Cover
| Publishing/Cataloguing
Information | Table
of Contents | Preface
| Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Notes | Index | Table for Converting Page Reference |
V
Chapters 8-11:
Believing and Perceiving
PLOT SUMMARY: Orual, bruised and sore from her father’s beating, watches as Psyche is taken away, hideously costumed and painted. Orual is ill for a long time, and in her delirium dreams of Psyche doing some great wrong to her. She recovers, under the loving care of the Fox and her servants, to find that the drought is over, the plague and famine have ended, and the danger of invasion by Phars has passed. Orual wonders if the Great Offering was, therefore, effective, but the Fox assures her all this could be explained through natural causation. She decides she owes Psyche a proper burial and prepares to go to the Holy Mountain. Meanwhile, she relieves the emptiness of her existence by lessons in swordsmanship with Bardia. She journeys to the Holy Mountain with Bardia, repressing, out of her “duty” to grieve over Psyche, an urge to take joy in the beauties of nature along the way. They reach the mountaintop, but find only empty manacles--there is no sign of Psyche until, as they search for clues, they come upon a paradisal valley where, across a river, they find Psyche herself. Psyche helps Orual cross the river, greets her joyfully, brings her food and drink, and relates her story: how West-wind himself took her from the mountain and put her down by “her” palace, where she was welcomed, served a feast, and bathed; at night her bridegroom came to her. When Orual stops her, however, and asks where the palace is, Psyche realizes Orual cannot see it; likewise, when Psyche served her wine and honeycakes, Orual tasted only water and berries. A scene of tense conflict follows, and Psyche’s conviction almost persuades Orual--but her need to possess Psyche holds her back. She protests, upon learning Psyche has not seen her husband, that she hates all this mystery and wonder and begs Psyche to return with her. It then begins to rain, and seeing Psyche get wet convinces Orual there is no palace—she commands [< p. 35] Psyche to come, but Psyche says she now must obey another and sends Orual away.
Running through Chapters 8 and 9 are several different but related failures in perception. They begin with a failure to recognize the implications of allusions and archetypes and culminate in Orual’s inability to perceive the realities of the world in which Psyche now lives. Two key allusions, misapplied by the King and Orual, occur at the end of Chapter 8: “Grandfather, I have missed being Iphigenia. I can be Antigone” (p.86). In Greek mythology Iphigenia was sacrificed to Apollo in order that the winds would turn and the Greek fleet could set sail for Troy.1 In Till We Have Faces Psyche is the Iphigenia figure, sacrificed for her country’s good. Lewis uses the allusion she was sacrificed; in Apuleius's version of the tale she is not a sacrifice and that, as we shall see later, becomes an important difference. The allusion recalls the earlier occasion when the Fox used the story of Iphigenia to try to dissuade the King from allowing Psyche to be sacrificed:
“Master,” said the Fox, “I had not finished telling you. It is very true that a Greek king sacrificed his own daughter. But afterwards his wife murdered him, and his son murdered the wife, and Those Below drove the son mad.”
At this the King scratched his head and looked very blank. “That’s just like the gods,” he muttered. “Drive you to do a thing and then punish you for doing it. The comfort is I’ve no wife or son, Fox.” (p. 58)
His comfort may be shortsighted. A few months after Psyche was sacrificed the King injures himself in a fall and dies shortly thereafter, not literally but at least symbolically killed by his own kin: “Some will say…that if I had murdered him indeed, I should have been no less impious than I was. For as he looked at me with fear, so I looked at him; but all my fear was lest he should live” (p. 202).
Antigone was a daughter of Oedipus, King of Thebes; she was sentenced to death by Creon, Oedipus’s successor, because she performed burial rites for her brother after Creon had forbidden anyone to do so, on pain of death. Antigone [< p.36] has passed down through Western culture as a symbol of one who had to choose between the civil law and her moral duty, and who chose the latter though she died for doing so. Orual says that she can be an Antigone, but the comparison turns out to be ironic: Orual, too, will face a choice, between her own good and that of the one she loves. But utterly unlike Antigone, she acts upon her own good, oblivious as she does so to both beauty and moral codes.2
Archetypes—plot motifs, character types, or images which recur frequently in literature and mythology—appear throughout Till We Have Faces. Orual, for example, wondering what the new Queen will be like, reflects, “It wasn’t only what Batta had said that frightened me; I had heard of stepmothers in plenty of stories” (p. 12). The cruel stepmother is a recurrent element in stories and fairy tales, because stepmothers—probably in many cases unkind to their stepchildren—were common when many women died in childbirth. Lewis slips this reference in partly to make us share Orual’s feelings, partly for irony—Orual’s stepmother turns out to be younger than herself, very small, and thoroughly frightened rather than frightening. But a deeper irony is buried here, one which will emerge later: Psyche will have a cruel and hateful “stepmother” in Orual herself.
