Beneath the Hero's Journey the Beach! (How the Hero's Journey Promotes Hierarchy)

Let’s begin with the concept of the ordinary world, the place where the hero starts his journey and is accustomed to but that will ultimately become a site of dissatisfaction. In Siddhartha, this takes the form of his life at home, where he occupies an inherently hierarchical position as a Brahmin, the Hindu caste that possesses a monopoly on religious knowledge (the text states, “The Brahmins and their holy books knew everything, everything”) with the ostensible responsibility of adhering to a life of study and asceticism to transmit these teachings to the other castes that are too busy engaging in worldly activities to pursue spiritual quests (Hesse 6). However, it seems that not all Brahmins take this spiritual responsibility seriously, as Govinda mentions that Siddhartha would not become “an avaricious dealer in magic sayings” or “a wicked sly” priest. 

To understand the position of these corrupt Brahmins, it would be helpful to bring in the Marxist theory of commodity fetishism, which essentially states that all experiences and goods are thought of as products containing an inherent abstract value under capitalism, monetary or otherwise. The Brahmins have clearly commodified their religious knowledge in that the common people regard it as an essential good and are willing to enrich them to obtain it. Siddhartha asks, “But where were the Brahmins, the priests, and the wise men who were successful in not only having this profound knowledge, but experiencing it?” (Hesse 7) Siddhartha, of course, in experiencing the call to adventure disavows this paradigm of Brahminical life and wants to gain an experience of the real essence of enlightenment, so the call to adventure seems to be a liberationary step in that Siddhartha wants to leave the oppressive value regime he belongs to. 

 

 

A 16th-century Qur'an owned by a noble of the Persian Safavid Empire, who often were also clergy (ulama). Its floridity shows how a scripture revealed to the common people in Arabia was commodified to enable the creation of a privileged spiritual elite similar to the Brahmins.

This does seem to be the case, but another critique I have of the Hero’s Journey is that it is individualistic, and this can be seen in the next stage of Siddhartha’s hero’s journey. The individualism of the hero’s journey echoes hierarchical Protestant and capitalist narratives that success is dependent on an individual’s characteristics and all social relations must be seen as the means for an individual’s advancement, like the Brahmins’ spiritual knowledge is perceived as valuable for spiritual advancement. Marx believed that such an individualist outlook can only bind one in pursuing abstract value because humans are meant to pursue their values productively in the context of a community. As Siddhartha faces the road of trials with the samanas and the Buddha, he is intent on pursuing an abstract goal of a bliss free from desires. As the text states, “He felt this, conquered thirst, and then felt thirst again.” (Hesse 15) His pursuit of enlightenment through self-denial is competition for nirvana, a goal with a perceived value that Siddhartha himself acknowledges by stating, “I do not believe that any of the samanas will attain enlightenment,” implying that if one employed the correct methods, they could gain that valued object (Hesse 18). Siddhartha has not attempted to pursue an experience that he values with the help of others but instead engaged in chasing an abstract concept beyond the social sphere. 

Siddhartha’s experience with the kama people serve as the first moments in the narrative that depict a society similar to capitalism. According to Siddhartha, the kama people find themselves trapped in a pursuit of ‘property, possessions, and riches” and associate business dealings with passion and pleasure. In this respect, the kama people have taken commodity fetishism to the extreme by extolling the abstract value of capital. However, Siddhartha ignores the material conditions of his society that cause people to view wealth this way. He refers to the emphasis on wealth accumulation as merely “a game,” but such an analysis ignores the fact that Siddhartha is a voluntary participant in the system (Hesse 79). His own privilege, being a Brahmin whose religious knowledge is valued, has resulted in him not necessarily having to work in order to survive, and his literacy allows him to become a merchant who does not rely on others at all for work. The rest of the population, who is barely mentioned, likely belongs to occupational castes and must use their time to earn a wage that they rely on to survive, which is why they prize monetary accumulation. In contrast, Siddhartha uses his wealth to purchase pleasurable activities like fine clothes, food, and wine. Siddhartha’s turn to the world after his “belly of the whale” moment causes him to once again pursue abstract value, this time through capital accumulation. This perspective on the world is similarly oppressive to Siddhartha’s old life in that Siddhartha’s occupation as a profit-focused merchant causes him to become “impatient with slow-paying debtors” and lose “the desire to give gifts and loans to the poor.” (Hesse 80)

If we follow the hero’s journey, Kamala, who represents the woman as temptress archetype should be incentivizing Siddhartha’s mindless pursuit of wealth, but I would argue that she acts as a foil to it in fact and that women are portrayed as “temptresses” in the hero’s journey because they have the ability to lead the hero off of the hierarchical pursuit of abstract value. The text narrates during one of Siddhartha’s encounters with Kamala that, with “Kamala lay the value and meaning of his present life, not with Kamaswami’s business.” (Hesse 66) In order words, Siddhartha only engages in business because he values his time with Kamala.  Siddhartha’s relationship with Kamala is thus a prerequisite to his engagement in the capitalist system. In Caliban and the Witch, Marxist feminist theoretician Silvia Federici describes how the reproductive and domestic labor of women was commodified, exploited, and controlled through marriage and prostitution to allow men to become participants in the capitalist system. However, Federici also engages with the idea that women’s reproductive power needed to be controlled to create capitalism because it allows for the creation of social relations based on mutual interdependence and production. Siddhartha’s early interactions with Kamala do reflect a commodification of her sex appeal, as can be seen when she stipulates that her customers must have “plenty of money and presents.” However, Siddartha subverts this at first by offering a poem to Kamala that stirs her heart, with the artistic experience of the poem drawing her towards him instead of monetary “intercourse.” (Get it?) Later, their bond becomes distinctly socially interdependent and experiential with Siddhartha revealing to Kamala some of his greatest secrets. Siddhartha shows how the hero’s journey categorizes women as temptresses because they offer mutually interdependent and productive experiences of love to the archetypical heterosexual male hero instead of the pursuit of either spiritual or material accumulation.

Of course, in the end, Siddhartha returns to abstract goals that had previously driven him instead of the constructive and socially grounded experience of love. In his final explanation to Govinda, he expounds on the dichotomy of the sinner, representing the pursuit of worldly wealth, and the Buddha, representing the seeking of transcendent divinity. He observes that both of these approaches capture the totality and perfection of the world by being interdependent on each other. Worldly lust encourages spiritual reflections and vice-versa. Ultimately, Siddhartha’s final mastery of the two worlds, the material and spiritual, has him preach the hierarchical pursuit of abstract value as the highest form of emancipation. But why is abstract value so oppressive? The pursuit of capital for capital’s sake obviously leads Siddhartha to neglect the most vulnerable in society and his moral impulses to help them. Prizing abstract spiritual value, commodifying it like the Brahmins have done, is a tool that legitimizes the quest for wealth, a palliative for concerns about the moral and emotional implications of wealth accumulation that a privileged elite benefits from. Siddhartha and the archetypical hero are correct that spirituality and lust for wealth are interdependent, but what they have in common is creating a society where abstract goals are highlighted in order to justify hierarchies

 

Works Cited  

 

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and      Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia ; Pluto, 2003.  

 

Hesse Hermann. Siddhartha. Trans. Hilda Rosner. Bantam Books.     1971.