How many dreamers can one tale entrance?
One myth, Bardelys felt, lay behind all others. This was the theory Joseph Campbell had advanced in his groundbreaking 1947 study The Hero With 1000 Faces. Campbell had studied the cults and religions of many lands and had without doubt read Sir James Fraser’s The Golden Bough as a young man. In the course of all these studies, Campbell had recognized patterns and motifs that came up again and again. Like Lord Raglan before him, Campbell had assembled these story bits in order to make a kind of template of an underlying mythic tale – the tale of a hero’s journey – that was shared among many disparate cultures around the globe. Campbell called this the ‘monomyth.’
Bardelys had studied in Hollywood during a time when Joseph Campbell’s theory was looked on as a sure-fire formula for success, thanks largely to George Lucas and Star Wars. It was a notion, he had always thought, better honored in the breach.
Now, though, sifting his thoughts for some shape to give to a symbolic true tale, he wondered if Campbell’s monomyth wouldn’t do after all.
It had its temptations. It would be so easy to blend Lord Raglan’s 22 points of the solar hero with Campbell’s monomyth, and between the two achieve enough room for variants so that the formula might escape too much predictability. And the tales that grew from that nexus would be glamorous for most of Bardelys’ audience.
But first, Bardelys felt he had to satisfy himself that it was possible to set down one single template that could satisfy all. Could that be done, he wondered, without making it so general and vague as to be, in the end, useless? A thing like, for instance,
An empathetic protagonist wants something, strives to get it, and succeeds, (unless he fails).
That would surely describe all but one out of a thousand symbolic true tales. But it doesn’t help a talesman shape a new tale or fix one that isn’t working – and it fits a million fake tales as well.
A symbolic true tale must deal in universal desires or fears. It must transcend time and place and technology. It must be the same for young and old and for male and female. And that, Bardelys felt, was nigh on impossible.
(Composed on pen-top Wednesday 20 August 2008)
