All of us writers and readers of fantasy are in a trap, have always been in a trap, and there’s no escape. I didn’t know this until a few years ago. Of course, there were hints. For instance, I often wondered why it seemed so essential to take the young heroes and heroines of my stories away from their bed and board and send them out alone into the world to have their adventures. It was very hard, and is very hard, to keep inventing reasonable excuses for separating them from their parents. You can’t go on forever making orphans of them—it’s tiresome and it doesn’t always make sense. But beyond grumbling over this single problem, I didn’t recognize the trap for what it was until one day in 1972.
I had been working for nearly a year on a story which refused to be good. It was about a group of people, staying at a lakeside summer hotel, whose lives were all stalled in one way or another. They had lost their dreams and hopes and were not enjoying themselves very much. Each one had the physical characteristics of a different animal, and a name to match (Eunice Woolsey Merino, for instance, was a woman who was a whole lot like a sheep), but each had forgotten how to appreciate life on the simple, innocent level of young animals or, if you will, children. In the course of the story, each was turned into the animal he was most like, and carried off by a character called the Animal Man (who himself had turned into a stork) to a small abandoned island just offshore from the hotel, where, when they were all assembled, they remembered their childhood and their dreams and were refreshed into a happier, more hopeful view of the future.
I couldn’t make the story work because, among other reasons, the characters should, I knew, have been animals from the beginning—old animals who were turned back into young animals by the stork. But I find it exceedingly difficult to write about talking animals. I like to read stories that have talking animals in them, but I can’t seem to write such stories. Nevertheless, it seemed to me to be a good idea, the whole notion of rebirth by means of a stork and a magic island set apart from the world where one could recapture one’s original innocence and joy and then come back to the real world restored to one’s physical self, but emotionally refreshed and renewed. It seemed to me to be such an original idea, the separation problem for its child hero solved by giving her a trip to the hotel with an aunt who was keeping her while her mother had a new baby. Birth again! The fact that the story was ultimately a failure is beside the point here. The key thing is the excitement I felt over its ingredients: the magic island, the stork who carried people there, the whole idea of renewal and return.
During the same period I had been reading Roald Dahl’s book James and the Giant Peach, urged on me by one of my children. It was a splendid story, I thought, but there was something the matter with the way it ended. I couldn’t figure out exactly what bothered me, though, and since I was working on my own troublesome story, I forgot about James.
Then, on that fateful day in 1972, a student of mine gave me a book she had been reading in a philosophy course. It was called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the author was a man named Joseph Campbell. My student was very excited about the book. Spurred by her enthusiasm, I sat down and began to flip through its pages. And as I did so, my eye lit on a few lines at the end of the first chapter:
This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the “call to adventure”—signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, [or it may be] a secret island …
I was dumbfounded. What had I done? Had I somehow forgotten a story I had once read that had a secret island in it exactly like mine? A zone unknown to which a character was summoned? Was I a closet plagiarist? So I began to read the book in earnest, and that is how I discovered, to my delight and annoyance, the trap I told you about a few moments ago.
There is no point in trying to explain in any detail what The Hero with a Thousand Faces has to say. It is a dense, scholarly work which has finally more to do with religion, and particularly Buddhism, than it does with the writing of fantasy. There are large portions which I had great difficulty in following. And it never even mentions children’s literature (except for the classic fairy tales, which after all were not created for children alone). But the gist is simple enough.
The book shows that the fantasy hero and his adventures are universal to all cultures, and the ancient path he follows, though it leaves room for certain variations of detail, is in the main unalterable and inescapable. In Campbell’s own words: “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is … separation, initiation, return.” Once you understand the pattern, you see it everywhere in all fantasy literature, as well as in classic myth. As I trace it for you, I’ll use Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz (Baum’s version, and also Hollywood’s), and Alice in Wonderland for examples. That will help in showing how the pattern emerges.
The hero’s story begins with a “call to adventure,” usually from a character of some sort which Campbell calls “the herald.” The herald can be ugly or beautiful, frightening or attractive or odd, but whatever form it takes, it summons the hero to cross a threshold from the real world into mystery, from life into death, from the waking state into dream. For Campbell, these are all one and the same threshold. For Alice, the herald is the White Rabbit, and she leaves her sister’s side to follow him down the rabbit hole. For Wendy and Michael and John, Peter Pan himself is the herald. For Dorothy the herald takes the nonhuman form of a cyclone.
