People interested in storytelling have been obsessed with the “Hero’s Journey” for decades, which a fantastically sexist man hacked together as a concept from a poor interpretation of James Joyce and of cherry picked anthropological evidence.

What pisses me off is that the idea has taken such complete hold of artist’s imagination that it makes people only want to talk about “Narrative” with respect to storytelling, and it misses the most essential aspect of storytelling in that good stories are always inherently plural in their nature. A good story is a cacophony of potentially true narratives all vying for your soul on stage with no easy answer, not a simple list of plot points delivered to convince you of a particular belief and singular structure through which to see a set of events.

This leads to a massive learned blindspot about advertisement in that artists lose sight of the fact that Advertisement is the annihilation of Storytelling where the natural human invitation for the audience to interpret and construct their own unique Narrative is buried in an avalanche by an overwhelming reifying force that simplifies a complex reality down to a single corporate produced Narrative. People who do sports wear Nike.

Advertisement is the attempt to annihilate art, it can be seen no other way no matter how many artists the advertisement industry employs in the process.

Many people will be shocked, however, to learn that academic folklorists and scholars of ancient literature almost universally reject Campbell’s theories as nonsense—and for good reason. Campbell’s outline of the “hero’s journey” is so hopelessly vague that it is essentially useless for analyzing stories across cultures. It also displays ethnocentric, sexist, heteronormative, and cisnormative biases and it encourages people to ignore the ways in which stories are fundamentally shaped by the cultures and time periods in which they are produced.

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Campbell starts out with the assumption that every great story must be focused on a single hero, whom he generally assumes to be a heterosexual man. According to Campbell, the “hero’s journey” begins with the hero living in a state of normality, which is disrupted by some kind of “call to adventure,” which takes the hero into the realm of the “unknown,” which “is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human deeds, and impossible delight.

talesoftimesforgotten.com/…/the-heros-journey-is-…

For those who disagree, can you not see how directly this imposed definition of what a Story is slots perfectly into rationalizing Advertising and focusing on it as the true purpose of an Artist?

I disagree. James Campbell was not a perfect man, but he did coalesce what humans like to see in a story most of the time. It’s not a perfect scenario like he claimed, but more of a guide to most cultures. If you look at boring structures of story, it’s usually because it doesn’t follow western structure (the hero’s journey). Joseph Campbell hated Noh from Japanese culture because he couldn’t follow it as a hero’s journey. Even if he didn’t speak the language, he could usually tell when they followed it. I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about when cherry picking. He’s right in that to a westerner, it will be hard to understand and may be boring. To the Japanese though, it’s been around a long time.

He’s right in that to a westerner, it will be hard to understand and may be boring.

Ok, but he is wrong in believing that says anything meaningful about Storytelling, it is just a shitty mirror to our own failings as a culture to point out this repetitive structure, encourage people to repeat it more and then idolize it as “universal” when it isn’t.

Over the last few decades, this structure has come to dominate much of popular storytelling, and Hollywood cinema in particular. With so many bestselling novels and international blockbusters using the Hero’s Journey to great success, it would seem at first glance that Campbell was right—that most or all great stories can be distilled down to a formula, which is universally applicable across time and place.

However, as we’ll be exploring in today’s blog post, Campbell’s theories aren’t always a perfect fit for the needs of storytellers in the real world. The Hero’s Journey is not as universal as Campbell would claim—and the framework is weighed down by Campbell’s own antisemetic and sexist thinking.

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“projected Anglo-Western storytelling and cultural values onto Indigenous mythic narratives, which in fact have very different storytelling norms and serve a very different purpose to the individualistic striving for self fulfilment which he identified [as the key to all storytelling].”

In other words, Campbell cites superficial similarities between myths of different cultures as evidence for the claim that the stories of all cultures share an underlying purpose, i.e. the dramatic reenactment of the individual’s quest for self fulfillment.

In the process, he ignores overwhelming ethnographic evidence that the very idea of an atomized, individual “self” separated from clan, species, etc. is a relatively new one in the history of human thought, and that such a striving self is not a central feature in stories from many parts of the world.

freerange.com/…/joseph-campbell-history-and-antis…

Do I really need to explicitly connect why this broken conception of stories is advantageous to the Advertising Industry? It encapsulates the full extent of artistry within the bounds of capitalism and subsumes the work of the artist as simply the cherry on top to help a product be sold. EVERYTHING an artist can do is just a manipulation to impose a very particular narrative of a set of events into the minds of the audience.