XIII

 

THAT a major change in Lewis’s life occurred during the years 1929-1931 is readily granted. But I want to suggest that another turning point of major significance occurred in the 1940s. It is a change evidenced by a lessening of the strong reliance on reason which had come to mark his thinking in the mid-forties, and a much greater use of and confidence in the imagination than before. It is a change which enabled Lewis to write about himself, and, as a result, to write about others, in his fiction, in a new and more effective way.

            The change can be attributed to a number of causes, any one of which would have been insufficient by itself to bring it about. One can be assigned to a particular time and place. As the last chapter shows, Lewis’s apologetics had placed increasing confidence in the ability of reason to establish the existence of God, a confidence shown most strongly in the highly rationalistic methods of the early chapters of Miracles. Eight months after the publication of Miracles, its methods were challenged in a public debate by G. E. M. Anscombe, then already a well-known and impressive philosopher—and a Catholic. At a meeting of the Socratic Club in Oxford on 2 February 1948, Miss Anscombe attacked the methods of the crucial third chapter of the book. In the mode of analytic philosophy, she focused on what she called Lewis’s imprecision or confusion in his use of the key terms in his argument: “I am going to argue that your whole thesis is only specious because of the ambiguity [< p. 148] of the words ‘why,’ ‘because,’ and ‘explanation.’” She proceeded to analyze his arguments for the validity of reason and the incongruity of a naturalist asserting the validity of reason on naturalistic grounds, and concluded, “I do not think that there is sufficiently good reason for maintaining the ‘naturalist’ hypothesis about human behaviour and thought. But someone who does maintain it, cannot be refuted as you try to refute him, by saying that it is inconsistent to maintain it and to believe that human reasoning is valid.”¹

            The adequacy and effectiveness of Miss Anscombe’s attack are still being discussed.² But the issue of whether Miss Anscombe “won” the debate seems less important than the effect the encounter had on Lewis. According to his friends, Lewis felt depressed and defeated: Derek Brewer reports that Lewis’s talk, at lunch in a pub a few days after the meeting, “was all of the fog of war, the retreat of infantry thrown back under heavy attack.”³ Particularly striking, apparently, was the fact that the attack came not from an atheist but from a fellow-Christian, who therefore did not oppose Lewis’s conclusion but questioned his method of arriving at it. The effect of the experience apparently was to alert Lewis to something his friends, according to Humphrey Carpenter, had warned him of much earlier: “Charles Williams, listening to his wartime broadcasts, had expressed serious reservations about his tendency to make Reason the primary basis for belief in God, while Tolkien was aware of Lewis’s too close reliance on supposedly infallible dialectics.”⁴ Clearly the encounter with Miss Anscombe did not shatter his belief in reason: he in no way repudiated the apologetic works and, later, revised the third chapter of Miracles to avoid the difficulties Miss Anscombe had pointed out. Equally clearly, however, there is a movement away from apologetics after the forties which, combined with his broadened approach to myth, suggests that Lewis has reassessed his earlier heavy reliance upon reason.

A second cause was the effort to put into practice the expanded conception of myth Lewis arrived at in the mid-1940s. This effort is partially attributable also to the [< p. 149] influence of Tolkien: the cumulative effect of two decades of listening to and reading Tolkien’s stories and poems must account at least to some extent for Lewis’s deepened interest in and expanded vision of what myth can undertake and achieve. It is also partially attributable to Lewis’s continuing concern about the effect of abstraction. In “Myth Became Fact” he described abstract knowledge as useful, but less vital than myth. A year or so later, in 1945, he went further, to warn of a danger in the development of abstract formulas in apologetics. An apologist who is focusing on arguments for the existence of God cannot at the same time be tasting the reality of God:

 

I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the Reality—from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself.⁵

 

If there is a danger for the writer of apologetics, it would seem there could be a related danger for readers of apologetics. A person who overindulged in apologetic works, in preparing an arsenal of defenses for the faith, could do so at the cost of a living experience with Christ himself. Such thinking, I believe, reinforced by the Anscombe dispute, led Lewis to ask himself if perhaps he should move on to another mode of writing about Christianity. His turning to myth is not a rejection of his earlier mode, but an effort to go beyond it and to offer a reader not “knowledge” of God but a “taste” of Divine Reality. That effort was at least partially successful in the Chronicles of Narnia⁶ and entirely so in Till We Have Faces.

