Story #32: Lost in the labyrinth
Myth, rhetoric and the Talking Heads
I started reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces because it kept coming up in my exploration of story structures. Certainly, Campbell talks about classic story structure, which we touched on in Story #10 with our discussion of separation / initiation / return in Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode.” That much I expected.
What I didn’t expect was that Campbell’s work would plug into my reading about psychology and personal development, a la Story #27, which looks at the intersection of BTS and Carl Jung’s theories.
Campbell combs ancient mythology to show that for centuries, people have been exploring the recesses of their psyches, and coming back from the abyss to integrate the various parts of themselves. That fairy tale about the knight going to vanquish a dragon? That’s an allegory for people vanquishing their personal demons. And hopefully, surviving the journey and coming back to tell the tale.
The story
Early in the book, Campbell points to the Greek myth of the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Theseus is ordered into the labyrinth to kill the Minotaur, but without a way to come back out, the task is a death sentence. His lover, Ariadne, turns to Daedelus, the creator of the labyrinth.
As Campbell outlines on page 18, the labyrinth is a symbol for our journey to understand ourselves:
Ariadne turned for help, then, to the crafty Daedalus, by whose art the labyrinth had been constructed and Ariadne's mother enabled to give birth to its inhabitant. Daedalus simply presented her with a skein of linen thread, which the visiting hero might fix to the entrance and unwind as he went into the maze.
It is, indeed, very little that we need! But lacking that, the adventure into the labyrinth is without hope.
Campbell is arguing that we can learn from mythology to make our journey out of the labyrinth a bit easier. If we are prepared, it’s simply a matter of following the path that the linen thread, and the wisdom of our predecessors, provides.
Campbell continues (emphasis mine):
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
Just look at that last sentence! It’s glorious. It’s dramatic. It’s worth dissecting.
Why it works
Pattern and repetition
First of all, the sentence uses repetition. Campbell sets up the repeating pattern of
Where we had thought to _________, we shall find __________.
He does it four times. Look at it this way:
And
where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god;
where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves;
where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence;
where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
This technique, of repeating the start of a sentence or phrase, is called anaphora. It’s a common speech-writing technique.
Look at the opening paragraphs of Reverend Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech:
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.
Notice how both Campbell and King use lists of four. As I said in Story #31, lists of three are typical, but groups of four can be really effective too. I think it’s because we are attuned to groups of three, so extending the list effectively breaks the pattern we’re expecting. We sit up and pay attention, because if you’re going to the trouble to break the pattern, the last item must be worth listening to.
In King’s case, the fourth clause drives home the point that equality is well overdue. Campbell uses the fourth clause to drive home his point: that the unique experience of personal development connects us to the universal experience of discovering ourselves.
Doubling up
There’s another twist to the Campbell passage, which uses internal anaphora later on in the sentence (double anaphora?):
And
where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god;
where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves;
where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence;
where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
Notice how he uses the construction to emphasize contrast. Abomination/god, another/ourselves, outward/inward, alone/with the world. He’s challenging our ideas of the labyrinth—that everything we think is, in fact, the opposite.
There’s a resonance about this passage, an emphasis—so you won’t be surprised to hear that he uses it to finish a chapter.
Campbell uses (double) anaphora to relay meaning to the reader, while creating emphasis at the end of his chapter, while setting up pairs of opposites—all in the service of making his point, which is that when we learn from ancient myths, we get a roadmap to connect our individual personal transformation to the universal experience of those that have come before us.1
Writing for the ear
Campbell was writing for readers and King was writing for listeners. When you read both passages out loud, there’s a resonance to them, and a religious or evangelical quality to them. It’s not surprising, then, that anaphora shows up in music too.
In How Music Works, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne explains that he got the inspiration for the lyrics to “Once in a Lifetime” from listening to evangelical radio. Here’s the first verse:
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"
In an earlier draft of this story, I put the music video for “Once in a Lifetime” in the footnotes, but that didn’t seem right. Here it is, in its full glory.
What we can learn from it
In my day job, I’m a marketing consultant. Sometimes my work entails setting up teams of writers and, in many cases, training writers. One of the first things I tell writers is to listen to their work. Listening to your work is the fastest way to find sticky spots, long-winded passages, and all form of corporate jargon. What looks fine to your eye will sound awkward to your ear.
That’s because we’ve been telling stories around campfires for much longer than we’ve been reading and writing. Oral tradition required techniques like anaphora and repetition to hook the ear and keep listeners listening.2 We like to consider ourselves thinking machines, but we’re much more basic than that.
I also love that Campbell connects the dots between ancient mythology and today, and uses an ancient writing technique to do it. It’s not quite text-painting, but it’s pretty damn close.
I also think it’s the kind of sentence that seems like it sprang out of nowhere, but is probably the kind that emerged through lots of tinkering. I think it’s a great template sentence worth copying and playing with, not unlike the Shirley Jackson sentence that I looked at in Story #17.3
And much like Campbell’s point that we can learn much from ancient myth, we can learn a lot from old-school rhetorical techniques and structures. There’s a reason they’ve survived this long. Maybe we should be paying more attention to the wisdom they offer.
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King also uses a double anaphora (my emphasis):
“But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.”
He doesn’t use it as rigidly as Campbell—there’s variation between “still is” and “is still” and his third clause doesn’t use it at all. It’s a nice balance between giving listeners structure—so they can follow along—while still sounding like a human being.
We get a lot of tangential information from reading: at a glance, you can see where you are, where you’ve been and where you’re going. That sense of context allows you to anchor yourself in the story. And you don’t get that with an oral story, so you need other ways to provide the context.
Astute readers will know that after dissecting Jackson’s sentence, I shared a few examples of my own where I mimicked her structure, in Story #19. We’ll see if I get ambitious enough to mimic Campbell’s sentences.
Joseph Campbell was just the freakin' best.