skygiants | (no subject)

John le Carré's Our Game, about miserable ex-spies, and C.S. Lewis' Til We Have Faces, about Cupid and Psyche and the meaning of divine love, are absolutely not in deliberate conversation with each other. However I read one immediately after the other and so by the magic of coincidental juxtaposition I could not stop myself from making my little string diagrams between Orual and Timbo, unreliable narrators who have been cut to the quick by the fact that the people they've decided to love as they retreat from a meaningless world have committed the unforgivable sin of deciding -- against all odds and evidence! -- that there might in fact be something in the world worth believing in.

Otherwise of course Orual and Timbo are not much alike. Orual, in fact, is a classic YA heroine (affectionate) in ways that often surprised me to see from Clive Staples Lewis. I knew that this book was Cupid and Psyche from the POV of one of Psyche's sisters; I did not know that Orual is also a natural with a sword and spends a lot of this book coming of age & into power via training montages and significant costume choices and heroic duels. These are not the most important things about her but they're things I had a good time with.

However, the most important things about Orual are that she is desperate for love and furiously angry at the gods, and she is probably not right about these things (Lewis in fact wants to make quite sure by the end that we know she is not right) but she IS sublime about it.

What woman can have patience with the man who can yet be deceived by his doxy's fawning after he has thrice proved her false? I should be just like such a man if a mere burst of fair weather, and fresh grass after a long drought, and health after sickness could make me friends again with this god-haunted, plague-breeding, decaying, tyrannous world. I had seen. I was not a fool. I did not know then, however, as I do now, the strongest reason for distrust. The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us.

But I held my own without that knowledge. I ruled myself. Did they think I was nothing but a pipe to be played on as their moment's fancy chose?

GET EM HAMLET. I love this sort of self-defeating desperate bitter human dignity, the absolutely useless attempt to punch up at something that can't possibly be punched; I can't help it. It was actually quite odd reading this for the first time because she's so very much the pattern of a sort of character I love that it feels like I must have read her at such a formative age that she shaped my brain hereafter -- but I'm sure I didn't! this is my first time meeting her!

& for much of the book it is actually really beautifully balanced on an edge between Orual's anger at and defiance of [the force of divinity however you want to take it], and Psyche's willingness to open herself up to the beauty and possibility of the same, and the atheist-humanist perspective represented by the enslaved Greek philosopher who serves as their father figure, which finds divinity only in humans and the world and things that can be rationally explained. It lays out Orual's accusations against the gods, and lets you see and decide for yourself about the places where she's lying to herself, or using her love and desperation as a weapon, and there may be room for more than she's willing to see or understand.

Then of course the last couple chapters enter into a dream sequence wherein Mr. Lewis explains to us and Orual how we all actually ought to feel about divine love, which obviously gets my back up and makes me want to fight him just for the sake of it. But one can't expect to get through a C.S. Lewis book without a little Christian allegory, and if you're going to fight with a book it might as well be one worth fighting with, which this is; I really genuinely did love it.

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From:

sovay

and lets you see and decide for yourself about the places where she's lying to herself, or using her love and desperation as a weapon, and there may be room for more than she's willing to see or understand.

I actually found these places so painful that I have not re-read the book since, I believe, high school.

From:

skygiants

that is truly understandable, they are INTENSE

From:

selenak

Perhaps it's because I read A Grief Observed shortly before Till We have Faces, but I always thought both Oroual's anger and that final chapter were intensely autobiographical. I mean, A Grief Observed - which he wrote following his wife's death and didn't publish under his own name while alive - has that incredibly visceral "God is a vivisectionist" outburst and so much grief caused eloquent versions of WHY?, along with excellent observances of how he's already transforming the living woman into a memory to suit his emotional needs and how this is one of the worst things and yet it can't be stopped, and some great glimpses of her (for example, her retort to being praised for "male" qualities is simply that this is rubbish, and if he wants to be complimented for his female qualities?), and it also captures the numbness of grief and all the physical aspect....and then at the end you get Lewis, even under an alias, chiding himself for being petty and getting divine love wrong.

The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us.

Strikes me as the more elegantly phrased "God is a vivisectionist", and given Joy had cancer and thus he knew she would die well ahead of time, I wonder whether Till We have Faces was in part motivated by trying to work out his own crisis of faith caused by the loss of a loved woman.

From:

cahn

Ohhhhh this is such an interesting observation and I would definitely not be surprised if it were the case. I've certainly always thought that Orual's vividness (which is so surprising to me, having read this after much of his other work, which isn't exactly high on the vivid adult woman meter) owed a lot to Joy Gresham, and also it's clear to me that Orual herself was a mirror of Lewis, but I'd never put all the chronological pieces together (ha ha, of course not). (I've also never read A Grief Observed, though I expect I will one day.)

