VI

Chapters 12-15:

Seeing and Knowing

PLOT SUMMARY: Orual rejoins Bardia for food and rest, but, unable to sleep, she slips down to the river for a drink and has a moment’s view of Psyche’s palace—or imagines she does; she is full of uncertainty now and questions Bardia on the way home: he will say only that it seems Psyche must be bride to the Brute, but these are holy matters he doesn’t pretend, or wish, to understand.  Upon her return she tells the Fox of her adventure and questions him closely: he is convinced Psyche must have come under the control of one of the vagabonds who live on the mountain.  Orual, torn between the reverent answer and the rational one, decides she must rescue Psyche at any cost.  Taking with her a lamp, a roll of bandage, and a dagger, she returns to the mountain and tries unsuccessfully to convince Psyche that her lover is a monster.  Orual then stabs her own arm to demonstrate the seriousness of her intent to kill Psyche and herself if Psyche will not look at her husband.  To spare Orual’s life, Psyche agrees.  That night, from across the river, Orual watches as Psyche’s lamp shines forth, hears a stern rebuke and then weeping, and sees a storm begin to lay waste the valley.  As Psyche goes off, weeping, into the wilderness, a god appears to Orual and tells her, “You also shall be Psyche.”

In Chapters 12-15 the two earlier themes of possessiveness and blindness are blended in one of Lewis’s most skillful alterations of Apuleius’s tale.  The theme of possessiveness was present as a continuing undercurrent through Chapters 8-11—in Orual’s impression, during her illness, of some wrong or injury Psyche has inflicted on her; and in her protest against Psyche’s separating herself from Orual:  “Is it nothing to you at all that you are leaving me, . . . [< p. 47] turning your back on all our love?” (p. 125); but most of all in Orual’s sense of hurt and then rage when Psyche tells her, “Dear Maia, I am a wife now.  It’s no longer you that I must obey” (p. 127).  Orual’s next line sums up the entire theme of distorted love: “I learned then how one can hate those one loves.”

          A key episode in the sight-blindness motif occurs later that night.  Orual, unable to sleep, goes down to the river and—whether because her mental defenses are down, or because she drank water from the river in the gods’ country, or for whatever reason, but not because she has come to believe—she has a momentary glimpse of Psyche’s palace: “There stood the palace, grey—as all things were grey in that hour and place—but solid and motionless, wall within wall, pillar and arch and architrave, acres of it, a labyrinthine beauty” (p. 132).

          Because its Gothic intricateness is unlike anything in Glome, Orual knows she can’t be imagining it.  She realizes she must ask forgiveness of Psyche and of her god for doubting; and she realizes Psyche now belongs to another world and is “far above me”—if, she thinks, “if what I saw was real.”  That thought recurs: “Perhaps it was not real.”  A moment later she can no longer see:  “I looked and looked to see if it would not fade or change.  Then as I rose (for all this time I was still kneeling where I had drunk), almost before I stood on my feet, the whole thing was vanished” (p. 133).  Orual is left wondering if it was a “true seeing” or an illusion—it was, after all, only a momentary glimpse—and asks the reader to give judgment: “That moment when I either saw or thought I saw the House—does it tell against the gods or against me? . . . What is the use of a sign which is itself only another riddle?” (p. 133).  The answer for Orual and the reader is contained in an earlier experience of Psyche.  She had had only a momentary glimpse of West-wind: “Of course he was invisible again almost at once.  I had seen him only as one sees a lightning flash.  But that didn’t matter” (p. 112).  So too it could have been, should have been, for Orual.

          But it was not, and the events which follow force one [< p. 48] to question Orual’s motivations for her subsequent actions.  Is it genuine uncertainty about the seeing that prevents her from telling the Fox about the glimpse of the palace through the mist?  Is it genuine doubt that shapes her choice between the alternative explanations of Bardia and the Fox (p. 151)?  Is it not rather the jealousy and possessiveness that are clear in her rationalizations a moment later: “For there was one point on which [Bardia and the Fox] agreed.  Both thought that some evil or shameful thing had taken Psyche for its own.  Murdering thief or spectral Shadowbrute—did it matter which?” (p. 151; italics added).

