Till We Have Faces

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (September 2007)

This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling. You can assist by editing it now. A how-to guide is available. (January 2007)

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold is a 1956 parallel novel by C. S. Lewis. It is a retelling of the Greek myth of Eros/Cupid and Psyche, based on a chapter of The Golden Ass of Apuleius. The first part is written from the perspective of Psyche's older sister Orual, and is constructed as a long-withheld accusation against the gods. Although the book is set in the fictional kingdom of Glome, Greece is often invoked to give the story a setting in time, as well as to allow for an interplay between the Hellenistic, rationalistic world-view and the powerful, 'irrational', 'primitive' one.

[edit] Plot summary

The story is a powerful re-telling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, from the point of view of Orual, Psyche's jealous, ugly sister (as she is seen in the usual telling). The first book begins as the complaint of an old woman, bitter at the pain and injustice of the gods. Although Orual is indeed unattractive, she loves the beautiful Psyche obsessively, and when Psyche is sacrificed to the primitive god symbolizing the Greek Cupid, she feels as if the gods had stolen her sister from her. In an attempt to rescue her sister, she fails to recognize the beautiful castle in which her sister lived, except for a brief moment, and brushes off what she saw by claiming she could have been mistaken. She proceeded to urge her sister to look at her husband for fear that her sister had married a monster, although Cupid had specifically forbidden Psyche to do so. After suffering for years with the consequences of her actions (during which she had become a just and victorious queen — though one clinging and ravenous for affection), she heard a recounting of the tale which depicted her as having deliberately ruined her sister's life out of envy. In justice, she is recounting her tale in hopes that it will be brought to Greece, where she has heard that men are willing to question even the gods.

Orual begins the second part of the book by declaring that her previous argument was false, that she has no time to revise it properly, but must amend the book before she dies. After at first finishing her book, she considered it time to end her miserable life. However, various mysterious events and occurrences happened to her, including dreams paralleling the tasks given to Psyche in the myth. In the end, she has a dream where she is entitled to present her complaint to the gods. Re-reading her work, she realizes that her love for Psyche was compounded of possessiveness, and that her actual motivation for urging Psyche to look at her husband was jealousy — not of Psyche, but of Cupid (referred to in the story only as 'the god of the mountain'), who had, in her eyes, stolen Psyche's love. This realization allows her to meet and reconcile with Psyche.

The text ends in the middle of a sentence: "Long did I hate you. Long did I fear you. I might—", and is followed by a note from another character (Arnom, priest of Aphrodite), who describes that she had been found dead at her writing table, presumably mid-sentence as evidenced by the way the word "might" looked on the page on which her head fell as she expired.

[edit] The retelling's conception

[edit] Origin and evolution of the titles

Lewis originally titled his working manuscripts "Bareface," most likely in an effort to bluntly suggest Orual's physical ugliness (a haunting and ironic contrast to other beautiful characters, arguably the most beautiful archetypes in all of mythology: Psyche, Cupid, and Aphrodite). The metaphorical and literal utility of faces can be further elucidated from the original myth. Psyche was not allowed to see Cupid's face, relegating these intimate encounters with this strange being to be veiled in the bare nakedness of darkness. Furthermore, the plot, hatched by Orual and executed by Psyche, is an allegory for humanity's calculating and ambitious tendencies to supersede rule or law—to circumvent, mute, or escape punishment. This is a hard-earned concept that Psyche, and later, Orual, arrive at, effectively "earning" or "growing" their once bare, identityless faces, which fittingly qualifies them to meet the gods face to face in their own respective time frames. Still, the metaphorical device of "faces" allows the novel's arguably underlying theme of redemption to reach fruition (e.g., Psyche's rescue from the human sacrifice by Cupid; Aphrodite's allowances with the negotiating Cupid; the forgiveness of Cupid for Psyche's betrayal; forgiveness for Orual's contempt for her sister, her father, the Fox, the gods; and finally, a glorious rescue from her own self-hate). Notably, Orual has been compared to the "Beast" in the Beauty and the Beast adaptation, among other variations of the Psyche and Cupid myth. (Prima facie, she is one of Beauty's jealous sisters—characters missing in the Disney adaptation). In fact, the novel's same conclusion of redemption and transcendence from animal-like conditions remains in Beauty and the Beast, albeit with focus on different characters. It is ironic that Orual feared Cupid to be a beast or devil. Above all, Bareface metaphorically suggested the emptiness of identity, an ironic and even paradoxical concept.

I don’t see why people… would be deterred from buying it if they did think it a Western. …Actually, I think the title cryptic enough to be intriguing.

And then, on February 29, 1956, Lewis considered an alternative title, most likely in an effort to disambiguate Bareface from confusion the Western genre.

One other possible title has occurred to me: Till We Have Faces. My heroine says in one passage, ‘How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?’

Later, Lewis defended his choice, and in a just a few sentences essentially described the novel's import to the human condition:

How can they (i.e. the gods) meet us face to face till we have faces? The idea was that a human being must become real before it can expect to receive any message from the superhuman; that is, it must be speaking with its own voice (not one of its borrowed voices), expressing its actual desires (not what it imagines that it desires), being for good or ill itself, not any mask, veil, or persona.

Presumably, Lewis didn't give the book its final title until after the manuscript was completed and the “Bareface” controversy had done its damage, the original title being inevitably discarded.

[edit] References

• Till We Have Faces is in print, ISBN 0-15-690436-5
• Myers, Doris T. (2002). Browsing the Glome Library. SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review 19 (2). This discusses many classical references that Lewis used in the book, now obscure to many readers.
• The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim (1977), ISBN 0-394-49771-6 (The connection between "Cupid and Psyche" and "Beauty and the Beast" is found on pp 291–95 and 303–10).

[edit] Bibliography

• Donaldson, Mara E. Holy Places are Dark Places: C. S. Lewis and Paul Ricoeur on Narrative Transformation. Boston: U of America P, 1988 (currently out of print).
• Myers, Doris T. Bareface: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s Last Novel. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2004.
• Schakel, Peter. Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984.

[edit] External links

• Review and Quotation: Till We Have Faces
• Article: Till We Have Faces

[edit] See also

• Beauty and the Beast