            A third cause of the change, perhaps the most important, is an acknowledgment that an element of subjectivity is inherent in perception, and that a degree of self-consciousness is necessary to sound understanding. His movement [< p. 150] away from an almost mechanical approach to the objective, and from his lack of interest in the self, is surely a result of his friendship with Barfield and years of talking about “consciousness,” the central element of Barfield’s thought. Recent studies also discuss the influence of Lewis’s growing relationship with Joy Davidman, whom he married in 1956. Her effect is suggested in a poem he wrote apparently to her:

 

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.

I see the chasm. And everything you are was making

            My heart into a bridge by which I might get back

            From exile, and grow man.⁷

 

The lines suggest that the chasm, the sense of exile, the way in which he was less than fully man, was a lack of balance between heart and head. They show an ability at this point, helped along by his relationship with Joy Davidman, to give attention to himself and to write about himself. Consciousness of self, and of self as a necessary aspect of perceiving, thinking, and imagining, is a factor that shaped Lewis’s works in the last decade of his life, particularly Surprised by Joy, which was crucial in preparing the way for Till We Have Faces and the subsequent books.

            When Lewis previously had told the story of his conversion, in The Pilgrim’s Regress, he could do so only at a distance, through allegory and an everyman character named “John.” The pilgrimage John undertakes is clearly Lewis’s own journey toward Christianity, but Lewis wished to maintain a sense of separation from his material, perhaps to increase the sense of objectivity about what he says. In the 1950s, in Surprised by Joy, he tells essentially the same story, but close-up, in the first person—although he fears the account will be “suffocatingly subjective.”⁸ That Lewis now can give attention to himself and not only use but take rhetorical advantage of a subjective approach is the key element in the success of this and many of his later books.

 In Surprised by Joy Lewis is looking back on events and feelings of twenty to fifty years earlier; this will inevitably involve reconstruction of events and choices of detail dictated by what seems important to his purposes in the fifties and to the kind of book he is writing. Lewis himself [< p. 151] calls attention to the retrospective nature of the account. He writes, for example, “My real life—or what memory reports as my real life—was increasingly one of solitude” (p. 18; Ch. 1). Not just that thought, however, but the entire account is the report of memories—inevitably incomplete and unconsciously altered by later perspectives—and of partial reconstruction. The opening of Chapter 2, for example, illustrates the latter.

Clop-clop-clop-clop . . . we are in a four-wheeler rattling over the uneven squaresets of the Belfast streets through the damp twilight of a September evening, 1908; my father, my brother, and I. I am going to school for the first time. We are in low spirits. (p. 29)

The present-tense description of his first departure for school in a four-wheeler is surely a reconstruction, a telling of what it must have been like rather than exactly what it was. There is a rather clumsy shift of tense and point of view, at the beginning of the chapter, to signal that this bit is “story”—with the implied suggestion that the rest, that which is not told in narrative fashion, is objective recounting. A bit later in the chapter he mentions that “the flats of Lancashire in the early morning are in reality a dismal sight; to me they were like the banks of Styx” (p. 30). The second clause is a later reflection, with apt and resonant allusion, but the past tense verb (“were like”) makes it seem as if it were an expression of his immediate reaction. I do not mention these examples to challenge the accuracy and fairness of Lewis’s memory. Surely the incidents were very much like what he describes, and one must allow an autobiographer, like a poet, a bit of poetic license. But such poetic license involves subjectivity. Thus Lewis will sometimes present a distant and recollected detail as an assured and objective truth, as when he recalls the first metaphysical argument he ever took part in: “I have forgotten which side I took though I know that I took it with great zeal” (p.37; Ch.2). Does he know it (now) because he remembers the episode or its emotional imprint so clearly, or because—knowing the kind of person he always has been—that was the way it must have been?

            Lewis, then, was aware that Surprised by Joy was ret-[< p. 152] rospective and subjective. But there is some cause to wonder if he was aware of how subjective it was. Some episodes, for example, are presented as objective and universal, though they are clearly personal and subjective. Such is his account of boyhood:

 

For boyhood is very like the “dark ages” not as they were but as they are represented in bad, short histories. The dreams of childhood and those of adolescence may have much in common; between them, often, boyhood stretches like an alien territory in which everything (ourselves included) has been greedy, cruel, noisy, and prosaic, in which the imagination has slept and the most un-ideal senses and ambitions have been restlessly, even maniacally, awake. (p. 73; Ch. 5).

