Teaching the Hero’s Journey
as a Personal Narrative
By Reg Harris
NOTE: I adapted this article from a chapter in The Path of Transformation. While it is a bit dated, the concepts it explores and the points it makes are, perhaps, more relevant today than they were when it was written.
The Narrative Self: Our story-telling brain
To make meaning in life is to create dynamic narratives that render sensible and coherent the seeming chaos of human existence. To fail in this effort of mythmaking is to experience the malaise and stagnation that come with an insufficient narration of human life.
Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By
We live in our stories. Our brains naturally organize our experience of events into a narrative structure that gives our lives a sense of wholeness and coherence, of a single story unfolding and developing through time. This evolving structure, this “personal narrative,” creates our inner reality, our personality and self-concept. It is the filter through which we see our lives and ourselves, and it determines, to a great extent, how we interpret and interact with our world.
According to neurobiologist Michael Gazzaniga (2011), the mechanism responsible for this narrative processing is in our brain’s language-rich left hemisphere. This “interpreter,” as he calls it, works constantly to give context, order and meaning to the chaos of experience. “This is what our brain does all day long,” Gazzaniga tells us. “It takes input from other areas of our brain and from the environment and synthesizes it into a story.”
This means that our personal narrative, our sense of self, is an on-going process of managing and making sense of experience. “We are in the middle of our stories and cannot be sure how they will end,” writes Donald Polkinghorne. “We are constantly having to revise the plot as new events are added to our lives” (1988, p. 116). To stay healthy and resilient, we must constantly be revising our narrative by incorporating new experiences into its structure and by revising interpretations of past experience to make them cohere to our current life situation.
Narrative and the Hero’s Journey
When we look into literature, the literature is looking into us.
Keeping the personal narrative coherent, flexible and adaptable is especially important for our students. Adolescence is a critical time in the development of self-concept. Our students are exploring options and possibilities as they refine the personal narrative that will serve them in their adult lives. As teachers, we can use literature and the Hero’s Journey to help them in that process.
The first step is to realize that the Hero’s Journey is not just a heuristic for studying mythology. Even though Joseph Campbell identified the pattern through his studies of hero myths, he realized that the journey (or “monomyth,” as he called it) is far more than myth: it is a guide to understanding and living our lives. As he wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:
The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale….The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls (1949, p. 121).
Campbell believed that literature and art are tools to aid us in this process. In our classrooms, the Hero’s Journey can be an especially powerful schema because it creates a bridge that allows students to connect the literature they read to the lives they are living. It does this in two stages. First, it gives students a framework for exploring and understanding literature. Second, it allows literature to “return the favor” by inviting students to use their literary experience to understand and explore their own beliefs, attitudes and behaviors.
To do this, however, we—as teachers—must focus less on formal analysis and a more on authentic engagement. We must allow the literature to become part of the students’ lived experience so that it can open new possibilities in their lives.
Keeping life “in play”
If we allow it to do its work, literature can open us to a range of possible worlds explored by the text.
In Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, cognitive psychologist and educator Jerome Bruner makes the case that a primary function of literature is “to open us to dilemmas, to the hypothetical, to the range of possible worlds that a text can refer to” (1986, p. 159). Put another way, literature, when read for engagement, can break up our sedimented beliefs and assumptions, opening them to review and revision, thus putting our guiding narrative back “in play.”
To do this, however, we must allow a text to disrupt our narrative and challenge us to reinterpret our assumptions about our world and ourselves. By challenging our current perspective, the text opens our vision to new horizons, new possibilities for being. It forces us to realize that life, including our own lives, can be interpreted and lived in new and enlightening ways.
In his article on teaching writing, “Conversation with a Text,” Michael Cowan explains that when we engage a text (or film or poem), we are presented with alternative modes of living. This forces us to consider that our lives might be interpreted and lived differently. “Careful reading of significant texts gives rise to possible futures,” Cowan writes. “My realm of possibility, the sum total of ways in which I assume that life might plausibly unfold, has been transformed” (1994).
In other words, if our students read interactively, a text can present them with perspectives, meanings and possibilities they have may never have considered. In Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty on Narrative Identity, Mark Muldoon explains: “Each text, each philosophy, each literary product becomes a potential horizon or world that I can enter…and [which], in turn, transforms my perception, my outlook, my sense of being-in-the-world” (1997). In other words, engaged, interactive reading gives literature the power to help students unfold and follow their own Hero’s Journeys.
Read for Engagement: To “Live or Tell”
We see everything that happens through our stories. But we must choose: to live our story or to tell our story.
To make literature part of their lived experience, we must allow students to read for experience before reading for analysis. They must engage emotionally—existentially—with the text, which they cannot do if they are reading for analysis. Analysis requires us to step back from the immediate experience of the text so that we can reflect and evaluate. Unfortunately, we cannot experience and evaluate at the same time.
As existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre explained, either we can engage in life or we can reflect on life. Doing both at the same time is difficult, if not impossible. In Nausea (1964), Sartre writes,
This is what I thought: for the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story….But you have to choose: live or tell (p. 39).
In essence, when we ask students to “read analytically,” we are asking them to “tell” rather than “live.” We block the direct process that makes literature real and allows it to act on the reader’s personal narrative. A 2007 study at the University of Toronto may explain why students can’t experience and analyze simultaneously.
The researchers identified two distinct forms of self-reference that influence our interactions with the world: “an extended self-reference linking experiences across time, and momentary self-reference centered on the present” (Farb, et al.). They called these the narrative or extended focus and the experiential or present-centered focus.
