by Lance Lee
The hero as warrior is easy to grasp. The upshot of his action may be to “pour creative power into the world,” but that is because he is the champion of things becoming.7 He is the killer of the status quo, specifically of “Holdfast, the keeper of the past.”8 No clearer examples exist in dramatic literature of holdfast characters than the ghost in Hamlet or Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront. Edvard Vergerus is such a figure in Fanny and Alexander; Alexander specifically runs into trouble with him by using his imagination to reveal Edvard’s nature: a man who at least spiritually caused the death of his last family and who is well on the way to doing the same with his new.
The warrior version of the hero myth lets a salient feature arise: there is always a villain, the evil one who holds and abuses power and forces time to stop, so experience only repeats the forms of his control. He mistakes, it may be, shadow for substance, like the man watching shadows in the Platonic cave, but he is nonetheless powerful. His power increases in proportion to that given the hero in a particular tale. Time cannot be stopped, the past holds on forever: the tyrant, the holdfast, is a tyrant of fact, a visionless man and doomed. The hero is his doom and will sweep him away, whether the hero encounters him as a beast, man, or god.
The hero appears too as a lover. Romantic comedy and romantic drama in general draw freely on this aspect. Here woman symbolizes the life energy the hero has to win from his opponent and restore to the world. It doesn’t matter whether it is Ferdinand seeking Miranda in The Tempest, or the struggling father in Sleepless in Seattle: “getting the girl” is getting life. The heroine here is the “other portion” of the hero himself.9 She is exactly what Book cannot keep in Witness because he cannot control his violence; he fails a key test of being the hero. Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront doesn’t think of Edie as a “life force,” but he is the tyrant, the holdfast of that story who does recognize the threat she poses through her influence on Terry.
In drama the action of the romantic hero story becomes the hero overcoming whatever the resistance is to his “having the girl.” If that resistance has taken the form of being tested by a holdfast, then the hero must finally overthrow him. Typically in film, however, the holdfast is either another rival or the testing resulting from the heroine striving to be sure he is the destined hero, as Cecily imagines Algy to be as she fantasizes him as a knight in shining armor. Nonetheless, Cecily, as Gwendolyn does with Jack, puts Algy through a largely symbolic testing to make sure he’s the right one. There are further variants: the rescue of the threatened virgin and the “damsel in distress.” This principle, however, is maintained: the hero’s romance tests his suitability, and he must pass the tests whether of rivalry, prohibition, or doubt to “get the girl.” Underlying “and they live happily ever after,” however, is our sense of the Campbellian union of sundered halves, volition joined to life-giving capacity.
Plato gives an amusing variant of this in The Symposium. Aristophanes conjectures that the romantic problem facing men and women arose from jealousy on the part of the gods. Once man and woman were not separate but a single supremely satisfied, potent being. The gods were not just envious but worried by the apparition of such a complete being, and split it into male and female parts. Ever since, men and women have been running around desperately to find their other half.
The hero can be supreme, not just a warrior or lover. Such a hero makes us aware of the universal, creative source itself, not just through a symbolic marriage or the provision of a life-renewing elixir to a community. Characteristic of this aspect of the myth is “a going to the father,” for “the father is the invisible unknown.”10 The supreme hero’s adventures consequently fall into religious forms. If he finds and is blessed by the father, the hero returns from his adventure as a Moses, or as a cultural, founding father, a Huang Ti. He is, if you will, a representative center of the universe. But if the hero confuses the power of the universe with his own, he becomes the tyrant, the holdfast: he becomes a Johnny Friendly or Edvard Vergerus.
For the true villain the hero must face is a fallen hero, one who fell by selfishly confusing the creative power of the world/universe with his own. Lucas was friends with Campbell, but fortunately his ideas for the first Star Wars series make dramatic sense as well as owing Campbell a debt. They give a popular screen version of several strands of Campbell’s hero myth, especially in the way Darth Vader is a fallen hero as well as father who in the end redeems himself by killing the emperor. It’s worth noting he is motivated, at last, by love for his son, a form of Eros, for what is more powerful than even the first flood of romantic love than the love of a parent for a child?
The hero as world redeemer we have already met in drama in the Schindler of Schindler’s List. This hero may do all the deeds the hero as warrior does, but only to make evident to the clouded eye what the nature of the “truth” is. The supreme hero almost predicts the story he will be involved in: he appears in a time of moral degeneration and destroys the tyrant/villain, the source of the pollution. Yet as we have just seen, even he confronts the danger that he will confuse himself with the truth and fall into villainy, and become the very figure a new, Unfallen hero must overcome.
Implicit in the myth ultimately for Campbell is an identity between the slayer and the slain, the hero and the villain. In the mundane world we are riven by dualities: we are caught up, if you will, in the Cartesian dilemma. The hero myth points to illusoriness of the dualistic approach to reality.
