. . . for I was old enough to know that a man. . . can find comfort in words coming out of his own mouth. ( Till We Have Faces, p.86)
Several times as I read “Till We Have Faces,” the beginning of Rilke’s Duino Elegies came to mind. Here is the beginning of the poem:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
Rainer Maria Rilke, from the first “Duino Elegies”
Looking back at my markings in “Till We Have Faces,” I could only quickly find two times specifically when I thought of this poem. Here they are:
Till We Have Faces
(p.112):
Sister, do you think young gods have to be taught to handle us? A hasty touch from hands like theirs and we’d fall to pieces.
(p. 307):
The God comes to Judge Orual.
If Psyche had not held me by the hand I should have sunk down. She had brought me now to the very edge of the pool. The air was growing brighter and brighter about us; as if something had set it on fire. Each breath I drew let into me new terror, joy, overpowering sweetness. I was pierced through and through with arrows of it. I was being unmade.
Not that I think Lewis was quoting from Rilke, I just found the parallels interesting. The destruction of the self when in contact with god/beauty/angels. And it is terrifying to stand on the abyss and realize that we are a rather insignificant moment in time.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
Anosognosia
I finished "Till We Have Faces" a few days ago.
First Reaction
“the primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry’s view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.” (Ian McEwan, Saturday, p.17).
A fairly straightforward mechanical reflection on the binary nature of faith/belief/god and rationality/reality/”greek thinking.” It ends, rather predictably from the start with the solution to the binary being “god is the answer,” which I feel is kind of a cop out: “I can’t figure it out so there must be something greater than what can be thought out there who can figure it out.” The assumption being is that there is an answer, and that the search for an answer isn’t enough. There must be some end point, in time (end of the world/our selves), but without the ability to accept that end point without some way to get out of it (all united in the godhead after death which is life everlasting).
Other aspects of interest:
* Storytelling, and who gets to tell the story. Psyche’s story told by the priest in contrast to Oural’s version in the book. Additionally her view of her relationship with Bardia and Bardia’s wife’s version. “I must try at any cost to write what is wholly true. Yet it is hard to know perfectly what I was thinking while those huge, silent moments went pst. Byu remembering it too often I have blurred the memorey itself.” (C.S. Lewis, p.117).
An unreflective self caught up in what is true, without questioning the ground on which you stand.
“How restful it must have once been, in another age, to be prosperous and believe that an all knowing supernatural force had allotted people to their stations in life. And not see how the belief served your own prosperity - - a form of anosognosia, a useful psychiatric term for a lack of awareness of one’s own condition.” (Ian Mcwan, Saturday, p.74).
* Eros telling Orual that she is Psyche as a punishment. Then the consequent unfolding of Orual not being aware (blinded, not able to see) of the love of Bardia, the Fox, Redival, and how their love for her crushed out aspects of them. Orual became the devourer. “Some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing.” (C.S. Lewis, p.49).
First Reaction
“the primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry’s view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.” (Ian McEwan, Saturday, p.17).
A fairly straightforward mechanical reflection on the binary nature of faith/belief/god and rationality/reality/”greek thinking.” It ends, rather predictably from the start with the solution to the binary being “god is the answer,” which I feel is kind of a cop out: “I can’t figure it out so there must be something greater than what can be thought out there who can figure it out.” The assumption being is that there is an answer, and that the search for an answer isn’t enough. There must be some end point, in time (end of the world/our selves), but without the ability to accept that end point without some way to get out of it (all united in the godhead after death which is life everlasting).
Other aspects of interest:
* Storytelling, and who gets to tell the story. Psyche’s story told by the priest in contrast to Oural’s version in the book. Additionally her view of her relationship with Bardia and Bardia’s wife’s version. “I must try at any cost to write what is wholly true. Yet it is hard to know perfectly what I was thinking while those huge, silent moments went pst. Byu remembering it too often I have blurred the memorey itself.” (C.S. Lewis, p.117).
An unreflective self caught up in what is true, without questioning the ground on which you stand.
