians; but at the same time he derives authority from the facts accumulated within his own text. Also like Frazer and Frye, Campbell warns of the damage done to the Bible when it is taken literally as “history” and not taken literarily as “poetry”: for both Frazer and Campbell the aestheticization of the religious document denies a place to historical process.¹⁶

Again, Campbell's analytical adeptness and authority is masked by a humility claiming that only “the talent of an anthologist” is needed to let the “meaning” of myth “become apparent of itself” (HTF vii). But, as happens with Frye, the medium with which Campbell works is obscured, mystified. For Campbell's method, as exemplified in Hero, hardly involves the simple translation and evocation of the multiple mythic voices of the hero; rather, to achieve thematic simplicity and coherence the author sculpts, or more accurately chops from context, the representations of mythic voices. Doty accurately describes the method at work in Hero: “Campbell … presents a simple, easily graphed cycle, with great analytical power—as he exemplifies with many accounts of heroic figures from a wide range of cultures” (Mythography 176). This power has made Campbell's work more usable as an “analytical tool for literally hundreds of secondary studies,” and hence more influential than “Raglan's or Rank's statistical accountings of the [hero] motif” (176).

Others have harshly isolated Campbell's neglect of culture-specific myths in his figuring of the hero, in critiques that recall Benedict's criticism of Frazer's Frankensteinlike method of comparison. Alan Dundes, for one, holds that Campbell's attempt to fuse all heroes into a “monomyth” damages the integrity of the particular heroes as they function in their own distinctive narratives. According to Dundes, “Campbell's pattern is a synthetic, artificial composite which he fails to apply in toto to any one single hero. Campbell's hero pattern, unlike the ones formulated by von Hahn, Rank, and Raglan, is not empirically verifiable, e.g., by means of inductively extrapolated incidents from any one given hero's biography.”¹⁷ Segal also states that although Campbell is praised as a storyteller, “in his writings he tells surprisingly few myths, at least whole ones” (Joseph Campbell 264), and Raphael Patai claims of Campbell's text that “no actual mythology contains such a pattern of composite myth” (Myth and the Modern Man 59).

Campbell's “synthetic” master-myth ignores cultural holism in the colossal authorial effort of fitting together a piecework universalism. In this respect it resoundingly recalls the monomyth that he projected onto Joyce's text, which in turn recalls Eliot's Waste Land and The Golden Bough. The notion of the text as brilliantly configured composite, as aggregation of “fragments” of culture, is crucial to understanding Campbell's authorial tactics. For Campbell's harmonic heroic cycle is, like Frazer's text, not the “real thing” but a simulacrum, constructed out of the severed parts of multiple heroes that are pulled from the great body of myths and sources.

Like Eliot, Campbell figures as archaeologist who pieces together a cultural mosaic out of the shards of myths, or, in another Campbellian trope, as geologist who reconstructs the whole of ancient myth from the survivals that trace the pattern of its glacial disappearance. Note in this regard how the metaphor of “terminal moraine” used to describe Finnegans Wake in 1943 is reintroduced almost forty years later, in the opening to the first volume of The Atlas of World Mythology, to describe what remains of mythic culture: “We live, today, in a terminal moraine of myths and mythic symbols, fragments large and small of traditions that formerly inspired and gave rise to civilizations.”¹⁸

This rhetorical strategy, like that of The Waste Land, is predicated upon the assumption that culture lies in ruins at our feet and that the author must refit the pieces or fill out the whole from the partial pattern. Read in the light of a rhetoric of inclusive domination, the “fragments” of cultural artifacts that Campbell, like Eliot's persona, has “shored against [his] ruins” signify cultural authority regained, as the Promethean capacities of the creative mythologist forge out of the shards of ancient culture a new mythical coherence.

Like the reception of The Golden Bough, Hero's appeal to a literary readership continues long after, and indeed usually in ignorance of, strong contemporary critiques that emerged from within the fields of folklore and mythology. In both cases, more circumspect experts in the “field” (anthropology, myth and folklore) posed the work as a repudiation of reigning functionalism in its disregard of important cultural differences. William Kerrigan, for example, claims that Campbell “has no respect for locality.” Responding to a typical Campbellian assertion that various Oriental and Occidental holy men and artists are saying the same thing, Kerrigan states: “These figures did not have ‘the same thought,’ their voices are not interchangeable; the passage [quoted from The Mythic Image] comes to little more than the free associations of an educated mind. … At such times, as if a spell had been lifted, this lovely book metamorphoses into a crude collage done with scissors and paste” (“Raw, Cooked” 655).

Campbell himself, moreover, does not deny either his scorn for those who insist upon narrowing their focus to a single culture or his filiations with an earlier brand of comparativism. He claims that it is the functionalists who ignore holism in their insistence upon discrete cultures and their neglect of the more comprehensive perspective upon human culture in total. In “Bios and Mythos,” published in 1951, Campbell holds that the functionalist insistence upon “stressing the differences between the dialects of the common human language” (again, note the trope of polyvocality at work) wrongly rejects the comparativist belief in “the uniformity of mankind's ‘Elementary Ideas.’”¹⁹

In “Bios and Mythos,” Campbell pays tribute to Adolph Bastian for his work in bringing to light “the local manifestations of universal forms,” and goes on to claim that “Tylor, Frazer, and the other comparative anthropologists, likewise recognized the obvious constancy in mankind's Elementary Ideas.” To Campbell, “the result” of the rejection of the comparativist notion of uniformity “has been a complete dismemberment of what [before the 1920s] promised to become a science” (16). According to Campbell, “no learned amount of hair-splitting … can obscure the fact that the primary problem here is not historical or ethnological but psychological—even biological … and no amount of scholarly jargon or apparatus can make it seem that the mere historian or anthropologist is dealing with the problem” (17).