 

Is boyhood almost always so? The following sentence, “In my own life it was certainly so,” suggests that he regards his case as part of a universal pattern rather than acknowledging that his experience was the basis for the generalization.
            Lewis also realized that a work such as this inevitably involves selectivity. Thus he notes, “I pass over a holiday in Normandy (of which, nevertheless, I retain very clear memories) as a thing of no account” (p. 21; Ch. 1). It is safe to assume that much else was passed over as well. The stated principle for inclusion of details appears in the next sentence: “If it could be cut out of my past I should still be almost exactly the man I am.” That may generally account for what is included, but it probably does not account for the amount of detail given in particular instances. Oldie’s school is described, in Chapter 2, because it helped shape Lewis’s development and character; he would indeed have been a different man if he had never attended the school. But the amount and kind of detail reflects the fact that he is his father’s son. In Chapter 1 Lewis described his father’s love of “wheezes,” or anecdotes, told by acting “all the characters in turn with a free use of grimace, gesture, and pantomime” (p.12). Is not the depiction of Oldie just such a “wheeze”?

 

He called his class up and asked questions. When the replies were unsatisfactory he said in a low, calm voice, “Bring me my cane. I see I shall need it.” If a boy became confused Oldie [< p. 153] flogged the desk, shouting in a crescendo, “Think—Think—THINK!!” Then, as the prelude to execution, he muttered, “Come out, come out, come out.” When really angry he proceeded to antics; worming for wax in his ear with his little finger and babbling, “Aye, aye, aye, aye. . . .” I have seen him leap up and dance round and round like a performing bear. (p. 34; ellipsis in the original)

 

The detail is not crucial to the central purpose, but the anecdotalist in Lewis could not resist, and was reluctant to stop: “I must restrain myself. I could continue to describe Oldie for many pages; some of the worst is unsaid” (p. 35).

            A different sort of selectivity, and subjectivity, enters with his decision to include the sentence, later in the chapter, “My father must not bear the blame for our wasted and miserable years at Oldie’s” (p. 36). All that has been said on that page and the preceding one, even the rather weak disclaimers, puts the blame just there. Lewis says much in Surprised by Joy about his difficulties with his father, but he by no means says it all—the antipathies ran very deep. Reflecting back on Oldie’s, he writes, “If the school had not died, and if I had been left there two years more, it would probably have sealed my fate as a scholar for good” (p. 39). The language suggests that Lewis might well be using the chapter to express, perhaps unintentionally, some of the bitterness the experience, and the lack of awareness on his father’s part, engendered in him.

            A similar motivation, surely, lies behind his account of his public school experiences. It is difficult to justify the long, detailed, intense accounts of “bloodery” and pederasty in Chapter 6, and even much of Chapter 7, on the grounds that they clarify Lewis’s development and character in any significant sense. Chapter 6 says comparatively little about Lewis. The point of it and Chapter 7, that Malvern College (he calls it “Wyvern”) made him a Prig, that “the Public School system had thus produced the very thing which it was advertised to prevent or cure” (p. 104; Ch. 7), could have been made more briefly and believably. Lewis is aware that this account is personal, for in the middle of Chapter 8 he admits, “My brother had liked Wyvern as much as I loathed [< p. 154] it” (p. 122). But he takes pains rhetorically, in this instance, to minimize its subjectivity. Several pages in the first half of the chapter are devoted to contrasting his and his brother’s factual precision with their father’s subjective distortions of what they say. The effect is to heighten the sense of accuracy and objectivity in what Lewis recalls about Malvern. So does his effort to explain away his brother’s positive response to the school: 

 

He had gone there straight from Oldie’s and I from a preparatory school where I had been happy. No school in England but would have appeared a heaven on earth after Oldie’s. Thus in one of his first letters from Wyvern my brother communicated the startling fact that you could really eat as much (or as little) as you wanted at table. To a boy fresh from the school at Belsen, this alone would have outweighed almost everything else. But by the time I went to Wyvern I had learned to take decent feeding for granted. (p. 122)

 