“How restful it must have once been, in another age, to be prosperous and believe that an all knowing supernatural force had allotted people to their stations in life. And not see how the belief served your own prosperity - - a form of anosognosia, a useful psychiatric term for a lack of awareness of one’s own condition.” (Ian Mcwan, Saturday, p.74).
* Eros telling Orual that she is Psyche as a punishment. Then the consequent unfolding of Orual not being aware (blinded, not able to see) of the love of Bardia, the Fox, Redival, and how their love for her crushed out aspects of them. Orual became the devourer. “Some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing.” (C.S. Lewis, p.49).
Monday, May 11, 2009
Appetizers
Here are some links I found the other night concerning "Till We Have Faces:"
http://www.spectrummagazine.org/reviews/book_reviews/2009/02/17/lewiss_favorite_till_we_have_faces
This one is a review of C.S. Lewis "Till We Have Faces."
It comes from an interesting site if you back up to spectrummagazine.org
Additionally here are two more sites that were interesting enough to pass along. Just something to keep you engaged while you wait for the book to arrive.
http://www.montreat.edu/dking/lewis/TILWEHAV.htm
http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=12321
Till We Have Faces, Introduction
... Lifted from "Bareface" ... an analysis of TWHF I once read:
Far and away the best I have written”—this is how Lewis described
Till We Have Faces, or, as he originally titled it, “Bareface.”
He added ruefully, “That book… has been my one big failure both
with the critics and with the public” (Let, 492).
Certainly Till We Have Faces is a radical departure from the beautiful
fantasies and religious teaching that loyal readers are accustomed
to associate with Lewis. The reader who picks it up expecting
a mental holiday in a strange and wonderful place like Narnia—or
Perelandra, for that matter—instead finds a squalid little “kingdom”
where two “princesses” play in the barnyard, sliding on the
frozen urine of the domestic animals. Similarly, the reader who
expects witty, poetic, inspiring arguments for Christianity will be
disappointed. Orual, the narrator and main character, was born
before Christianity existed. She alternates between cynical disbelief
in her tribal religion and hatred for its gods. Her opening lines are
quarrelsome and abrasive; many people read no further.
Other people love the novel and read it over and over; for a few,
it is not just Lewis's best novel, but the only one they enjoy. It would
be arrogant and schoolteacherish of me to define why others love
this book, but I can speak for myself. From the first, I became deeply
involved in Orual's personality and experience. She is so ugly, and
so ashamed of her ugliness, that she wears a veil; she never goes
bareface. She is angry. In her father's eyes, she is a worthless female,
not even marriageable. She is frustrated with the narrowness of her
environment, the barbarian kingdom of Glome. She loses the love
of her life, her half-sister Psyche. She will never have a man of her
own or be a real wife and mother. It is not that these specific things
happened to me, but that my experience has the emotional resonance
of hers.
It also has the emotional resonance of Lewis's experience. In his
nonfiction books about Christianity, and especially in his letters,
Lewis seems very frank, very open; those who read these writings
come to feel that he is a personal friend. Yet there is something hidden
about him. He refused to go bareface, so successfully that one
friend commented that his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, should
have been entitled, “Suppressed by Jack.” In Orual we see much of
the real Jack Lewis—his loss of his mother, his disrespect for his
father, his desire for closeness, his struggles with disbelief. Again,
although Orual's experiences are quite different from his, they ring
true. Something similar happened to him.
It is Lewis's last novel, and in some sense he worked on it all his
life. He first read the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius's
Roman novel, The Golden Ass, when he was eighteen. After World
War I, as an undergraduate at Oxford, he tried twice to write his
own version of the story, “once in couplets and once in ballad
form” (AMR, 266). As he wrote to one friend, “So, though the version
you have read was very quickly written, you might say I've
been at work on Orual for 35 years. Of course in my pre-Christian
days she was to be in the right and the gods in the wrong.”2 From
the beginning his attention centered on the elder sister as narrator,
but her motivations became more complex as Lewis matured. For
example, in the poetic versions she was not jealous, but simply
unable to see Psyche's palace. In the mature version, she was not
only unable to see the palace, but also blinded by jealousy. And in
his remark about his pre-Christian assessment of Orual we see why
the novel consists of two parts, the story as Orual first experienced
it, and then the same story retold.