Again, Campbell creates or emphasizes institutional dichotomies (in this case, history and anthropology versus mythology) that compel a comprehensive view only possessed by the comparative mythologist. The distinction between the mere fact-grubbing and “hair-splitting” historian or ethnographer and the more comprehensive mythologist (whose activities are rooted in the, oddly enough, more trustworthy fields of psychology and biology) is further enhanced by the rhetorical tactic of opposing the activities of objective science and art. In the following quotation Campbell's forced opposition of science and art, like Frazer's, looks forward to the comparativist whose artistically intuitive faculties afford a more comprehensive vista:

Since in poetry and art, beyond the learning of rhetorical and manual techniques, the whole craft is that of seizing the idea and facilitating its epiphany, the creative mind, adequately trained, is less apt than the analytic to mistake a mere trope or concept for a living, life-awakening image. Poetry and art, whether “academic” or “modern,” are simply dead unless informed by Elementary Ideas: ideas not as clear abstractions held in the mind, but … vital factors of the subject's own being. … Their force lies not in what meets the eyes but in what dilates the heart, and this force, precisely, is their essential trait. Since mythology is the compendium of such ideas effective at any moment, the historian or anthropologist proud of his objective eye has been gelded of the organ that would have made it possible for him to distinguish his materials. He may note and classify circumstances, but can no more speak authoritatively of mythology than a man without taste buds of taste. On the other hand, however, though the poet or the artist, with immediate recognition, experiences the idea and grows to meet it … he is finally an amateur in the fields of history and ethnology.

(“Bios and Mythos” 18)

Of course, Campbell's segregation of art and science leads to the inexorable conclusion that only the comparative mythologist can fuse the classificatory function of science to the intuitive faculty necessary to apprehend myth. Indeed, this rhetorical move is consistent with Campbell's larger assumption that science itself is becoming more mythic, is, as he reports in The Power of Myth, “breaking through now into the mystery dimensions” (132). In “Bios and Mythos” the shortcomings of each field (science, art) are obviated as the mythologist joins what a postlapsarian world has torn asunder. At the heart of Campbell's conception of the commonality of poetry and myth and the incongruity of myth and social science is his version of transcendent semiotics: the poetic mind, in tune with myth, intuitively recognizes “mere trope” and casts it aside in the search for “life-awakening image,” just as history must be shunted aside in order to clear the view for the “picture-message” of pure myth. The scientist, caught in the confines of objective literalism, effeminately confuses metaphor for the real thing. Poetry, like myth, is not in essence figural but transcendent; thus the poet does not negotiate meaning through the medium of language (or history, for that matter) but, rather, follows a beeline to an ultimate meaning that is eminently nonlogical and subjective (associated, after all, with the “heart” over the “eyes” and, one can surmise, the head).

Campbell holds that Bastian's hierarchy of Elementary Ideas is essential, but believes that depth psychology, as initiated by Freud and Jung, “now makes it possible to go beyond Bastian's mere listing and description of the Elementary Ideas to a study of their biological roots” (“Bios and Mythos” 18). Like Frazer, Campbell here is mapping out an institutional space which he himself is eminently qualified to fill: a mythologist with a stress on essentialist ideas and a background in biologically based depth psychology. His anticipation of the criticism to be leveled at his method once again fortifies the lines drawn between scientist and artist, as well as objective and subjective, in the interest of staking out a distinctly comprehensive position from which the comparative mythologist can hold sway.

The appeal to the experiential suffuses Campbell's texts and plays a large part in their popularity. Indeed, a key to Campbell's rhetorical authority, similar and yet distinct from Clifford's notion of ethnographic authority, lies in the appeal of the authentic, the “lived through” or “lived in,” and especially the “felt.” In the opening chapter of Creative Mythology, entitled “Experience and Authority,” for example, Campbell distinguishes creative from traditional mythology by associating the “experience” of the individual with the creative and the “authority” of “socially maintained rites” with the traditional (4). Necessary to this experiential appeal is the supposition that the text is a medium in which the signified, in this respect experience, shines transparently through. This version of semiotics is supported in Creative Mythology when Campbell claims that the individual's “communication of ‘experience’”—“if his realization has been of a certain depth and import”—“will have the value and force of living myth” (4).

The direct transmission of the real most characteristically takes the form of the panoply of human voices, those “dialects of the common human language” (“Bios and Mythos” 18) that culminate in a wide polycultural chorus absent from the work of the hair-splitting specialist. But for Campbell, as for Frazer, beneath the aural variation there runs the dominating bass of authorial resolution (the “common” in those “dialects” of the language). For both, the chorus reduces to an overdetermined generalizing chord—for Frazer, evolutionary in nature, for Campbell, both evolutionary and universalist—in which the mythic signifiers are firmly blended into a signified system of belief. In the conclusion to Hero, Campbell trots out the trope of polyvocality in his expression of the authorial narrowing of many into one: “‘Truth is one,’ we read in the Vegas; ‘the sages call it by many names.’ A single song is being inflected through the colorations of the human choir. General propaganda for one or another of the local solutions is superfluous—or much rather, a menace. The way to become human is to recognize the lineaments of God in all of the wonderful modulations of the face of man” (389-90).

Campbell deploys a strategy of containment aimed toward reducing multiplicity and chaos to uniformity, harmony, and order. Meisel's description of The Waste Land's strategy of aiming to “resolve its apparent fragments into an isomorphic symbolism that yokes all myths, all religions, all literature in a serene and pacifying conclusion” (Myth of the Modern 87) well approximates the tactic behind Campbell's comparativism. As with Eliot, Frye, and Frazer, the signifiers of the cultural-mythic universe are many, but the signified message is one.

RITUALIST UNDERPINNINGS

Though Campbell's strategies promote his rendition of myth as an ultimate opening up to a signified message, a comprehensive widening that defies exclusion of any mythic signifier, in fact Campbell's primary representations of myth are quite determined historically, largely fixed within the fragile confines of evolutionary ritualism. His most pronounced inheritance from that line of thinking concerns the fate of spiritual and mythic forces within a culture in the process of becoming civilized. As they progress most cultures, according to Campbell, progressively suck the might and magic out of myths by reducing mythic figures to their contemporary correlatives, logical and anthropomorphized versions of the mighty signified:

In the later stages of many mythologies, the key images hide like needles in great haystacks of secondary anecdote and rationalization; for when a civilization has passed from a mythological to a secular point of view, the older images are no longer felt or quite approved. In Hellenistic Greece and in Imperial Rome, the ancient gods were reduced to mere civic patrons, household pets, and literary favorites. Uncomprehended inherited themes, such as that of the Minotaur—the dark and terrible night aspect of an old Egypto-Cretan representation of the incarnate sun god and divine king—were rationalized and reinterpreted to suit contemporary ends.