          Orual tries further to rationalize her inclinations by asking herself, “What lover would shun his bride’s eyes unless he had some terrible reason for it?” (p. 152).  To this too she has the answer, if she would only recall and accept it.  In the poem the Fox recited to Orual as a child, Aphrodite hides her immortal greatness before she comes to Anchises, not because she was hideous or fearsome, but because one must be made ready to come into the presence of a god.  Psyche’s experience as she related her story could have confirmed the point for Orual.  She spoke of feeling ashamed in the presence of West-wind and the immortal servants: “Ashamed of looking like a mortal—ashamed of being a mortal”; for the difference between them is striking—“We, beside the gods, are like lepers besides us” (p. 111).¹  Embedded in the old Aphrodite-Anchises myth is a kernel of divine truth, a truth which reappears in Psyche’s being forbidden to look upon her husband and again in the “till we have faces” motif of Part II, a truth which is available to all who are open to receiving it.

          Out of the themes of possessiveness and blindness emerges the most profound and powerful of Lewis’s alterations in the story Apuleius told.  In Apuleius’s version the two sisters deceived a simple, ignorant child by convincing her that her life would be in danger if she did not kill the monster who came to her by night.  That account turns the sisters into unmitigated villains, almost criminals, and reduces one’s esteem for Psyche, who lacks the intelligence to see through the obviously inconsistent argument. Lewis [< p. 49] changes this superficial and rather artificial scene of deception and intrigue to an intense and realistic psychological struggle which reaches deep into the motives and self-awareness of the two characters involved.

          Convinced that Psyche’s “husband” is a monster, natural or supernatural, Orual attempts to persuade Psyche, using the arguments she herself found so convincing.  She argues first that there must be some logical reason why he will not allow himself to be seen—“Nothing that’s beautiful hides its face” (p. 160).  When Psyche replies confidently that she knows he is no “salt villain,” Orual uses her second argument, that seeing is believing: “How can you know if you have never seen him?” (p. 161).  Psyche’s reply, “How could I not know?” (p. 162), reflects the culmination of a long series of experiences.  When she was shackled on the mountain and the rain came, “then I knew quite well that the gods really are, and that I was bringing the rain” (p. 110).  She recognizes and responds to the rain as a “sign” from the gods.  Later that same sign is available to Orual, but she ignores it:  “I promised anything [the gods] might ask of me, if only they would send me a sign.  They gave me none. . . .  [Meanwhile] the rain drummed on as before” (p. 150).  Psyche has a glimpse of West-wind and knows it is “he, not it” (p. 112); she sees the palace and knows, because it is not the gold and amber house she used to dream of, that she can’t be imagining it.  When a mysterious voice says “Enter your House,” she doesn’t rationalize it away; and when the servants lead her through the house, “though I could see no one,” she follows (p. 113).  Because she believes, she can know; but her knowledge is not dependent on seeing: it has a firmer basis than that, in love or in Love:

Orual’s virginity, elsewhere a symbol of her barrenness, here symbolizes the limitedness of her experience with love, so [< p. 50] different from Psyche’s experience.  Thus Psyche continues: “You do not think I have left off loving you because I now have a husband to love as well?  If you would understand it, that makes me love you—why, it makes me love everyone and everything—more” (pp. 158-59).  Orual knows “little of love” (p. 162) and nothing at all of such love: to hear of it can only intensify her anguish at no longer being the exclusive possessor of Psyche’s affection.  Because she knows so little of love, Orual thinks it can be used:  she drives a dagger through her arm to demonstrate the seriousness of her determination to kill Psyche and then herself if Psyche will not put her lover to the test.  To save not herself but Orual, Psyche capitulates and agrees to disobey her husband; she acts not out of fear and delusion, as does the Psyche in Apuleius’s tale, but with full awareness of what she is doing and why: “I know what I do.  I know that I am betraying the best of lovers and that perhaps, before sunrise, all my happiness may be destroyed forever.  This is the price you have put upon your life.  Well, I must pay it” (p. 166).  And Orual acts not out of a conscious desire to destroy Psyche’s happiness, as do the sisters in Apuleius’s tale, but out of the remains of what once was her love and desire for the good of Psyche.  Here we see the full extent of how distorted that love has become.  In Orual’s words,

This becomes the central issue of Orual’s legal brief: had the gods not withheld certain knowledge of themselves just long enough for Orual to force Psyche into destroying her happiness?  This she now must believe to avoid having to accept blame herself.  If so, the gods are unjust, and it is right for Orual to present a case against them, so that all will know of their cruelty and injustice.

          But the decision to present her case comes later.  At this point she has only the rather cryptic words the god speaks to her: “Now Psyche goes out in exile.  Now she must hunger [< p. 51] and thirst and tread hard roads.  Those against whom I cannot fight must do their will upon her.  You, woman, shall know yourself and your work.  You also shall be Psyche” (pp. 173-74).  The gaining of such self-knowledge, of what it means that Orual also shall be Psyche, is the central theme in the rest of the book.  [< p. 52]