Talking Tuesday: Joseph Campbell

This novel has taken me down some interesting rabbit holes.  I've learned more about the craft of acting than I ever thought possible (one of the protagonists is a professional actor).  The latest was a little jump into Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey.  I should hasten to add that I did not read the book entirely, but read some passages as well as critical analysis to get a feel for the argument.  Campbell is probably the father of modern literary critical theory, and from my brief reading yesterday, his ideas about story structure and the role of the hero in a story have completely taken over how we understand what we read.  Even if you've never read Campbell, I'm sure you would recognize the ideas.  This passage in particular stood out to me as interesting:

"The ego is as you think of yourself.  You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them.  The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of.  And you're stuck with your past when you're stuck with the ego.  Because is all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened.  The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through."

~Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey. New York: New World Library, 2014.

I think what he is saying is that there is always something new to discover, some new horizon to pass through as you go through life.  That it all becomes part of your history, a sliver of who you are.  There's no such thing as stuck; there is merely finding a new path forward.  There is a lot in Campbell that I don't agree with, but I think I can go along with this one.