(HTF 248)

Like Frye and other mythic critics, Campbell clears the ground of the messy tangle of historical and social particularities in order to get at the root of the myth, the ur-myth itself, the transcendental signified of mythic power. Campbell's anathema, the merely “local,” rears its ugly head as specific cultures express themselves in variation from the ur-signified, “to suit” their own petty “contemporary ends.” But in fact Campbell's figuration of local culture's warping of myth overtly replicates the Frazerian and Cambridge-Hellenist representation of late Greek culture's shaping of earlier mythic content: from the more primal and “natural” representations of mythic content (those elemental vessels of mana), on to plant and animal representations, and finally to the more intellectualized and anthropomorphized versions (the Olympian “gods” themselves).

In the conclusion to Hero, “The Hero Today,” Campbell asserts that the true task of the modern hero is to “discover the real cause for the disintegration of all of our inherited religious formulae.” The cause of the collapse, Campbell then informs us, is that “the center of gravity … has definitely shifted.” Where there was originally in “primitive hunting peoples” no “psychological” link to nature around them, “an unconscious identification took place, and this was finally rendered conscious in the half-human, half-animal, figures of the mythological totem-ancestors.” From there “the tribes supporting themselves on plant-food became cathected to the plant.” But eventually “both the plant and the animal worlds” were “brought under social control,” and at that point “the great field of instructive wonder shifted—to the skies—and mankind enacted the great pantomime of the sacred moon-king, the sacred sun-king, and the symbolic festivals of the world-regulating spheres” (390).

Anyone who has read The Golden Bough, or Harrison's Themis for that matter, will immediately recognize the pattern. Campbell's rhetoric promotes the notion that the unfortunate transmission from the primal to the local-specific is, once recognized (thanks to Campbell), obvious to the eye and indisputable. What is of course not acknowledged is the extent to which Campbell's reading of mythic transmission is dependent upon long-discredited ritualist notions. Like Frye, Campbell does not realize that the political and social uses of myth that he so scornfully points to (local cultures selfishly and narrowmindedly reading myth “to suit contemporary ends”) apply as fittingly to those who influenced him and, by extension, to himself.

Although Campbell does not hold the classical ritualist position that all myths can be traced to rituals (for that matter, neither does Frazer), nonetheless the attractions for Campbell of an evolutionary ritualist view that highlights the vital and sensual in a culture are clear. Figured in Cambridge-Hellenist writings and most mid-century myth criticism is a call for the revitalization of culture, achievable by tapping into the sources of prime spiritual energy, or mana. Like Eliot, though far more blatantly, Campbell puts forth his own call to revivify the original energies that have since been drained. “To bring the images back to life,” Campbell pronounces, “one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanent meaning” (HTF 249).

Campbell's urging for a renewal of ancient mythic images recalls the search in The Waste Land for the originary spiritual source, the mana that reanimates culture. Indeed, Campbell's description of those images as corpses that are “half-dead” and need to be brought “back to life” is redolent of a controlling figure of “The Burial of the Dead,” the corpse planted in the garden, whose “bloom” is crucial to rebirth. In both instances the rebirth works, in part, as a reversal of the flow from live spiritual energy to dead gods. In Eliot's case the transition between half-death (“feeding / A little life with dried tubers,” ll. 6-7) and rebirth (“Has it begun to sprout,” l. 72) is wound within a complex semiotics: in fact, reams of Eliot criticism have been devoted to the debate over whether the poem presents a rebirth at all. But for Campbell the journey becomes simply and plainly a matter of spontaneous translation, as “iconography”—what Campbell terms in this same context “picture language” (256)—dissolves, with fluoroscopic ease, into the ultimate signified of “permanently human meaning.”²⁰

The logocentric oneness at the heart of this ritualist conception of primitive spirituality becomes replicated in Campbell's text, as in Eliot's poetry, in the form of figures that precede the unfortunate fall into duality. To borrow from the language of “Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service,” Campbell laments the loss of the originary “Word” that “produced enervate Origen” and thus has passed from the one to the many and lost the capacity to contain contraries. In Campbell's work that nostalgic cause for lament is strikingly figured, as in Eliot's early poetry, in the image of the androgyne. Once the “feminine” was abstracted from the notion of the “androgynous,” according to Campbell, we see “the beginning of the fall from perfection into duality … the devolvement of eternity into time, the breaking of the one into two and then the many” (HTF 153).

Not coincidentally, Campbell follows his statement on androgyny with a note that cites the example of Tiresias, the “blinded seer” who is “both male and female” (HTF 153). Striking here is the parallel to Eliot's treatment of Tiresias, whose status as androgyne, in whom “the two sexes meet,” makes him “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest” (Collected Poems 72). For Campbell, the androgyne, like the primal antithetical “Word” of both Freud and Eliot, precedes the division into dualities, in this case of male and female, and so functions as a valuable figure in his own effort to bring together the fragments that the dissociation has torn asunder. Campbell's discussion of “Primal Bisexual Divinity” and androgyny in The Way of the Animal Powers (173-75) and his treatment of the “primal androgyne” in Oriental Mythology bear out this interest.²¹

In Hero the two myths Campbell initially provides as examples of the fall into the later “rationalized” attitude toward mythology concern fire-sticks, recalling again Rendel-Harris's treatment as chronicled by Eliot. The first, in which a hero escapes from the belly of a whale by making a fire, is interpreted by Campbell as follows: “Fire-making in this manner is symbolic of the sex act. The two sticks—socket stick and spindle—are known respectively as the female and the male; the flame is the newly generated life. The hero making fire in the whale is a variant of the sacred marriage” (248).

But the second tale, an Eskimo story in which Raven escapes from the whale, Campbell interprets as a “modification” of the “fire-making image” that helps to prepare for his point on the unfortunate transition from the “mythological to a secular point of view” (248). In that tale, according to Campbell, “the original fire sticks having become superfluous, a clever and amusing epilogue was invented to give them a function in the plot.”

The primary function of both Eliot's and Campbell's use of fire-sticks/snakes is to chart the coordinates of the sexual-spiritual evolution, or devolution in this case, that progressively drains the vitality out of the mythic representation. The sexual fusion that creates the mythic fire, however, functions as a representation of the even more primal fusion of sexes figured in androgyny, the double- (or neither-) sexed version of ultimate spirit that Campbell refers to as “the first wonder of the Bodhisattva: the androgynous character of the presence” (HTF 162). In that ultimate state of androgyny, Campbell claims, two critical mythic functions, “the Meeting with the Goddess and the Atonement with the Father,” come together (162), just as in The Waste Land the meeting with the Hyacinth Girl and the Test of the Thunders are the determining factors for the quester's salvation. Indeed, this fundamental meeting of male and female Campbell saw as integral to Finnegans Wake as well. In A Skeleton Key, Campbell claims that “HCE and ALP represent a primordial male-female polarity, which is basic to all life” (11). Referring to the anniversary at the end of Joyce's book, Campbell holds that “despite the complexity of HCE and ALP” (italics my own), “together they constitute the primordial, androgynous angel, which is Man, the incarnate God” (13).