The school had “appeared” a heaven on earth to Warren, in other words, but in reality it was the hellish place Lewis described. Although he realizes that Surprised by Joy as a whole is subjective, he seems to have difficulty admitting that this particular portion is subjective and that the school might not have been as bad as his situation and reaction made it seem to him. His brother later persuaded Lewis he was wrong about some details; Lewis had included them, apparently, because he regarded them as accurate and significant.⁹ But an equally important reason for their inclusion might stem from the fact that he admittedly “loathed” the school. When he mentions that at Malvern an “orgiastic” dimension entered his imagination, he explains it as follows: “It was perhaps unconsciously connected with my growing hatred of the public school orthodoxies and conventions, my desire to break and tear it all” (p. 111; Ch. 7). It appears that, perhaps unconsciously, he devotes a chapter and a half to just such a breaking and tearing of it all.

            Thus the selection of details or emphasis is at times governed by Lewis’s purposes at the time of writing, purposes he may not always have been fully aware of, not just by the demands of accurate reporting. So it is, I believe, [< p. 155] with the theme of imagination. What he now calls the “imaginative” side of his life was always an important factor in his life, but he did not, previously, use that term often in referring to it. Longing, or “sweet desire,” in earlier works is regularly identified with the term “romanticism.” Neither of the two main statements about Sehnsucht, or longing—the Preface added to The Pilgrim’s Regress in 1943 and the 1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory”—associates it explicitly with “imagination.” The Preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress spends two pages clarifying various meanings of romanticism before specifying that “what I meant by ‘Romanticism’ when I wrote the Pilgrim’s Regress. . . was a particular recurrent experience which dominated my childhood and adolescence and which I hastily called ‘Romantic’ because inanimate nature and marvellous literature were among the things that evoked it.”^l0 The experience obviously involves the imagination, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Lewis to mention that. It is striking, therefore, that he not only mentions it in Surprised by Joy but includes a deliberate pattern of references linking “Joy” with “imagination.”

            The first reference to imagination occurs in the paragraph which leads up to the first occurrences of longing: “It will be clear that at this time—at the age of six, seven, and eight—I was living almost entirely in my imagination; or at least that the imaginative experience of those years now seems to me more important than anything else” (p. 21; Ch. 1). “Now seems” cannot be ignored. It is a reminder that the account does not necessarily record the terms and emphases Lewis used at ages six, seven, and eight, or in his thirties, but those of the 1950s, when he was writing Surprised by Joy. The linking of imagination with Joy continues. At Oldie’s, “there was also a great decline in my imaginative life. For many years Joy (as I have defined it) was not only absent but forgotten” (p. 40; Ch. 2). When he wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress he would have said in my “romantic life”; now he uses “imaginative” for the same quality. In his discussion of the school he calls Chartres, imagination is made one side of a dichotomy: “My secret, imaginative [< p. 156] life began to be so important and so distinct from my outer life that I almost have to tell two separate stories” (p. 79; Ch. 5). It begins to be contrasted with the rational when he goes to Kirkpatrick’s: “Though I could never have been a scientist, I had scientific as well as imaginative impulses, and I loved ratiocination. Kirk excited and satisfied one side of me” (p. 131; Ch. 9). Its fullest expression, two chapters later, brings out an element of tension:

 

Such, then, was the state of my imaginative life; over against it stood the life of my intellect. The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless. (p. 161; Ch. 11)

 

The terms and emphasis are, of course, those of the fifties. The subjectivity and retrospectiveness of the account are unavoidable. He might have felt the same tension in the twenties, but he did not make it explicit earlier. In particular, he did not previously use such terms as “glib and shallow” with rational activity. It might be well to reflect, then, upon the context in which these changes in terminology and, to some extent, attitude were taking place.

            The emphasis on giving explicit attention to and mention of the imagination appears elsewhere in the early 1950s. He begins to write about the imaginative process involved in his own writings: “I have never exactly ‘made’ a story. With me the process is much more like bird-watching than like either talking or building. I see pictures. Some of these pictures have a common flavour, almost a common smell, which groups them together. Keep quiet and watch and they will begin joining themselves up.”¹¹ The very fact that he focuses such attention on himself as writer may well be significant. In another essay he emphasizes that his Narnia stories grew out of the imagination, not out of cognitive or thematic purposes:

 

Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected infor-[< p. 157]mation about child-psychology and decided what age group I’d write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out “allegories” to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.¹²

