I wish I had said that. In fact, I intend to.

(Only kidding!)

Actually, I quite like the old coot.

It would have actually been easier to hand-code it, because Blogger was screwing stuff up then choosing to undo my corrections!!!

Okay, time to bring the tone down then…

As I find myself having a fair few things to say, to make them more palatable I’ll reply to Gavin Robinson’s comments here now, and to Andrew’s original post over at my place as soon as Blogger stops being a complete ***ing screw-up like it is right now.

Gavin says…

Campbell’s “theory” is a massively oversimplified version of structuralist narratology. This started with Vladimir Propp…

This, of course, is a very good point. But in presenting Campbell as offering ‘Structuralism For Simpletons’ it is itself an oversimplification. Campbell borrows much of the form of Structuralism, true, but he then shoe-horns into it many of the content of Jungianism. Despite the fact that this is actually a fairly uneasy join, most people don’t notice.

For one thing, the two have occupied quite separate spheres. Though Structuralism is pretty much dead nowadays, during it’s life it’s dominion was academia. Campbell, conversely, exuded a feelgood fuzziness that appealed more to the New Age crowd. (Famously, Campbell gave up an academic post to start his writings and even insisted he should never be referred to by an academic title. But many who worked outside academia were subsequently taken up by it, such as Marx. It’s the fact that Campbell remained contrapedal to academia that’s the point.)

Significantly, Campbell compensated for his lack of depth by affecting tremendous breadth – it is genuinely impressive the number of cultures he covered. For a Structuralist writer like Levi-Strauss it’s exactly the opposite way around. His ‘universal structures’ were pretty much all found from studies in a relatively small part of Brazil.

And the links are further obscured by the fact that Structuralism is dead. It’s veneer of academic rigour was ultimately found wanting and self-justifying, for all the reasons Gavin describes. But by this point people have pretty much forgotten they even used to criticise it. I suspect that even many Post-Structuralists would have hard time remembering what Structuralism was these days. Meanwhile those New Age bookshops are still open…

But perhaps most important, they differ so vastly in prognosis. Structuralism was not just rigorous, but almost literally inescapably bleak. We are hard-wired into our world-view, communicating by a set of signs that not only reproduce it but can only reproduce it. Campbell couldn’t be more feelgood. Stories to him are like magic spells which liberate our minds just by the action of being told. He’s notorious for his dictum “follow your bliss”- certainly the most irritating thing he ever said, and quite possibly the most irritating thing ever said unless you count the solo work of Paul McCartney.

(Incidentally, some have doubted the link between Propp and Structuralism. Martin Barker, in ‘Comics, Ideology and the Critics’ hails Propp and spends a lot of time separating him from ‘Formalism’. By this he means Formalists contemporary to Propp, but it’s notable he goes on to be critical of Structuralism.)

As for Joe – I agree there’s a lot of potential there for it to go right, but it’s the first thing I’ve read of Morrison’s where I’m thinking more of the potential than what’s already there…

The Graveyard Book, on the other hand, is one of the best things he’s written…