Like Eliot, Campbell sees the return to the ultimate androgynous spirit-state as possible through an opening up to “Oriental” religion. Note, again, that Campbell's version of androgynous presence is the Bodhisattva. And in Hero Campbell holds that “the modern thinker wishing to know the meaning of a world religion (i.e., of a doctrine of universal love) must turn his mind to the other great (and much older) universal communion: that of the Buddha, where the primary word still is peace—peace to all beings” (159).

While Oriental religion in Hero is represented as a window to the comprehensive universal (as discussed below, this view will change in later works), Occidental religion is figured as insufficient precisely because it is narrow-mindedly “local,” unable to liberate itself from social context. Campbell holds that the religions of the West fail because they are dominated by what Campbell calls in Creative Mythology “the priestly orthodox mind,” which is “always and everywhere focused upon the local, culturally conditioned rendition” (8). The answer, Campbell baldly states in Hero, lies in opening oneself to the archetypal, in this case to the power of love:

Once we have broken free of the prejudices of our own provincially limited ecclesiastical, tribal, or national rendition of the world archetypes, it becomes possible to understand that the supreme initiation is not that of the local motherly fathers, who then project aggression onto the neighbors for their own defense. The good news, which the World Redeemer brings … is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children. … The World Savior's cross, in spite of the behavior of its professed priests, is a vastly more democratic symbol than the local flag.

(158-59)

That Christianity at its best (which is, at its most universal) is figured as “democratic symbol” indicates just how ideologically fixed and locally determined Campbell's “universalism” really is. Campbell himself becomes, as translator into a mythic Esperanto, a spiritual version in human form of the United Nations. The mythographer, by standing on the heads of the priests, has become the empowered channel through which we pass on to the great universal.

Campbell's self-defined role as conduit to the Great Spirit hearkens back to Bedient's version of Eliot as architect of a poem whose signifiers all point to the otherworldly, the “unsignifiable.” Again useful is Eagleton's point that the signifiers of Eliot's poem fail to link precisely in order that the poem's highly ideological “meaning” remains surreptitiously preserved. Just as Eliot's message of unutterable peace (“Shantih shantih shantih”) is bracketed within an ideology of containment and conservatism, so Campbell's vision of mythic universalism functions as an ethnocentric valorization of Western power mechanisms: the privileged ability, arising from Western cultural expansion, to exercise a comparative method; “democracy” itself as ultimate religious standard; “Love” as translated, controlled, distributed by the comparative mythographer; gender pared down to the “androgynous angel, which is Man” (SK 13).

Campbell's rhetoric, like Frazer's, promotes a feint of openness and plurality that, in this case, graciously admits the Other—the woman, the Oriental—in order to appropriate it. Although, according to Lefkowitz, Campbell's portrait of mythic woman emphasizes her supportive role (earth mother, child bearer: “Myth of Campbell” 422-23), sexual difference is eliminated, quashed, in the journey toward the unsignifiably androgynous. Similarly, in the journey toward spirit, the “Oriental” is taken out of the Oriental, as all religions meld into a lump of prime spiritual energy. All the mythic signifiers, according to Campbell, have no value per se but, rather, illustrate “with clarity the anthropomorphic powers in the realm of myth. They are not ends in themselves, but guardians, embodiments, or bestowers, of the liquor, the milk, the food, the fire, the grace, of indestructible life” (HTF 173). We do not see the unsignifiable milk, food, fire, however. What we are left with is the trace of the journey toward that ineffable mana, a path that bears the signature of the pathfinder. The drive toward the absence of nation, gender, and religion effectively functions as a logocentric tactic of assimilation. For it is only the author who, by a self-created contagion, wields the mana that proceeds from the sacred source.

THE POLITICS OF MYTH

Campbell's ideological aspiration as set before us in the preface to Hero is integrally tied to his method: “my hope is that a comparative elucidation may contribute to the perhaps not-quite-desperate cause of those forces that are working in the present world for unification, not in the name of ecclesiastical or political empire, but in the sense of mutual human understanding” (viii). Comparative arrangement, the compiling of the multiple voices and sources of various cultures, reveals the truth about human fellowship. The task as set before us is great indeed: “a transmutation of the whole social order is necessary,” Campbell states near the end of Hero (389). And Campbell's rhetoric makes clear that only through a comparative lens is such a vision of unified humanity possible.

For Campbell, the unification of the world's peoples has self-evident, ultimate value; it is ideologically timeless (unrelated to current, local, or national trends) and pure (note, for example, how his motives are presented as untainted by colonialism, as having no link to the Western expansion and dominance that makes his comparative culture-reading possible). In fact, as Florence Sandler and Darrell Reeck point out, Campbell's Hero was popular with its audience in part because “appearing as it did in the aftermath of the Second World War, the book reads as a sincere attempt to demonstrate the similarities of the mythical traditions and thus enhance ‘mutual human understanding.’”²² What Sandler and Reeck do not explicitly suggest is that the postwar climate that gave birth to the United Nations was actually formative in shaping Campbell's “universalist” perspective.

One striking example of the period-bound nature of Campbell's universalism is found in the 1950s and 1960s, when his ideology of unification takes a different turn. The opening to “The Separation of East and West” (composed in 1961, appearing in Oriental Mythology and later in Myths to Live By) lays the groundwork for a new dichotomization of East and West:

It is not easy for Westerners to realize that the ideas recently developed in the West of the individual, his selfhood, his rights, and his freedom, have no meaning whatsoever in the Orient. They had no meaning for primitive man. They would have meant nothing to the peoples of the early Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, or Indian civilizations. … And yet … they are the truly great “new thing” that we do indeed represent to the world and that constitutes our Occidental revelation of a properly human spiritual ideal, true to the highest potentiality of our species.

(MTLB 61)

The easy conflation of “primitive” to “Oriental,” and the equation of Western individualism to the higher reaches of the species, reveal some evolutionist assumptions inherited from turn-of-the-century social theory and anthropology (Tylor, Frazer, the Cambridge Hellenists, Leo Frobenius, Spengler).²³ The call for liberty of spirit, it is true, correlates to Campbell's earlier condemnation of the priestly class (then figured as Occidental) that has denied individuals of their potentials, but now Campbell's ire is directed toward the Oriental, rather than the Western, Other.

