Unveiled, barefaced

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Fantasy of an Ancient Bath (1755/1760)

Till We Have Faces
by C S Lewis.
The C S Lewis Signature Classics:
HarperOne, 2017 (1956).

Glome. A polity somewhere in the Levant (as we may suppose), far from the sea, sometime in the centuries immediately before the Common Era. A name connected to ‘globe’, its meaning a mass, a clump, or – like the Latin glomus – a ball of string. A place where we can follow the thread of story to its end. Or so we may infer from this novel by a literary scholar, lay theologian and children’s author.

Glome is also the setting of a story to parallel the tale of Cupid and Psyche, the legend recounted in The Golden Ass by Apuleius back in the second century CE. A narrative now to focus not on Psyche herself but on one of her two sisters. A novel in which Lewis concentrates more on the human than the fairytale aspect of the Roman fable to explore contradictions like love and hate, courage and fear, belief and ignorance, free will and fate.

For behind this first person account by the sister called Orual are deep considerations which Lewis wishes to confront. Inspired by religious views of the afterlife – as in 1 Corinthians 13: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” – Lewis has his protagonist tell us, “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

J W Waterhouse: ‘Psyche Entering Cupid’s Garden’ (1903)

In the obscure little barbarian kingdom of Glome a widowed king has three daughters, the eldest by her own account not a looker, the middle one vapid and at times a trouble-maker, and the youngest the epitome of every princess in every fairytale you can remember. But the youngest has angered the goddess Ungit and she has to be offered as a sacrificial victim. Instead she is rescued on condition that she never seeks to see the face of her rescuer; however on her elder sister’s impassioned promptings she disobeys this rule, with terrible consequences, leaving the older sister trying to expiate guilt by committing the story to manuscript.

This focus on the older sister (whom he calls Orual) allows Lewis to create a distinctive character – distinctive in looks (her bullying father calls her a ‘goblin’), in physical ability (she shows an unexpected propensity for swordplay), and in intellect (she develops consummate skills in statecraft). She is also fierce in all things, a quality which will allow her to achieve much but could also result in her undoing.

Lewis’s long obsession with the legend of Cupid and Psyche arose from his belief that there were inconsistencies in the classic story where human motivations were concerned. But mixed in were his own feelings about having long resisted a return to religious faith after a period of agnosticism, feelings he has Orual partly express at a moment of personal crisis as a kind of apologia or justification for blaming the gods for all that has happened:

That moment I resolved to write this book. For years now my old quarrel with the gods had slept. […] Often, though I had seen a god myself, I was near to believing there are no such things. […] Well, I could speak. I could set down the truth. What had never perhaps been done in the world before should be done now. The case against them should be written.

XXI

Till We Have Faces is a profound and intense read, hard if not impossible to do full justice to in a short review. Lewis has a strong cast of characters for his drama, from Orual’s family members to her well delineated confidants the Greek tutor Fox, the soldier Bardia, and the temple priest Armon. He evokes the otherwise anonymous archaic period vividly, and the narrative is varied in terms of action, pace and dilemmas to be confronted. But those who like me are most familiar with his children’s fiction or his so-called Space Trilogy may find a depth and a subtlety that I personally found missing or buried beneath the allegory in those earlier stories.

The clue to this sea change, I think, comes from this novel’s dedicatee: Joy Davidman. She married Lewis, seemingly a confirmed bachelor, in the same year the novel was published, and was known to type up his handwritten drafts; as a poet and author in her own right she must surely have had more than just a hand in suggesting improvements. The psychological make-up of Orual in particular can justifiably owe much to Joy’s direct influence, as illustrated in asides such as this reaction to Bardia’s enthusiastic outburst:

‘Oh, Lady, Lady, it’s a thousand pities they didn’t make you a man.’ (He spoke it as kindly and heartily as could be; as if a man dashed a gallon of cold water in your broth and never doubted you’d like it all the better.)

XVII

For me a lot of the heavy moralistic tone I’ve resented in some of Lewis’s previous fiction is largely missing in this final novel, a tone which when combined with the rounded psychological portrait we get of Orual herself suggests a substantial input from Joy. Considering that Orual spends the greater part of the narrative behind the veil she has voluntarily adopted, I wonder if the theme of no longer seeing “through a glass darkly” is part-metaphor of Joy’s greater involvement in Till We Have Faces being tacitly acknowledged?

Joy Davidman, 1915–1960

Bearing in mind too that Lewis is drawing on the Cupid/Eros and Psyche tale, and that the couple’s names respectively mean ‘desire’ and ‘soul’, there is a final theme I want to touch on. As a vocal critic tells Orual, “They say the loving and the devouring are all one, don’t they?” Loving and devouring: Orual comes to see that she might be like the goddess Ungit, “that all-devouring womb-like, yet barren, thing. Glome was a web – I the swollen spider, squat at its centre, gorged with men’s swollen lives.”

Is she correct in her summation? Will she meet her soul sister Psyche ever again? Will she finally feel able to go unveiled? Only a close reading of Lewis and Davidman’s narrative may bring answers to such questions.

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https://746books.com/2023/02/08/reading-ireland-month-is-coming-2/

C S Lewis was born in Belfast, NI; this novel was read for Cathy @746books’s Reading Ireland Month