A Spiritual Quest Begins inside a Whale

Spiritual Sunday

I’m currently teaching Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces in my British Fantasy Literature class. Alternately brilliant and garbled, Campbell’s totalizing vision is helping us make connections between private dreams, cultural mythologies (including Christianity), and fantasy literature. As my goal in the class is to explore what fantasy means and how we use it to aid our lives, it’s good to have an overarching framework, even if only to push against.

In our last class we talked about how the hero, early in the journey, enters “the belly of the whale.” Campbell sees this step occurring after the hero has accepted the call and crossed the threshold of his or her quest. The initial excitement, however, gives way to self-doubt. That’s because heroes often find themselves reluctant to abandon the self that they are familiar with, even though that old self stands in the way of their new identity. As Campbell puts it,

The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm….In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties…

And further on:

 [T]he passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation…[T]he hero goes inward, to be born again.

The Jonah story, of course, gives us the image. Jonah initially refuses God’s call and must undergo a transformation before he steps into his true potential. I love the moment where he accepts his destiny, which uses the deep water images to capture the psychological turmoil (Jonah 2:4-6):

I said, ‘I have been banished
   from your sight;
yet I will look again
    toward your holy temple.’
The engulfing waters threatened me,
    the deep surrounded me;
    seaweed was wrapped around my head.
To the roots of the mountains I sank down;
    the earth beneath barred me in forever.
But you, Lord my God,
    brought my life up from the pit.

Seaweed wrapped around the head and entrapment beneath the roots of mountains is a pretty good description of depression.

The class has been applying Campbell’s framework to The Fellowship of the Ring, and we decided that the stages of the hero’s journey can recur multiple times within a novel, only at ever more intense levels. We identified two “belly of the whale” experiences in the first volume, the first where Frodo and his friends are captured by a barrow-wight (which is where Frodo discovers that he has powerful internal resources to draw on), the second where Frodo sustains a wound while confronting the Nazgul atop Weathertop (Frodo almost slips into a wraith-like state but demonstrates remarkable resilience, indicating that he has what it takes to become the ring bearer). In the run-up to Frodo’s long dark journey into the soul, these are moments where the old hobbit must die so that a new hobbit can emerge.

My friend Rachel Kranz sent me a wonderful poem by Dan Albergotti, “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale,” which gets at this interior journey with a few Pinocchio references. Although it may appear that we are just marking time when we find ourselves in the belly, Albergotti shows us that we are in actuality preparing for a deep dive. Which is to say, for our hero’s journey:

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

By Dan Albergotti

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.

Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires

with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.

Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.

Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way

for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review

each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments

of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you. 

Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound

of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.

Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,

where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all

the things you did and could have done. Remember

treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes

pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

From The Boatloads (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2008)