Till We Have Faces

This article is about the C. S. Lewis novel. For other uses, see Till We Have Faces (disambiguation).

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold
1st edition cover
Author(s)	C. S. Lewis
Cover artist	Liz Demeter
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Mythological novel
Publisher	Geoffrey Bles
Publication date	1956
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold is a 1956 novel by C. S. Lewis. It is a retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, which had haunted Lewis all his life, and which is itself based on a chapter of The Golden Ass of Apuleius.

The first part of the book is written from the perspective of Psyche's older sister Orual, [Pronounced Or'w'ahl] as an accusation against the gods. The book is set in the fictional kingdom of Glome.

The people of the primitive city of Glome have occasional contact with civilized Hellenistic Greece.

This was his last novel; and, he considered it his most mature, written in conjunction with his wife, Joy Davidman.

Plot summary

Part One:

The story tells the Ancient Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, from the perspective of Orual, Psyche's older sister.

It begins as the complaint of an old woman who is bitter at the injustice of the gods. Although, disfigured herself, covering her facial deformity with a mask, throughout the book, Orual loves her beautiful half-sister Psyche; and, when Psyche is sent as a human sacrifice, at the command of Ungit, Aphrodite, to her son, the unseen "God of the Mountain", Cupid, she feels wounded and betrayed.

Orual tries to rescue her sister; who says she doesn't need rescued; insisting that she lives in a beautiful castle, which her sister can't see. She almost sees, something; but, then it vanishes, like a mist.

She urges Psyche to do the one thing the God has commanded her not to, to sneak a peak, when he comes to their marriage bed. Orual argues the God must be a monster, or he would not hide his face. She brings her the means, and threatens, and cajoles, and coerces; until, Psyche agrees reluctantly, out of pity and love, for her sister.

When Psyche obeys Orual, the God has no choice, but to banish her. Orual suffers with the knowledge, that she destroyed her sister's happiness and marriage, through misapplied love and jealousy. The Four Loves have all gone horribly wrong.

Eventually, Orual becomes Queen, warrior, diplomat, architect, reformer, politician, legislator, judge; all alone. She drives herself, through work, to forget her grief, as well as the love she's lost, and doesn't have in her life.

Her sister is gone; her other sister, married and moved away; her Father, and beloved Tutor, "The Fox", passed on; even her old infatuations are castrated, bloated, ridiculous; and, the gods, remain as ever silent, and unseen.

When she's invited to witness a new cult ritual, as Queen, Orual hears a version of Psyche's myth, which shows her as deliberately ruining her sister's life, out of envy. In response, she writes out her own story, which becomes this book, to get the record straight, in hopes that it will be brought to Greece, where she has heard that men are willing to question even the gods.

Part Two:

Orual begins the second part of the book stating that her previous argument was wrong, but she doesn't have time to revise it, before she dies. After finishing her book, she thought the gods would end her lonely, exhausted life.

Instead, she writes, that through dreams and visions, she sees herself in the midst of the tasks given to her sister Psyche, in the myths, as a penitence.

Orual dreams of even presenting her complaint to the gods, herself. Among them, her sister, Psyche comes to meet her. Orual weeps, "Long did I hate you. Long did I fear you. I might—". Finally, Psyche helps her sister to see, what was hidden, from her; though she caught glimpses of it along the way, on the long, hard road, to meet her, again.

Conception

The idea of retelling the myth of Cupid and Psyche, with the palace invisible, had been in C. S. Lewis's mind ever since he was an undergraduate, and the retelling, as he imagined it, involved writing through the mouth of the elder sister. He argued that this made the sister not simply envious and spiteful; but, ignorant, as any mortal, of the divine, might be; and, jealous, in their love, as anyone, could be.

He tried it in different verse-forms, when he considered himself primarily a poet, so that one could say that he'd been "at work on Orual for 35 years," even though the version told in the book "was very quickly written." In his pre-Christian days, Lewis would imagine the story with Orual "in the right and the gods in the wrong."

Origin and evolution of the title

Lewis originally titled his working manuscripts "Bareface," with the interplay of the multiple meanings of Orual's facial deformity, which she hides with a mask; as well as Psyche's mortal beauty; and the invisible gods: Psyche, Cupid, and Aphrodite, who are supposedly the most beautiful of all, in mythology. There is also the "barefaced lie", of the gods; and, the "plain truth", of her argument, as Orual sees it, in the beginning.

The word "face" also refers to the original myth, in which Psyche was not allowed to see Cupid's face, so her intimate encounters with him would be veiled in the bare nakedness of darkness. The working title "Bareface" also suggests the anonymity of the dark; and, of "Everyman", looking to see the face of god.

The editor Gibb, rejected the title "Bareface" on the ground that readers would mistake it for a Western.

In response, Lewis said he failed to see why people would be deterred from buying the book, if they thought it was a Western, and that the working title was cryptic enough to be intriguing.

Nevertheless, Lewis started considering an alternative title on February 29, 1956, and chose "Till We Have Faces", which refers to a line, from the book, where Orual says, "How can [the gods] meet us face to face till we have faces?"

He defended his choice, in a letter to his long time corespondent, Dorothea Conybeare, explaining the idea that a human "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."

In popular culture

Steve Hackett named his 1984 album after the book. Hackett was influenced by Lewis's work, also having a song about "Narnia" on his 1978 album Please Don't Touch.^{[citation needed]}

The band Over the Rhine named their first album, released in 1991, Till We Have Faces, after the C. S. Lewis book.^{[citation needed]}

The band Noise Ratchet released their debut full-length, Till We Have Faces, in 2002 with the name of the album and a song therein named after the C. S. Lewis novel.

The band The Subtle Way has an EP and title track called "Until We Have Faces" named after the C. S. Lewis novel.

The Christian band Red named their third album, released in 2011, Until We Have Faces, after the C. S. Lewis book.

Notes

• 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).
• 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.

External links

• Review and Quotation: Till We Have Faces
• Article: Till We Have Faces
• Peter J. Schakel's Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces Online

See also

• Beauty and the Beast