Narrative focus or processing requires elaboration to form connections between new information and prior knowledge. Experiential processing demands that we open our attention to experience and explore a broad range of mental and physical sensations. The experiential focus disengages us from reflection and self-referencing so that we can fully engage in the experience in the moment. In Researching Lived Experience, Max van Manen explained why this is so:
A person cannot reflect on lived experience while living through the experience. For example, if one tries to reflect on one’s anger while being angry, one finds that the anger has already changed or dissipated…. Reflection on lived experience is always…reflection on experience that is already passed or lived through (1990, p. 10).
Each mode activates a different part of the brain and that using one mode necessarily decreases our ability to use the other.
Both modes of processing have their place in our lives. However, in the context of our discussion, the significant finding in the study is that each mode activates a different part of the brain and that using one mode necessarily decreases our ability to use the other. This is why experience should precede analysis.
Many educators confirm this view. Robert Scholes, a leading scholar in literary studies argued that by asking students to read for such things as irony, theme, symbolism and meaning, we add a layer of difficulty by creating an “alternate text” that “stands between the literature students read and their own humanity” (1999, p. 35). To avoid this, Scholes encouraged teachers to allow students to find personal resonance and meaning in the text rather than to distance them from it by putting them immediately into the role of analysts. (Link to resonance article.)
“You Gotta BE the Book!”
Reading is a dialogue between the reader’s existing knowledge base and the potentials presented by the text.
This “reader-oriented” (rather than “analysis-oriented”) approach to literature allows students to engage the text and create personally significant meanings. In a real sense, while students interpret the text, the text “interprets” them by bringing to awareness their hidden beliefs, understandings and potentials. Texts can make the unconscious conscious and influence students’ perspectives and expectations. In Campbell’s terms, literature can help our students expand their horizons and take journeys of “ever-expanding realization.”
While the interactive model of reading does allow readers to engage literature authentically and to construct their own meanings, it necessarily changes our approach to teaching. According to Jeffrey Wilhelm, in You Gotta BE the Book (1995), the interactive approach stresses the reader’s existing knowledge base (or schema). As a result, “Reading becomes a meeting of the reader’s prior knowledge and textual meanings that work together to create a greater sense of things” (pp. 17-18).
However, this reliance on the reader’s prior knowledge puts an additional burden on the teacher, who must ensure that students have the schemata needed to read and write in a personal yet purposeful way.
The most important of these schemata is the narrative structure. In With Rigor for All, Carol Jago explains that an ignorance of narrative structure is one of the greatest blocks to eliciting genuine student engagement and response to literature. If students don’t understand of how stories work, she explains, they may not be able to respond to literature at all. Jago goes on to observe that while some story structures “may be so familiar to an English teacher that they hardly bear commenting on, this is not the case for many high school readers,” and that “it is unrealistic to assume that … they will figure out the structure themselves” (2000, pp. 39-40).
The Hero’s Journey: The Key that Unlocks the Narrative Structure
The Hero’s Journey is a more natural and experiential tool for understanding literature because it emerged FROM experience rather than having been applied TO experience.
This poses the question, “What is the best tool to teach narrative structure?” What schema best shows students how stories work?
Perhaps the most universally used tool is Freytag’s Pyramid or “narrative arc” (see below). Gustov Freytag developed his arc in 1863 when he wrote The Technique of Drama, in which he explored the structure and dynamics of the five-act drama. While the arc is simple, Freytag created it to analyze—not experience—the five-act play, so the arc’s analytical nature may inhibit student’s narrative experience.
We propose that a better schema for teaching narrative structure is the transformative model of the Hero’s Journey. The journey is more natural and experiential. It emerged FROM experience rather than being applied TO experience. Students easily understand its stages because stage names are more descriptive of their actual lived experience. More importantly, though the journey is effective because students already know it (albeit, unconsciously). They have lived it dozens of times, both in their lives and in the literature and films they enjoy.
Knowledge of the Hero’s Journey and its psychological dynamics will give students a framework they can use to understand story elements and structure. More importantly, they will be able to translate the themes from literature to their own life experiences, their own Hero’s Journeys. When students recognize journeys―including their own journeys―are an on-going process of reinterpreting experience and reframing meaning, they will have gained a perspective that will help them embrace and navigate the challenges they will face in their lives.
References
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces (2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.
Cowan, Michael A., Conversation with a text.. Vol. 42, College Teaching, 04-01-1994, pp 66.
Farb, N. et. al. (2007). Attending to the Present: Mindfulness Meditation Reveals Distinct Neural Modes of Self-Reference. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Oxford University Press, Vol. 2, Num. 4, pp. 313-322.
Gazzaniga, M. (2011). Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. New York: Ecco/HarperCollins.
Jago, Carol. (2000). With Rigor for All: Teaching the classics to contemporary students. Portland, ME: Calendar Islands.
McAdams, D. P. (1993). The Stories We Live By: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York: Guilford.
Muldoon, M. S. (1997, Winter). Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty on Narrative Identity. The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 71, pp. 1-18. Retrieved on February 7, 2002, from http://www25.brinkster.com/marcsgalaxy/merlric.htm.
Polkinghorne, D. E. (1988). Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (1st ed.). Albany, NY: State University of New York.
Sartre, J-P. (1964). Nausea. (trans: L. Alexander). New York: New Directions.
Scholes, R. (1999) Mission Possible. English Journal 88 (July): 28-35.
van Manen, M. (1990). Researching Lived Experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. New York: State University of New York.
Wilhelm, J. (1995). You Gotta Be the Book. New York: Teachers College Press and NCTE.