Who are the biggest influences in your life?
During my Basic Terms lecture for my Intro to Theatre course, I would mention, during the course of talking about Ritual and Archetype, “my three heroes.”
The first of these heroes was Joseph Campbell, whom I quoted as having called a ritual, “The enactment of a Myth.” (Sorry, I don’t have the source for this; I put my Intro class together so long ago, the details of its construction—the blueprint?—are partially lost.) Reading Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God series had a huge impact on my thinking and on the way I interpreted literature and drama, and I quoted and cited him often.*
Moving on to archetypes, I attempted to define the term for those who had never thought of a pool of knowledge, a “racial unconsciousness” (the race being human, by the way), as something that existed out there and that all humans could tap into for a common understanding of images and stories. I would return to that idea again when discussing Plato’s ideal forms. In the 20th Century, this idea of a “racial unconsciousness” was postulated by Carl Jung, the psychologist, whose Man and His Symbols made a strong impression on me.
Then, talking about archetypal characters, such as the Wise Old Man/Woman and the Trickster, I mentioned my third hero: Bugs Bunny. This was a bit facetious, and a humorous way to list three names rather than just two, rounding out the rhetorical list. However, Bugs is a good example for us in that his detachment from negative emotion serves as a model for those of us who get bogged down (bugged?) by common daily occurrences. Oh, sure, he did get angry at times, but how often did the cartoon end with him breaking the third wall, chewing on a carrot, smiling at us with a verbal shrug, and sloughing off the bad energy that he’d just walked through with a wry comment?
Whether my students ever went farther in an examination of my three “heroes,” I don’t know. But it did nicely tie the presentation of those definitions together.
*Checking some references on Joseph Campbell on Wikipedia, I decided to glance at the “Academic reception and criticism” section and discovered a great deal of negativity about him and his work. I guess the critic who said The Masks of God series “impressed literate laity more than specialists” referred to me. I also know Jung has been criticized in some circles for his ideas and beliefs, but for me that doesn’t diminish the influence his writings had on me.
Fortunately, no such negativity has been placed on Bugs Bunny. Or maybe I should check his Wikipedia entry.
MUSOFYR 