Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Yet Another Journey: On the Monomyth and "American Gods"

I remember a lot about reading Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 10th grade English class.  I can recall hoping that Tom Sawyer would die a gruesome death by novel's end.  Or I could tell you about reciting Hamlet's "to be or not to be" solliloquy for some tangentially related extra credit.  But what sticks out most in my memories of that time is the paper that we had to write on it: a twenty-five page monstrosity on the monomyth.

The prompt was fairly straighforward: using Joseph Campbell's outline of the monomyth, compare The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and any other work of literature or film along the lines of the hero's journey.  With only about a week to do it, our teacher told us that all of our thoughts would be on the monomyth.  As a result, he continued, once we emerged from our bedrooms, essays in hand, we would be unable to look at at any piece of media without making monomythic comparisons.

For me, at least, that last part wasn't true.  I know that others in the class mentioned unconsciously linking everything back to some stage of the monomyth, but alas, I was not.  Recently, I've been wondering why that was.  After all, it's not as if I am incapable of unwillingly making connections between my studies and the outside world.  About a year ago I took a class on philosophy of science, which I barely understood, and last semester I was tying it in with absolutely everything.

And yet here I am today, three years later, thinking hard about the monomyth.  As I write this, I only a few hours ago finished American Gods, a 2001 novel by Neil Gaiman.  It's a wonderful book, one I highly recommend reading.  It's also, especially in it's early stages, very much in sync with the hero's journey.  More importantly, I quickly recognized that it followed that story arc.  Largely removed from when it was relevant to my life, only now am I seeing the monomyth in art.

Given the subject matter of American Gods, though, it's not that surprising that I made the connection.  Set in a world where every god conceived exists because humans believe in them, it is immediately apparent that mythology plays a crucial role in the story.  Given that, I can see how my mind could drift from classical gods to classical heroes, and from that point it's just a stone's throw to the classical hero's journey myth.

Way back in tenth grade, though, and the monomyth could not have been further from my mind.  Why is that?  Well, for one thing, I remember having a hard time thinking of a work to which I could compare The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  The teacher gave us a handout with a list of monomythic works.  After reading through it, I found that the only one I had read and liked was The Catcher in the Rye, so that became my comparative pieces.

I could use this incident to demonstrate my detachment from popular culture.  I am proud to say that I've never seen Star Wars, and I got two chapters into The Hobbit before throwing it across the room.  I feel no particular attachment to the Disney animated film canon, and I can't even remember the rest of the works he suggested.  As the kind of person who will self-deprecatingly say he likes works where people stand around and stare at each other, the hero's journey simply doesn't suit me.

On top of that, I found--still find, really--the notion of a monomyth a bit hard to swallow.  Not only does it seem male-centric and overly broad in its schemata, but it also strikes me as bizarre that one would need to codify it if it were truly ingrained in the collective unconscious.  Add to the fact that after The Hero with a Thousand Faces creators consciously tried to craft monomythic tales, and it's no wonder that I find the monomyth something artists should choose to avoid.

Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy writing about it.  Part of the fun was trying to fit the adventures of Holden Caulfield into the monomyth, as I find his travail neither heroic nor journey-based.  And part of the fun was making the filler; my favorites were arguing that because both Huck and Holden think about going west, they are quintessentially American monomyths, and that one could make a case that Holden's goddess figure is his little sister.

So, with this piece, I'm going to see if I can recreate some of that half-baked essay magic.  That's right--I'll be comparing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye and American Gods as variations on the monomyth.  Now, covering every stage of the hero's journey would take an inordinate amount of space for a blog, so I'll be confining myself to the first two parts: The Call to Adenture and The Refusal of the Call.

The Call to Adventure

The Call to Adventure is exactly what is sounds like.  The hero of whatever tale we speak is given the chance to start a grand journey.  The call may be someone literally calling on the hero to do action X for purpose P, or it may be an external force which forces the protagonist from his current situation and out into the world.  Either way, this is a crucial step in the story.  After all, if there's no impetus to get off the couch, why should the hero bother?

For Huck Finn, the call to adventure is two-fold.  The first part can be summed up as "survival".  Huck's father, who had been absent from Huck's life, returns to town to get at the money that Huck acquired in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  "Pap" manages to gain custody of Huck, and thus begins an abusive parentage.  Huck realizes that he must escape from this living arrangement, or else the whippings and neglect will continue.  As Twain has Huck narrate:
But by and by pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and I couldn't stand it.  I was all over welts.  He got to going away so much, too, and locking me in.  Once he locked me in and was gone three days.  It was dreadful lonesome.  I judged he had got drownded, and I wasn't ever going to get out any more.  I was scared.  I made up my mind I would fix up some way to leave there. (23; ch. 6)
Huck has a flight-or-flight stimulus to leave town, but he also has mental call as well.  Huck is not enthralled with the "civilized" world that has been thrust upon him since coming into money.  From the get-go, it is clear that Huck wishes to escape from this life-style as well.  According to Huck, "[I]t was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out" (Twain 1; ch. 1).  Huck real call, then, may be his desire to reject antebellum civilization.

In J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield also receives a two-part calling: an "ultimatum" and a "motivation", if you will.  Unlike Huck, though, Holden knows damn well what his ultimatum is and when it's coming: "I wasn't supposed to come back after Christmas vacation, on account of I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself at all" (Salinger 6; ch. 1).  Yet though he can forsee this part of the call, Holden is just as compelled to begin his journey right there and then.

