Darwin & Kubrick, Joe Campbell & Me: Eminent-Genius and Everyday-Joe Heroes on a Journey

Abstract

This article examines the lives of two eminent geniuses, scientist-writer Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and writer-artist-filmmaker Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999), as monomythic hero’s journeys. The article is in three parts: Part One (Separation) presents Vogler’s (1992) twelve-step monomyth, a compressed version of the 17-step monomyth hero’s journey pattern identified by comparative mythographer Joseph Campbell (1949) in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In Part Two (Initiation) the twelve-step monomyth narrative algorithm (Vogler, 1992) is used to explain the eminent genius lifework of Charles Darwin, and this same twelve-step lens is then applied to the eminent genius lifework of Stanley Kubrick. Part Three (The Return) applies the same twelve-step monomyth to the author-researcher of this article (Velikovsky), aiming to demonstrate how the monomyth applies not only on large scales to eminent geniuses such as Darwin and Kubrick in Science and the Arts, but also on small scales—even to Everyday Joes such as myself, thus also supporting Williams (2016, 2017). The conclusion drawn is that the monomyth pattern is a life-problem and also domain-problem solving tool, supporting the heroism science research of Allison (2016) and Efthimiou (2016a, 2016b). As this research is transdisciplinary, the disciplines of the research presented are: Communication and Media Arts, Information Science and Technology, Creativity Studies, Consilient Narratology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Metamodernism.