Several important archetypes, whose significance Orual fails to recognize, appear at the end of Chapter 9. As Orual and Bardia search for Psyche on the mountain, they come to the edge of a cliff and “the sun—which had been overcast ever since we went down into the black valley—leaped out” (p. 100). The sun is a traditional symbol associated with the divine; it reminds one of Psyche’s earlier reference to a Greek philosopher who contrasts our present life, “a little, dark room,” with the life to come—“a great, real place where the true sun shines” (p. 73). As they look across the valley, it is described in the summer imagery traditionally associated with a paradise:
The valley…was like a cleft in the Mountain’s southern chin. High though it was, the year seemed to have been kinder in it than down in Glome. I never saw greener turf. There [< p. 37] was gorse in bloom, and wild vines, and many groves of flourishing trees, and great plenty of bright water—pools streams, and little cataracts. And when, after casting about a little to find where the slope would be easiest for the horse, we began descending, the air came up to us warmer and sweeter every minute. (p. 101)
That this is a paradisal world, the country of the gods, is reaffirmed by another archetype: “There, not six feet away, on the far side of the river, stood Psyche” (p. 101). A river is traditionally a symbol of death or the dividing line between worlds—it is reflected in classical mythology by the river Styx, which souls must cross to enter the underworld, and in Christian thought by the river at the end of the journey of life in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and by such hymns as “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah” (“when I tread the verge of Jordan . . .”). The archetypes prepare us, then, for what Bardia utters a moment later when he sees Psyche: “It is the bride of the god. It is a goddess” (p. 102). Psyche has passed, through divine magic or death,3 into the world of the gods and is perhaps herself now one of the immortals (“she was so brightface”—p. 102), though Orual, as she fails to heed the archetypal signals, fails also to recognize Psyche’s new status.
Orual’s imperceptiveness in comparing herself to Antigone and in neglecting the implications of the paradisal archetypes foreshadows her inability to experience what was present and evident to Psyche: “You can’t see it. You can’t feel it. For you, it is not there at all. Oh, Maia [Psyche’s “old baby’s name” for Orual4) . . . I am very sorry” (pp. 119-20; ellipsis in the original). The scene, and point, are crucial to the book: Lewis knew from the first time he read Apuleius that this is “the way the thing must have been.”5
Orual’s inability to see the palace traces to the philosophical system she learned from the Fox—not just the rationalism but the materialism at its base. The Stoics differed from earlier philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, by their belief that nothing incorporeal exists: “The Stoics attempted to give a completely materialist explanation of reality and the knowledge of reality. They maintained that [< p. 38] anything that was real was body.”6 It is only to be expected, then, that for the Stoics knowledge would derive directly from material objects: “The Stoics found the criterion of knowledge in sensuous impressions, which furnish the materials fashioned by reason…and affirm[ed] that every representation of an object implied the existence of the object itself.”7 Diogenes Laertius summarized it this way:
The Stoics agree to put in the forefront the doctrine of presentation [impression] and sensation, inasmuch as the standard by which the truth of things is tested is generically a presentation. . . . For presentation comes first; then thought, which is capable of expressing itself, puts into the form or a proposition that which the subject receives from a presentation.8
He then partly closed his hand, and so represented the response of the governing-principle to the impression: the mind assents to it. Having next made a fist he likened this to cognition (“grasping”). And finally, grasping his fist with the other hand he said: “This is what knowledge is like.”9
Lewis was clear and definite about the Fox’s background: “The Fox expresses neither Anthroposophy nor my views, but Stoicism.”10 If Lewis was knowledgeable and consistent in applying details, the Fox would hold the Stoic notions of substance, perception, and knowledge. That he does hold them is confirmed in Chapter 13, when Orual, upon her return to the palace, asks the Fox about sight and reality:
| “If I’d had my eyes shut, I would have
believed her palace was as real as this.” “But, your eyes being open, you saw no such thing.” “You don’t think—not possibly—not as a mere hundredth chance—there might be things that are real though we can’t see them?” “Certainly I do. Such things as Justice, Equality, the Soul, or musical notes.” [< p. 39] “Oh, Grandfather, I don’t mean things like that. . . . Are there no things—I mean things—but what we see?” “Plenty. Things behind our backs. Things too far away. And all things, if it's dark enough.” (pp.141-42) |
And Orual, as the Fox’s pupil, accepts these notions as well; they underlie her attempts in Chapter 14 to convince Psyche that she does not know her husband because she has not seen him.
