Sounds to me like the changes in common story structures are reflecting changes in the structure of society -- it's all very well to say that the Hero's Journey is rooted in human nature, but if increasing numbers of people find Hero's Journey stories unsatisfactory in the 20th century and beyond, that might be a hint that the HJ archetype was rooted in the society that created it rather than in something more abstract and general.
I mean, it's all very well to say that a really genuine story ends with the hero winning a kingdom... but most of us don't live in kingdoms any more, and we wouldn't want to.
Well, succession to the kingdom in this context is more metaphorical than literal. It's more about the hero/heroine assuming control of some area of life from the previous generation.
"The underlying patterns of storytelling are designed to express the hero transcending the ego and embracing the self."
I know this is probably nit-picking, but isn't the ego and the self the same thing? Sorry, I'm not as familiar with Jung as I am with Freud and the successors to his ideas (studied a lot of literary psychoanalysis at uni) and I know that after a point Jung forks off very significantly from Freud's ideas. I know you said don't ask, but I am. Can you clear this up?
From what you've written, it seems to me that Booker is trying to take all the genre theory amassed during structuralism/post-structuralism in the 70s and then retroactively trying to fit it into Jungian theory from 100 plus years previously. This is the kind of thing that goes down very well in university literature circles (especially with those obsessed with theory rather than fiction). Now, I think structuralism is important, and genre theory is one aspect of theory that I really took to during my degree (the only part which actually complemented the close reading of a text, unlike a lot of theory which is aimless pontification). But Booker seems to be straining the idea to a ridiculous extent, like hammering a square nail into a round hole. Simply, his analysis moves from founded speculation to arbitrary conjecture.
I didn't stick with it all the way, either. Partly that was because the text is very repetitive - Booker states his set of types and rules over and over again. (By the way, there are really a lot of misprints in it. Maybe the proofreader felt the same way.) And when he gets to 20th century storytelling he indulges in a great deal of mindreading: a writer disobeys the archetypes because they're a perverse or inadequate human being (viz his comments on Proust), and are deaf to the word of God - though he doesn't quite come out and put it like that.
Sounds dreadful. How does the author account for something like, say, the Epic of Gilgamesh - the oldest surviving story we know of - in which the hero starts out as a divine king, fails in his epic quest, loses the magic herb, and resigns himself to living out the rest of his life as a mere mortal? I guess you could torture the meaning of "completing a quest" and "inheriting a kingdom" to the point where they encompass the complete opposite, but that seems like a cheat.
I'd guess that would be "Tragedy". Did Gilgamesh have a fatal flaw that led to his downfall? (I know the basics of the story but not the details)
Gilgamesh has plenty of flaws, and the gods certainly hold him to account for them, so there's some overlap with the Greek tragedies. But his "downfall" is more like a renunciation of heroism in favor of mortal existence, kind of like Alan Moore's imaginary Superman tale, and it's accomplished via a kind of inverted hero's journey that transforms our superhero back into an ordinary man. ..
"Isn't the ego and the self the same thing?"
No, because this is Jungian jargon. Oversimplifying massively, the "self" is the whole, unified consciousness, as opposed to the ego which is self-centred. Basically, the "Self" is how you'd end up with you were a fully-rounded and fully-developed human being. It's a horribly confusing piece of terminology, because in plain English, it really denotes something closer to "selflessness."
Gilgamesh: Booker does actually discuss it at some length, although according to the index, most of that is in in the closing pages of the book, which I haven't read. Basically, he regards it as a hybrid. It's also one of those episodic stories where individual episodes are based on different basic plots.
Thanks, Paul. Consider me enlightened.
Well, succession to the kingdom in this context is more metaphorical than literal. It's more about the hero/heroine assuming control of some area of life from the previous generation.
True, but such a story structure still assumes a belief among a majority of its audience that any such assumption of control is possible, and I'd suggest that has long since been an assumption that can no longer be made consistently.
From J.R.R. Tolkien to William Gibson, a great deal of 20th century fiction has subconsciously expressed the idea that "paradise" can only exist in a state of retreat, either as an idyllic past that can't withstand the modern world, or else as a pirate utopia that barely manages to exist under the radar of oppressive authority.
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