From the beginning I knew I wanted to look at journeys from a more complex angle than simply travelling from A to B, however it wasn't until I began my research that I realised that angle was going to be literary. Find the full brainstorm here.
I approached the topic the only way I knew how - what stories do we tell about journeys? - and the all encompassing structural and thematic answer to that was the Hero's Journey, devised by Joseph Campbell. The research here was practical - there is a set plot system that the Hero's Journey proposes that takes a character on a cyclical journey of character growth. In many cases this coincides with a physical journey too.
This idea of a cyclical journey was very interesting to me, with the protagonist coming back to where they began having changed to create a stark and obvious contrast between their past and present self. This prompted me to remember Dan Harmon's Plot Embryo, very similar to the Hero's Journey but with a key focus on the returning of a changed character. This helped me focus in on an interest - a physical journey representing an emotional one.
I started looking at this idea specifically, finding quite a lot of reading to do on the subject. A physical journey as a metaphor for character growth is something classic and timeless that appears in a lot of stories, like The Aeneid, Jane Eyre, and more recently, Eat Pray Love. There are a lot of scholarly materials on this subject, too - although of course I'm not the first to look at this theme.
I did some very brief research into artists who've explored this theme, although a difficulty arose in being able to accurately interpret metaphors in art as it's such a subjective medium. Perhaps I'm not well-versed enough in fine art, but I struggle to see an entire story arc including complex character development in a single painting.
I did discover, however, a series of paintings by Thomas Cole in 1842 that indisputably portray the stages of life as a physical journey.
I also rediscovered Andy Goldsworthy, who produces a lot of images that depict the winding, meandering path that journeys tend to entail. (There's most definitely a contradiction here between my previous statement of not being able to discern a novel's worth of meaning from some art and the obvious emotional response I had to this collection.)
And last but not least, I was reminded of a children's book I read in which the main two characters undergo a great journey only to discover a friendship that was present the whole time. I selected some images from the book Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers as an example of how simple illustration can carry the subtext of a children's story about journeys.
