Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis

First published: 1956

Type of work: Mythical allegory

Time of work: Sometime after the death of Socrates (399 b.c.e.) and before the birth of Christ

Locale: Glome, an unknown kingdom in Eastern Europe or Asia Minor

Principal Characters:

• Orual, the narrator, eventually Queen of Glome
• Trom, her father, the King
• Redival, her younger sister, a fool and troublemaker
• Psyche, also known as
• Istra, Orual’s half-sister
• Lyslas, also known as
• The Fox, a Greek slave and tutor
• Bardia, captain of the King’s guards, later counselor to Orual

The Novel

The myth which Till We Have Faces retells is that of Cupid and Psyche, told most familiarly and at greatest length by Lucius Apuleius (born around A.D. 125) in his compilation of stories The Golden Ass, written probably when the author was in his thirties. According to Apuleius, there was once a king who had three daughters, all beautiful. Yet the youngest was so superlatively beautiful that men adored her as Venus. At this, the goddess became jealous, and she sent her son Cupid to inflame Psyche with love for the most despicable creature possible. Cupid, however, fell in love with her himself and carried her off from the stake where she had been left as a sacrifice, to be his bride. In the palace to which he took her, however, he came to her only in the dark, forbidding her to see him. Her sisters learned of this, and in their envy they persuaded Psyche to break the taboo of darkness, giving her a lamp to see her lover. When she lit the lamp, though, a drop of oil fell and woke the sleeping Cupid; Psyche was cast out and punished with many labors by Venus, until in the end she was forgiven and reunited with her husband.

Apuleius’ story is about characters either divine or semi-divine, for Psyche means “soul,” and the tale has often been interpreted allegorically. It also has strong elements of fairy tale, however, including, for example, motifs from “Cinderella”: the weak father, the oppressed but beautiful heroine, and most obviously, the two jealous sisters. What C. S. Lewis has done is to take the Apuleius myth and treat it as a realistic novel, but to insist on telling it not from the “Cinderella” viewpoint but from that of one of the “ugly sisters.” In Lewis’ story, also, the narrator, Orual, is ugly, not simply ordinarily beautiful as in Apuleius. Orual is so ugly that after a certain point she spends her whole life veiled and dies unmarried, never caring to expose herself. Unlike Apuleius’ sisters, however, she is not jealous, or at least not primarily and simply jealous. At all points, she loves Psyche and tries to do the best for her. The “book” which Till We Have Faces feigns to be is in fact Orual’s own first-person reply to a story such as that in The Golden Ass, which she has heard from a foolish priest and which has offended her so much that she believes that she has to set the record straight. It was not her fault that Psyche was exiled and rejected, she says: It was the gods’ fault. In part 1 of the novel, some five-sixths of it, she calls on the reader to judge her case.

The way she tells the story is this. She and Redival were the daughters of a petty king of a barbarian country, somewhere in the Greek world’s “back of beyond,” a place of no importance. To their father’s second wife, though, was born a baby of incredible beauty, whom Orual loved from the beginning, careless of the contrast with her own ugliness. The danger to them came from the second sister, Redival: disappointed and frustrated, she reported tales of the country folk adoring Psyche to the priesthood of Ungit (the Glome equivalent of Aphrodite, or Venus). In the end, the priesthood insisted on sacrificing Psyche to end drought and plague, an expedient to which Psyche’s cowardly father consented. After the sacrifice, though, when Orual crept stealthily into the wasteland to bury the body, she met Psyche, alive, happy, convinced that she was living with her husband in a palace—yet to Orual’s eyes, unsheltered, in rags, eating berries. Orual decided to try to cure Psyche’s “madness” by giving her a lamp. Yet, it seems, Psyche was not mad. The god was present after all, and lighting the lamp was a disaster, breaking the spell from which Orual had been shut out.

