II

Part I, Chapters 1-2:
Methods, Motives, Materialism

PLOT SUMMARY: The death of Orual’s mother is followed by the arrival of the Fox, a Greek slave whom the King, Orual’s father, purchased to teach the sons he expects to have and meanwhile to teach his daughters, Orual and Redival.  Preparations begin for the marriage of the King to a Princess from Caphad, which the King hopes will yield him a son.  The young queen dies in childbirth, after giving birth to a daughter, a beautiful child whom the King names Istra, or Psyche.  Orual loves her devotedly and tends to her upbringing; she becomes a close companion to Orual and the Fox.

The key function of Chapters 1 and 2 is to establish the perspectives from which the story is told and to introduce the central characters.  With that in mind, the opening paragraphs repay attentive reading and close examination:

I explained in Chapter I the extra task of understanding imposed on the reader by the first-person narration, to which the first word in the book, “I,” alerts us.  The word “now” is equally important.  The narrator is old “now,” a signal that the story operates at different levels, or different stages in time.  “Now,” in the first sentence, is contemporary with the [< p. 9] events at the end of Part I; Part I looks back over the events of a lifetime, perhaps six decades.  Part II follows Part I by a few weeks at most.  The narrator is always looking back at things after they happen, not simply reporting them as they occur, although she generally tries to tell things as they were and to avoid commenting on them.  The important thing is that the narrator understands a great deal more at the end of Part II than at the end of Part I, because she learned much in the writing itself.  And that has important implications for the reader:  One can understand Part I fully only after finishing Part II.  Till We Have Faces is, therefore, a book to be read twice, or three times, or more, for one begins then to appreciate levels of meaning and insinuations and ironies that could not be noticed on a first reading.

          From the rest of the opening paragraph, and the one following, we learn a great deal about the narrator: that she is female (“I have no husband”), lonely (“hardly a friend”), of royal standing (“the succession,” “my crown”), and well educated (as the sophisticated style and structure of the third sentence indicate).  We learn that she is unhappy, and blames her unhappiness on the gods, and that her purpose in writing Part I is to present a case against the gods demonstrating the injustice of their dealings with her: “I will accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain.  That is, I will tell all he has done to me from the very beginning, as if I were making my complaint of him before a judge” (p. 3).  Part I, therefore, will be a mixture of diary and court case (along with romance and myth), and we must remember as we read that although this is at one level an autobiography, an account of the narrator’s life, it is always told with a purpose—that of building a case against the gods.  Thus it is written, we are to suppose, in Greek in the hope that the book will sometime be carried to Greece, where wise men will read it and “know whether my complaint is right” (p. 4).  This dates the story some centuries before the birth of Christ—200-300 B.C., perhaps—and establishes a criterion—Greek thought, rational, objective—by which the narrator intends us to judge what will be said.

          The third paragraph introduces another major change [< p. 10] from the ancient myth, in addition to the use of a first-person narrator.  In Apuleius’s version the setting is vague, unspecified, and undetailed.  Lewis adds greatly to the interest and impact of the story by constructing an imaginary place and time for the story, and filling out its scene in detail.  As he put it in a letter to Clyde S. Kilby, shortly after the book was published, it is “a work of (supposed) historical imagination.  A guess of what it might have been like in a little barbarous state on the borders of the Hellenistic world of Greek culture, just beginning to affect it.”¹   Lewis draws on his imagination and his knowledge of ancient times for specific details which bring out, for example, the crudity and cruelty of that world—in the references to the girls sliding on ice formed from “the stale of beasts” in the palace yard, to the sores on the legs of a slave where the irons had been, to the pouring of human blood over the stone statue of the goddess Ungit.  James Como has described Lewis’s method as not demythologizing but remythologizing: the events and characters do not exist in another world and another dimension, but in a real and believable setting in this world.²   And that has an important effect: it takes the story out of the realm of allegory, in which people and things “stand for” abstract qualities or meanings, and places it firmly in a mode of realism, in which things simply are themselves. Thus, in the letter cited above, Lewis gently corrected Clyde Kilby on this matter:  “The children made mud pies not for symbolic purposes but because children do.  The Pillar Room is simply a room.  The Fox is such an educated Greek slave as you might find at a barbarous court—and so on.”  Lewis had a fine ability to bring a setting to life and enable his readers to enter imaginatively the feelings and experiences of people very different from themselves.  That is his initial and basic purpose here.

