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| 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 |
Chapter 21:
The Myth and the Retelling
PLOT SUMMARY: Orual and several younger people undertake a progress, or journey, into Phars and then into Essur, combining the pleasures of travel with opportunity to consult with neighboring monarchs. In Essur they go to see a hot spring and plan then to return to Glome. As the others set up camp and prepare food, Orual wanders into the woods and comes upon a small white stone temple. A priest, for a few coins, offers to tell her the story of its goddess, Istra. The story is very much like that of Orual and Psyche, except that in the priest’s tale, Istra’s sisters were able to see Istra’s palace, and they destroyed her happiness out of jealousy over her good fortune. Orual asks the priest where he learned all this, but he can only reply, “It’s the sacred story,” a story handed down to him as part of a fertility religion. Orual is greatly upset, for the story handed down seems wrong, for Orual wasn’t jealous and she couldn’t see the palace. Had she been able to, all would have been different. In order that things may be set right and the truth known, she determines to write an accusation against the gods as her own defense. She hurries back to Glome and begins to write what we have been reading so far, the twenty-one chapters of Part I.Chapter 21, brief as it is, repetitive of the overall story as it may seem, actually is crucial to the success of Lewis’s venture. As we said earlier, Lewis found in Apuleius a tale which, although called a myth, was not mythical—it lacks the mystery and power characteristic of true myth. Apuleius drew on folk motifs and archetypes which could have been—which even cried out to be—turned into myth, but he failed to imbue them with the imaginative and numinous qualities essential to myth. As Lewis tells the [< p. 61] story, it is important to notice that he inserts an extra step in order to bring out the basic mythical implications of the tale. The story told to Orual by the Priest of Essur becomes a middle level between Apuleius’s telling and Lewis’s re-telling, needed to show what Apuleius could, perhaps even should, have developed but did not.
The excursion to see “a natural hot spring fifteen miles further to the west” is made on “the calmest day—pure autumn—very hot, yet the sunlight on the stubble looked aged and gentle, not fierce like the summer heats. You would think the year was resting, its work done. And I whispered to myself that I too would begin to rest” (p. 239). The setting is ironic, in terms of the unsettling revelations about to come, but also symbolic, since Orual, like the year, has reached her golden time, the time for a harvest of the wisdom which has been maturing over the decades. The setting introduces the seasonal archetype, which will be crucial to the story she is about to hear, as is the “journey” archetype (p. 239)—a journey of education into experience.
The story she hears is not, as she suspects, her own but the “sacred story,” the archetype, on which her story rests. Inevitably, therefore, details of the Priest’s story will be familiar to her. The black “band or scarf” tied around the head of the goddess’s image in the temple is “much like my own veil, but that mine was white” (p. 241). Furthermore, as she listens to the Priest,
to me it was as if the old man’s voice, and the temple, and I myself and my journey, were all things in such a story; for he was telling the very history of our Istra, of Psyche herself—how Talapal (that’s the Essurian Ungit) was jealous of her beauty and made her to be offered to a brute on the mountain, and how Talapal’s son Ialim, the most beautiful of the gods, loved her and took her away to his secret palace. (p. 242)
Lewis turns Psyche into the goddess Apuleius worshipped, into Isis, originally a goddess of fecundity identified with Demeter,1 and he uses that identification to indicate what Apuleius had missed, namely the theme of sacrifice: Istra in the Priest’s tale is “offered to a brute on a mountain,” not, like Apuleius’s Psyche, given in marriage to “a dire [< p. 62] mischief, viperous and fierce” in obedience to Apollo’s oracle. But for Orual, as she identifies with the story, two elements of the Priest’s tale seem erroneous. First, he apparently mistakes the motivation of the sisters as jealousy rather than Orual’s desire for the truth—and this is what incites Orual to the writing of Part I in her own defense. Second, he says that both sisters had visited Psyche and, more importantly, had seen her palace: “How,” Orual writes in protest, “could any mortal have known of that palace at all? That much of the truth [the gods] had dropped into someone’s mind, in a dream, or an oracle, or however they do such things. That much; and wiped clean out the very meaning, the pith, the central knot, of the whole tale” (p. 243).
Orual, however, preoccupied with the claim that the palace could be seen, misses “the very meaning, the central knot” of the Priest’s account. She is not even listening until he gets to the part where “Talapal torments Istra and sets her to all manner of hard labours, things that seem impossible. But when Istra has done them all, then at last Talapal releases her, and she is reunited to Ialim and becomes a goddess. Then we take off her black veil, and I change my black robe for a white one, and we offer—" (p. 246). Here the seasonal archetypes Lewis planted earlier in the chapter reappear and transform Apuleius’s pleasant tale into a pagan fertility myth: “But, Stranger,” the Priest goes on when Orual asks if Istra has actually been reunited with her husband, “the sacred story is about the sacred things—the things we do in the temple. In spring, and all summer, she is a goddess. Then when harvest comes we bring a lamp into the temple in the night and the god flies away. Then we veil her. And all winter she is wandering and suffering; weeping, always weeping” (p. 246).