Far and away the best I have written”—this is how Lewis described
Till We Have Faces, or, as he originally titled it, “Bareface.”
He added ruefully, “That book… has been my one big failure both
with the critics and with the public” (Let, 492).
Certainly Till We Have Faces is a radical departure from the beautiful
fantasies and religious teaching that loyal readers are accustomed
to associate with Lewis. The reader who picks it up expecting
a mental holiday in a strange and wonderful place like Narnia—or
Perelandra, for that matter—instead finds a squalid little “kingdom”
where two “princesses” play in the barnyard, sliding on the
frozen urine of the domestic animals. Similarly, the reader who
expects witty, poetic, inspiring arguments for Christianity will be
disappointed. Orual, the narrator and main character, was born
before Christianity existed. She alternates between cynical disbelief
in her tribal religion and hatred for its gods. Her opening lines are
quarrelsome and abrasive; many people read no further.
Other people love the novel and read it over and over; for a few,
it is not just Lewis's best novel, but the only one they enjoy. It would
be arrogant and schoolteacherish of me to define why others love
this book, but I can speak for myself. From the first, I became deeply
involved in Orual's personality and experience. She is so ugly, and
so ashamed of her ugliness, that she wears a veil; she never goes
bareface. She is angry. In her father's eyes, she is a worthless female,
not even marriageable. She is frustrated with the narrowness of her
environment, the barbarian kingdom of Glome. She loses the love
of her life, her half-sister Psyche. She will never have a man of her
own or be a real wife and mother. It is not that these specific things
happened to me, but that my experience has the emotional resonance
of hers.
It also has the emotional resonance of Lewis's experience. In his
nonfiction books about Christianity, and especially in his letters,
Lewis seems very frank, very open; those who read these writings
come to feel that he is a personal friend. Yet there is something hidden
about him. He refused to go bareface, so successfully that one
friend commented that his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, should
have been entitled, “Suppressed by Jack.” In Orual we see much of
the real Jack Lewis—his loss of his mother, his disrespect for his
father, his desire for closeness, his struggles with disbelief. Again,
although Orual's experiences are quite different from his, they ring
true. Something similar happened to him.
It is Lewis's last novel, and in some sense he worked on it all his
life. He first read the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius's
Roman novel, The Golden Ass, when he was eighteen. After World
War I, as an undergraduate at Oxford, he tried twice to write his
own version of the story, “once in couplets and once in ballad
form” (AMR, 266). As he wrote to one friend, “So, though the version
you have read was very quickly written, you might say I've
been at work on Orual for 35 years. Of course in my pre-Christian
days she was to be in the right and the gods in the wrong.”2 From
the beginning his attention centered on the elder sister as narrator,
but her motivations became more complex as Lewis matured. For
example, in the poetic versions she was not jealous, but simply
unable to see Psyche's palace. In the mature version, she was not
only unable to see the palace, but also blinded by jealousy. And in
his remark about his pre-Christian assessment of Orual we see why
the novel consists of two parts, the story as Orual first experienced
it, and then the same story retold.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Metonymy Not Fragments
“Richard Rorty suggests that ‘ solidarity has to be constructed out of little pieces, rather than found already waiting, in the form of an ur-language which all of us recognize when we hear it.’ (Bhabha p. 336)
Foucault suggests that the sign of modernity is a form of decipherment whose value must be sought in petit recits, imperceptible events in signs apparently without meaning and value - - empty and eccentric - - in events that are outside the ‘great events’ of history. (Bhabha p. 348).