However, Holden, like Huck, is driven by a fundamental mistrust of society.  In Holden's case, he is disgusted by what he calls "phoniness".  What exactly being phony entails is not entirely clear--hypocrisy? cynicism?--but given how he hates words such as "grand" and the upscale academic society that is Pencey, it bears at least some relation to the civilized ways against which Huck Finn chafed.  Granted, though, him describing the phoniness of Pencey Prep is a bit scattershot:
You ought to go to a boys' school sometime...It's full of phonies, and all you do is study that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football teamn loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddamn cliques. (Salinger 170; ch. 17)
Whatever it is that Holden resents about society, it is clear that both he and Huck Finn are ultimately driven by their views of the world around them.  The same cannot be said for Shadow, the protagonist of American Gods.  In fact, Shadow seems to be perfectly fine with the state of America.  After spending three years of a six-year sentence in prison, all Shadow really wants is to return home to Eagle Point, Indiana and to pick up his life where he left it.
No, Shadow's call is purely of the "what-else-can-I-do" variety.  A shady figure who goes by Mr. Wednesday, after telling Shadow that his wife is dead and that his job opportunity back home is gone, offers him a job as his errand boy.  Although Shadow makes it clear that he is not fond of Wednesday, he concedes that he's "at a loose end right now" (Gaiman 31; pt. 1, ch. 2).  After drinking some ceremonial mead, Shadow joins Wednesday and accepts the call.

Refusal of the Call

While it should be obvious that one must accept the call for their to be a story, the hero need not accept the call at once.  In fact, one of the seventeen stages that Campbell indentifies in the monomyth is the Refusal of the Call.  Early on, the protagonist may decide to ignore his calling and stay on his couch.  He might be scared of the other world, believe that the journey is immoral, or just content with his life as it is.

Not all hero's journey tales follow every step, though.  In fact, in both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, he narrative does not include a refusal of the call.  That this stage of the monomyth is not included is in large part due to the nature of the call.  Huck will die if he stays in the cabin with Pap, and in a few days Holden will be forcibly removed from the premises of Pencey Prep.  Refusing the call is impossible for both characters.

That said, given where both Huck and Holden are mentally when they receive the call to the adventure, it would go against character for them to turn it down.  In Huck's case, he had been trying to escape from the Widow Douglas' civilizing force since the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  Holden, meanwhile, has done nothing that would indicate he would like to stay at Pencey (e.g., applying himself), and it appears he's chomping at the bit to begin his journey:
But all of sudden, I changed my mind.  All of sudden, I decided what I'd really do, I'd get the hell out of Pencey--right that same night and all.  I mean not wait till Wednesday or anything.  I just didn't want to hang around any more.  It made me too sad and lonesome. (Salinger 66; ch. 7)
Neither Huck nor Holden are all that heroic as characters when their journey's begin, but one trait they both possess is a clear willingness to venture forth.  Neither can know what's in store for them, but once the ultimatum is delivered, they're out the door in a heart beat.  Such is not the case with Shadow.  Eagerness to journey is a trait which Shadow does not possess, and this becomes clear when he initially rejects the call to adventure.

On the plane from St. Louis to (eventually) Eagle Point, Shadow winds up in first class sitting next to Wednesday.  It is on the plane that Wednesday first makes his job offer, and Shadow turns him down several times during the flight.  Shadow's refusals aren't weak, either, but unequivocal: "'Mister whoever-the-fuck you are,' said Shadow, just loud enough to be heard over the din of the engines, 'there isn't enough money in the world'" (Gaiman 19; pt. 1, ch. 1).

Shadow does eventually come around--though not before getting off at another airport to get away from Wednesday.  It's a call that Shadow is unwilling to accept until it becomes clear that this is effectively an ultimatum.  Even when he does accept the call to adventure, he does little to mask his contempt for the man offering it: "I don't like you, Mister Wednesday, or whatever your real name may be.  We are not friends" (Gaiman 31; pt. 1, ch. 2).  Whereas Huck and Holden are eager heroes, Shadow is a reluctant one.

What Have I Learned?

In writing on the first two stages of the monomyth in relation to these three books, I wished to discover what it is about American Gods that reminded me of the monomyth, and why The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye didn't.  Factoring out the central presence of mythological beings in Gaiman's book, and I believe that it comes down to one thing: the fact Shadow first refuses the call.

One of the key elements of the any story is that the hero has something which he needs to overcome.  Whether it's societal rules or the protagonist's own immaturity, there is something which must be in some way conquered.  Yet if the hero is immediately willing to do something--even if in the end it plays no role in solving the problem--the payoff does not feel all that heroic; it's something of a foregone conclusion then.

However, if the protagonist at first is skeptical about making the journey, only later coming around on the idea, then, at least from my perspective, the stakes have been raised.  If it took so long for the hero to fully acknowledge that a problem must be conquered, then there's significant build-up, and the hero's journey itself comes into greater focus.  I'm not necessarily saying that the monomythic hero should be a relucatant one, but it would explain some of my reactions.

I say "some", because I can immediately think of counterexamples.  I've already mentioned how I could not stand what little I read of The Hobbit, and Bilbo Baggins is often held-up as the typical reluctant hero.  The same is true of Harry Potter: he would probably be more than happy to not be the chosen one, yet the series hold little appeal for me on a story level.  Both are unwilling heroes, but neither draw me to their journeys.

I suppose that further analysis might end up clarifying why the monomythic aspects of American Gods stand out to me, but that would probably require more time and space than I am willing to devote to the topic.  That, and reading over the essay I wrote back in tenth grade is excruciating.  This might be a topic I will return to in the future, but for now, I am willing to write off my observations on American Gods as pure coincidence.  I am, if you will, refusing the call.

Works cited:

Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. New York: William Morrow-HarperCollins, 2001. Print.

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. 1951. New York: Back Bay-Little, Brown and
     Company, 2001. Print.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. Garden City, NY: Nelson
     Doubleday, 1969. Print.

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