          The most important character, naturally, is Orual.  Since the entire book is a development of her character, only the initial elements can be laid out here.  The main impression created in the early chapters is of a person very honest and fair.  That impression starts at the end of paragraph two, as Orual hopes her case will be read and discussed by Greek [< p. 11] readers, who will access its strength: “Perhaps their wise men will know whether my complaint is right or whether the god could have defended himself if he had made an answer” (p. 4).  It is reinforced by her forthrightness about herself, especially her refusal to hide or mitigate the fact of her ugliness.  Some readers suggest that she wasn’t as ugly as she had been made to feel she was, but her ugliness, I believe, must be accepted as literally true:  first, because so many parts of the story hinge on it or point toward it, particularly as other characters, characters sympathetic to Orual, say or imply it is so; and second, because her physical appearance later becomes a symbol of her inner, spiritual condition, she must be literally ugly.  From the beginning, then, Orual seeks to be open and honest as a person, accurate and trustworthy as a reporter.

          Given those aims, the fourth paragraph is striking and significant.  “I will begin my writing with the day my mother died and they cut off my hair, as the custom is” (p. 4).  Why should she begin here?  Why not earlier, so that we might know something of the formative influence of her mother, or later, with the coming of the Fox?  One could attempt to justify this starting point as being where the story really begins, for the King’s first wife must die in order that he can take a second, who will be Psyche’s mother.  But the real reason for Orual’s choice of a starting point lies not in what is to come in the story but in her character and attitude.  The reason she remembers that episode comes out in two key sentences:  “As the shears snipped and Redival’s curls fell off, the slaves said, ‘Oh, what a pity!  All the gold gone!’  They had not said anything like that while I was being shorn” (p. 5).  Here is an early expression—perhaps even the beginning—of the rivalry between the two sisters and of Orual’s attitude toward herself.  It may mark the first time Orual is made aware of a significant difference in appearance between her and Redival—thus it is that she remembers this particular day and event.  Beginning here shows something more, although she herself may not be aware of it.  She is writing a case against the gods because, she believes, they have been unjust in taking Psyche from her and [< p. 12] not revealing themselves to her.  What we realize—though she may not—is that her lasting feelings of injustice and jealousy go as far back as this: her later attitudes grow out of a sense of unfairness that Redival should be golden and beautiful, while she is drab and ugly.

          Till We Have Faces is a story of the resolution of Orual’s charges of injustice, but it is also an account of Orual’s movement between the experience and attitudes of the other two main characters, the Fox and Psyche.  The Fox’s thought draws mainly upon the philosophy of the Stoics.  When the Fox calls the old Greek myths “only lies of poets, lies of poets, child.  Not in accordance with nature” (p. 8), or says conception of male children comes not from magic bedsteads but “by natural causes” (p. 10), or asserts that wind and weather “are all part of the same web, which is called Nature, or the Whole” (p. 85), his ideas can be traced back to Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, Greek philosophers of the third and fourth centuries before Christ.  His scoffing at death, because “at death we are resolved into our elements” (p. 17), and his idea that “all men [are] of one blood” (p. 9), have the same origin.  Diogenes Laertius, author of a third-century history of Greek philosophy, summarizes the key aspects of early Stoic thought as follows:  “The end [of life] may be defined as life in accordance with nature, . . . a life in which we refrain from every action forbidden by the law common to all things, that is to say, the right reason which pervades all things.”³  To the Stoics, the world is endowed with soul and reason, and nature is either that which holds the world together or that which causes things to come to life: “They hold that there are two principles in the Universe, the active principle [God] and the passive [matter]. . . .  God is one and the same with Reason, Fate, and Zeus. . . .  The substance of God is declared by Zeno to be the whole world and the heaven.”⁴  On this belief in nature as “the Whole” rest the basic Stoic beliefs in an “endless chain of causation” (that is, Fate or Destiny),⁵ in acceptance of natural processes like death, and in the common rational system inclusive of all human beings.⁶

