Trojan War Wednesday: "The Routine"
Author Notes for the 5th installment of RAGE!
Earlier this week, I published an essay on the monomyth theory of Joseph Campbell, and why it’s less universal and more problematic than people, myself included, have traditionally thought.
I’m not ready to give up on the Hero’s Journey, but I am trying to recontextualize it as one tool of many for my writing and one of many possible lenses for story analysis and interpretation.
For example, Homer’s Iliad doesn’t present the story of Achilles as a character. Instead, it describes itself as the story of Achilles’s anger, the emotional state, its origins, its manifestations, and its impact. But modern readers, more used to character-based stories than emotion-focused stories, tend to plug the Iliad into their preconceptions like a square peg on a board that only has round holes.
Mapping the Iliad onto the monomyth requires us to select a hero to be our protagonist. Framing the story as the hero’s journey of Achilles is going to lead to a different reading experience than framing the story as the hero’s journey of Agamemnon, or as the hero’s journey of Zeus. Our tendency to use the Hero’s Journey as a default template allows some people to read the complex and morally ambiguous Achilles as a hero, while others insist on seeing him as a villain.
This is a known limitation of the monomyth.
In jumping from one perspective to another in my retelling, I’m allowing multiple characters to take turns in the spotlight. This week, the focus is on Briseis, who doesn’t get much development in Homer’s version of the story. To tell the story of Briseis, I need to develop her character, her motivations, her challenges, and her achievements. I need to give her a character arc.
And with all its caveats and limitations, the monomyth is still the go-to tool in my toolbox for plotting out character arcs.
What is Briseis’s “ordinary world” from which she receives her “call to adventure?” In a different telling, the ordinary world could be her former life before the Achaean raid that ended with her enslavement by Achilles. Yet here she is, months later, having settled into a new life and new routine. As the Iliad begins, the “inciting incident” of Briseis’s personal story is only still about to start.
Nine years into the siege of Troy, the greatest Achaean warrior, Achilles, is sidelined by rage and resentment following a conflict with his commander, Agamemnon. This short but intense phase of warfare leads to devastating losses on both sides, conflict among the gods, and great tragedy on a human level.
Rage! remixes Homer's Iliad from a variety of viewpoints, including alternate sources, building on three thousand years of Epic Cycle tradition.