Campbell gives to his vilification of Oriental Other a pseudo-social-scientific (historical, anthropological) foundation that is, again, anchored in an earlier brand of social evolutionism. Essentially, the Oriental is tied to the ideology of a prehistorical period and thus, quite simply, has not sufficiently evolved: “the great point I most want to bring out is that this early Bronze Age concept of a socially manifest cosmic order, to which every individual must uncritically submit if he is to be anything at all, is fundamental in the Orient—one way or the other—to this day” (MTLB 65).

In Oriental Mythology, the second volume of The Masks of God, Campbell's opinion of the Oriental is based upon an oddly skewed reading of world history that prefers prehistoric hunting cultures over agricultural ones: Orientals, we are to believe, derive primarily from the agricultural cultures. The cultivators, according to Campbell, embody the passive and sacrificial aspects of culture that gave rise to the Bronze Age and produced the priestly class, which in turn bound religion to the morality of fully anthropomorphized, removed gods. Campbell prefers the hunting class because, in brief, it preserves the vitality of “primitive” worship that was lost with the postlapsarian predominance of “moral authorities.” As Sandler and Reeck point out, for Campbell the liberating mentality of the hunter is figured in “the bands of lusty barbarians, usually Aryans (Greeks, Vedic Indians, Celts, and Germans), who erupt into civilization from time to time, usually on horseback, usually as smashers and destroyers, but all the same self-sufficient and freedom-loving. Their religion does not bind them to the collective super-ego, and therefore does not fill them with guilt and moral intolerance” (“Masks of Campbell” 12).

Campbell's cultural, ethnic, and religious divisions fan out from this highly dubious evolutionist reading of world culture. Orientals differ from Westerners in their steadfast cleaving to the “collective superego”; at the same time, the Germanic tribal mentality of individualism is distinguished from both the Oriental and Levantine mentality of sacrifice that encourages the formation of priest classes and states. As Sandler and Reeck indicate, the ideological filiations of Campbell's rhetoric are frightening: “to differentiate the freedom-loving non-state-forming Germano-Celtic type from the state-and-priest-ridden Levantine is so transparent a revival of the old prejudice of Aryan culture against Jewish that one blushes for an author so disingenuous, especially when that author knows and deplores Nazi politics” (“Masks of Campbell” 15).

The recent controversy over Campbell's alleged anti-Semitism, surfacing in editorials in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, is then nothing new to one who has read with care Campbell's corpus.²⁴ And yet the point really is not that Campbell, in what he thought were small and safe private audiences, seems to have passed on anti-Jewish anecdotes; more pressing and fundamental is the kind of dichotomizing that constitutes and remains inscribed in his extremely popular writings. Intention is not the issue (certainly Campbell was not purposefully establishing a parallel between his set of contrasts and those of Hitler). More to the point is that his entire rhetoric matches quite neatly the structure of Said's Orientalism, described by Clifford as the “tendency to dichotomize the human continuum into we-they contrasts and to essentialize the resultant ‘other’—to speak of the Oriental mind, for example” (PC 258). Said's attacks on “essences and oppositional distinctions” (PC 274) apply only too fittingly to Campbell's self-constructed dichotomies, “primitive” versus “civilized,” Oriental versus Occidental, Aryan versus Oriental and Levantine.

Campbell's Orientalist rhetoric surfaces most blatantly in the conclusion to Oriental Mythology, and indeed it is here where we find the underpinnings of the anti-Orientalist rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s. Campbell's fiercely antagonist responses to Communist China and, more important, the generalizations on the Orient that proceed from his contemplation of China's reception of communism, tell much about this turn against the Oriental mind:²⁵

The first point of interest here for the student of mythology is that there has taken place a juncture between the old Chinese yin-yang dichotomy and the dialectical materialism of Marx. And, as many manifestations in the modern Orient suggest, there is in the Oriental mind a deep sense of affinity with the Marxist view. … The notion of a cosmic law is disregarded as irrelevant, but that of law in human affairs is retained: a law to be known to be followed, without the necessity or even possibility of individual choice and freedom of decision. So that, whereas formerly it was the priest, the reader of the stars, who knew and taught the Law, now it is the student of society.

(507)

Campbell's interpretation of the Oriental reception to communism points up, again, the evolutionary immaturity of the Oriental mind: it has not had “to face the crucial Occidental problem of what Dr. C. G. Jung has termed individuation” (Oriental Mythology 507). But when the Marxist is equated to the law-enforcing priest, the Oriental shifts from being harmlessly backward to dangerous, even horrifying. Chinese communists are to be dreaded because they are forcing themselves “into the modern world on wholly modern terms” (507). In one important sense, they will no longer remain comfortably marked off as “primitive,” “exotic,” “fading” from view, so become instead the threatening Other.

Sandler and Reeck refer to Campbell's treatment of the Oriental in Oriental Mythology as “Cold War Rhetoric” (“Masks of Campbell” 13). Like the ideology of unification surfacing just after the Second World War, Campbell's packaging of the deadly threat of Chinese communism follows a decade of rightist dichotomizing ideology in the United States. Once again, Campbell presents local, nation-bound ideology as a universalist statement that transcends the petty ideologies of the local, the nation-bound. Specifically, Campbell's strong ideological response has been triggered, we find out at the conclusion of Oriental Mythology, by horror stories from the Orient, accounts of atrocities by the communist Chinese.

This final chapter, entitled sardonically “Tibet: The Buddha and the New Happiness,” serves as an interesting example of Campbell's variety of comparativist rhetoric. Here Campbell, like Frazer, quotes from and paraphrases a plethora of sources that build to seemingly irrefutable, and oftentimes implicit, generalizations on the nature of the “Oriental” mind. Multiple voices of the sufferers are vented, evoking tales of murder, torture, rape, and horrifying scientific experimentation; those voices are carefully placed against each other and against Campbell's own editorializing comment. After quoting from an account of people burned alive and crucified, Campbell mentions Mao's “All Power … to the Peasant's Association” (Oriental Mythology 510). Quoting from an eyewitness account of a public execution by shooting, Campbell places the powerful line “as their brains spattered the Chinese called them the flowers in bloom” against “‘Let a thousand flowers bloom,’ wrote Mao Tse-Tung, ‘and let a hundred schools of thought contend’” (513). The careful selection of quotation and retort is belied by the powerful impression, calculated on Campbell's part, of multiple sources giving way to universal truths. As example is heaped upon example, quotation layered upon quotation, Campbell's rhetoric, like Frazer's, is calculated upon the belief that the more “facts” that are produced, the truer the generalizations drawn from those examples become. Kerrigan is speaking of such a rhetorical tactic when stating that Campbell “collects coincidences with great rapidity until, incapable of explaining away every one of them, opponents forfeit their skepticism” (“Raw, Cooked” 651).

