The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stands this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.
—Joseph Campbell
THAT statement, fanciful as it sounds, is simply a shorthand way of saying that everyone is a creature of myth, that the ancient legends and tales of the race are still the master keys to the human psyche. The science-minded Victorians who sneered at myths as superstitious twaddle were guilty of a kind of scientific superstition themselves: the belief that reason could explain all human motives. Aided by psychoanalysis, anthropology and three-quarters of a century of archaeological discovery, modern
scholarship has replaced the Victorians' sneers with respect and even awe. Mythology, its partisans are now claiming, tells as much about humanity—its deepest fears, sorrows, joys and hopes—as dreams tell about an individual. "Myths are public dreams," says Joseph Campbell, who is probably the world's leading expert on mythology. "Dreams are private myths. Myths are vehicles of communication between the conscious and the unconscious, just as dreams are."
The trouble is, Campbell asserts, that this communication has broken down in the modern Western world. The old myths are no longer operative, and effective new myths have not arisen to replace them. As a result, he maintains, the West is going through an agony of reorientation matched only by a period during the 4th millennium B.C., when the Sumerians first conceived the concept of a mathematically ordered cosmos and thus changed utterly man's concept of the universe around him.
Campbell's words carry extraordinary weight, not only among scholars but among a wide range of other people who find his search down mythological pathways relevant to their lives today. A professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Campbell has written and edited some 20-odd books on mythology. They include a massive four-volume work entitled The Masks of God; The Flight of the Wild Gander and the book for which he is most famous. Hero With a Thousand Faces, a brilliant examination, through ancient hero myths, of man's eternal struggle for identity. Hero, which has had sales of more than 110,000 copies, an impressive figure for a scholarly book, has become a bestseller on campus. After 37 years of teaching in relative obscurity, Campbell, at 67, has now become a well-known and respected figure in academe.