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Dear runt,
I write this in the form of a personal letter from me to you, if for no other reason than to blunder and blur genres further.
I assume you're referring to Joseph Cambell. Well, in truth, I was not cribbing from any of his books (though I've read them all- they're excellent toilet-breezers). Actually, I'd been talking about what's come to be called the 'Hero's Journey' for years before I'd ever even heard of Cambell (with whom I have some major beefs). In fact, I wrote a paper in high school along similar lines and the teacher was the one who directed me to the Grand Master of the Mono-myth, Joseph Cambell himself. Imagine my surprise when I read him and discovered we were talking about the same things. I thought he was stealing MY thunder. But hey, what could I do?
On further investigation, I found that Campbell himself was working off the research of a predecessor named Lord Raglan. Cambell infused Raglan's work with Jungian archetypes, but in order to do so, he had to simplify Raglan's roughly 17 part progression to roughy three. This is the lot of the populizer, to simplify.
In fact, many hinted at these things before JC. Freud, Raglan, Levi-Strauss, Malinowski, Jung, etc. This is all, of course assuming that you are referring to JC. If so, then so, if not, then not.
There are themes that appear as universals, and no one can be called the 'inventor' of such a thing, only the 'discoverer.' |
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