The last of Campbell's examples (and he reminds us there are many more: “the reports go on and on”) recounts Tibetan monks “taken to the fields, yoked together in pairs, pulling a plow, under the supervision of a Chinese who carried a whip” (Oriental Mythology 515). In the paragraph that follows, Campbell explains how, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a lama counsels the soul “to recognize all the forms beheld as projections of its own consciousness.” The lama says of the time when the soul encounters visions from hell, “‘Fear not, fear not, O nobly born! The Furies of the Lord of Death will place around your neck a rope and drag you along; cut off your head, extract your heart, pull out your intestines, lick up your brains, drink your blood, eat your flesh, and gnaw your bones; but in reality, your body is of the nature of voidness; you need not be afraid’” (515).

Campbell makes no explicit comment on the purport of his selection from the Book of the Dead, or of its connection to the account of the tortured monks, but the message comes clear: the monks typify that mentality of sacrifice that sadly deemphasizes individual initiative and thus encourages state formation.²⁶

While the monks are represented as members of the wretched and foolish cult of sacrifice, not unlike Western Christian ascetic groups, Campbell figures the Chinese communists as Furies of the Lord of Death. With broad strokes, Campbell paints a grandly staged mythic allegory of the good (the Westerner who has achieved individuation), the bad (the modern Oriental communist), and the indifferent (the silent, suffering Tibetan monks). But, like Frazer's allegorizing, Campbell's figuration is posed as the truth come plain and simple. In the paragraph following the quotation from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Campbell presents his highly skewed reading of Oriental culture as the virtual manifestation of myth, the fluoroscopic visualization of the grand mythic structure: “And with this sobering, terrifying vision of the whole thing come true, the materialization of mythology in life, I shall close—in silence; for no Western mind can comment on these two aspects of the one great Orient in terms appropriate to the Orient itself, which, as far as any words from its leading contemporary minds would seem to show, is rather proud and hopeful of both” (Oriental Mythology 516).

Campbell's concluding “in silence” represents an ultimate Frazerian ploy: his own figuration is figured as pure representation, so that the author himself is posed as a speechless conduit to mythic truth (after we have seen the pictures, what is there to say?). And the author promotes his own humility by flourishing a bow to the voices of an Orient that he himself has created (we mere Westerners are not capable of talking about Orientals, but this is what they say about themselves).

In the book's concluding paragraph, Campbell extends his gesture of humility to Oriental mythology, “the one timeless doctrine of eternal life” (Oriental Mythology 516). And yet, in speaking of that doctrine as “the nectar of the fruit of the tree that Western man … failed to eat” (516), Campbell closes his volume with firm separate-but-equal rhetoric that announces implicitly, “and thank God we didn't take that bite.” Instead, Campbell's next two volumes of The Masks of God (Occidental Mythology and Creative Mythology) tend to applaud the Western mythic mind. As Sandler and Reeck testify, Campbell at this stage of his career shifts his interest from East to West “to celebrate the Western worldview and a hero like Parzival whose style is not dissolution [like the suffering monks] but individuation, and who will be nobody's victim” (“Masks of Campbell” 14). Though Parzival the knight is but one of a number of figures who exemplify for Campbell Western individualism, as quester he is highly appropriate for Campbell's ideological purposes. For Parzival becomes a powerful signifier of Campbell's creative mythologist, who, like the knight, must go on a dangerous quest through the wasted modern world in search of the Grail of mythic meaning. That Campbell in Creative Mythology would allude to Eliot in his articulation of this allegory is only appropriate: “In Christian Europe, already in the twelfth century, beliefs no longer universally held were universally enforced. The result was a dissociation of professed from actual existence and that consequent spiritual disaster which, in the imagery of the Grail legend, is symbolized in the Waste Land theme” (5).

Campbell borrows from Eliot the notion of dissociation to indicate, as did Eliot, a spiritual-material split in civilized consciousness: little matter that one sites that split in the twelfth century and the other in the seventeenth. In both cases the dichotomization is figured in the loss of the Grail itself; and in both cases the knight must restore a spiritual-mythic wholeness to existence. The dissociative quality in The Waste Land is discussed by Campbell throughout his career. When Bill Moyers, in The Power of Myth, talks about “the curse of modern society, the impotence, the ennui that people feel,” Campbell responds with, “this is exactly T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land that you are describing, a sociological stagnation of inauthentic lives and living that has settled upon us, and that evokes nothing of our spiritual life” (131).

In Creative Mythology the quester as knight is made to signify the creative mythologist, the author who initiates a new mythology to give the modern world meaning, or, to put it in Eliot's words, “makes the modern world possible for art.” Indeed, in Creative Mythology the modern questers are figured as the literary Modernists (Joyce, Mann, Eliot), who like “young people today” are “facing in their minds, seriously, the same adventure as thirteenth century Gottfried [another knight-quester]: challenging hell” (38). Campbell parallels the careers of Mann and Joyce according to their proximity to mythic patterns of heroic quest. Early works by both, for example, figure as “accounts of the separation of a youth from the social nexus of his birth to strive to realize a personal destiny” (38-39). Campbell then creates a narrative of the life experience of the hero-Modernist that shaped his later literary masterpieces: “He will have arrived in this world in one place or another, at one time or another, to unfold, in the conditions of his time and place, the autonomy of his nature. And in youth, though imprinted with one authorized brand or another of the Western religious heritage, in one or another of its historic states of disintegration, he will have conceived the idea of thinking for himself, peering through his own eyes, heeding the compass of his own heart” (40). Significantly, Campbell's own history quite neatly fits the pattern that he has constructed: Campbell rejected the Catholicism of his youth and constructed his own mythic symbology. The ideal of individualism becomes a vessel for the ultimate aggrandizement of the self.

