★★☆☆☆ Sucks all the joy out of story-telling

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Joseph Campbell

I read The Hero with a Thousand Faces around 2001, I believe. I was in business school at the time, and for some reason one of our books mentioned Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, I read his Drumming at the Edge of Magic, which I enjoyed greatly. (Sadly, it appears I was the only one, as it is now out of print.) In Drumming Hart mentions his conversations with Joseph Campbell. Campbell's name had come up in other things I have read, of course, and that was enough to make me read the book.

I found The Hero with a Thousand Faces exceedingly long and dull. This opinion is, of course, not uniquely mine. You will easily find large numbers of reviews that say the same. Campbell's point is that there is one story that all human cultures tell in some form or another. The insight that the same stories come up again and again is one that has come to more scholars than I could count. Campbell's thesis in its strongest form says more than that -- he says that we all tell the same story.

My main problem with The Hero with a Thousand Faces is that it makes this simple point with so little joy. You will easily find the point made much more engagingly by authors of fiction. Particularly those who are indebted to folklore for the stories they write will tell you this.

Now, two objections immediately come to mind. (1) Am I simply a person who can't endure scholarly writing? (2) Seen in its historical context, The Hero with a Thousand Faces deserves more regard than you are giving it.

With respect to (1), I assure that that I am not. Those who follow my reviews have seen me review positively many scholarly works (see, e.g. my review of Plagues and Peoples or SPQR).

As to objection (2), this is a valid point. I am not a scholar of comparative mythology, and I understand that when it was published in 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces was a ground-breaking work. Therefore, when I give it a two-star rating, that is only intended for the guidance of people thinking of reading it in 2023. If you want to study General Relativity, I would advise against trying to do it by reading the works of Albert Einstein -- modern authors understand it and explain it better than he did. If you want to understand comparative mythology, read someone other than Campbell.

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