From:

skygiants

I was talking with another friend who suggested that perhaps it's also easier for him to write Orual as a full person rather than A Woman because she can't (or thinks she can't) exist as an object of desire -- Lewis sort of wandering by accident into thinking seriously about what it would be like for a woman not to fit in the Woman Box.

From:

skygiants

I've not read A Grief Observed, but this sounds ... very plausible to me.

From:

lirazel

This makes a ton of emotional sense to me, but I think that the timeline doesn't quite work--Till We Have Faces was published in '56 and she wasn't diagnosed until '57. If I'm remembering correctly, though they married sometime in '56, it was just a green card marriage and they didn't get together romantically until after her diagnosis.

But I absolutely think the lines between Orual's pov and "God is a vivisectionist" are really meaningful. And A Grief Observed is a book that I respect the hell out of--that he actually published something so vulnerable and at odds with his very very cerebral nonfiction. Those two books feel like the same kind of book for all one is a diary and one is a novel, and different than, like, The Abolition of Man or something.

From:

blotthis

goddammit

From:

skygiants

sorry about your list

From:

blotthis

you're not

From:

dorothean

I read and loved—I thought it was his best novel, maybe even before Perelandra—Til We Have Faces a very long time ago when I still thought C.S. Lewis was right about everything. Realizing he wasn’t was such a pivotal moment that my recollections of all his books are warped with a sense of betrayal. (I understand this is a not uncommon way to feel about Lewis!) It’s very good to hear that you loved Til We Have Faces for the same reasons I did despite not being predisposed in favor of the theology. Perhaps I’ll read it again someday.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I loved Lewis growing up -- the first books I remember actually reading were the Chronicles of Narnia, my parents actually just turned up my old stuffed lion in our house that I named Aslan and carried around with me everywhere -- but I also can't remember a time when I didn't know that these were Christian Books and The Lion Was Jesus and have that kind of .... level of guardedness, I guess, reading them as Jewish kid and knowing that many of the things he believed were simply quite different from the things that I did. And that did hit me from time to time with Till We Have Faces, every so often Psyche would say something that was fully paraphrased from Jesus and I'd just walk face-first into it and be fully jolted out of the narrative for a moment, and then Orual would go on and I'd be completely swept away again.

From:

osprey_archer

Orual is SO angry and petty and convinced that no one loves her despite being surrounded by people who would literally die for her - the Fox gives up going back to Greece to stay by her side! - God I love her. We love you so much, Orual! Doesn't our love count?

NO, says Orual, refusing the false comfort of the distant love of a few paltry thousands of readers. You say you love me, but could you live with me???

And I must confess with bowed head that I probably could not. She's so good at snatching (emotional) defeat from the jaws of victory! While also being a victorious badass politically and militarily, but that is as dust in her eyes. (I love the part where she dismisses her entire reign in, like, a page. Oh yeah, I conquered some territory and made peace and enacted good laws and built bridges and my people will be singing my praises for centuries after I'm dead like Good Queen Bess, but whatever, Psyche didn't love me best.) And she's SO mad about it.

One of the things that struck me in my recent reread of C. S. Lewis is the terror of divine love. It's not cruel in the sense of causing pain for fun, but the absolute mercilessness of making Orual read her own real complaint. In the presence of the divine you see yourself as you really are and that's so scary, even for characters less self-deceiving and self-absorbed than Orual.

From:

cahn

(I love the part where she dismisses her entire reign in, like, a page. Oh yeah, I conquered some territory and made peace and enacted good laws and built bridges and my people will be singing my praises for centuries after I'm dead like Good Queen Bess, but whatever, Psyche didn't love me best.)

haha, I love that too! Only I guess I thought at the end that this was a strength, because once she can get through understanding Psyche's love, maybe she can give herself credit for the rest of it (both her reign and the other love in her life).

One of the things that struck me in my recent reread of C. S. Lewis is the terror of divine love. It's not cruel in the sense of causing pain for fun, but the absolute mercilessness of making Orual read her own real complaint. In the presence of the divine you see yourself as you really are and that's so scary, even for characters less self-deceiving and self-absorbed than Orual.

Ohhhhh, yeah, I really like this observation. (While the actual concept terrifies me. I know I've got my own self-absorption spots for sure!)

From:

osprey_archer

Oh I am absolutely with Lewis on the thought that being confronted, simultaneously, with Absolute Goodness and a crystal-clear understanding of my own character would be soul-searing. Maybe I don't want to see myself that clearly! Maybe none of us do!

From:

sovay

In the presence of the divine you see yourself as you really are and that's so scary, even for characters less self-deceiving and self-absorbed than Orual.

Liam Gavin's A Dark Song (2016), which I saw shortly after it came out and never managed to write about, actually pulls off a version of this onscreen which is both horror and eucatastrophe and really impresses me, because I am not a big fan of horror which relies on theology in general.

From:

skygiants

There's a bit towards the end that absolutely kills me when the Fox is going downhill, frequently muttering names that Orual doesn't recognize that are clearly his children, and then Orual is casually like 'but I didn't have that much time to spend with him anymore.' Orual! Orual!

