"Star Wars" Origin Theory

One of my favorite comedians, a master of dry British one-liners Jimmy Carr, recently was on another one of my favorite comedians' (Trevor Noah) podcasts where they talked about the greatest works of fiction.

"Do you want my hot take on Star Wars?" Jimmy Carr asked.

"Sure," Trevor responded.

And Jimmy went into a somewhat lengthy explanation that he believes the greatest work of the 20th century literature was Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Not only because it is experimental and looped (the first sentence is also the last sentence of the novel, and Joyce plays with the reader's sense of time and patience for 100-letter-long words called thunderclaps) but also because it's very dense on purpose, as Joyce wanted to pay the tribute to One Thousand and One Nights (better known as as Arabian Nights) in it. To most readers, Finnegans Wake is too complex and impenetrable.

"I like reading around it, but I never got through it," Jimmy Carr confessed.

"It's beyond YOU?" Trevor asked, shocked, because Jimmy is a Cambridge educated, exceptionally well-read man who is considered to be one of the most intellectual comedians of our time.

"It's way beyond me, it's on a different level," Jimmy admitted. And then he said that the book was so complicated and dense that it was largely beyond appreciation by most readers. Until Joseph Campbell, a brilliant doctoral student of myths in literature came along, parsed and plowed through the Finnegans Wake for his doctoral dissertation and in 1949 published a more popular, non-academic, version of it titled "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," (a 'thousand' is probably a kept reference to 1001 Nights).

Campbell's book popularized the framework of a hero's journey (which Campbell in 2014 published as his autobiography), which became the foundational arch for George Lucas' Star Wars.

"So, Star Wars is a too-long, didn't read Finnegans Wake," Jimmy concluded with his trademark one-line zinger.

There are so many things in Jimmy's theory that I loved! First of all, I also attempted to read Finnegans Wake and dropped it on the first page. Thinking it might be because English is not my first language, I tried the Russian translation. And then I tried the audio book in English. Neither one helped. The fact that even Jimmy Carr couldn't get through it makes make me feel a little better, that I am not an idiot who can't read Joyce.

Second, the allusion to the One Thousand and One Nights, one of my favorite works of literature of all time that I grew up on, elevates Joyce to the status of a literary god in my eyes. I will definitely read Campbell's book, it's in the mail on the way to me.

And third, the idea that Lucas was inspired by Hero's Journey (which he I believe admitted to in a couple of interviews himself) is so foundational and inspiring for me! Once again, it is confirming that all humanity's myths and legends have one common arch, and we as writers just re-arrange its pieces in creative ways and give them the new ornamentation.