Till We Have Faces

Till We Have Faces, novel by C.S. Lewis, published in 1956, that retells the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche. It was Lewis’s last fictional work. Reviews and sales were disappointing, probably because it was different from and more complex than the works that made him famous. But in a letter Lewis called it “far and away my best book.” He liked it best in part because, after several earlier attempts to retell the myth, he had at last succeeded by depicting the ancient setting of the story in realistic detail, by giving the characters psychological depth and consistency, and by telling the story from the perspective of one of Psyche’s sisters, Orual, who is the novel’s unreliable narrator.

Part 1 of Till We Have Faces, which consists of 21 chapters, is written by Orual as a defense of her life. She voices her anger at the gods for taking her beloved Psyche from her and claims that her use of psychological manipulation to force Psyche to look at her sleeping husband, in disobedience to his direct command, was justified because she did it for Psyche’s own good. Much of Part 1 is an account of Orual’s many decades as a wise and good ruler over her people, assisted by faithful friends whom she takes for granted until shortly before her death. Orual gives what she believes is an objectively true and accurate record of her life. Readers are thus challenged to realize that the characters and events are being described entirely from her perspective and that they look quite different from other perspectives.

In the much-shorter Part 2, which consists of four chapters, Orual comes to understand, partly as a result of writing Part 1, the self-deceptions that have plagued her for most of her life. She also realizes how she has taken advantage of the people who loved her deeply and supported her loyally throughout her reign. Orual had accused the goddess Ungit of devouring offerings made to her, which were the best things that Orual’s realm, Glome, had to offer. Now Orual comes to realize that she herself has devoured those closest and dearest to her through her jealousy and possessiveness. As the old Priest of Ungit puts it, “Some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing.” Orual experiences a series of visions in which she assists Psyche in carrying out tasks imposed by Ungit that should have been impossible. In doing so, Orual learns to sacrifice and to put others ahead of herself; as she learns to love unselfishly, she finds salvation and dies.

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The book is set in an era before Christianity and cannot develop Christian themes in the direct, often explicit ways found in Lewis’s Ransom trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) and the Chronicles of Narnia. But Christian themes are present more subtly in Till We Have Faces, in its emphasis on love, sacrifice, and self-sacrifice and in lines such as “I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man” and “I was being unmade…. I loved her [Psyche] as I would once have thought it impossible to love, would have died any death for her. And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted.” Till We Have Faces echoes many of the themes Lewis developed in his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955). To some extent Orual is Lewis himself—Lewis as he later looks back on the way he was in his teens and 20s, lacking self-knowledge, self-deceived, and committed to reason though filled with longings for imagination, myth, and the divine. Many contemporary critics concur with Lewis in regarding Till We Have Faces as his best work, because of the scope of its imaginative achievement and because he put so much of his own self and life into it.