Such thinking, however, cannot account for the scene between Orual and Psyche, and the point of Chapters 10 and 11 is to establish the inadequacy of the Fox’s theory of knowledge, even before Chapters 13 and 14 make use of it. The scene can be accounted for, and clarified, by ideas Lewis shared with his friend Owen Barfield, a way of thinking which the Fox and Orual resisted. Barfield begins with the point that seeing is not a simple process of “grasping,” or “taking in,” an external object in its physical “reality,” its “matter”: after all, things are “made” mostly of empty space. Rather, “seeing” is a complex process to which our minds and external objects both contribute: our visual faculty encounters the extended object; that meeting results in an image, or “appearance,” or “phenomenon,” and that, not “the thing itself,” is what we “see”; as the Oyarsa of Perelandra puts it to Ransom, “You see only an appearance, small one. You have never seen more than an appearance of anything.”11
But we “see” the appearance only as the mind receives, sorts out, classifies, and recognizes the object. If we encounter something for the first time and aren’t familiar with what it is, we can't really see it—we will receive an image, but we will not be able to interpret and thus perceive that image: thus, in Out of the Silent Planet, when Ransom first looked at the landscape of the planet Malacandra, “he saw nothing but colours—colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.”12 In Barfield’s words, “I do not perceive any thing with my sense-organs alone, but with a great part of my whole human being…. When I ‘hear a thrush singing,’ I am hearing, not with my ears alone, but with all sorts of [< p. 40] other things like mental habits, memory, imagination, feeling and . . . will.”13
Lewis had studied the same philosophers as Barfield and knew that one does not see “the thing itself.” In his teens he had summarized it as follows for his nonphilosopher friend, Arthur Greeves:
Of course we all start with the idea that our senses put us in direct contact with reality—you think that your eyes are windows by which your brain “sees” the world. But science teaches you that your eye, or rather the nerve of your eye, is merely a telegraph wire. It’s [sic] vibration produces a feeling in your brain which we call colour etc.: but what the Something at the other end which starts the vibration may be, of this no human being can have any conception. No increase of our sensory keenness, no microscope or telescope can put us in any direct relation with the Thing: we still remain dependent on this long chain of communications, travelling by vibration from atom to atom: and we can never have any proof that the sensation which it produces in our brain conveys any true idea of the external Thing.14
Lewis agreed with Barfield that one does not actually “see” objects; but he was suspicious of the psychological aspect of the process which chiefly interested Barfield, and of the subjective element that inevitably accompanies it. Thus the process as Lewis describes it is wholly physical, almost mechanical: there are wires, vibrations, and chains of communication. Ransom’s becoming able to see strange objects on Malacandra was only like the automatically adjusting lens on a projector coming into focus. Lewis put his emphasis, through the thirties and forties, not on the process but on the object, even if direct knowledge of it is unattainable. Writing to Barfield in 1929, Lewis brings out the importance of the object through an analogy with economics:
As it is impossible to conduct any developed economic operation in terms of the real wealth, so you cannot think without removing yourself from the thing really thought about to its counters or chits. But—just as the credit has no meaning apart from the wealth in the background—so the skeleton-conceptions live only in the light of the real which they represent: a thing v. different from them. It is therefore very necessary to go back now and then, either to an actual [< p. 41] experience of the sort they abridge, or to the concrete imagination of such an experience.15
Because of this basic attachment to the object, Lewis would not say, with Barfield, that perception is in large part “dependent upon the percipient”16—it is simply in the percipient. Lewis, from his teen years through his forties, would not put much emphasis on Barfield’s central point, that there is a subjective element in perception, that what a person brings to perception—the range of his or her experience, the state of emotions, the degree of attentiveness, the kind of training—will affect what one perceives. The mechanical nature of Lewis’s approach to perception and the heavy emphasis on the object itself have affinities not with Barfield but with the Fox and Stoic ideas about perceiving.