“Once having traversed the threshold,” says Campbell, “the hero moves in a dream landscape … where he must survive a succession of trials.” But he will be assisted by some kind of protective figure who will give him charms to help him in his struggles. For Alice, there are a number of these protective figures, but the Caterpillar is the most obvious: He gives her the hint about the sides of the mushroom which will eventually make it possible for her to get through the tiny door into the beautiful garden. For Wendy and her brothers, Peter Pan, in addition to being the herald, is the protector as well. For Dorothy, it is the Good Witch of the North who starts her on her way and provides the charm: the mark of a kiss on her forehead. (In the book there are no ruby slippers—only silver ones, the magical qualities of which are unknown.) And Dorothy has beside her throughout the story the very protective Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion.
If it were not for these protective figures or devices, which Campbell calls symbols of “the benign, protecting power of destiny,” the hero would never be able to survive the trials of his adventures to come. And though in every story the trials are different, they all represent, according to Campbell, a coming face-to-face with the confusions, terrors, and pains hidden in the hero’s subconscious mind, that stand between him and the achievement of spiritual perfection.
This concept can best be described, where children’s fantasy literature is concerned, as the lesson the hero must learn before he can become an adult. It takes many forms, that lesson, and in Alice in Wonderland it is very difficult to see it clearly at all, for though Alice’s adventures are full of trials, there is no overt lesson to be learned. For Wendy and her brothers, the lesson is clear, though it is the author’s lesson, not Peter’s: When the time comes to grow up, it’s best to do it and leave childhood behind. And for Dorothy, the lesson is equally clear, though Hollywood spells it out differently from Baum: The real lesson here is that we can control our own destinies if we want to. As Russell MacFall says in To Please A Child, his biography of Baum, “What we want, [Baum] the moralist whispers, is within us; we need only look for it to find it. What we strive for has been ours all the time.”
Having survived the trials, then, and learned the lesson, the hero is free to return to the real world or the waking state or life—however you wish to define it—to recross the threshold, bringing with him his new knowledge. In classical myth, this knowledge, what he has learned in that other place, may be used to enlighten the world. But sometimes the knowledge, or “boon,” as Campbell calls it, is too difficult or too bizarre to be understood by ordinary people. “How [can the hero] communicate,” he says, “to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses, the message of the all-generating void?… Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss?” Dorothy makes no attempt to explain Oz to Auntie Em on her return, and even in Hollywood’s version, though she does try, the people around her don’t believe her and she soon gives up the effort. Wendy and Michael and John are likewise silent, though their mother, Mrs. Darling, would have understood Neverland very well indeed. Alice, on the other hand, gets around the problem quite easily: She calls her adventures a dream, and as we all know, anything can happen in dreams. Tolkien has said that Alice in Wonderland is not a true fantasy, since it dismisses the adventures this way. He claims that in true fantasy, the world across the threshold is as real on its own level as the everyday world we inhabit, and continually coexists with it. But Campbell would say, I think, that it doesn’t matter that Alice calls her adventures a dream; for him, dreams, myth, and fantasy are all the same world, all using the same symbols to the same ends.
Where does all this—the pattern of the classic hero’s path—leave the writer of fantasy? Once Campbell spelled it out for me, I could understand why I was trapped into separating my child heroes from their parents: I was following a route laid down thousands of years ago. It was strong in my subconscious, even though I didn’t know it. Adventure means exposure, danger, and growth, and there can be very little of that if parents are present. They have to be done away with, kept out of sight, left behind, if anything interesting is going to happen. They belong to one reality while the adventure belongs to another. And on top of that, they are symbols of overprotection, and can retard development. The hero cannot grow if he is shielded from the very elements which create growth. So acceptance of the call to adventure represents the great rite of separation, the cutting of the apron strings.
One does not have to cross the threshold into adventure and danger all alone. Hansel and Gretel have each other. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie Bucket takes along his grandfather. Sometimes, as in The Wizard of Oz, the young hero will take an animal along. In the immortal words of Hollywood’s Wicked Witch of the West: “… and your little dog, too.” But the hero never takes a parent along. The apron strings, which are a symbol for the umbilical cord, are severed forever when the call to adventure is answered.
