Welcome to the extended analysis! For our first series, we’ve looked at Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. The author is a journalist, and the book is a memoir describing his lifelong love of surfing.
My favorite thing about Barbarian Days is:
This book demonstrates how difficult it can be for a real person, living in the real world, to understand what a hero’s journey looks like for his own life
Which leads us to our current question:
How have you been called to adventure? How did you know that the calling was real?
The sympathetically maddening part about Finnegan’s journey is that he doesn’t actually know if his call is genuine. The journey of a folktale hero doesn’t leave any room to doubt whether the journey is actually happening. But the fascinating reality is that we have no way of knowing whether we’ve embarked on a divine quest – or turned onto a dead-end road.
Furthermore, just because we have a real calling doesn’t mean we are real heroes. The fairytale hero must approach the journey with sincerity, and expend genuine effort. The hero must actually try. Do we try? When presented with an opportunity, do we pursue it with sincerity, and genuine effort?
Finnegan’s memoir is beautiful: the narrative of his life reads so naturally that it’s hard to remember that it’s being told in retrospect - with all the creative license that can be taken after the fact. Every author needs to curate his work into something worth reading. But if we’re approaching this from the lens of a hero’s journey, Finnegan’s admission that he’s never really sure if his calling is real resonates.
So, is Finnegan’s life a hero’s journey? He creates a beautiful book based on the events of his life. But was his path actually a calling to something greater? And was his attempt at following it honest?
****
Fairytales often emphasize the hero’s initial call to adventure: the thing that interrupts his daily life and diverts his attention to something different. Finnegan’s call appears to be his invitation into the local surfing community. But it’s the result of a gentle buildup.
As Joseph Campbell explains in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the call consists of more than just an inciting incident. The call is often layered: A “blunder” or accident creates a conflict or otherwise “is the first sign of something coming for” the hero; the hero then encounters a “herald” who is “a preliminary manifestation of the powers that are breaking into play;” and the “crisis” or opportunity that the herald brings is the actual call to adventure. (THWATF, 42)
Finnegan makes his initial interest in surfing feel normal, like any other fleeting childhood pastime: Intriguing, but not life-changing; an enjoyable act that could not be executed on a regular basis. The drama really starts when he’s adopted into the surfing community in Hawaii.
It’s easy for us, real human beings, to long for a glittering interruption in our lives: a clear sign that we’re being thrown into something bigger and better. But even in stories, catalyzing events rarely come out of the blue.
The implications of this are both comforting and exasperating. Can anything turn out to be a call to adventure? Is something magical waiting around every humdrum corner, if only we bother looking? Could we even have the seeds for multiple adventures scattered throughout our lives, waiting for us to say “yes” to that one? Finnegan’s narrative seems to suggest that the call may be uneventful. Things get good once we take that first real step.
Furthermore, Finnegan does recall an intense interest in the water. Bodies of water are often a metaphor for the unconscious mind. While the author may not have meant it this way, Finnegan’s childhood fascination with being in the ocean (and a relative indifference to a particular activity, beyond a childish interest in a hobby) reads as a general readiness to explore himself. Growing up involves developing a sense of self-awareness which helps us eventually build a life that is suited to us, our needs, and our wants. Perhaps the author’s willingness to dive in, so to speak, set him up for his invitation into adventure.
****
Once Finnegan accepts his invitation into the local surfing community, his eyes are opened to a totally new world. In other words, it’s his crossing of the first threshold – the point at which “the overbold adventurer [who is] beyond his depth may be shamelessly undone,” but “terrors will recede before a genuine psychological readiness” to undertake the upcoming journey. (68)
The author gives us some history of surfing in Hawaii: It originated among the native people and was a widespread pastime, a core part of their culture. Therefore, while surfing had spread to other parts of the world including Finnegan’s previous home of California, Hawaii was the origin and heart of surfing culture. It was the real deal. This topic of authenticity – who was a real surfer versus who was an exhibitionist, who was an insider versus who was an outsider – follows Finnegan throughout his lifelong surfing journey.
Immersing himself in surfing culture ends up being like slipping into another world. As Finnegan points out, surfing has always been a counterculture. It’s an alternative lifestyle. And by accepting the invitation into the Hawaii surf scene, the author steps into a new world and simultaneously starts to remove himself from the old.
Surfing culture has always been at odds with mainstream Western European-style values. American Protestant missionaries considered surfing to be one of many unproductive habits that inhibited the native Hawaiians from appropriate forms of “modesty, industry, and religion.” (28) But the author’s description of post-colonial Hawaii reads like an account of a banishment from Eden.
Nonetheless, when Finnegan arrived, more than a trace of that “old Hawaii” persisted: complete with “all-powerful” elders who left people “quaking” but whose “features…were softened at times by wisdom.” (16) One of the author’s new surfing companions professed a belief in the goddess Pele so sincere that a skeptical Finnegan decided he would nonetheless “keep [his] junior atheist’s mouth shut.” (17) This was a world where his old beliefs, his old concepts about what was real and what mattered, did not fit in. And in order to become an insider, he would need to be the one to accede. This was “a world more unitary…more coherent…than any [he]’d known before.” (27) He would have to adapt.
