PERMUTATIONS OF A MYTH
953
one dreads to contemplate. Although Mr. Campbell is a writer of re–
markable erudition, the truth is that the task which he has here under–
taken is larger than could have been perfectly accomplished by anyone
man. First of all, the book belongs to a field which in our day has be–
come inexhaustible-namely, that of comparative mythology, which is
perhaps an inadequate label in view of everything which that field has
now come to include.
It
is inexhaustible simply because the human race
has managed to endure so long and in so many different places. For
example, Mr. Campbell happens to be specially interested in Oriental
myth and religion and quite understandably indulges this interest at the
expense of other important cultural areas. But to have given equal at–
tention to the Greek, the Celtic and the Teutonic areas would have
resulted in a work three or four times longer than the present one. But
in addition to this merely quantitative difficulty there is its method. In
his attempt to interpret what he calls the "monomyth" (a useful coinage
of Joyce in
Finnegans Wake
to designate the basic universality of the
heroic pattern) Mr. Campbell is necessarily drawn into all of the more
important departments of modern knowledge. Since the Renaissance
our knowledge, like everything else, has undergone an ever increasing
process of atomization; the Logos has been broken down into a rich
confusion of "ologies." Anyone in our time striving to construct a uni–
fied picture of man in his individual, social and cosmic relationships
is confronted with nothing less than the necessity of studying each of
these categories of knowledge and of reconciling them with one another.
This also is manifestly too much for one man. Mr. Campbell refers often
to the old Gnostic concept of the Cosmic Egg upon the waters, whose
breaking was responsible for all the manifold forms of creation. Most of
us are familiar with this myth through the nursery rhyme of Humpty
Dumpty and his irremediable predicament. Perhaps we say everything
when we admit that Mr. Campbell can hardly be expected to succeed
completely where all the king's horses and all the king's men failed.
We must also immediately admit that Mr. Campbell has performed
an extraordinary job of synthesis for which we all must be grateful. The
only full-length book in English with which it may be compared (if we
exclude Robert Graves'
The White Goddess
as having a different in–
tention and much narrower scope) is Lord Raglan's crotchety and
ill–
tempered but at the same time handy treatment ef the same subject
in
The Hero.
But Mr. Campbell is concerned not only with detaching what
might be called the General Morphology of the heroic myth through–
out the ages but also with determining its meaning on several levels of
interpretation.
