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.

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.