          More important than identifying sources for specific re- [< p. 13] marks by the Fox, however, is to notice that Stoic philosophy is characterized by rationalism and materialism.  The Fox’s thinking, therefore, is similar to that of Lewis’s tutor, W. T. Kirkpatrick, a rationalistic naturalism grounded in the scientific writings of Darwin and Huxley.  Lewis described Kirkpatrick as “a purely logical entity . . . a ‘Rationalist’ of the old, high and dry nineteenth-century type.”⁷  He insisted on precise observation and careful inference therefrom, and dismissed entirely matters of “belief” and “opinion.”  That there is much of Kirkpatrick in the Fox has frequently been noted, and is pretty much beyond doubt.⁸  But there is also much of Kirkpatrick in Lewis.  Lewis was highly impressionable, and there is no doubt that Kirkpatrick’s system of thought and modes of argument left a deep and lasting imprint on him.  He ceased to be a rationalist even before he became a Christian, but the love of dialectic and “talking for victory” lasted long thereafter and helped shape his methods in his apologetic works.⁹  To some extent, then, the Fox is Lewis, who for much of his life was drawn toward rationalistic thinking despite his love of the imagination.

          There is much of Lewis in Psyche as well.  The non-rationalistic way in which she approached others and the gods also appealed to Lewis, and pulled against the rationalist tendencies in him.  In Psyche there is a natural, almost intuitive response to God, an inner loveliness and lovingness which is reflected in her physical beauty.  The Fox on several occasions compares her to Helen, in Greek legend the most beautiful woman in the world.  Orual says of her, “She made beauty all round her.  When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver.  When she picked up a toad—she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes—the toad became beautiful” (p. 22).  In fairy tales, when a princess kisses a frog, it turns into a beautiful prince; in this tale, Psyche’s touch will, eventually, give beauty to an ugly queen, for among the strangest and unchanciest of Psyche’s loves is her love for a brute, Orual.

          In his letter to Kilby, Lewis describes Psyche as having a “naturally Christian spirit.”  Her life, characterized by love [< p. 14] and by a series of sacrifices, has led some to call her a symbol, or a type, of Christ.¹⁰  Such a reading is suggested, for example, by the fact that she heals the sick, calls herself a “ransom for all Glome” (p. 72), and dies at “a single leafless tree” on a hilltop (p. 98).  It is supported also by such lines, referring to the sacrificing of Psyche, as “the victim must be perfect” (p. 49) and “it’s only sense that one should die for many” (p. 61).  Lewis himself, however, preferred that she not be interpreted as a symbol of Christ; the resemblances to Christ are important for a different reason, as he said in his letter to Kilby:  “She is in some ways like Christ because every good man or woman is like Christ.  What else could they be like?”¹¹  In the story Orual says Psyche was “what every woman, or even every thing, ought to have been and meant to be, but had missed by some trip of chance” (p. 22).  We are not to assume, therefore, that Psyche’s loving attitude, self-giving concern for others, responsiveness to spiritual urgings, and understanding of divine matters reflect something unique and unattainable; rather, they exemplify what all of us could be and indeed should be.

