[OT] The Second Thread on that Star Wars Salon article

[mattcolville]

That artile makes two really good points. First, Leigh Brackett was a profoundly good and popular writer who doesn't get enough credit, any credit really, for Empire.

Second, Lucas does not credit his real influences enough. True.

But this:

[QUOTE/]Campbell specialized in treating religious imagery as a set of metaphors divorced from historical context, a method that allowed him to talk, for example, about the Crucifixion as symbolizing the tree of life in an agrarian society, when in fact it was a very concrete reference to a particularly atrocious form of execution, rooted in a very specific period. Campbell's ability to generate whirlwinds of cross-cultural references makes his chatter sound tremendously erudite -- his disarming style reduced Moyers to an awestruck supplicant in the "Power of Myth" series -- but once the dust settles it's hard to grasp the point of it all.[/QUOTE]

First, this guy dislikes Campbell either because he doesn't understand it, or because he's really pissed at Lucas and Campbell gets heat by association. Frankly, if the author was already sick of hearing about Campbell, he probably wasn't interested in Campbell's ideas anyway.

But A: Campbell thinks that the *reason* the *idea* of Christ on the Cross passed from a fable into the subconsiousness of millions of people is because there's a nautal place in our minds for the idea of the Tree of Life, and the Cross has some resonance with the Tree of Life. The author doesn't seem to understand what "symbolize" means.

B: The point of Campbells hypothesese is that all humans, by virtue of the commonality of the human experience, have a need for a collection of symbols that help make meaning of the experience. And those symbols are universal. This idea is widely misunderstood.

I agree with the author. Lucas has grafted the Campbellian view onto something afterwards. But I also agree with Campbell, the *reason* Star Wars is so popular is because it *also* works as Myth. And man will always have a need for Myth. Man doesn't have a need for Sci-Fi. I do, yes, but not everyone on earth.

 

[V-2]

I haven't read a single line by this Campbell fellow, but your fairly detailed summary makes it sound like it's the worst kind of crackpot Jungianism.

That sort of theorizing has been discredited for decades now, and with good reason. It potentially reduces humans to passive puppets of this static model of the unconscious Jung claims to have discovered--it reduces human history to variations of his finite number of themes. I am weary of people who want to ground culture and history in biology. Jung had his flirt with fascism. I'm all for theories that explain how people symbolically express their experience, but here I like models of culture better where people *invent* their myths, as opposed to somehow being condemned to *repeating* them.

But this is not just a matter of preference. First, the biological part. It's gonna be hard to come up with sound physiological evidence for that Jungian unconscious. It’s supposedly transmitted unchangingly throughout human history, so it must be biological. So, exactly where on the cortex is it located and how do you experimentally show how it behaves?

Second, the historical part. What this kind of "constancy theory" of human experience cannot explain--because it can't deal with truly radical historical change--is the actual disappearance of myth from human experience in the modern period. When Jung was writing his archetype theory, those archetypes had long since gone under. Not to say that they don't crop up in certain very rarified works of art and literature (Joyce, Newman), but those are melancholic or desperate invocations of a past age that is no longer relevant to the vast majority of people in Western industrial democracies--hence the melancholy.

And then the methodology.... Your example shows just how arbitrary this symbolic matching game is. The only things that the Tree of Life and Christ's cross have in common is that they're symbolizing salvation--in *very* different ways--and that they're made of wood. That's not a lot, considering that I can spontaneously come up with a better Christian parallel: the Tree of Jesse. At least that's a tree and not two logs of wood nailed together. But if that *is* indeed a good parallel, then I would argue that's because Christianity consciously assimilated (as opposed to unwittingly repeated) the symbolism of other religions.

All of which begs the question: Where the hell does that leave Star Wars? Right now I'm tired, so I would have to say: I dunno.

 

[mattcolville]

I haven't read a single line by this Campbell fellow, but your fairly detailed summary makes it sound like it's the worst kind of crackpot Jungianism.

This does a pretty good job of dismissing any interest I might have had in what you have to say. Here's why. You begin by saying A: I haven't read and am not familiar with Joseph Campbell. Fair enough, most people aren't. B: Even though I'm not familiar with it, I'm *passionately* opposed to my idea of what it must be about. This tells me that C: you're never going to be able to dispassionately approach the subject.

The idea of Jungian archetypes, which Campbell talks about, are not the same as the idea of the collective unconscious. I have snipped your rant about Jung and the collective unconscious because it's not relevant to this discussion.

 

[LostSoul]

The thing I got from reading and watching Campbell was that people go through the same things in life - growing up, moving away from the family, dealing with death - and that we create stories that help us deal with these issues.

This doesn't have anything to do with Jung's idea of a collective unconciousnes, other than saying that people are people and think along similar lines.

 

[V-2]

Well, as you can glean from this snippet, my reflexes do work:

The Hero is joined by allies. Are the allies mentors?

Sometimes. They can take many forms; an old teacher, a wise old enchantress, a mysterious old magician, a strange creature like Yoda. Sometimes, friendly animals in a story showing that wisdom comes from nature. This guiding figure is more than an actual character. This is a representation of an energy or spirit. Jungian psychology talks of this.

I will give you, though, that I haven't actually read the guy's work. On the other hand, you haven't explained how it differs from Jung's. Or what makes the Tree of Life / Cross parallel viable.

EDIT (This is the first time I'm editing a post, I hope this works): Here's some more on Campbell's Jungian ties, straight from the website of his foundation:

Joseph Campbell was an American author best known for his work in the field of comparative mythology. He was born New York City in 1904, and from early childhood he became interested in mythology. [...] While abroad he was influenced by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These encounters led to Campbell's theory that all myths and epics are linked in the human psyche, and that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities.

Campbell's other works include the four-volume Masks of God (1959-1967), The Flight of the Wild Gander, Myths to Live By, The Mythic Image, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, The Mythic Dimension, Baksheesh and Brahman: the India Journals, and the multi-volume, unfinished Historical Atlas of World Mythology. He also edited Zimmer's posthumous volumes on Indian myth and culture (The King and the Corpse and three others), The Portable Arabian Nights and The Portable Jung. Joseph Campbell died in 1987. In 1988, a series of television interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, introduced Campbell's views to millions of people

The editor of The Portable Jung, unrelated to Jung? I don't think so.

 

[LostSoul]

I will give you, though, that I haven't actually read the guy's work. On the other hand, you haven't explained how it differs from Jung's. Or what makes the Tree of Life / Cross parallel viable.

Campbell talks about a common myth where a hero sacrifices himself and, from his death, life springs. He points to the Catholic tradition of consuming communion wafers (the body of Christ) as a symbol of this.

The fact that the cross became the symbol of Christianity (not the fish) probably influences his belief.