July/August 2004 Living Now
The Hero’s Journey - Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work
Mythic Worlds, Modern Words - Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce

In the early and middle part of the 20th century, world mythology was becoming a shadowy, hazy subject, at best understood only by academics and was not regarded as a source of living wisdom for the general public in Europe and America. The progressive influence of technology and the rise of a sociological-scientific bias in academia were quickly consigning myth to the dust heap of contemporary consciousness. Joseph Campbell, inspired by other great writers such as Carl Jung, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, and Heinrich Zimmer, chose as his life’s work to keep this sacred flame of truth alive in its deepest forms so that future generations could still develop and evolve through the teachings of world myth.

As an American growing up in the Jazz Age, then as an athlete-scholar at Columbia and the University of Paris, and through his distinguished career as college professor and freelance lecturer Campbell was able to synthesize all of the main streams of the artistic and philosophical movements of the 20th Century into his method of comparative mythology. Drawing together an incredible wealth of sources he brought into light the deep links between primitive, occidental, oriental mythologies and modern psychology and modern art.

Originally published in 1990, The Hero’s Journey is a selection of outtakes and primary takes of interviews assembled and edited by Phil Cousineau, producer of the 1987 film of the same name. That such outtakes could produce such fine material is both a measure of the success of the original project and due to the fact that once you turn Campbell on what you get is, in his own words describing James Joyce, all meat and no fat. The interview material spans a broad range of mythology and it places Campbell’s views on myth in a biographical format that is essential to understanding the true scope of his ideas.

Campbell’s method is discursive, and when he is in the right company he expands to the sublime. Phil Cousineau assembled a wonderful group to jointly interview Campbell-Robert Bly, Stanislav Grof, Roger Guillemen, Joan Halifax, and others whose sympathy brings out the very best of Campbell as teacher and spiritual guide. For anyone wishing to dive back into Joseph Campbell’s ideas again or refine their spiritual study, this book should not be missed.

The New World Library in conjunction with the Joseph Campbell Foundation has also released at this time Mythic Worlds, Modern Words-Joseph Campbell on The Art of James Joyce. This is definitely the more difficult of the two books, but equally rewarding.

When Campbell talks about Joyce opening up the whole world of mythology to him he places the body of Joyce’s fiction on the exalted plane to which it belongs-a fusion of world literature and world mythology barely equaled in the 20th Century. We mere mortals have to crack the books and catch up!

I used this book in two ways, I re-read A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man before reading Campbell’s comments on it and pre-read his comments on Finnegans Wake to begin a study of that monumental edifice. In a life’s search for spiritual wisdom James Joyce certainly is as essential as Joseph Campbell.

The Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell, New World Library 2004-$24.95

Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, By Joseph Campbell, Edited by Edmund L. Epstein, Ph.D., New World Library 2004-$22.95

--- Philip Lee Jefferson