Much of that changed for Lewis in his fifties. He came to accept Barfield’s ideas about the importance of the perceiver, and a subjective element in perception. He embodies that change of emphasis in a key scene of Prince Caspian, written a few years before Till We Have Faces. The four children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—are brought back to Narnia to help put Caspian on the throne which has been usurped by Caspian’s uncle, Miraz. With Trumpkin the dwarf they start out confidently to join Caspian’s forces at Aslan’s How, relying on their knowledge of the forests and on their compass. At one point Lucy is sure she sees Aslan, beckoning them in a different direction:
“Where did you think you saw him?” asked Susan.“Don’t talk like a grown-up,” said Lucy, stamping her foot. “I didn’t think I saw him. I saw him.”17
None of the others saw him, however, and, having not seen, do not believe her, so they continue on their own way—only to admit, by evening, that they chose the wrong route, wasted most of the day, and now must retrace their steps.
Aslan wakes Lucy that night and tells her she must “go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell them you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at once and follow me.” [<p.42]
“Will the others see you too?” asked Lucy.
“Certainly not at first,” said Aslan. “Later on, it depends.” (pp.126-27; Ch.10)18
Lewis’s use of the word “certainly” is striking. Reluctant as Lewis was to loosen his grip on the object as wholly determining perception, here he accepts a subjective aspect as simply the way things are. Thus, when Lucy wakes the others, they protest that they can’t see Aslan—“because there isn’t anything to see,” says Susan; and they ask, “Why should Aslan be invisible to us? He never used to be” (p. 130; Ch. 11), not realizing that the change is in themselves and their relation to the lion. But they decide to go, and once they commit themselves by an act of faith (in Lucy, if not in Aslan), they gradually become able to see Aslan themselves.
In Till We Have Faces, as in the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis suggests that belief, or even the will to believe, can be one of the factors that affect perception. Thus, as Orual sits on the steps of the god’s house, her perceptual mechanism is not in a state which will enable her to experience it: “You can’t see it. You can’t feel it. For you, it is not there at all” (pp. 119-20). To Orual the cup of wine was water in Psyche’s cupped hands, the fine honeycakes were mountain berries, Psyche’s royal robes were nothing but rags.
A similar scene occurs in The Last Battle, written only shortly before this work, where the Dwarfs are unable to experience the paradisal world all about them. “Can’t you see?” Lucy asks. “Look up! Look round! Can’t you see the sky and the trees and the flowers? Can’t you see me?” But the Dwarfs, determined not to believe in such mysterious things, remain in the darkness of the Stable: to them sweet flowers are stable-litter, rich red wine is water from a donkey trough, and a glorious feast is hay, old turnips, and raw cabbage leaves. “They have chosen cunning instead of belief,” Aslan explains. “Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison.”19
Orual, too, is determined not to believe, lest it should—as indeed it would—make her act upon those beliefs and do things other than what she herself wants to do. Thus she protests, “I don’t want it. I hate it. Hate it, [< p. 43] hate it, hate it” (p. 124). Orual, her heart full of jealousy and unlove, wills not to see, and will not see, what would force her to give up her possessive hold on Psyche.
