The monomyth, otherwise known as the “hero’s journey,” attempts to set structure to story. First developed by folklorist Joseph Campbell, the monomyth is the type of concept you are quizzed on in a college literature survey course—a multi-stage narrative journey that includes an archetypal hero, a departure from a homeland, a period of trial often necessitating a descent into an underworld, and a triumphant return with newfound power and experience. It is an attractive formula, in part because it monumentalizes many well-loved works of literature—turning anything from the Odyssey to Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings into a simple series of steps. The monomyth is helpful insofar as it illuminates patterns, but, like all theoretical frameworks, it is capable of obscuring distinctive aspects of any given work.
A narrow focus on narrative stages, for example, can obscure the emotional heft of a story—the unique punch that a novel, play, or poem delivers: Odysseus’s dog Argos, recognizing his master disguise and running to him, or the moment we see Gandalf the Grey plunge into the depths beneath the bridge of Khazad-dum. These are moments when we feel rather than fit puzzle pieces together—moments that affect us in head and heart.
Consider that at the emotional center of many stories, characters are often faced with a particular loss or trial. We might propose an alternative structure that is more attentive to the affective dimensions of narrative: In the middle of their journey, few heroes seem conscious of the great story they are a part of, but they are certainly aware of their immediate lack of home or a person they have lost or a peace that once existed but has been disrupted. Considered in these terms, the hero’s journey is fueled by a desire to overcome—or rebuild in the aftermath of—an experience of grief.
Many examples of this structure might be gleaned from the film, poetry, memoir, and fiction of twenty-first century American art. Take Chloé Zhao’s Academy Award-winning film, Nomadland (2020), adapted from Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name. As much as the film is a story about the plight of middle-aged Americans disillusioned with a world shook up by the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, the film is propelled by a particular and personal grief: the destabilizing loss of direction that the main character Fran (played by Frances McDonald) feels in the wake of her husband’s death. Grief haunts the film more than the gig economy or any economic downturn.
Grief is in many of the great texts—not just in our contemporary ones but also in those of the ancients as well. Take Euripedes’s Medea, for instance, in which the sorceress Medea is abandoned and exiled by her husband, Jason, for another woman. Rather than leave her children to a life without their mother, and to represent the heart-fracture of what it means for one to lose your home and your love, Medea murders Jason’s new wife and her own two children. It is a horrifying violence, done out of vengeance as much as it is out of bewildering sorrow. Here is Jason’s reprisal—equally steeped in grief, equally exiled:
Go, worker in evil, stained with your children’s blood.
For me remains to cry aloud upon my fate,…
And the boys whom I begot and brought up, never
Shall I speak to them alive. Oh, my life is over!
Medea is a Greek tragedy that defiantly champions female agency, providing a stark case of what might happen when women test the boundaries placed on them by men. Grief—loss of children, loss of relationship, and “loss of a native land” of which “there is no sorrow above”—is at the heart of the play.
Grief and loss are often intricately intertwined. Robert Cording, author of the recent hybrid memoir The Unwalled City, speaks of a “double loss” in grief: “first, my loved son; and then my own life, at least as I knew it.” The book is a searing account of the death of Cording’s thirty-one-year-old son Daniel to an accidental drug overdose. The book is creatively organized—a single essay is broken up and scattered throughout the book. In intervening sections, Cording provides poems that similarly navigate the “vanishing.” It is a book of heartbreaking remorse—the voice of a bereft father in the twilight of life mourning the loss of an adult child. No memory that Cording has is left untouched by the existence of his son. The book is a reminder that trauma is recursive, endlessly persisting in the lives of survivors. As he writes in “Lost”:
Yesterday I said to someone,
I lost my son, as if a day would arrive
when I could find him (“Lost”)
Or, in “Lamentations II”:
Daniel, whether you are
In some underworld,
Afterlife, or just the ground,
I am the same to you.
No father now,
Just a man turning back.
Another recent work by an award-winning contemporary poet is Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla. Dzukogi’s debut poetry collection traces the grief of the speaker who has lost his infant daughter. Her crib, an ever-evocative image of new life, here is a “qibla,” the direction a Muslim prays toward Mecca and the Kaaba. Grief, then, is the reorienting compass of prayer. In “Shattered,” Dzukogi writes:
Prayer is now the dark
side of light, a night
so impenetrable, heavy
with a silence that tears the neighborhood,
his skin, his entire body.
And yet for as much as grief is a vocabulary, grief is also the loss of language and of prayer. Consider Dzukogi’s poem, “The House Held by Chaos”:
It is unsayable what echoes inside of him,
like some word that has already been said.
There is no space in his voice for anything
other than sorrow. It clings like a shadow,
something he cannot step out of,
a house, a masjid. It temples in his heart.
I knew when I first read the collection that I needed to write about it, but I also found in its devasting poems that my own language was silenced by the all-consuming power of its grief-infected lines. Like the empty halls of a mausoleum, these poems are full of the shadows that recall a once present light. The vocabulary of grief is never complete: It continues to return to a central moment of loss in search of a kind of mythmaking. As Dzukogi puts it in another poem, “Baha is not dead—/she is walking her way into myth.”
Neither Cording’s book nor Dzukogi’s astonishes with over-the-top feats of language or form. Their strength is in their minimalism, their “direct-ness”—what it means for a speaker to come face to face with death at the breakfast table, to brush against death with every breath. These are poems in which no memory and no waking moment can fall outside the reaches of a lost loved one, who seems as present now as when living.
Being attentive to such emotional resonances provides not only another layer of interpretation. It also helps us understand how poetry and narratives can lead us into experiences in which we are seen, known, and sometimes even purged of what we had not yet been able to express.