We can depart from Campbell here and remind ourselves of how figures as diverse as Nietzsche and Winnicott struggle with exactly this issue. Nietzsche’s fascination with Greek tragedy grows out of the way in which he is able to show how the Apollonian and Dionysian fuse in its action. In sum, for Nietzsche the Dionysian impulse is one that intoxicates, that takes us out of our narrow selves and makes us mass celebrants to whom the ordering of reality into clear, well-lit structures typical of the Apollonian impulse appears as an absurdity. Music is central to Nietzsche’s thinking, because it is an art with a direct impact on emotion which sparks images in the mind as we are carried away. Those images are Apollonian attempts to render the meaning of the Dionysian experience of being carried out of ourselves into a sense of the indestructible flow of nature itself, an experience much greater than any image can evoke. But to an Apollonian a Dionysian reveler seems mad and dangerous, and, if provoked or not controlled, wildly destructive.
In tragedy the Dionysian is evoked by the chorus, the streams of specific imagery sparked by the Dionysian experience appearing as the concrete dramatic scenes between choral interludes that were sung and danced and which reportedly on occasion had electrifying impacts on the audience. The specific dramatic scenes Nietzsche sees as the visions of the chorus we see through our identification with the chorus. The definition of character, refinement of dialogue, development of a specific story content, and conflict are Apollonian forms; the chorus, music-driven Dionysian celebrants. In those specific dramatic scenes, the Apollonian characters through their conflict and tragedy finally give voice to Dionysian insights. It is no wonder these plays were semireligious in nature, performed at the great spring festival, the Greater Dionysia, that celebrated the renewal of the creative life force in the world. Nor is it any wonder Greek tragedy atrophied with the death of the chorus and the movement of religious observance from public celebration to private cults like the Eleusinian in Athens, and finally to the Christian. The key to understanding tragedy for Nietzsche is the way at a certain moment one can no longer separate Apollonian and Dionysian and how we, as audience members, through our vicarious involvement in the drama, experience that unity too.
Winnicott, we saw, comes at this experience of unification through psychoanalysis. He wrestles with the inheritance from the late Freud and the work of Melanie Klein of a death instinct. He did not believe nor find experience justified their Eros vs. Thanatos dichotomy. It was at once too easy and a misunderstanding of the nature of the forces involved. Yet the powe
r of destructiveness, of the negative side of the Dionysian ecstasy that sweeps away all in its path, is undeniable in human history and within our psyches. So Winnicott developed his unique answer to the problem of destructiveness in “The Use of an Object,” a chapter in Playing and Reality, first read in New York in 1969. Some claim the baffled, hostile reception given it by the analytic society there was a material factor in giving Winnicott a heart attack; others discount the story, saying he was already an ill man.11
As we saw, Winnicott shows how the process of weaning gives rise to the transitional object, the baby’s first toy that stands symbolically for the absent mother. It at once symbolizes absence and unity: through the transitional object the mother is still there. If unchallenged in its use, play arises through the use of the transitional object in an environment of trust, where the actual absence of the mother can be tolerated because she is known to return, which the transitional object represents. Once infants, then, can play on their own, they can play with others, and from play arises ultimately the cultural world in which we spend our lives, where we “play” with others, creatively responding to experience in a third area, the cultural area, the area of actual, everyday experience, neither wholly “me” or “not me” but made up of both. The Cartesian model fails because it does not deal with the very reality Descartes thought he was examining. He doesn’t have to be disproved: he is simply irrelevant to understanding reality. By the same token Kant is answered, not through a monolithic Schopenhauerian will or a Nietzschean fusion of opposites, but by the same provision of a tripartite division of reality beyond our easy dualities. Drama goes farther, as we will see: the Kantian thing-in-itself, that ultimate point beyond which the “me” cannot go, is reached routinely in the dramatic experience.
Further, Winnicott viewed destructiveness through this tripartite experience of reality. One reason the transitional object must not be challenged, i.e., subjected to a destructive effort by the mother, is that then separation becomes intolerable and the maturation of the human personality necessarily collapses. Not only must the transitional object not be challenged, because its survival is so important, any subsequent object must survive destructiveness if it is to be felt/experienced as real. That, as we saw, is Winnicott’s key insight, which brings us to the paradox of destructiveness as part of the very process by which something becomes real, in which destructiveness is an aspect of creativity, just as the Dionysian and Apollonian are aspects of one unity. Our perception of the heavy in drama is rooted in our recoil from destructiveness for its own sake, meaning one without creative outcome. That is the full measure of its repulsiveness to us, for the creative response to reality and life are synonyms insofar as we are talking about meaningful experience.
Now Campbell’s perception of the ultimate unity of the slayer and the slain makes real psychological as well as mythological sense. In the mundane world, dualities are easily recognized and exploited, but those same divisions, when viewed from the point of view of the forces that produce the world of experience, appear as different facets of the underlying creative flow of reality. It has been and is a difficult concept for us to hold in mind. Our present culture and language work against something so at odds with the immediate polarities of experience, and we experience destructiveness so widely and with such dislike it is not appealing to see it sub specie aeternitatis.