Orual’s inability, or refusal, to perceive reality is reinforced by a motif of dreams. Dreams were always important to Lewis, in his life as well as his stories. In Surprised by Joy Lewis notes that he remembers “nothing earlier than the terror of certain dreams.”20 He writes to Arthur Greeves, “I wish you and your family would have the goodness to keep out of my dreams.”21 In his diaries he often mentions his dreams: “I dreamed that I was in our room at Little Lea . . .”; “I had a most horrible dream . . .”; “I had an unusually nasty dream connected with my father in the night”; “a curious dream in the night.”22 It is quite natural, therefore, that he should often use dreams in his stories: the hero of his early narrative poem Dymer has several dreams; The Pilgrim’s Regress is a dream allegory and The Great Divorce a dream fantasy; Ransom, in the second chapter of Out of the Silent Planet, has a rather frightening dream of a garden and a wall and an attempt to scale it; and of course the Dawn Treader, in its voyage to the end of the earth, encounters an island where dreams—“not daydreams: dreams”—“come true, . . . come to life, come real.”23
Dreams appear in several forms, and have several functions, in Till We Have Faces. Orual dreams as she lies ill after her father beat her:
Now mark yet again the cruelty of the gods. There is no escape from them into sleep or madness, for they can pursue you into them with dreams. Indeed you are then most at their mercy. . . . Finding me heart-shattered for Psyche’s sake, they made it the common burden of all my fantasies that Psyche was my greatest enemy. All my sense of intolerable wrong was directed against her. It was she who hated me; it was on her that I wanted to be revenged. (pp. 80-81)
Fantasies, whether Psyche’s “old dream of [her] gold and amber palace on the Mountain” (p. 109), or Orual’s “impossible fool’s dream” about being married to Bardia (p. 224), are referred to as dreams (see also pp. 129, 137, 152, 266, 282, and 295). “Dream” is frequently used in figures of speech: [< p. 44] “A sudden shock, like a vile dream”; “the last day, the eve of the battle, shows like a dream”; “now all the dreamlike feeling in me suddenly vanished”; “all the long years of my queenship shrank up small like a dream” (pp. 205, 211, 243, and 273).
Dreams contribute to the development of character and plot. Thus Orual’s dreams about Psyche’s ill-treatment of her bring to the surface her subconscious resentments and jealousy, though she does not recognize them for what they are. Dreams also anticipate and prepare the way for the visions Orual experiences near the end of her life. Blending the visions into an already established motif of dreams makes them seem more natural and acceptable than they would be if the many references to dreams had not already established a suitable tone.
More importantly, dream unites with the motif of sight in questioning the nature of reality. To Orual, Psyche’s talk of her palace must be dreaming: “We’re women, aren’t we? Mortals. Oh, come back to the real world” (pp. 124-25). But Psyche suggests in reply that the mortal world, not her world, is the dream. As she was carried out of the palace on her way to the mountain, she now tells Orual, “I couldn’t lift even a hand to wave to you. . . . And I thought it didn’t matter much, because you too would wake up presently and find it was all a dream. And in a sense it was, wasn’t it? And you are nearly awake now. . . . I must wake you more” (p. 106).
What, then, is reality—the mortal world back in Glome, or the world Psyche now inhabits? In The Last Battle Lewis uses Plato’s idea that the present physical world is a transitory dream, while another, permanent and eternal world is the more real one. Professor Kirke declares,
“That was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here. . . . Of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.”24
So it is here: when Orual asks Psyche if what has happened to her is not just a dream, Psyche replies, “If it was a dream, [< p. 45] Sister, how do you think I came here? It’s more likely everything that had happened to me before this was a dream. Why, Glome and the King and old Batta seem to me very like dreams now” (p. 112). She is now in the place of reality, the home she has longed for all her life. But it is a land Orual cannot even see: small wonder, then, that Orual feels “a sickening discord, a rasping together of two worlds, like the two bits of a broken bone” and that, “years after, I dreamed, again and again, that I was in some well-known place—most often the Pillar Room—and everything I saw was different from what I touched” (p. 120). Much, much later, after many experiences and much growth, Orual says the following about seeing and dreaming:
For all I can tell, the only difference [between what men call real and what men call dream] is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth. (p. 277)
But that point is much further along in her journey, and can be reached only when sight and reality need no longer be limited for her to the physical and the material.
Psyche said to Orual earlier, “Oh, Sister, you’d understand if you’d seen,” and “Perhaps, Maia, you too will learn how to see” (pp. 111, 121). At this point Orual simply cannot see or understand the difference between dream and true Reality. Learning to see, although Orual is quite unconscious of the process as it goes on, is what the rest of the novel—and all of life—is actually about. [< p. 46]