“. . . the figure of the ‘human’ comes to be authorized.” (Bhabha p. 339)
For years, and since I am 49 years old I mean decades, I have sensed that there is something to be found in the minutia of life which when pieced together allowed a meaning to unfold which provided a deeper understanding of the world than one would expect. I will show you fear “in a handful of dust,” as Eliot pontificated. Or Blake’s more positive eternity in a grain of sand. And this might be a mundane story, but then that is the point: When I was in elementary school, I felt there was some kind of grand meaning maker (a godlike creature) because whenever we were studying something in class, like Greek Gods, or looking at how prisms fragmented light into rainbows, then somewhere else in the world I would see the same thing or something similar. On TV there would be a show about the Gods (Clash of the Titans kind of thing) or I would notice in “The Golden Book Encyclopedias” my parents had bought for us a picture of Newton with a prism, so I would read the entry on Newton. The godlike creature I have come to realize was me. (No, I am not being narssisistic; yes I know I have that tendancy). It was just my brain taking notice of the patterns presented to it. The brain is a pattern seeking organ; and mine was working just fine at the time. I was beginning to piece together the meaning of my world with what I had at hand: a bricoluer to use a fancy academic word.
It is in the small events; the atoms and molecules that slip through the membrane seperating one space from another, where the meaning, the difference, occurs. The cumulative whole of the details create the meaning, not neccessarily the frame of the “great events of history” although that as well can be seen as one of the petit recits. Although in many ways it is the great events that become the dominant force through which we, as individuals and as a culture, become (in that incredibly violent expression) authorized. We are written into existance by the empty and eccentric signs that we read; a language that no one speaks but ‘which all of us recognize when we hear it.’ And it is this ur-language we (italics mine) all recognize that is the third space, it is neither created by us or upon us as individuals or hegemonic culture onto the colonial (interpreted) culture, but rather it is all of the bits, all of the atoms, and quarks and Clash of the Titans and pictures of Newton in interaction with one another where the Location of Culture resides. “Every atom of me is an atom of you,” -- Walt Whitman.
Foucault suggests that the sign of modernity is a form of decipherment whose value must be sought in petit recits, imperceptible events in signs apparently without meaning and value - - empty and eccentric - - in events that are outside the ‘great events’ of history. (Bhabha p. 348).
“. . . the figure of the ‘human’ comes to be authorized.” (Bhabha p. 339)
For years, and since I am 49 years old I mean decades, I have sensed that there is something to be found in the minutia of life which when pieced together allowed a meaning to unfold which provided a deeper understanding of the world than one would expect. I will show you fear “in a handful of dust,” as Eliot pontificated. Or Blake’s more positive eternity in a grain of sand. And this might be a mundane story, but then that is the point: When I was in elementary school, I felt there was some kind of grand meaning maker (a godlike creature) because whenever we were studying something in class, like Greek Gods, or looking at how prisms fragmented light into rainbows, then somewhere else in the world I would see the same thing or something similar. On TV there would be a show about the Gods (Clash of the Titans kind of thing) or I would notice in “The Golden Book Encyclopedias” my parents had bought for us a picture of Newton with a prism, so I would read the entry on Newton. The godlike creature I have come to realize was me. (No, I am not being narssisistic; yes I know I have that tendancy). It was just my brain taking notice of the patterns presented to it. The brain is a pattern seeking organ; and mine was working just fine at the time. I was beginning to piece together the meaning of my world with what I had at hand: a bricoluer to use a fancy academic word.
It is in the small events; the atoms and molecules that slip through the membrane seperating one space from another, where the meaning, the difference, occurs. The cumulative whole of the details create the meaning, not neccessarily the frame of the “great events of history” although that as well can be seen as one of the petit recits. Although in many ways it is the great events that become the dominant force through which we, as individuals and as a culture, become (in that incredibly violent expression) authorized. We are written into existance by the empty and eccentric signs that we read; a language that no one speaks but ‘which all of us recognize when we hear it.’ And it is this ur-language we (italics mine) all recognize that is the third space, it is neither created by us or upon us as individuals or hegemonic culture onto the colonial (interpreted) culture, but rather it is all of the bits, all of the atoms, and quarks and Clash of the Titans and pictures of Newton in interaction with one another where the Location of Culture resides. “Every atom of me is an atom of you,” -- Walt Whitman.
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