After this, the hero’s path is clear. He has his trials, survives them, receives his boon or learns his lesson, and then returns to the real world. And seeing this final step, I knew at once why the ending of James and the Giant Peach was disturbing to me: James goes to a magic world and stays there, rather than returning. That is a violation of the pattern, a remaining in the dream state, the death state, a rejection of the notion of rebirth. In myth, in dream, in fantasy, if you are the hero, you must leave the real world, you must face and successfully complete your trials, and then, with your newfound knowledge in hand, you must go home again. In every case, home, though it is safer, is less attractive than the other world. Kansas, compared to Oz, is a wasteland. London, compared to Neverland, is dull. And sitting under a tree being read to by your sister is far less exciting than being in Wonderland. Nevertheless, if you are the hero, home is where you have to go.
Campbell would say that all of us know the pattern well without having to be taught. We were born with an understanding of it, subconsciously, and everything that happens in our lives reinforces it. But for most of us, certainly for me, it remains subconscious until it is somehow exposed. I’ve told you that The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a densely scholarly work. I can’t keep much of its wealth of detail in my head for long at a time. I read it first in 1972 and then again this past winter. In between, I wrote several stories, including one called Tuck Everlasting. Imagine my chagrin on coming across the following passage in Hero this winter, one I must have read six years ago, in the chapter dealing with that first step, the call to adventure:
Typical of the circumstances of the call are the dark forest, the great tree, the babbling spring, and the loathly, underestimated appearance of the carrier of the power of destiny.
Some of you may have read Tuck Everlasting. If so, you will recall my own dark forest, great tree, babbling spring, and my own loathly carrier, or herald, Winnie Foster’s toad. I had a letter from a child last week asking me why I put a toad into this story. How can I give a simple answer? The toad is there because my subconscious told me I had to supply my hero with a herald? But that is the only true answer.
It is annoying in the extreme to find that one’s work, struggled with for so long, and finally finished after trying and discarding numberless bits of detail, can be found to have been summed up—parts of it, anyway—by a scholar years before one even began, and described as “typical.” I knew my ash tree and spring were ancient symbols of immortality and I used them for that very reason, but I didn’t know, consciously, that for this story they were representing any kind of threshold. And I certainly didn’t like to think of them as preordained and typical. I didn’t and don’t like to think that I have so little freedom of choice, that the pattern with all of its elements laid out is so deeply instilled in me that it leads me without my knowing I am being led.
Still, we have to come to the conclusion that all fantasy stories are fundamentally alike. Their patterns are immutable, and as writers we must follow them willy-nilly or suffer the consequences of a plotline gone askew. It is annoying, but it is miraculous, too. We are trapped, but it is a kind of confinement that makes a brotherhood of us all, writers and readers alike, here, everywhere, and on back to our common prehistory ancestors. For the questions have never changed, and the answers are always the same.
Carl Sagan, in his remarkable book The Dragons of Eden, talks at length about the two halves of the brain—everyone’s brain: how the left side is the residence of logic and language, while the right side is the home of dream and intuition and creativity. Much of the truth of this brain division has been established through surgical experiments on animals, and observance of human accident victims. But Sagan goes on beyond facts and into theory to talk about the content of the brain’s right side. The logical left side tries hard to control and repress the intuitive right side, but in sleep the left relaxes its vigil and the right brings images up to the surface that in the waking state would never be permitted. Sagan quotes Erich Fromm at this point. Fromm, he says, calls these images “the forgotten language” and “argues that they are the common origin of dreams, fairy tales, and myths.” Whether or not these images are common to all of us, whether or not there is such a thing, really, as “race memory,” may be arguable. But I believe with Sagan that we do all ask the same urgent questions and fear the same implacable monsters. There is no other way to explain the remarkable similarity among the world’s myths of creation, for instance, as well as among its wealth of folk and fairy tales.
The common questions, put simply, seem to be: Who am I? What is the meaning of life? Can I make my way through it alone? And must death be the final end? We all begin, after all, in the same way: We are protected by our parents for a time, and then we are thrust out into the world without them. Sometimes there are happy ceremonies to mark this thrusting out—ceremonies like bar mitzvahs or graduations or weddings—and sometimes the event is unceremonious and harsh. But it must take place if we are to grow. Still, the world is dangerous, and most of us are afraid as we head out into it alone. We wonder if we are strong enough. But we face our trials as bravely as we can, and most of us, fortunately, can say to ourselves, as the theme song of The Mary Tyler Moore Show says to its hero, “You’re going to make it after all.” We must all follow the mythic hero’s path, and his experiences have for centuries served as a guide for us, whether we realize it or not.