Seeing reality truly, however, has always been our single greatest struggle.
There is a final aspect of the hero myth before we leave Campbell: the hero as saint. Here the hero overcomes his ego entirely and, once he finds ultimate reality, does not come back but moves out of the hero myth. Saints see the illusion of immediate experience, that all its “forms” or “truths” are corruptible. They move into God’s realm, the realm of true being where creativity flows constantly into the world, creating it. In the rare case of a Bodhisattva in Buddhism, the saint returns and becomes the hero as avatar. In a sense this is Hamlet’s dilemma in Hamlet: he has a saint’s perception of the illusoriness of action and the corruptibility of the world of immediate experience but a hero’s obligation to act.
Finally, the hero dies. The true mythological hero faces death without fear. He has seen past dualities like creativity vs. destructiveness, life vs. death, into the uniform, indestructible creative flow of existence.
Rites, ceremonies, even meditation, are all ways to handle the transitions individuals must make in life to embed them meaningfully in society and help them find the truth. The hero myth in a given society embodied its ideals and gave direction to the transitions in life: Alexander slept with the Iliad under his pillow, or at least beside him. But for Campbell in modern society, the old myths and gods are dead, the religious organization of experience supplanted by our modern economic-political system. Because all meaning is in the ever more atomistic Western individual, ever less in the group, the modern hero deed must be to “bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul,” to render the “modern world spiritually significant.”12 In modern terms, we need to find the cosmic, creative power out of which the first gods emerged. We have become the modern mystery, and from our lonely I a thou must be found.
Drama is one of the places where we encounter this struggle as a community.
The Dramatic Hero
The fundamental story pattern in drama is a technical description of the pattern of the structural story development of the conflict. The Past (Part 1) contains all of the previous experience of the characters, including unresolved problems more or less unknown, preceding the immediate action. However the past is held in memory, a modus vivendi exists at the start of the immediate action in the Beginning, or Act 1 (Part 2), which embodies a false solution. Into that modus vivendi conflict-causing problems intrude, including sooner or later the inciting event, the problem whose solution will require the abiding problem from the past being resolved necessarily with the present, inciting problem. The protagonist initially makes false moves in dealing with that problem, then at the end of Act 1 settles on or is driven into a line of action she or he thinks will solve the problem. This is the Act 1 turning point into the Middle, or Act 2 (Part 3). Act 2 pursues that line of action until it reaches the crisis at the end of Act 2 when the attempted solution fails, or looks like it is about to fail, the emotional nadir for the hero. Thus the End, Act 3 (Part 4), represents the final climactic and intensely focused action on the part of the protagonist that succeeds in resolving the problem in the form it took in the crisis, or in tragedy fails. In any event, that problem with its fusion of past and present elements is solved, whether in a tale of moral redemption, as in Schindler’s List, or in one of an action hero triumphing, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Witness. All is made clear, with the final values of the story asserted by its outcome. A New Beginning (Part 5) comes into view, which is the specific turn we imagine a story’s “happily ever after” will take or the direction the community will take if the hero has been swept away in a tragedy.
Reviewing the fundamental story pattern this way makes clear just how dry, if typical, a description it is of dramatic action. You can guess only some of the nature of the dramatic journey we go on, as audience, through the hero and how the action plays within the context of the argument we are having with ourselves. The hero’s journey, which every screenplay takes us on structurally through the fundamental story pattern, is not well described by the technical evaluation of action and character found in the various dramatic and screenwriting manuals going back as far as Aristotle’s Poetics. There has been since the beginning of writing on drama the attempt to treat it as a structure within its own special bubble, but as I have been at pains to show throughout these essays, one element after another of that structure roots in the psyche and impacts our experience far beyond the realm of drama. We saw how the experience of fullness roots in the perception of human wholeness, while complexity implies a sense of the lack of integration of experience. The heavy we saw was the raw taken to the p
oint of the experience of destructiveness without creative issue, while both moral substance and ambiguity are essential for story fullness and root in our innate ambivalence, while their lack leads to trivialization, until a drama becomes merely a moment in the history of entertainment. Slowness, we saw, arises from the sense of discontinuity in experience and our conscious inability to deal with more than one story at a time, while cause-and-effect writing is not just a sine qua non of good writing but implies the trustworthiness of experience, that one thing follows from another, whatever David Hume may say to the contrary. The difficult standard of necessary and probable makes that experience seem so real a screenplay becomes a convincing metaphor that it is reality, not its imitation. Our will to believe, if story elements are handled convincingly, is guided by these devices; our mythopoetic drive assembles the story elements into a coherent and revelatory experience.
Yet if structure can be discussed abstractly, and every specific story varies, what is the point, even in jest, of saying that drama is the story with a thousand faces? What is the underlying heroic journey being conveyed through the underlying structure the hero takes us on in each uniquely realized drama?