Some still treat it as a Theory of Everything for literature, even when we take ourselves aside to agree, "We're only pretending it's sound because it's a good model, alright?" Key word here is "some." I don't have numbers for how many scholars or academics take the Monomyth seriously, nor how many recognise it for the literary tchotchke that it is. What I do know is that it keeps fucking coming back, not just in academic circles, and it needs to be reburied and sealed away in concrete.

But before that, an aside on #cryptids. As a Scottish person, I find it utterly baffling the sort of creatures that people travel from far and wide to see. What do folks actually believe about #Nessie, for example? It's as real as any hoax, and yet that bastard apparently reels in over £40m every year:

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/627436/loch-ness-monster-tourism-in-scotlands-economy

Sure, Nessie is not the only reason people travel to Loch Ness, but suffice it to say for many a one who goes, even if you know for a fact it's not real, your imagination begs you, kicking and screaming, to believe it is, just for a bit. You can tell by the way people talk about Nessie whether their imagination shows through or not. It's not good irony if everyone agrees it's not real*.

The #Monomyth is literature's #cryptid. As long as we continue to concede that it's "at least a good model," it remains in that liminal state between being a universal measurement for stories, or the overgeneralisations of a man who, as he admitted himself, was just spitballing. That is, the effect of the Monomyth has on our studies is to learn to compare stories by stripping them down to their symbols, and what they have in common. Curiously, on symbols, Campbell wrote (next post 👇):

> "[They] are only the VEHICLES of communication, they must not be mistaken for the final term, the TENOR, of their reference. No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding… no-one should attempt to read or interpret [them] as the final thing."
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 518-9 (emphasis my own)

Models, insofar as I understand, are structures defining simple rules for analysing a single work, and or comparing several works in tandem. Like metaphors, they are not an actual, objective representation of something. They're not meant to be detailed; if it makes comparison easier to work through in our heads, or in dialogue, as many argue the Monomyth does, then it follows that it's a good model, doing its job - and many follow that no further inquiry is required.

Comparing one story to another isn't the problem. The #Monomyth lens can shine a light on a thousand stories with a thousand supporting protagonists, young and male, who join the main protagonist after they've crossed the first threshold. The lens cannot tell you that there is one, and only one, Junpei Iori from #Persona3Reload ("DA MAN"). The best it can do is shrug and go "Idonfuckinknow, he's the Romeo to Chidori's Juliet, I mean, have you SEEN West Side Story? Same story."

For whatever reason, we seem to keep passing thought experiments - like the #Monomyth - down the telephone game, and arriving a priori at the conclusion that, given enough data (or stories), they can be proven a fait accompli. We do this in spite of Campbell's self-waiver above, an extremely safe, and conservative conclusion. We've done this before with #Hobbes and #Rousseau. The structure of conclusion is the same. Maybe there are angles we're missing.

Perhaps the most fetid and swollen elephant carcass in the room is that, even by the standards of what was politically acceptable in the 1940s, Campbell's politics were weird. Randian-weird. Hobbesian-weird. As Joel Christensen and Sarah E. Bond write in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Monomyth blends in and aligns with Ayn Rand's interpretation of ethical egoism in her Fountainhead:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-behind-the-myth-should-we-question-the-heros-journey

If Campbell's theories are a tuning fork, then what resonates when you strike it are the frequencies of rugged individualism, as Christensen and Bond write*; there's also harmonies with Hobbes; Great Men theories of history; it's libertarian in broad strokes. But let's be very clear: Campbell consistently repeated, time and again, that Monomythic heroes must always be male; they are destined to inherit power, supernatural or otherwise; they are born to bring order, and to rule.