Throughout the struggle, however, no matter how successful we are, we still fear the ultimate separation, death. In myths and fairy tales, the heroes seldom die a literal death within the bounds of the story, but their happy endings are not denials of death. Happy endings, says Campbell in his Hero with a Thousand Faces, are “to be read not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.” In myth and fairy tale, death is dealt with symbolically. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are both awakened from their long sleeps—for which read: resurrected from their deaths—by the kiss of a prince, and are carried off to the typical fairy-tale heaven of a castle where it is possible to live happily ever after. In much of children’s fantasy literature, this last step to the hero’s final reward will take place, as I have said, beyond the scope of the story, but we know that some kind of heaven awaits him, for he has completed his trials successfully and has earned that final reward. For my own Tuck family, the final reward is withheld, but Winnie, the standard hero, achieves it fully.
So how do we explain Peter Pan? He is a herald announcing the call to adventure, and a protector of Wendy and her brothers, but he is also a hero himself, a hero who has refused to take the final step and return to the real world, to adulthood and eventual death. He has chosen instead to remain forever in Neverland, having the same adventures over and over again, and he tries hard to persuade Wendy and the Lost Boys to do the same. Barrie makes it clear, however, that there is a heavy price to pay for refusing to return: One forfeits all rights to putting one’s learned lessons, or “boons,” to work in the real world. To remain a child, though it has advantages, nevertheless means that you will remain immature, ignorant, powerless, and unfulfilled.
These facts apply as well to James in James and the Giant Peach. But he and Peter Pan are not unique. Campbell points out that the return is often refused in myth and folklore. “The full round,” he says, “requires that the hero … [come] back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.” And when the hero refuses to complete the round, he has, in fact, chosen to withdraw from his own humanity.
It would be well nigh impossible to name a single fantasy or fairy tale where the pattern or some major portion of it does not prevail. Whether the call to adventure is heralded by Pinocchio’s Cat and Fox, or Charlie Bucket’s golden ticket, or the appearance of Mary Poppins, there will be a herald of some kind, always. Whether the threshold is Alice’s rabbit hole, or the desert surrounding Oz, or the closet in the Narnia series, there will be a threshold always. Whether the protective charm is as simple as Cinderella’s fairy godmother or as complex as the usual youngest son’s usual three objects given him by the usual hag he encounters on the road, there will always be some kind of charm. Adventures and trials will always be present, for they form not only the conflict and suspense of the story, but more important, they represent the struggle to learn the necessary lesson and achieve the mastery of one’s own fears. As for coming home again, where it happens, there is a completion of the round and a feeling of satisfaction. And where there is a refusal to return, there is the suggestion that for the particular hero of the particular story, reality is not worth returning to. For most, however, the ending will be happy.
Why, if the patterns of fantasy are so unchangeable, do writers of fantasy not get tired of it? Well, I, for one, do get tired of it and sometimes wish for more elbow room to explore my ideas. The trouble is, I believe in the pattern. It’s the only kind of story line that seems to make any final kind of sense. And this means that I believe in happy endings. Modern adult fiction, and much of what we call teenage fiction, cannot itself entirely escape the pattern; the difference is that in much of this type of fiction, the hero will refuse the call in the first place, or worse, he will cross the threshold only to be defeated in his trials, or to opt for remaining in that other world. This, for instance, is the principal difference between the movies Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Star Wars is a classic fantasy with the hero’s round complete. Close Encounters is a modern study: The hero, after struggling through most of the story merely to answer the call to adventure, crosses the threshold only at the end, and the implication is that the round, which took so long to begin, will never be completed—the hero will not come home again.
For me and for all writers devoted to fantasy as a means of exploring ideas, the total round of the hero’s path is vitally important. We cannot tell stories that satisfy us without it. And I think there will always be a place for us in the world of fiction. There always has been for as long as the basic, simple questions have been asked. Fantasy will continue to answer those questions symbolically at some level and in some place that is always unexplained and yet universally understood. In The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan quotes a fourth-century philosopher, Sallustius: “Myths are things which never happened, but always are.” To carry on in that tradition, to take the hero through his round and bring him home again, over and over, is a tradition that will never lose its vitality or its value. I hope that in these practical times, with their new and urgent practical problems, you will agree with me that while we must, with realistic fiction, define and redefine for our children our rapidly changing physical world, we also have an obligation to serve the needs of their ancient, searching, universal souls.