Barack Obama and the Hero’s Journey

I was thinking rather morbidly today bout how old Robert Plant looks next to Allison Krauss, and this lead me, rather morbidly, to think about how quickly the public digests the passing of popular idols. It occurred to me that the lives of celebrities are of such interest to so many because they are stories we watch unfold in real time, myths that are not part of some imagined past but somehow seem immediate and close.

Humankind has always needed metanarratives. For premodern peoples, shared mythology reflected the socioexistential needs of purpose and belonging and common founding stories. Such need was not overcome by the moderns, and even though their metanarrative replaced myth with Science, the difference is semantic. The postmodern metanarrative is a return to story-based, anthropomorphic meaning-making, and the pantheon of our myth system is filled with living, breathing gods we see in hi-def color. They are actors and talk show hosts and athletes and politicians and their stories are followed and retold for generations. A typical breakdown of Western history has the Gutenbergs destroying oral tradition, but anyone who’s ever listened to sports radio knows received mythology is alive and well. And in the information age, we don’t simply recount the exploits of our heros, we comment and opine ad nauseam about them. I’d like to consider the recent election in this context and, like any good citizen of of the era, contribute to the myth-making as has become the right of the mythologized-to.

Joseph Campbell argued famously for the existence of the shared human monomyth that is the basis of all great tales: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Bracketed comments below are my connections between the Obama narrative and the scholarly deconstruction of the monomyth. [Quoted sections come from the holy writ of collaborative metanarrative, Wikipedia, and full footnotes can be found on the "monomyth" page.]

If you’ve followed this election even remotely, the dots are fairly easy to connect. “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day [born of humble origins to a single mother] into a region of supernatural wonder [Indonesia, Kansas, Harvard Law, Chicago politics, the 2004 convention, the 2008 primaries]: fabulous forces [the Clintons] are there encountered and a decisive victory is won [the nomination, and then, the general election, but only as denouement]: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man [I don't think I need to comment here].

Other specific stages of the Hero’s Journey in Campbell’s taxonomy include:

The Call To Adventure: “The adventure begins with the hero receiving a call to action, such as a threat to the peace of the community, or the hero simply falls into or blunders into it. The call is often announced to the hero by another character who acts as a “herald”. The herald, often represented as dark or terrifying and judged evil by the world, may call the character to adventure simply by the crisis of his appearance.” [The election 2004 Illinois Senate election in which Obama was bolstered by the scandalous end of original opponent Jack Ryan.]

Mother As Goddess/Meeting with Goddess: “The ultimate trial is often represented as a marriage between the hero and a queenlike, or mother-like figure. This represents the hero’s mastery of life (represented by the feminine) as well as the totality of what can be known.” [Oprah.]

Woman As Temptress: “His awareness expanded, the hero may fixate on the disunity between truth and his subjective outlook, inherently tainted by the flesh. This is often represented with revulsion or rejection of a female figure.” [Hillary Clinton, and, to a lesser extent, Sarah Palin.]

Atonement With The Father: ”The hero reconciles the tyrant and merciful aspects of the father-like authority figure to understand himself as well as this figure.” [Rev. Wright, before Obama disowned him, as well as Obama's own father, cf. "Dreams From My Father."]

Master of Two Worlds: “Because of the boon or due to his experience, the hero may now perceive both the divine and human worlds.” [The Community Organizer-In-Chief.]

David Adams Leeming adds concepts like Miraculous Conception and Birth ["with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas"] and Initiation of the Hero-Child ["she used to wake me up at 4 am to go over my lessons"] to Campbell’s structure. Phil Cousineau includes The Vision Quest [Obama's trip to Kenya to meet his father and his father's family, thereby informing "Dreams From My Father."], which equates to Leeming’s Withdrawal stage.

Heroic figures on this order rise in tumultuous days when the need for redeeming or reassuring narratives is particularly acute. John McCain’s own story is a compelling one, but against the monomyth in anxious times, it never had a chance. That the monomyth (and the need to believe it) was affirmed in this election is no great surprise. ”Yes We Can” is, after all, the original American metanarrative, even as “Yes We Will” (yes we will make this political/military/sports myth, yes we will contribute to or oppose it, yes we will immerse ourselves in it with our time and dollars and fanhood) is the recreational credo of an era who’s gods are not in twilight.