Orual concludes angrily that the Priest “knew nothing” (p. 246), but here in fact is the mythical significance Apuleius chose not to develop. By interrupting the Priest, Orual prevented him from completing his sentence with the word sacrifices. Inherent in the Cupid and Psyche story is what Lewis in “Myth Became Fact” called “the old myth of the Dying God”;2 it is, when its archetypal threads are traced [< p. 63] back, one of “those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men.”3
In missing the image of sacrifice, Apuleius neglected what is at the heart of the matter for Lewis, who brings out its importance later in the book when he has the Fox comment on the revolting blood sacrifices offered in Ungit’s temple: “I never told [Orual] why the old Priest got something from the dark House that I never got from my trim sentences. . . . The Priest knew at least that there must be sacrifices” (p. 295). And Lewis knows that in the basic myth of Cupid and Psyche, there must be sacrifice, for it is in sacrifice that the old pagan religions anticipate God’s fullest revelation of himself in Christ and God’s requirement that his people also must sacrifice, must offer their bodies and lives “as a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1) to God and to others.
Lewis saw, then, the failures of what Apuleius’s tale was; but even more important to him was the inadequacy of what Apuleius’s tale should have been, the insufficiency or incompleteness of paganism. Till We Have Faces, as a “myth retold,” is actually a retelling of the Priest of Essur’s tale, a retelling of Lewis’s smaller retelling of Apuleius. Having, in the sacred story of the Priest, emphasized the theme of sacrifice, Lewis in Till We Have Faces points beyond pagan sacrifice to what it prefigures, the full embodiment of this theme in Christianity. Lewis earlier had put it this way: “If my religion is true, then these stories may well be a preparatio evangelica, a divine hinting in poetic and ritual form at the same central truth which was later focussed and (so to speak) historicised in the Incarnation.”4 The archetypes in the fertility myths of a dying god who returns to life, of an Istra who wears a black scarf through winter, are crucial to the Cupid and Psyche story because they convey a vital “gleam of divine truth.”5 Lewis explained that truth as follows in “The Grand Miracle”:
As soon as you have thought of this, this pattern of the huge dive down to the bottom, into the depths of the universe and [< p. 64] coming up again into the light, everyone will see at once how that is imitated and echoed by the principles of the natural world; the descent of the seed into the soil, and its rising again in the plants. . . . We all know about Adonis. . . . Christ is a figure of that sort. . . . The corn itself is in its far-off way an imitation of the supernatural reality; the thing dying, and coming to life again, descending, and re-ascending beyond all nature. The principle is there in nature, because it was first there in God Himself. Thus one is getting in behind the nature religions, and behind nature to Someone Who is not explained by, but explains, not, indeed, the nature religions directly, but that whole characteristic behaviour of nature on which nature religions were based.6
In retelling the Priest of Essur’s tale, Lewis in Till We Have Faces takes us behind Istra, the nature goddess, to the Someone toward whom all such myths point: “We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate.7
Till We Have Faces is lifted far above the tales told by Apuleius and the Priest of Essur by the union of the theme of sacrifice with the love theme discussed in previous chapters. Sacrifice in Till We Have Faces is not just the death and rebirth of a pagan god or goddess, but the unselfish giving of self by individuals for others—Psyche going out to touch the sick and later offering herself on the mountain to end the drought; Bardia, the Fox, and Psyche disregarding their own good to promote Orual’s; and Orual—unknowingly—spending her life for her country. Orual can find peace, forgiveness, and acceptance only as she sacrifices herself, her selfish demands and desires, and learns to give herself totally to others instead of requiring total devotion from them, a process completed in Part II.
The episode of the Priest of Essur is also crucial to the narrative strategy of Till We Have Faces. In recent years the concept of narrative has come under attack. Narrative sequence in history, for example, has come to be viewed by some historians as an interpretative, and thus somewhat artificial and subjective, pattern imposed upon discrete events. Louis Mink, for example, argues, [< p. 65]
Life has no beginnings, middles, or ends; there are meetings, but the start of an affair belongs to the story we tell ourselves later, and there are partings, but only in retrospective stories are hopes unfulfilled, plans miscarried, battles decisive, and ideas seminal. Only in the story is it America which Columbus discovers and only in the story is the kingdom lost for want of a nail.8
According to this view, life is different from stories about life: only in retrospect does one see patterns and ends and causes. And such retrospective accounts are necessarily interpretative. As A. R. Louch says,
The notion of plot depends upon the choice of story. And this is very much a matter of what is emphasized, where the story begins, and where the historian chooses to end it. For what confers the aura of inevitability on the historical process is that the different episodes that carry the story forward are chosen in such a way as to lead to the circumstances with which the historian has chosen to end his tale. And he might have selected a different emphasis, a different starting point, a different conclusion. How we see the evolving process and how we understand the past will vary accordingly.9
For such thinkers, the description of a person’s life is not an objective listing of events and places but narrative in which events are related to each other in sequences which make them comprehensible and seem to make them meaningful.
