I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
Many novelists and screenwriters use Joseph Campbell’s monomyth as the structure for their story, a practice popularized by Christopher Vogler in The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. Campbell’s monomyth template describes a hero who is called to adventure, goes on an adventure, overcomes adversity in a decisive crisis, and comes home transformed, bringing back a boon for society.
Jungian psychotherapist Maureen Murdock developed a version of the journey for women for use in her therapy practice. When she asked Campbell in an interview about how the journey might apply to women, Campbell said, bluntly, it doesn’t:
In the whole mythological tradition the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to. When a woman realizes what her wonderful character is, she’s not going to get messed up with the notion of being pseudo-male.
Murdock comments:
This answer stunned me; I found it deeply unsatisfying. The women I know and work with do not want to be there, the place that people are trying to get to. They do not want to embody Penelope, waiting patiently, endlessly weaving and unweaving. They do not want to be handmaidens of the dominant male culture, giving service to the gods.
And she proposes that women do have “a quest at this time in our culture”: “the quest to fully embrace their feminine nature, learning how to value themselves as women and to heal the deep wound of the feminine.”
I started a new Things Men Gave Me essay a couple days ago, writing about my first love. It happened in high school, and it was a brief but intense relationship that left me in crisis and distress my senior year of high school, when the boy broke up with me.
I have always looked at my struggles in twelfth grade as evidence of my psychological weakness, perhaps even the suggestion of some sort of mental disorder. But, writing that essay at the same time I was reading Byung-Chul Han’s The Agony of Eros gave me a very different lens on what was going on for me.
I see that episode now as the beginnings of my quest towards wholeness, towards becoming a fully integrated, whole human being who combines both feminine and masculine qualities.
Murdock didn’t design her heroine’s journey as a template for narrative; instead it is a way to understand a woman’s life and help her work through problems in therapy. I don’t find it a structure that maps onto what I went through in romance after romance. Murdock writes of how a woman rejects the feminine and identifies in the masculine in order to make her way in an economic regime that privileges male ways of acting in the world. I did do this, first as a software engineer and data scientist, and later as a technology leader. But at the same time I was on a wholly different quest, one which privileged my feminine side.
I find myself questioning standard formulas for writing, including the hero’s journey or typical three-act structures. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggested that narrative is never just about struture but is rather an act of configuration, gathering scattered moments of life into some shape that can be told. He descibes this in terms of “mimesis”: the world as it is lived (messy and fragmentary), the world as it is plotted (cohered into a story), and the world as it is refigured when a reader encounters it. The middle step, the act of emplotment, is where so much writing advice gets stuck, as if every story must march through a beginning, middle, and an end or follow Campbell’s cycle of departure and return.
If my series of romances through time, starting in high school (and even as far back as middle school) resist a clean arc or a journey through the steps of the monomyth, perhaps that is a more powerful way to present it.
And, critically, there is another step: the third step of Ricoeur’s mimesis, where the reader completes the story in their own horizon of understanding. The reader’s world can be refigured. This is yet another way of looking at how meaning in art and writing develops; the writer (or artist’s) emplotment or artistic conceptualization interacts with the reader (or viewer’s).
For Ricoeur, narrative is a way that humans reconcile the chaos of time with the need for meaning, shaping both personal identity and cultural memory. Narrative asks what counts as a good life? It doesn’t simply explain a life, it evaluates it. But it is always going to be provisional, fragile, and open to reinterpretation. After all, we are always at least somewhat opaque to ourselves and opaque to other people. There is not just one story to tell about a person and the events that happened in her life.