I have seen numerous blog posts
about how Anse fits the Campbell paradigm, but I thought it might be fun to see
all the ways he completely missed the mark. To preface, I am not saying that
Anse is not the hero of the story, but I am trying to show the different ways (according
to Campbell) that his journey fails to fit the criteria. Examples of Anse’s
journey straying from the Campbell paradigm range from his lack of decision
making to his general lack of character development.
The first
example of Anse not following the Campbell paradigm relates to the “Refusal of
the Quest” and “Accepting the Call”. In some crazy way, Anse manages to do neither
of those things. When the novel starts, we are simply told that it was Addie’s
last wish to be buried with her family in the city, and Anse never truly
challenges her. Yet at the same time, Anse does not fully accept the call
either. We learn early in the novel that he is slow to making decisions, and I
never felt that Anse fully went along with this journey. There were times when
he had to be prodded by Dewey Dell to continue the quest, something that I
would not expect from a hero that had “accepted the call”. It is Anse’s
unheroic quality of indecision that put him a spot between refusal and
acceptance.
Another way
that Anse fails Campbell’s paradigm is with respect to allies and helpers. In
the Odyssey, for example, Odysseus was helped by nearly every person he met,
and he used the hospitality to further his journey. On the other hand, Anse
would never be “beholden to no man” and thus he pushed away any outside help he
could have gotten. Other than the chance to sleep in some family barns, Anse
did his best to push away all other help, even going so far as to turn down an
offer of mules. In some ways, Anse’s stubborn mentality seems heroic, but it
still strays from the hero’s journey paradigm.
The final
difference between Anse’s journey and Campbell’s, relates to the changes the
hero went through over the duration of the journey. In most hero narratives, there
are drastic improvements in the appearance and actions of the protagonist, but
in the case of Anse, the changes were only physical. At the very end of novel,
he gets a new haircut and teeth, but he is still the clueless Anse we met at
the beginning of the book. He never really changes from his absurd ways, and in
that regards, Anse’s journey is very different from that of Odysseus and
countless other heroes. Although there are numerous examples of how Anse’s
journey fits the Campbell paradigm, I think the differences are even more
important. They help to show how the journey itself is epic and heroic, but
Anse is not the right fit to lead the quest.
I agree that we can't really say Anse is "transformed" by his journey in any meaningful way--if anything, he gets even worse in terms of his willingness to sell off or steal his children's possessions and money in order to pursue his interests. But the ironic transformations we do see (his new teeth, looking taller, with a new wife on his arm) are significant: Anse somehow, incredibly, infuriatingly, comes out of this ordeal a "winner." And we have to give him some kind of credit for this, much as we find his winning distasteful. There are two points where Anse goes off to negotiate and returns having ostensibly made a good deal, and in both cases we see that combination of "proud" and "hangdog": when he negotiates away Jewel's horse in order to buy a team from Snopes, and when he goes to borrow a shovel and manages to get a wife (and a "graphophone"!). This guy must have some kind of game if he's able to convince this pop-eyed, duck-shaped woman to marry him in about ten minutes, with his wife's corpse rotting in the wagon outside (and borrowing shovels to bury her!). We can't account for how he's done it, and his "victory" is totally offensive to pretty much every member of his family. But he does pull it off.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the interesting parts of Anse's character is how structurally he is like a hero, but he also does all these things that don't seem heroic at all. On one hand, he does go on a journey, but it's not really a "heroic" journey. He does have a quality that sets him apart from everyone else... but that quality is being extremely lazy and useless. It makes me think that Faulkner was trying to get us to look at the ironic nature of heroes, and how if you look at them from one perspective, they would look really great, but from another, they're far from that.
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