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.