After that moment, the sisters never met. Orual became queen and ruled successfully for many years—but was haunted by the notion of Psyche wandering, weeping, in exile. Whose fault was this? demands Orual. Why could the gods not have let her see what Psyche saw? Why were good intentions first frustrated, then slandered with this tale of petty jealousy? In the last section of her book, the gods let her answer her own questions and also extend a kind of mercy. Yet Orual’s accusation and recantation raise further questions well beyond Apuleius. In particular, they raise the rationalist and post-Darwinian issue of theories of the divine.

The Characters

Two vital additions to Apuleius’ plot, in Lewis, are Orual’s two mentors and “father-figures,” Bardia and the Fox. The latter is introduced first. He is a Greek slave, bought by the King of Glome to tutor his daughters (and, he vainly hopes, his son). The Fox is characteristically Greek, a philosopher, a rationalist, devoid of the aggression shown by all the barbarians around him, preaching only self-mastery and the power of human potential. His blind spot is that he cannot understand anything religious at all. When the Priest of Ungit comes with the proposal to sacrifice Psyche as the Accursed (who has sinned against the gods by accepting divine honors) and as the country’s best and noblest (to avert the drought and plague), he says it is flat nonsense. How can Psyche be the worst and the best? he demands. There is no logic in it. Divine matters do not turn on logic, the Priest replies. Divine knowledge is not clear, like water, but thick, like blood. In mysteries many contradictions are reconciled. Orual, and through her the reader, is brought painfully to see that there is a kind of wisdom which the Fox, good man that he is, totally lacks.

Some of this is lent to Orual by her other counselor, Bardia, captain of the guards, who is soldierly, barbarous, practical, and superstitious where the Fox is philosophical, Greek, logical, and powerless. Whereas the Fox thinks that Psyche has been taken from her stake by a bandit, Bardia thinks that she has fallen prey to “the Shadowbrute.” Both men think that the taboo on light hides horror, but of entirely different kinds. Both are wrong, for Cupid was neither material villain nor holy beast, but their agreement in error persuades Orual to make Psyche shine the light. It must be said, though, that Bardia is nearer the truth than the Fox.

Both men are, in the end, killed by Orual’s love. She frees the Fox from slavery but then cannot bear to let him return to Greece: He dies in the “barbarian” land of Glome. Bardia, too, is worked so hard by his queen and mistress that he dies before his time, his widow accusing Orual of selfishness and spite. In the last section of the book, Orual comes to realize how possessive she has in fact been, how she has tried to monopolize her male father-or husband-surrogates, how even Redival was excluded from her attention, and how much her feelings about Psyche turned on possessiveness. It is for these reasons that she retracts her accusation against the gods. Yet the last words of the book, written after Orual is dead, praise her as the best queen ever known, the wisest and most merciful, and the reader tends to agree with them. If Orual’s good intentions cannot escape blame, whose can? Her own judgments on her character, and on those other people, remain at odds.

Critical Context

Lewis’ novel is much clarified by his autobiography, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955), which recounts a progress to God very similar to that of Orual, and whose title became doubly appropriate, with the kind of irony Lewis did not think accidental, after Lewis’ late marriage to Joy Davidman, to whom Till We Have Faces is dedicated.

Other than that, one has to say that Lewis’ novel has few or no close parallels. Novels which turn Greek myth into historical fiction are common, but none of them leans as far as that of Lewis toward allegory or have so clearly religious a theme. “Progresses of the soul” also used to be common, but none comes close to realistic fiction. Few books sport with the theory and practice of myth as powerfully as Lewis’ does. The narrative achievement of Till We Have Faces is in fact to combine a multiplicity of genres, including novel, myth, and anthropological argument. Its spiritual achievement is to insist on a divine experience forever unknowable by mortal people and yet continually approached in fear, dream, insight, or hallucination. The book exudes charity and conviction. Though entirely pagan in setting, it remains a powerful religious, even Christian, apologetic.

Bibliography

Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends, 1978.

Hannay, Margaret Patterson. C. S. Lewis, 1981.

Hillegas, Mark R., ed. Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, 1969.

Smith, Robert Harston. Patches of Godlight: The Pattern of Thought of C. S. Lewis, 1981.

Walsh, Chad. The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis, 1979.