The Doctor With A Thousand Faces

Back when I used to work in a bookshop, there was a man who came in every day, sometimes several times in one day. He was in early middle age, and suffered from a rare degenerative brain disorder that meant that he would do - could only do - the same things over and over. So first he would pick up a copy of Atomised by Michel Houellebecq and ask the nearest female employee if that was her on the cover. As the cover featured a girl wearing only a pair of white knickers, this was irritating. Then he would ask whether we had a mythology section (we didn’t) and whether we had a copy of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. If the book was in, he would stand reading it for a while (or pretending to read, I’m not sure whether he was still capable of reading) and then he wouldn’t buy it, seeming to know on some level that he didn’t need it (indeed probably already had it.) On the way out, he would stop at the hardbacks display and ask if we had “the new one” by Alan Bennett. If there happened to be a new Alan Bennett, he would ask us to hold it for him. And if we weren't busy we would try to get him talking about Alan Bennett, about whom he had relatively plenty to say. He was an admirer of his, and they had gone to the same school (though not at the same time), and he bore a resemblance to him: similar build, Yorkshire accent, sandy hair. He would ask us if we had any sweets, and we would offer him a satsuma or banana - whatever fruit we had to hand - until he began asking for fruit instead, and it became part of his routine. So it seemed he was capable of learning new things, but only with great difficulty.

It was apt that the book he always asked for was The Hero With A Thousand Faces because the thesis of the book, a non-fiction classic from 1949, is that myths from all cultures follow the same universal structure, the “monomyth”, of the Hero’s Journey along a number of archetypical steps: the call to adventure, the road of trials, the ordeal and so on, until he finally achieves his goal and returns home. (The Hero With A Thousand Faces was famously the inspiration for Star Wars and any number of Hollywood films since then.) The monomyth is the way that all cultures make sense of the chaos of life through the order of storytelling. Our Bennett-like customer was the hero, following the same path over and over, unknowing of all the other versions of himself who trod it before or since.

I thought of him for the first time in years a few days ago, watching the 60th anniversary episode of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor has regenerated as David Tennant for the second time, and is wondering why the universe has returned him to an old face. (The obvious answer - to make Marie Phillips happy - doesn’t occur to him. Long-term subscribers know all about my love for David Tennant and may even be curious if there have been any further instalments in my now eighteen-year sequential dream cycle about him. There has! And guess what? WE FINALLY HAD SEX!!!!!!!!! The sex was terrible, we have no chemistry, and it’s probably ruined our friendship, but at least it laid to rest some of my concerns about his prostate, raised a few dreams ago. But I digress.) It was a fun episode, reuniting the Doctor with one of his most enjoyable, caustic companions (Donna / Catherine Tate) on an adventure that was more comical than menacing, as London came under threat from The Meep, a cutesy fluffball with hidden sharp teeth and the voice of Miriam Margolyes. Part of the pleasure of Doctor Who is that the thrills and surprises come within a format that we are completely familiar with, not only from the years of episodes watched in childhood, but also from the monomyth. It is exciting but it is safe. We know exactly what to expect, even when the Doctor turns up with a completely new (or second hand) face.

Doctor Who is a perfect, endless example of the Hero’s Journey, going around and around the same loop, just like our customer from long ago. I’ve long thought how Doctor Who structurally resembles The Odyssey, in which a battle-weary man tries to return to his home land but keeps getting lost and distracted by goddesses and monsters. In The Odyssey, Odysseus is accompanied by his sailors, but gradually they are all killed or bewitched until he finally reaches Ithaca completely alone and unrecognisable as the man who set out. The characters of the Doctor and Odysseus resemble one another too, relying more on their considerable wits than brute force to survive and defeat their enemies. I find both stories compellingly sad, allegories for the relentless loneliness of life and the yearning for the feeling of home as much as home itself. Both The Doctor and Odysseus have temporary stretches of finding a home-like place or person (the Earth, the companions, Ogygia, Calypso) but they are never fully comfortable, knowing that one day they will have to leave them behind. We are born alone, and we die alone; but in between, as Campbell’s book tells us, we have our mentors and our allies; our friends. Friendship is intrinsic to the Hero’s journey, more even than love.

(It’s worth drawing attention here to the way in which the “hero” of Campbell’s monomyth is resolutely male. There is much debate over whether the archetypal hero is structurally male, or if the cataloguing of male stories to the exclusion of female is an oversight (deliberate or otherwise) by a blinkered Campbell. Some argue that when a woman is cast in the traditional hero role she merely takes on a male mantle, and that this denies the specificity of the female journey. Maria Tatar, an expert in fairytale, has taken this on in her book, The Heroine With A Thousand And One Faces, where she argues that the heroine’s story is intrinsically countercultural and counter-patriarchal, and therefore cannot be the same as the traditional hero’s. For others, a journey is a journey no matter the gender of the person undertaking it. For me? I still find exploring the question too interesting to answer it just yet.)

One of the reasons that Doctor Who works so well as a format is that although there is a vaguely implied ending to the Doctor’s story - the Doctor stops travelling and returns to Gallifrey - there is no sense that the show itself is actually headed there. (In fact recent series have repeatedly destroyed and revived the Doctor’s home planet to push this resolution even further away. Which doesn’t matter, since it is really a metaphor for death, and dying is the one thing that endlessly-regenerating Doctor cannot do.) In Doctor Who, we are within the Hero’s Journey, but we are on the road of trials and we are staying on the road of trials. As long as we don’t expect to see an ending, the show can carry on indefinitely without outstaying its welcome, something that any number of soap operas and case-of-the-week procedurals have also understood. Within such an open-ended format, films and TV programmes set up as a series are free to tell self-standing stories, whether episode by episode (Columbo, say), season by season (Slow Horses) or film by film (James Bond). They end but they don’t end; the hero continues his journey. Alternatively, a single story, novel or film can tell a complete hero’s cycle, from departure to return, end satisfyingly, and allow us to move on to a new tale.

Where modern streaming models of television frustrates is where it appears to be set up to tell us one story, one hero, one journey, but strung out sequentially over an unknown number of seasons designed to keep us watching, none of which come to any kind of satisfying conclusion, until the show is suddenly cancelled, meaning that it either has to rush to tell all its remaining story in a handful of episodes or, worse, is never given the chance to end at all. Not knowing how many seasons they have to stretch the story into, the storyteller sends the hero on a journey not knowing where he is headed, but all the while reassuring the viewer that he is definitely going to get there soon. The result is something like Westworld: a shaggy-dog-story pretending to have meaning, ultimately collapsing in a confusing muddle. Without structure, the monomyth will not stand. Ironically, the first season of Westworld was beautifully structured, and only when it tried to continue along an unclear path did it fall in on itself. Form gives meaning. It is what separates music from noise.

What does any of this have to do with our bookshop’s erstwhile customer? Looking back, his story seemed tragic from the outside: so much loss of self, and a future holding only more deterioration. But he himself never seemed distressed. He was just walking his path, a small path perhaps, but one that he had chosen long ago - the bookshop, the beloved books and authors, the conversations with the staff. Are we, in our own stories, so different? We may have more agency, more awareness, but we all make choices within the randomness of life to give ourselves a sense of coherence, of joy and of purpose. We are all the hero, with different faces, on the only journey that any of us will ever take.