When a story becomes popular, and I mean really popular — Star Wars popular — that story usually incorporates the characteristics of myth. Its elements are widely and instantly recognizable; they become cultural reference points that everyone understands. Even people who don’t like Star Wars get the references, so Darth Vader can sell Volkswagens while kittens, cats, dogs and even chipmunks can become lightsaber-wielding forces of nature [must. close. youtube. now]. Anyway, the point is (before the valiant critters buckled their swash all over the internet) not that George Lucas set out to make a mythic franchise (he did, working with no less than Joseph Campbell during the writing of A New Hope) but that Lucas’ story devolved.
What is devolution? Devolution means to pass on from one stage to another, to mature or, in another sense, to decay. In its original meaning, it implied degeneration, or a flowing downhill.
Devolution is natural in the development and maturation of myth. You can see it clearly at work in the Arthurian legend. Early treatments of King Arthur and his knights (11th and 12th century) focus on Merlin and Arthur’s “magical” conception, his brilliant kingship, his fight with Modred and his death. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittaniae (early 12th century) did much to popularize Arthur and spread his legend.
And spread it did — widely. “The Matter of Britain” — the founding of Britain by Aeneas and the culmination of its nobility in Arthur, peerless king, flower of chivalry, Rex quondam Rexque futurus — a scribe can’t swing a quill pen in the Middle Ages without hitting an Arthurian something. Arthur is everywhere.
But something happened. Once the tale of Arthur’s life, his battles against the Saxons and the Romans and his own son/nephew Modred, were told, there wasn’t much more to be said. So the focus began to shift; characters secondary to the myth began to take the spotlight. The myth devolved.
Even in isolated Wales, the 13th century scribes who collected the texts that became the Mabinogion find Arthur appearing in a supporting role, while the main action is given over to other figures. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, again—Arthur is in the background. And when the French get hold of the legend, the devolution goes wild. The romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, as well as Percival, Galahad and the Grail legend — all of it is chronicled in Chrétien de Troyes and in the Great Vulgate Cycle and both works are easy to get lost in. If you’re so inclined, The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester is a good place to start your deep dive into All Things Arthurian.
The thing to note about mythic stories, whether they be King Arthur or Luke Skywalker, is that the original story eventually gets tired, but the setting, the cycle, can be so intriguing, can touch our interests on so many levels that, although we’re done with the main story, it’s not done with us. And so we move on, and other stories develop, fresh heroes rise. Witness the focus of The Force Awakens, which is most definitely not on Luke; witness 157 different novels set in the Star Wars universe. We’re talking serious devolution.
I bring this up because I wonder if something similar hasn’t happened in fantasy.
Joseph Campbell revived and popularized the study of myth, and the most famous of his works is The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which examines the concepts of the hero and the hero’s journey as they work out through comparative mythology. It was Campbell who devised the hero’s journey as, in essence, a restatement of traditional rites of passage: “separation—initiation—return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth” (1, p. 30).
This journey is, of course, the classic quest. The hero goes out into the wilderness, accomplishes a great task, and returns to the world. Campbell further breaks down the mythic progression into a formula: the Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Crossing the First Threshold, Passage Through the Belly of the Whale (or Trials and Tribulation), etc., Crossing the Return Threshold, Master of Two Worlds. We can go into all of this if you want to. We can examine how fantasies conform to the formula (or don’t), drill down further and examine the permutations, the other elements like supernatural assistance, animal guides, etc.
Or not. Right now, I just want to note that it exists, and Campbell mapped it.
And of course, no good deed goes unpunished; no great formula is ever so great that it can’t be left alone. And where Campbell blazed a trail with a pocketknife, a torch and his extraordinarily keen mind, his followers built a superhighway.
Google “the hero’s journey” and you’ll get about 1,560,000 hits in .67 seconds, plus a nearly-unlimited range of images. Part of its popularity is the inherent interest of the subject (because it is interesting), but it’s also due to burgeoning industry in “Aids for Writers of Fantasy.” Sometimes it feels like there are as many how-to resources for writers of fantasy as there are fantasy novels—but then, the how-to works are a lot easier to produce.
For example, and this is just one of many but it happens to be the one that’s handy and better than most, a hero’s outline from Agile Writers, a much better-than-average writer’s resource site. Not only must the hero have a quest, or at least a goal, (s)he must also have a life goal. In other words, it’s not enough to have a quest, the hero now must have a character arc, must be in the process of maturing or becoming. (S)he must lack an inner quality, something to grow toward, in addition to needing flaws that endear her/him to us as readers. (S)he must also have companions whose strengths compensate for whatever the hero lacks. Halfway through the story, the hero should have committed fully to the quest; three-quarters of the way through, at least one of the allies must die, in order to raise the stakes.
You see, something funny happened to the way to the Belly of the Whale: formulas took over, and the heroes themselves got predictable. If it’s not the “lost noble raised in obscurity,” it’s the “chosen one” destined to save the world, or the “diamond in the rough” aka “thief with heart of gold.” Google “tired fantasy tropes” and some 400,000 hits come up, each one complaining about the same thing—the hero.
If we can credit Tolkien with popularizing fantasy, with securing its place in mainstream literature, we also have to attribute at least some of the excesses of high fantasy to his pervasive influence. But if we’re going to do that, we also have to slap a similar sticker on Joseph Campbell. And really, neither is responsible for what their successors did and did with a vengeance.
I suspect that too much of Prince Destined and Princess Saveme wandering the wastelands for the Magic Macguffin while slaughtering trolls and fulfilling the Prophecies of the Elves or somesuch gave us all a massive hangover, and the whole mess got so twee that when the first streetwise sword-wielding half-vampire with a Daddy-issue and a taste for heavy metal came along, everyone threw up their hands and cheered.
Even so, I wonder if traditional heroes are still possible in contemporary fantasy, or whether we’re going to be stuck with Gentleman Bastards and Black Companies and the like for the foreseeable future, since anti-heroes are all the rage. Has the hero given way to the Flawed Protagonist in the Process of Becoming, or Character Arc 101? Is King Arthur even possible anymore, and if he ever shows up, will we notice?
Previous Installments
Notes:
1. Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. 2nd ed. Princeton: Bollingen, 1968.