Campbell's essentializing portrait of Western individualism functions, then, as allegorically as his conception of Oriental submissiveness. It is not only a matter of Campbell's creating his own Orientalism as a useful tool for the promulgation of Western ideology, rather, both East and West ultimately serve the purposes of a strategy conceived by the omnipotent culture-reader. And the portrait of the West that Campbell paints sells not because it is true but because it flatters the Westerner. This is especially true of Campbell's depiction of America as mythic site and source. It can come as no surprise that Campbell's promotion of the individual and condemnation of the submissive and sacrificial should be intimately related to a celebration of mythic America. As Sandler and Reeck relate, “Wolfram's Parzival may be the paradigm for modern man in general, but as the parvenu, pursuing his chivalric quest according to his own sense of direction to become the deliverer of Anfortas and be recognized as the new Grail king, he is the paradigm for American man in particular” (“Masks of Campbell” 16).

Campbell does view the ascendancy of America as the introduction of a special mythic force, and yet he also states that the American myth functions as a paradigm for myths to come. In The Power of Myth Campbell, holding to the need for “myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet,” goes on to claim that “a model for that is the United States. Here were thirteen different little colony nations that decided to act in the mutual interest, without disregarding the individual interests of any of them” (24). Campbell illustrates the mythic significance of the American experience with a score of high-flying numerological parallels that enter into the whacky and occultish. For example, waxing on the significance of the Great Seal of the United States as it is displayed on the dollar bill, Campbell claims,

When you count the number of ranges on this pyramid, you find there are thirteen. And when you come to the bottom, there is an inscription in Roman numerals. It is, of course, 1776. Then, when you add one and seven and seven and six, you get twenty-one, which is the age of reason, is it not? It was in 1776 that the thirteen states declared independence. The number thirteen is the number of transformation and rebirth. At the Last Supper there were twelve apostles and one Christ, who was going to die and be reborn. Thirteen is the number of getting out of the field of the bounds of twelve into the transcendent. You have the twelve signs of the zodiac and the sun.

(25)

In Campbell's mythical-magical universe, America has stood to signify the “eye of the pyramid” on the Seal that can see all impartially (PM [The Power of Myth] 25-28). Contrary to Sandler and Reeck's claim, Campbell's promulgation of a superior mythic America does not simply translate into a paean to America's status as newfound world power. Indeed, in The Power of Myth Campbell holds that with America's entry into the First World War, “we canceled the Declaration of Independence and rejoined the conquest of the planet. And so we are on one side of the pyramid. We've moved from one to two. … We do not represent the principle of the eye up there” (28).

In a sense the loss of a mythic America is necessary to the authorial program of the comparative mythographer who, like Joyce or Eliot as creative mythologist, requires a wasted civilization that can then be reconstructed. The nostalgic appeal to the lost wholeness of American life parallels Campbell's logocentric impulse to reclaim the indivisible unity of the androgynous spiritual source. It is significant in this sense that we have moved from “one to two” in our fall from mythic grace. And of course Campbell's program strongly suggests the rhetorical dynamics of The Waste Land. Tiresias is the equivalent of that mythic eye, the “spectator” (see Eliot's Notes) seeing all, in whom “the two sexes meet,” in whom the two have rolled back to the one. But Tiresias is old and impotent; like America he has lost the full power of myth: so enter the author, whose genius at arrangement can evoke the forces to recall us.

In Campbell's vision of fallen America, the rhetoric of the comparative mythologist as pedagogue, as great mythic teacher, is most explicitly at work. According to Campbell in Myths to Live By, with the loss of belief in the old myths, enforced by traditional society, “there is nothing secure to hold on to, no moral law, nothing firm” (10). Citing the collapse of “primitive communities unsettled by the white man's civilization” (again, trotting out the allegory of extinction), Campbell proclaims, “Today the same thing is happening to us. With our old mythologically founded taboos unsettled by our own modern sciences, there is everywhere in the civilized world a rapidly rising incidence of vice and crime, mental disorders, suicides and dope addictions, shattered homes, impudent children, violence, murder, and despair” (11). The evolutionary nature of his use of “primitive communities” becomes clear: we, after all, are just like primitives in our general behavioral patterns, only more evolved: and it is important that we keep evolving to keep the distance between us. In this respect, Campbell sounds much like Frazer when he tells Moyers that “by overcoming the dark passions, the hero symbolizes our ability to control the irrational savage within us” (PM xiv).²⁷

Ironically, what's right about America, the nonbinding individualism, the breaking free from enforced group belief, is also what's wrong. In “Bios and Mythos” Campbell laments both the loss of traditional social cohesion that comes with the fall of the old mythologies and the maladjustment that follows: “Hence we find today, after some five hundred years of the systematic dismemberment and rejection of the mythological organ of our species, all the sad young men, for whom life is a problem” (22). What aimless “young men” need, Campbell claims in a conversation with Moyers, is the swift kick in the rear that a traditional (read here, primitive) society, through its rituals, provides:

MOYERS:
What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?
CAMPBELL:
What we've got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.
MOYERS:
And you'd find?
CAMPBELL:
The news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people who don't know how to behave in a civilized society.
MOYERS:
Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, the community …
CAMPBELL:
That's exactly it. That's the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don't have your little baby body anymore, you're something else entirely.

(PM 8)

Andrew Klavan, after quoting from the above conversation, retorts: “Those young people! Bring back Torquemada with his powerful mythology, his rituals, his civilized society—and, oh yeah, those hot pincers too.”²⁸ Now Campbell, given his hatred of organized religion, ought not to be described as an apologist for the Inquisition. And yet he certainly does hold up ritualized violence as a model and articulates it as such, and he appears to relish its effects upon the unruly young.

Campbell's tips on returning to primal disciplinary tactics most blatantly reveal the particular ideological underpinnings of his mythography; but to assert, as does Klavan, that by the time of The Power of Myth Campbell had “followed the path of his study into dogma” severely oversimplifies the issue and bypasses the purport of the anthropological authority that runs throughout his works. Klavan, in claiming that in Campbell's case “a scholar of mythology becomes a guru and forgets that he is just another teller of the tale” (“Myth Master” 62), is mistakenly assuming that Campbell before the late stages of his career was simply telling stories, giving vent to the multiple voices of myth. Rather, the multiplicity of voice in A Skeleton Key and Hero operated through a comparativism that strained the multiple chords to an even frequency of ideology.

