The Hero’s Journey and the River Marah

La Mujer: [after taking a drink from a river] It’s bitter.

El Topo: Moses found water in the desert. The people tried to drink it but were unable to because it was bitter. They named the water Marah.

La Mujer: [after taking another drink from the river] It has turned sweet!

El Topo: I shall call you Marah, because you are bitter like water

–El Topo, dir. Alejando Jodorowsky

It is hard to foresee any universe where Alejandro Jodorowsky and C.S. Lewis would be friends, or for that matter if Lewis would see the value in having his work compared to either a video game or a Chilean midnight acid flick like El Topo. But both men seem to believe in the idea of following a path, a path that is not made to be easy but vexing, difficult, and most of all uncomfortable—and so does Jenova Chen’s video game Journey.

We will set to prove that across the mediums of film, print, and videogames, beyond the tenements of Christianity and Pagan Mysticism—the idea of a journey that does not bend to you but you to it, is universal—and unlike the typical view of the hero’s journey, the threats here are not external so much as they are internal.

Though ostensibly a Christian, C.S. Lewis is in many ways an outlier in his faith. Similar to how Jodorowsky transforms the action-oriented west into a biblical allegory, and how Chen takes the normally light-hearted genre of adventure and morphs it into a brooding post-apocalyptic fairy tale, Lewis takes one look at the concept of Heaven as an easy-going place and turns it on its head.

His book The Great Divorce is a theological dream vision that follows a fictionalized version of himself, as he wanders a ghostly town stuck in purgatory and eventually makes his way into the foothills of a strange afterlife. Like the heroes of a SNES RPG, Lewis and his company make their way into this heaven expecting ease and comfort… and instead are met with horror.

“The men were as they had always been; as all the men I had known perhaps, it was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison. Moved by a sudden thought, I bent down and tried to pluck a daisy which was growing at my feet. The stalk wouldn’t break. I tried to twist it, but it wouldn’t twist. I tugged till the sweat stood out on my forehead and I had lost most of the skin off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like diamond” (Lewis 21)

It is as if the ground itself is unwilling to bend to the newcomers, it is only through accepting the pain and the change that the residents of the ghost town can even begin to entertain the thought of entering into Heaven for more than a jaunt. As the party journeys on, members start to become weeded out and eventually the ghosts make the acquaintance of some of Heaven’s permanent residents, who offer the visitors a tough choice — “Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?” (Lewis 39)

At first is the key phrase here. The solid people are not asking Lewis and company to suffer forever but to forget themselves for a moment in exchange for a better life. Essentially the spirit is asking for the people to drink from the river Marah until it begins to taste sweet. So why does Lewis bring us to the foothills of Heaven? It is because he has an enemy to expose—the idea of a Hero’s Journey being an external one rather than a deeply internal one. Ascending the mountain isn’t an end to itself, only a means to an end—to transform us into something more closely resembling the mountain. As Lewis once said in Book IV of Mere Christianity;

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house… He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to?… You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” (Lewis 110)

But what has any of that got to do with Jenova Chen’s fun and touching little yarn: Journey? The journey that Lewis talks about is the same that appears in Chen’s video game. You have to imagine the Hero’s Journey as the river Marah, a vast flowing thing whose tendrils appear in art of all sorts from the slight to the bizarre to the wonderfully sad.

Like the protagonist in the Great Divorce, Journey’s hero is about an ethereal being making its way up a mountain to escape an existence grounded in the mundane. But what lies at the summit? MDA show us the way.

Mechanics: You move your little fabric person with the left stick, move the camera with the right, press x to jump, and circle to chime attracting cloth fragments to yourself—this is also your only way to communicate with other players. Your goal is to solve puzzles, collect fragments which increase your power (or solidity as Lewis might see it) find other players and ascend to the peak.

Dynamics: I began my journey alone, in a wilderness not too dissimilar from the scorched wastelands of the Mad Max films. As I made my way to my vague and strange goal I like Lewis would sometimes encounter a being on my travels but never for too long—mine was for the most part a mission I had to take alone.

Aesthetics: All in all, my own journey was a pleasant one, in an era where most games give your humble narrator terrible motion sickness, this luckily did not. I was however left with a different sickness… one of longing for a place I could do remember except that it feels real to me and as painful as the grass in the foothills of Heaven.

As anyone who has played the game knows, your ending is not of the Disney variety. All your effort and toil is greeted with a white screen as the game resets. You are back at square one. Older, wiser, and perhaps a bit more bitter.

Like the fabric people awaking at the foot of the mountain, Lewis awaking from his dream vision, or Jodorowsky finding himself still stranded in the desert, we are back at the start of things—a little enlightened but still heavy with questions. That speaks to what these stories try to communicate to us, that the Hero’s Journey is less about happiness than it is about satisfaction—less about turning the river water sweet than it is about learning to love bitterness.