 

A few years later he reveals that his earlier stories likewise began with visual images: “All my seven Narnian books, and my three science fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head.”¹³ Surely all this is not a new insight for Lewis—he did not suddenly, in the fifties, come to realize that Perelandra grew out of mental images. But he had not previously cared to direct attention to himself and talk about inner processes, and he had not felt it important to stress the imaginative aspects of his work. Now he does. Thus, in a letter to the Milton Society of America in the mid-fifties, he goes out of his way to highlight the imaginative and even to cite it as a unifying quality of his lifework:

 

The list of my books which I send . . . will I fear strike you as a very mixed bag . . . (but) there is a guiding thread. The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic. It was he who made me first attempt (with little success) to be a poet. It was he who, in response to the poetry of others, made me a critic, and, in defence of that response, sometimes a critical controversialist. It was he who after my conversion led me to embody my religious belief in symbolical or mythopeic forms, ranging from Screwtape to a kind of theologised science fiction. And it was of course he who has brought me, in the last few years, to write the series of Narnian stories for children; not asking what children want and then endeavouring to adapt myself (this was not needed) but because the fairy tale was the genre best fitted for what I wanted to say.¹⁴

 

This, like Surprised by Joy, is retrospective: he now sees the imaginative as central, because of the context in which he is writing in the fifties.

            Behind this new attention to the imaginative stand a decreased dependence upon the rational, shaken as it was by the encounter with Miss Anscombe, and an increased confidence in the imagination. Through his theorizing about myth, reinforced by his experiments with the mythical in the Narnian Chronicles in the years following, he came to [< p. 158] realize that he had unnecessarily limited the role of the imagination, that he could entrust to it a larger role than he previously had. Having reached this new appreciation of the imaginative, it is only natural that as he looked back over his life, he should begin to recognize that it had, after all, been very important to him all along, more important and influential than he had realized. And it is only natural that he should begin to use terminology and to emphasize qualities which, on the one hand, highlight the place imagination had filled in his life in the past, and, on the other hand, play down the rational. As he looked back across his life, he concluded that what he had previously regarded as primarily a tension between the romantic and the rational, or faith and science, or the “other worldly” and “this worldly,” was also a tension between the imagination and reason; and he recognized that, while the earlier tensions had been resolved by his conversion in the early 1930s, the tension between imagination and reason lingered on, and even intensified, until it reached a breaking point in February 1948. His subsequent efforts to pick up the pieces culminated in the paired works Surprised by Joy and Till We Have Faces.

            The tension seems to be resolved in Surprised by Joy itself, at the end of Chapter 11, when imagination becomes the key term in his description of the effect that reading Phantastes had upon him. Previous visits of Joy were reminders of another world which left this world drab and unappealing in contrast.

 

But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged. Or, more accurately, I saw the common things drawn into the bright shadow. Unde hoc mihi? In the depth of my disgraces, in the then invincible ignorance of my intellect, all this was given me without asking, even without consent. That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptised; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantasies. (pp. 170- 71)

 

This sounds as if it resolves the tension, as if imagination has won out over intellect, and Lewis was content that it should seem so, for it is a satisfying place, rhetorically, to [< p. 159] leave the matter. His imagination was “saved” from the directions his romanticism was taking him, toward Magic and the Occult, and was directed by MacDonald to the glory of everyday experiences and the everyday world—a crucial preliminary step toward his later acceptance of Christianity. The succeeding chapters trace the further contributions of longing and of his reading, the influence of friends, and the force of logic, all of which lead to an acknowledgment that the Reality he has tasted is the God of Christianity. That the tension between imagination and intellect continued after his conversion is not a part of this story, the story of the influence of Joy upon his life, and he has no reason to go on. And he would have been unable to go on, at this point or in this literary form, to tell of a harmony between intellect and imagination which was yet to be achieved.