But I also love the postscript at the end that

cahn mentions when someone picks up her book and adds the final note about how beloved she was and how much good she did; you can't trust Orual on Orual, and the more she's sure she's being grimly clear-eyed the less trustworthy she is on the topic. That's probably my favorite thing about the ending, honestly. (My least favorite thing about the ending, speaking of the Fox, is that Lewis has to bring the Fox back in, too, to tell Orual about how he was wrong about everything -- must you? He might have been right! Or at least, I would have liked better the book in which the Fox might have been right, although I understand that Lewis can't allow it.)

But you are right about the terror of it, and the way he makes you feel it.

From:

osprey_archer

ORUAL maybe you should have made time to spend with your oldest friend and confidant and the chief advisor of your reign AS HE DIED? ORUAL. ORUAL. (And of course this circles back to her feeling of being unloved: in some ways it's a reflection of the ways that she's unloving...)

Lewis of course believes he is giving the Fox a happy ending. I did like that Orual got to meet at least one of her old friends after her eyes had been opened, and it's hard to see how it could have been Psyche or Bardia (God, just imagine the potential awkwardness of that meeting with Bardia), because it's nice to see her truly experiencing love and friendship without all these veils of bitterness and self-deceit... but yeah, the circumstance of the meeting pretty much mean that the Fox has to concede that WOW he got some things wrong, huh. Which collapses the ambivalence that is so powerful in the rest of the book.

From:

lirazel

I love everything about this comment.

From:

ellen_fremedon

Oh dear. I haven't read any Lewis since Narnia betrayed me, but cut to the quick by the fact that the people they've decided to love as they retreat from a meaningless world have committed the unforgivable sin of deciding -- against all odds and evidence! -- that there might in fact be something in the world worth believing in is VERY much one of my character types, and this sounds very tempting. (As does the Le Carré, which I might also need to try.)

(My instantiation of that type is Grantaire, who otherwise seems to have zero in common with Orual, but. That thing! That is the thing he does.)

From:

skygiants

yessss I would recommend the experience of reading them back to back, honestly! It's one of those accidental wine pairings that enhanced both in ways I would not have expected.

(yesss I love Grantaire and he does do this but also the opposite of this, the thing that Orual does in specific; Grantaire follows, yearning to find a way into that belief by proxy, whereas Psyche invites Orual to follow and Orual only wants to drag her out of it. And Tim ... well, spoilers. Running between the poles.)

From:

cahn

ohhhhh I love this book so much and I love Orual SO MUCH. SO MUCH.

I love what an incredibly unreliable narrator Orual is, and in such a human and complex way too. There's the anger and the defiance against the gods, which is the biggest piece of it, but also things like how complicated her relationship with Bardia is (in a way that she understands better when talking to his wife after his death). But maybe my favorite is the very end postscript where, after she gets beat up about Being Wrong about Divine Love -- I forget the character who writes it, but the bit where he is like "Orual was TOTALLY AWESOME, don't read Orual's manuscript and get the wrong idea!!" and I feel like that opens up this whole other world of -- well, Lewis might call it grace; the idea that we might have done all right, after all, even through all our flaws and wrongheadedness. <3

From:

skygiants

Yes, I have arguments with the ending but that postscript is my favorite thing about the book -- this one little glimpse into a head that isn't Orual's, another way of telling her story, and in the opposite direction from the twisted version of the story that she hears at the end of Part One that kicks the whole book off. The last third is so much about her castigating herself for the things that she left out or misunderstood, in the least self-charitable way, and it's so vitally important to see the things she did get right, and the way that that sublimity of spirit you can't help but admire in her showed through. Grace, as you say.

From:

happydork

When I saw you link this on twitter I read it as "today I learned we have faces" and that has coloured my reading of your review delightfully

From:

skygiants

I am a lifelong learner! :D

From:

lirazel

I love this book so much. I was terrified to revisit it after drifting away from Christianity for fear that it wouldn't still work for me, but it does. I mean, yes, there are moments when you're confronted by our man Jack being himself too much, but like, god, how did he write that character???? Orual!!!!

From:

skygiants

I was saying earlier that if you gave me this book and asked me to guess who wrote it, I wouldn't have had a chance of guessing until Psyche's conversation with Orual after she's learned she's to be sacrificed -- and even then I might have had to stumble around for a while. I truly don't know how he managed it, but I'm so glad he did!

From:

chestnut_pod

What woman can have patience with the man who can yet be deceived by his doxy's fawning after he has thrice proved her false? I should be just like such a man if a mere burst of fair weather, and fresh grass after a long drought, and health after sickness could make me friends again with this god-haunted, plague-breeding, decaying, tyrannous world. I had seen. I was not a fool. I did not know then, however, as I do now, the strongest reason for distrust. The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us.

This is just a beautiful set of sentences, wow.