          The initial indications of character are enriched by ironies, allusions, and anticipations, literary devices Lewis introduced in these chapters and used throughout the book.  Irony enables a writer to be indirect, to convey shades of meaning, to bring out aspects of character subtly and naturally; it demands more alertness and flexibility in a reader than nonironic prose.  The ironic tone employed in much of Till We Have Faces is established in the description of Orual’s hair being cut by the slaves after her mother’s death:  “While Batta was using the shears many other of the slave women were standing round, from time to time wailing for the Queen’s death and beating their breasts; but in between they were eating nuts and joking” (p. 5).  The ironic contrast, or discrepancy, between their apparent and actual feelings prepares the way for several types of irony later in the book.  There is the irony created by the use of a first-person narrator, who often is less fully aware of the implications of what she says than the reader should be.  There is also simple verbal irony, where one thing is said but the opposite is [< p. 15] meant.  When the King arranges to marry the third daughter of the King of Caphad, he believes he has “made a great match” (p. 9); but as the now much older Orual writes these words, she means just the opposite, as she points out a few sentences later.  There is a sort of situational irony when the King says to the Fox, “It can’t often have fallen to the lot of a mere Greekling to rule the grandson of so great a king as my father-in-law that is to be. . . .  You’re all pedlers and hucksters down in the Greeklands, eh?” (p. 9)—irony in the striking discrepancy between the King’s estimate of a situation and that of the reader and the rest of the world.  And there is irony when the King, having purchased at great expense a bed “made of an eastern wood which was said to have such virtue that four of every five children begotten in such a bed would be male” (p. 10), has another daughter.  The ironies in the book, often humorous, enhance the character of Orual as an incisive, wry, but understanding person.

          Equally important in adding depth to the characterizations are allusions, such as the references to Aphrodite and Anchises (p. 8), and the lines “Virtue, sought by man with travail and toil” and “The Moon’s gone down, but / Alone I lie,” quoted from Greek lyric poems by Simonides and Sappho, respectively.¹²  An author expects a reader to recognize such explicit allusions and to draw relevant parts of their original contexts into the story: thus the comparisons of Psyche to Helen (p. 23) are disturbing because Helen was not only beautiful but also a source of discord, the cause of the famous Trojan War (which is alluded to on page 33).  But allusions are often less explicit; there may be no more than a key phrase to indicate that the author is pointing toward an external reference and invoking its associations.  One such allusion appears in the second paragraph of Till We Have Faces.  Orual writes,

The phrase “there is no judge between gods and men” closely resembles a phrase from the Old Testament book of Job:  “There is no umpire between us, who might lay his hand upon us both” (9:33 RSV).  The similarity in the wording and situation suggests strongly that, although for Orual this is simply the most effective way to state her point, for Lewis it is an allusion to Job and thus an initial signal that Till We Have Faces, like the book of Job, is a reply to a charge of alleged injustice on the part of God or the gods.  And it suggests that the answer to that charge in Till We Have Faces should be considered in relation to that in Job, either as similar to and thus reinforced by it, or as a contrast, probably a dramatic and striking contrast, to it.

          Also important to the characterizations are foreshadowings or “anticipations” of later actions or events.  Thus the use of veils as the twelve girls sing a Greek bridal hymn on the King’s wedding day prepares for the importance of veils later in the story.  Similarly, the first mention of Psyche’s love for the Grey Mountain and the stories she made up about being a queen and living in “a castle of gold and amber . . . on the very top” (p. 23) should lead one to expect something of the sort to occur to Psyche, literally or symbolically, in the future.  In Chapter 1 a more subtle foreshadowing occurs when the Fox tells Orual a tale of how Venus (Aphrodite) fell in love with Prince Anchises, who was to be the father of Aeneas, the mythical founder of Rome:

This anticipates the story, later in the book, of Psyche’s marriage to the God of the Mountain: the sexes are reversed, but the same theme of a divine-mortal union, the same emphasis on not looking at a god, are there.  Lewis has placed [< p. 17] it here partly as a preparation: the strange story to come will seem slightly less strange because it was preceded by this one.  But it is here also as an initial undermining of the Fox.  The Fox, upon finishing the story, hastens to add, “Not that this ever really happened. . . .  It’s only lies of poets, lies of poets, child” (p. 8).  The Fox, as a Stoic and rationalist, will admit into his world only that which is open to scientific explanation.  We are introduced here to the first of many mysterious but meaningful occurrences which lie outside the domain of the Fox’s understanding.  As the motif of human-divine union recurs, we should recall this episode and the Fox’s inadequate response to it. [< p. 18]