Many twentieth-century literary figures have argued against any degree of meaningfulness in narrative: narrative, they say, is not subjective-but-meaningful, but inevitably falsifying. The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, has a character argue that to present life in narrative form always falsifies it.10 The events in people’s lives and in the world generally are wholly separate and unorderly; they lead nowhere; the course of things is random and “absurd.” To put events and actions into a unified sequence, according to this view, is to impose in retrospect an order the events did not have as they were lived, and thus to falsify them. Many modern writers, therefore, have ceased to write sustained narratives. Their essays as well as their fiction—inevitably, since art reflects life—are made up of random fragments and images which readers are to [< p. 66] experience as such, without imposing a logical or sequential pattern upon them.
What these people are arguing is that narratives—whether of the historian, or anthropologist, or economist, or theologian, or biologist, or biographer, or autobiographer—always and inevitably are subjective and somewhat artificial. The choice of starting point, end point, emphases, and connecting links give the “shape” to the story, not just the details or events by themselves. The issue facing those who write or read narratives is reliability: What limits the subjectivity? What supplies a norm or standard which makes a narrative meaningful rather than just arbitrary? This is not the place to explore the various answers which have been proposed; but we should notice how Lewis’s narrative strategy anticipates the problem and supplies a solution.
Orual’s story is just the kind to be open to charges of subjectivity. The story she tells is shaped considerably by the beginning point she selected, the point at which she intended to stop, and the things she chose to emphasize. Had she ended with Chapter 21, as she had planned, the narrative would have been very different from the one that includes Part II or that would have resulted had she been able to revise Part I, as she wishes she could. Chance, her own purpose, her knowledge and lack of it all enter into the narrative of her life. The story of her life would look quite different if Arnom had written it: his postscript to the book indicates that he would have begun differently, emphasized different details, aimed at a quite different goal. Is all story-telling, then, merely subjective and arbitrary? It is subjective—inevitably; one can never, in any enterprise, step out of oneself and be totally objective. Lewis seems to be aware of that here, as he might not have been earlier in his life, and to accept it and to use it, for that very subjectiveness leads to the ironies which are at the heart of the story. Something, however, must have seemed necessary to prevent it from appearing wholly arbitrary, and the tale told by the Priest of Essur becomes that something.
The chronology of events and the detail out of which a narrative is constructed place constraints on historical [< p. 67] interpretation: they provide external criteria upon which to judge internal detail. The Priest of Essur’s tale functions in a similar way in Till We Have Faces. Subjective as its account ultimately (and inevitably) may be, the Priest’s own telling is utterly nonsubjective—he simply reports the “objective facts” of the “sacred story,” and that is its effect in the book. It comes from outside the narrative (outside Orual’s narrative, at any rate), verifies the chronology and detail used by Orual, and provides a standard for evaluating her interpretation of those details. It points to exactly what Orual did not want to recognize: that she could—or at least did—see the palace and that she was indeed jealous of her sister. By the introduction and careful placement of the Priest’s tale, Lewis’s story authenticates itself—from within itself it supplies the external standard needed to guard against total subjectivity. Thus Lewis’s belief in the value of narrative is affirmed. There is an orderliness in the story of Istra, as there is in the story of Orual, and as there is in the lives of Lewis’s readers—the first-person subjective narration of Till We Have Faces, framed and constrained by the Priest’s tale, embodies this as a truth in a deeper, fuller way than Lewis’s other, third-person stories can.
The key motifs of the book are drawn together here, near the end of Part I, in Orual’s reaction to the Priest of Essur’s story:
It’s a story belonging to a different world, a world in which the gods show themselves clearly and don’t torment men with glimpses, nor unveil to one what they hide from another, nor ask you to believe what contradicts your eyes and ears and nose and tongue and fingers. . . . Now, instantly, I knew I was facing them—I with no strength and they with all; I visible to them, they invisible to me. . . . Well, I could speak. . . . The case against them should be written. (pp. 243-45)
The images—other worlds, veils, faces, invisibility—and the oppositions—seeing versus believing, Greece versus Glome, gods versus man—remind the reader of the central issues in the case Orual wrote. For Part I is that case against the gods; Part II presents the effects upon her of writing it. [< p. 68]