And in the epilogue:

> There is no final system for the interpretation of myths, and there will never be any such thing.
- Ibid., pp. 767-8

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

You might say that "must always be" is a bit too strong, for in the eighth step of the journey ("Meeting with the Goddess"), he appends the notion that there can be heroines. For this, I would like to retell the arguments from Spencer McDaniel's "The Hero's Journey is Nonsense," as I understand them:

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/

> "When the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth, but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed - whether she will or no."
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 299-300

If your protagonist is female, then forget the whole 'Woman as Temptress' step that comes next - she will be tempted here and now, and deep within her psyche and yours is the inability to think otherwise, because she is destined to be the chattel of the divine. What an incredibly *weird* way of framing it, Campbell!

Well, OK. What about stories where the protagonists aren't white--

This, folks, is Campbell's *opening.* It is his 'dark and stormy night;' his 'best of times, worst of times;' his Greek chorus who foreshadows everything that is going to happen in the play; he might not have flat-out compared these cultures to primates in this quote*, but he makes it very clear that not only are they not Western, he finds their stories amusing, bizarre, mystical, and on the whole, "it's all the same."

It may be to my detriment to have this as a footnote - #RationalWiki bills Campbell as a 'late Romantic' - not until after it quite rightly calls him out on his #antisemitism

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell

The focus of stories on individuals seemingly separate from the society around them intensified in the post-war period, but, a book in my postgrad reading list raises an interesting point. In Kim Wilkins' "Writing Bestsellers," she explores why some of us artists still yearn to separate our work from 'the market' to avoid it being tainted.

Now, book production in Britain was industrialised with William Caxton's importing of the printing press in the 15th century, as I briefly mentioned in a previous essay:

https://brologue.net/2024/06/21/wtdwa/

But it's in the late 18th century, where the first industrial revolution is in its heyday, the dawn of the Romantics, and with them, the modern mode of book production we're still with today.

Faced with the prospect of larger audience, the Romantics decided that they would be the writers who would not engage in such vulgarity. Their work was to champion individual experiences to be savoured, not to churn out penny dreadfuls with mass appeal! #Schismogenesis strikes again…

https://brologue.net/tag/schismogenesis/

We can link Campbell to all the bootstrapping rags-to-riches anaesthesia of the post-war period, and of our #neoliberal overlords, AND we can link back to the Romantics. It's something none of my other sources have done, and I think it's something worth pointing out.