            The subjectivity and selectivity in Surprised by Joy seem to have opened the way for Lewis to write Till We Have Faces, his next book, in which full unity of reason and imagination at last were achieved. As Lewis had before attempted to tell the story of his conversion objectively and at a distance, so had he also attempted much earlier an objective account of the story of Cupid and Psyche, but had been unable to find the right “form” for it. Now the right form comes to him, and it is no coincidence that it is fictional autobiography. All of Lewis’s earlier stories are related by third-person or first-person narrators whose accounts are objective and reliable. Orual’s account of her life, like Lewis’s account of his own in Surprised by Joy, is retrospective, subjective, and selective. It is striking, then, that suddenly he is able to complete successfully two stories he had long sought to tell but had been unable to: his own story and that of Cupid and Psyche. That he can now tell them, the one as pure autobiography and the other as pure myth, is perhaps the best evidence of a second major change in his life, and of the nature of that change.

            As he finds himself able to tell the two stories, he finds they actually are one. The story of Orual, which resembles the myth in Dymer and develops most fully the themes of The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Great Divorce, is also the [< p. 160] story of Surprised by Joy. Each is a story of consciousness, and of the achievement of wholeness through sacrificial death; and each is the story of Lewis himself. In the earlier attempt at autobiography, the character closest to Lewis himself was John, the pilgrim, in search of the object of the longings which had haunted him throughout his life. In Till We Have Faces, however, the situation is very different. There is again a character, Psyche, who feels the longings Lewis felt in his youth and journeys onward until she finds their Object despite the various efforts of the rationally minded to impede or dissuade her—much like John in The Pilgrim’s Regress, but one can almost sense Lewis in the background asserting, “Yes, but that’s not me.” He clearly feels closer to Orual, the character caught in a tension, attracted to the imaginative but held back from it by the rational, and thus unable to assent fully to the one or the other. That closeness to Orual is reflected in the fullness with which her character is developed. As Father Zogby points out, a key difference between Till We Have Faces and The Pilgrim’s Regress is that “in the former there is the evolution of a fully conscious person, while in the latter we have not evolution but rather an accomplished and staged fact."¹⁵ The point could be generalized to the rest of Lewis’s fiction: Orual is the only character whom Lewis seems to know deeply and to develop fully. It is as if his unwillingness to pay attention to his own personality for so many years prevented him from being able to get into the personalities of his characters in a detailed and convincing way. The prolonged attention to his own consciousness in Surprised by Joy enabled him to portray the consciousness of at least one character fully. Not surprisingly, that character is very much like himself. Humphrey Carpenter goes so far as to call Orual a “self-portrait of Lewis”;¹⁶ I think he is right, and in that lies the key relationship between the two books. For Lewis, like Orual, was seeking wholeness. Orual in one sense spoke for Lewis when she said, “I saw that for years my life had been lived in two halves, never fitted together” (p. 151). She needed to fit the rationalism of the Fox together with the longing and vision of Psyche and the “mystery” surrounding Ungit, as [< p. 161] Lewis needed the imaginative, the rational, and the spiritual to find salvation. Surprised by Joy shows Lewis’s reconciliation, not yet union, of the three; Till We Have Faces depicts their synthesis, through which Orual is able to find completeness and peace, and thus beauty of soul.

            From this perspective one can see that Till We Have Faces is a deeply Christian work, but in a very different way from the works of the previous decade. It does not have the clear answers and tidy packaging of the apologetic books, or the expository or allegorical explicitness of the Ransom trilogy. In them the reason and the imagination were addressed separately—story for the imagination, explanation for the reason. In Till We Have Faces the distinction and the separation break down and Lewis writes to the whole person, emphasizing not answers and formulas but struggles and the ultimate goal. “What happens, then, in Till We Have Faces,” Gunnar Urang points out, “is that C. S. Lewis moves toward coming to terms with his own dividedness. . . . Do we dare say that he moves toward becoming genuinely ‘incarnate’ in his fantasy-creation?”¹⁷ The result is a presentation through myth of the essential Christian experience: one is given a “taste” of Reality through the story of Orual’s achievement of wholeness of self and with God.

            At the same time that it is profoundly and pointedly Christian, it is also fully universal. The use of the classical myth and the pre-Christian setting help universalize the story. And the sense of fragmentation and the search for wholeness involve a universal situation. Thus the story’s struggles with separation, of self and from others, and the efforts of its characters to find unity of reason and imagination, of the physical and the psychological, can speak meaningfully to a reader who would reject the more explicitly Christian implications. It is the most universal of Lewis’s works; at the same time it is the most closely personal of Lewis’s works. Only as he accepted himself and found personal wholeness could he get fully beyond the personal and particular to the artistic and universal wholeness of his finest work. [< p.162]