The only feature that stays substantially the same in Campbell's corpus is the authorial rhetoric that dissolves the disparate mythic sources and voices into sameness. As with Frye, the social criticism that operates out of the later work is deeply embedded in the early literary criticism; the semantics of that criticism may shift, but the rhetorical structure stays the same. The self-serving dichotomies persist but with different tags attached: “fact” versus “symbol,” historian versus mythologist, Aryan versus Semite, Oriental versus Westerner. In each case whole entities are divided so that the comparativist may step in and become the agent who fluroscopically mediates them. Like Frazer, Eliot, and Frye, Campbell as comparative culture-reader divides only to bind the world.

Notes

1. Mary Lefkowitz, “The Myth of Joseph Campbell,” The American Scholar 59 (1990), 429.

2. Robert Segal, “Frazer and Campbell on Myth: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Approaches,” The Southern Review 26 (1990), 471-72. Segal notes that whereas Frazer's view of myth is essentially rationalistic, Campbell's is romantic. See as well his essay “Following Your Bliss: The Romantic Appeal of Joseph Campbell and Modern Myths,” Cultural Vistas: Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (Summer 1991), 19-20. In “Frazer and Campbell on Myth” Segal also points out that both authors garnered wide popular readerships but have “mixed professional receptions” (470).

3. Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1944). Referred to hereafter as SK within text. Throughout this chapter I refer to Campbell as author of A Skeleton Key not because I want to deny that Robinson had a part in writing the book, but because, as I hope my treatment of the book demonstrates, A Skeleton Key functions so clearly as a blueprint for Campbell's later works. Campbell is listed as primary author of the book for reasons other than alphabetical.

4. Shari Benstock, “The Letter of the Law,” Philological Quarterly 63 (1984), 163, 206-07.

5. Margot C. Norris, “The Consequence of Deconstruction: A Technical Perspective of Joyce's Finnegans Wake,” in Critical Essays on James Joyce, ed. Bernard Benstock (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 206.

6. In Beyond Modernism: A New Myth Criticism (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1988), Ted Spivey wrongly sees the promotion of difference in deconstruction as closely approaching the “collision of forces” and “tension of opposites” found in the writings of Jung, Eliade, and Campbell (9).

7. Raphael Patai, in Myth and Modern Man (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), writes of Campbell as the example of “the transformation of a historian of religion into mytho-poet” (58).

8. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 256. Referred to hereafter as HTF.

9. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 142; Joseph Campbell, with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, ed. Betty Sue Flowers (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 231. Referred to hereafter as PM within the text.

10. See Robert Segal's discussion of Campbell's notion of the modern artist as hero in Joseph Campbell: An Introduction (New York: Mentor, 1990 [1987]), 124-40.

11. See Segal's treatment (Joseph Campbell 123-26) of Campbell's conception of creative mythology; also, see Lefkowitz (“Myth of Campbell” 432) on the importance of individualism to Campbell.

12. Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, volume 4 of The Masks of God (New York: Viking, 1968), 260-61.

13. Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By (New York, 1973), 12. Referred to hereafter as MTLB within the text.

14. Joseph Campbell, quoted in H. A. Reinhold, “A Thousand Faces—But Who Cares?” Commonweal (8 July 1949), 322. See also William Kerrigan, “The Raw, The Cooked, and the Half-Baked,” VQR 51 (1975), 651.

15. William Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1986), 176.

16. Segal makes the point that both Frazer and Campbell condemn taking myth literally—that is, as true—but that Frazer has no use for myth symbolically either, as Campbell does. See “Frazer and Campbell on Myth,” 472, 474.

17. Alan Dundes, Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 232; See also Stanley Hyman, “Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense,” Kenyon Review 11 (1949), 455-56.

18. Joseph Campbell, The Way of the Animal Powers, volume 1 of The Historical Atlas of World Mythology (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), 8.

19. Joseph Campbell, “Bios and Mythos: Prolegomena to a Science of Mythology,” in Myth and Literature, ed. John Vickery, 16.

20. Campbell's notion of “picture-language” is integrally related to the use of illustrations in his books. In volumes such as The Mythic Image, The Power of Myth, and especially The Historical Atlas of World Mythology, the pictures function as irrefutable testimony to his assertions. On the authority of such illustrations, see also Kerrigan's review of The Mythic Image, “The Raw, The Cooked, and the Half-Baked,” 455-56.

21. Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology, volume 2 of The Masks of God (New York: Viking Press, 1976 [1962]), 9-13. See, for example, The Way of the Animal Powers, where Campbell states that “a commonly recognized corollary of the male-female polarity theme is represented in the image of a single, androgynous, higher source of power out of which opposites have sprung” (173).

22. Florence Sandler and Darrell Reeck, “The Masks of Joseph Campbell,” Religion 11 (1981), 9.

23. Segal comments that with Myths to Live By and Creative Mythology, the West becomes Campbell's “ideal, and the East becomes his nemesis” (Joseph Campbell 140).

24. The piece that began this debate in the press is Brendan Gill's “Faces of Joseph Campbell,” New York Review of Books, 36 (28 September 1989), 16-19; following that were “Joseph Campbell: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, 36 (9 November 1989), 57-61, and editorials by Robert Segal and Arnold Krupat in the New York Times (2 December 1989), 26. Segal maintains that Campbell condemns Judaism as he does all organized religion, only with an added intensity. Like other religions, Judaism for Campbell is narrowly local (versus universalist) and reads myth literally rather than symbolically. Added to Judaism's shortcomings, according to Campbell, are its patriarchal, nationalistic, and anti-mystical tendencies. See Segal, “Campbell on Jews and Judaism,” Religion 22 (1992), in press.

25. I should like to avoid giving the impression that there is one definitive shift in Campbell's writing from a pro- to an anti-Orientalist position. Campbell is pro-Eastern (and anti-Western) at many points in his later writings. I focus on the anti-Orientalist rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s primarily because it most blatantly illustrates his brand of essentializing. Segal discusses the inconsistencies and multiple shiftings of Campbell's anti-Orientalist rhetoric in Joseph Campbell, 142-43.

26. See Sandler and Reeck, “Masks of Campbell,” 14.

27. Campbell's attitude toward so-called savages—usually Africans, in fact—can be traced back to Hero, which begins with the words, “Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse … it will always be the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find” (3). These words, in fact, are reverentially quoted by Bill Moyers in his introduction to The Power of Myth.

28. Andrew Klavan, “Joseph Campbell, Myth Master,” Village Voice (24 May 1988), 60.