Surfing was originally a religious practice – and the author became one of the devotees who spent every available hour in the water. In the book’s opening chapters, Finnegan describes how surfing quickly separated him from most children: surfing early in the morning, and every evening. This dedication, and the skill it earns him, leads to him being noticed by the locals and being invited into the local surfing world.
Finnegan idolized the members of this new community: “what [he] wanted…more than anything else” was to emulate them. (19) Following in his idol’s footsteps required him to push himself further than he ever had. The author describes the letters he wrote to friends back in California, in which he confesses that he did not feel any braver, and yet was achieving crazy feats. Recalling those letters and those memories, the adult Finnegan reflected that the “frontiers of the thinkable were quietly, fitfully edging back for me.” (19)
This is what it means to embark on an adventure!
*****
Finnegan spends his early adulthood traveling around the world to surf. The author does a beautiful job of crafting his youth into a coherent and compelling narrative. Many of his vividly-detailed episodes fit well into hero’s journey tropes: a road of trials, threshold guardians, women who are divine and women who are temptations.
But throughout his travels, he constantly wrestles with the topic of authenticity. While he traveled, he noted that the locals were skeptical about travelers like him:
Here was a large, awkward member of the global ruling elite who had probably spent more in an air-travel day than anyone on [the island of] Nias could make in a year of hard work, all for the pleasure of leaving an unimaginably rich, clean place for this desperately poor, unhealthy place…He wanted to see Asia from the ground, not from the Hilton height of some air-conditioned resort that any sane person would prefer. The complex ambitions and aversions that brought the poor backpacker seven thousand miles to struggle and suffer from dysentery, heatstroke, or worse in the equatorial jungle – anything to be a “traveler” and not a “tourist”! – were perhaps impossible to untangle, but it was well known that he brought so little money that he was hardly worth hustling. (251)
Here we have an account of what a luxury it is to pursue a calling: to do something because you want to, not because you have to. And in that situation, the “ambitions and aversions” can indeed be difficult to parse.
Deep into his travels, Finnegan becomes extremely ill. Too sick to move, he spends days ruminating alone in a hospital bed about his recent past: “I would return to the States in disgrace – penniless, my health broken, a failure.” (259) What are Finnegan’s success criteria? Is this an example of losing faith in your own objectives, and so you fall back on society’s definition of success? Or is this about never having any – or, at least never having any good ones – and you come to understand that society has a point?
After a photo of his beloved unknown surfing spot in Indonesia appeared in a magazine, other surfers appeared: “The era of semisecrecy was over. Fifteen guys would soon be fifty guys.” (260) Illness is spreading among the locals, and the author has lost his interest in the place. Finnegan’s comments resonate because many of us go on an adventure because we can, because it’s available to us, because it’s not actually that much of a stretch. But what do we do for show, and what do we do because it actually pushes us? We can easily find ourselves reducing other people’s problems, even global events, down to proverbial personal opportunities for growth.
****
So, is this a real-life hero’s journey? Does Bill Finnegan get called to a grand adventure that helps him transcend himself, therefore reaching his potential and allowing him to save the world – or, at least make it better? Has he put in enough honest effort?
Let’s ask ourselves if Finnegan ever really returns from the alternate universe of surfing.
In a way, yes: He gives up on his world travels. He becomes a journalist. He moves to New York City. He starts a family. Surfing becomes a hobby that recedes into the past. He can reflect back on his life, and even glean some wisdom from it.
But does he truly become a master of both worlds? Surfing creeps back into his life – and seems to do so on its own terms. Finnegan describes being an adult man with a family and career, living in a decidedly not surfing town, getting phone calls from surfing enthusiasts imploring (bullying?) him to grab his board and get back into the fray.
Does that matter?
Finnegan’s physical return from his travels isn’t a true indication of whether he has come home. A hero’s journey is, first and foremost, a psychological experience. This is all the more true since real human beings like us don’t get to go to magical worlds. And it makes sincere effort all the more important. Hiding in our heads is easy.
Our disappearances occur when we adopt different lifestyles, immerse ourselves in other cultures, experience new things and new people. We then get to branch off into a parallel universe, an alternate timeline. That decision becomes a crossroads after which it can be hard, even impossible, to look back over your shoulder at the old world.
Is that for the best? Our perspectives can change. Our opinions can mature as we gain new knowledge. But change, compared to what? If we never emerge, if we never re-enter the society we once knew, then are we mastering two worlds? Or are we escapists, hiding out in a delusion?
Finnegan doesn’t quite have a conclusion – which makes his story all the more relatable. Real life is never as simple as a fairytale.
***
Finnegan describes a friend he makes later in life. This friend was an accomplished surfer, and Finnegan asks him if he ever panicked when surfing. The response was, “‘Sure. But all you have to do, really, is relax…’ In retrospect, he said, the times when he had thought he was drowning were not in fact such close calls.” (331)
Maybe things aren’t quite as explicitly magical as they are in fairytales. But they’re similarly less dire. We can survive much more than we think, because the blows are less lethal than they seem. And that is knowledge worth gaining. That gives us the freedom to live.
Let’s return to the beginning, where I shared that my favorite thing about Barbarian Days is:
This book demonstrates how difficult it can be for a real person, living in the real world, to understand what a hero’s journey looks like for his own life
Which leads us to our current question:
How have you been called to adventure? How did you know that the calling was real?