Till We Have Faces: The Fulfillment of All Heroic Journeys

We hear the sentiment “It isn’t real, it’s just fantasy” floated a lot these days, even by novelists themselves. Today, I want to consider how people more intelligent than I relate to the hero’s journey to show that stories are not merely a form of entertainment but actually impact how we live. As a prime example, we’ll examine C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces.

But first, what’s the big deal about the hero’s journey? Isn’t it “just fantasy”? Does it really influence how we live?

According to Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, and a PhD folklorist, the hero’s journey does indeed influence how we live.

The Hero’s Journey

Jordan Peterson on the hero’s journey

Jordan Peterson has been talking a lot about how people are nested in stories and how being nested in stories is part of something like evolution’s meaning-making mechanism. It is not merely necessary for survival but integral to living a life that offers consolation in the midst of suffering. Part of how we make sense of suffering, says Peterson, depends on our ability to locate ourselves or those around us within the storytelling structure of the hero’s journey. 

Jonathan Pageau on the hero’s journey 

Jonathan Pageau also has repeatedly talked about the fact that the hero’s journey and its essentially cyclical or repetitive nature is a reflection of reality as reality actually is. In other words, it is not merely a convention passed down from generation to generation, but rather a structure that reflects how the world lays itself out. So when you watch or read a well-done hero’s journey, you experience wholeness: you are taken out of yourself and are able to experience the world not as you see it (which is necessarily very limited), but as the world actually is. 

A PhD folklorist on the hero’s journey

As a third example from a completely different perspective, I recently spoke with someone who has a PhD in folklore and took issue with my emphasis on the hero’s journey. He said most folklorists consider Joseph Campbell’s presentation of the hero’s journey to be not universal but rather limited to a small subset of largely Western stories. Further, he said that it is problematic because it preferences one kind of tradition that is “colonizing” and Western. He added that some people, particularly young men of a certain stripe, can imbibe too much of the hero’s journey wine and become toxic. Rather than seeing himself as the hero actually is (someone who travels through increasing cycles of disaster and comes to a resolution through a power outside himself), this type of reader can become self-assertive and hurt innocent people around him. 

(In response, I did acknowledge that, on a cultural level, Russia seeing itself as a spiritual hero in its struggle with the West has led to a very dangerous worldview in which the death of innocent civilians is largely papered over as something necessary for a holy cause. I don’t believe this, but there are plenty of people in Russia who do.)

What’s interesting about this third perspective is that, though the folklorist objects to the hero’s journey, he does not dismiss it as “just fantasy.” Rather, he sees it as a story with enormous power.

Till We Have Faces

As you can see from the examples above, stories do matter. Even if people dismiss stories as “just fantasy” and therefore “not real”, the way that people on all sides of the ideological spectrum talk about stories suggest that they agree on one point: the reality of storytelling structures has a much higher importance than perhaps we’re willing to admit. 

This struck me as I was finishing Till We Have Faces. C.S. Lewis is doing something very powerful in this, his most difficult novel. His previous novels (Narnia and the space trilogy) are very clear in their apologetics. They aren’t propaganda, but the author’s position is clear. 

On the surface, however, the author’s position in Till We Have Faces is not so obvious. This story is very profound and difficult. It is effectively a palimpsest (a parchment that has been layered over multiple times with new writing). It has many layers of meaning, very much like the image in The Last Battle in which Aslan’s country is likened to the unpeeling of an onion in which each successive layer is larger, not smaller, than the one before.  

Becoming Human

This story is about what it means to become human. Of course, all stories are about what it means to become human, but in Till We Have Faces, this theme is conscious. Both Orual’s story and Pyshe’s story are applicable and relevant to readers from all backgrounds. 

Through these two characters, we follow two kinds of journeys, which happen simultaneously, one being in the foreground and the other in the background. This is a really difficult authorial technique. 

(As a side note, this technique is done really well in Jane Austen’s Emma, where the author’s sympathies are not with Emma but rather subtly criticize and make fun of her. Actually, you can argue that the real heroine of the story is Jane Fairfax, whose entire romance with Frank Churchill is apparent almost entirely in subtext.)

The same happens in Till We Have Faces. Orual is on a hero’s journey, and her story is in the foreground, but Psyche is on the heroine’s journey, and her story is in the background. Both journeys culminate in the glorious final scene. What Lewis is telling us in this scene is that it doesn’t matter what your journey is: you might have to go through a hero’s journey, and you might have to go through a heroine’s journey. These are very different kinds of human experiences. But ultimately, according to Lewis, it doesn’t matter which journey you take because in the fulfillment of both, there’s something that is universally human and very beautiful. 

Let’s examine each journey individually.

Orual: The Hero’s Journey

Orual is not a traditional hero: she isn’t chosen, and she doesn’t get a call to adventure from a mentor, at least not in the traditional sense. She does, however, go through many of the beats of a hero’s journey. 

Call to Adventure

Throughout most of the book, Orual plays a passive role to the more interesting, beautiful, intelligent, and profound character of her sister Psyche. When Psyche leaves the scene, Orual has to take charge of her own life, and she has to do so in a fairly masculine way. 

(I should note that these prototypical journeys are not inherently gender specific. The hero’s journey can be undertaken by a man or a woman, and the same goes for the heroine’s journey. This is just the technical terminology.)

Assuming One’s Destiny and Overcoming Tests

Orual is a hero because she has to take her destiny into her own control through a difficult series of tests. The first is a literal battle with a neighboring prince who endangers her kingdom. She wins, but her victory leads to the second challenge of having to become a strong, independent ruler in a largely masculine mode: she rules as kings would have done in her historical setting, which is pre-Roman and faintly Babylonian. 

An Apparent Victory and The Dark Night of the Soul

She plays this role to perfection but then realizes that all of her life was a sham. This is the dark night of the soul that every hero must go through, and it is preceded by an apparent victory; in Orual’s case, this victory is that she thinks she has overcome the central problem of her life–her great sadness over losing Psyche.

Eucatastrophe by Divine Intervention

But when Orual encounters her life in a fairy tale fashion, she’s forced to face the fact that the way she has seen her life has been a lie. She is wrong about everything. She has to go through a transformation, through an underworld represented by a series of visions until she comes to the conclusion through a eucatastrophic intervention from divine agents. 

She reaches the end of her journey by being transformed physically. She sees a reflection of herself as a beautiful, slightly different version of her sister Psyche, then dies having fulfilled the purpose of the hero’s journey: to come back to one’s community and infuse it with one’s own transformation. 

The novel ends with a report from the chief priest of the goddess Ungit, who lets the reader know that, contrary to Orual’s perception and despite her personal failings, she was a universally loved ruler.

Psyche: The Heroine’s Journey

On the other hand, Psyche’s journey is reflective of Persephone’s journey, which is the archetypal heroine’s journey.

Losing Family

The heroine’s journey starts with the loss of something dear, usually family. In Psyche’s case, she also loses her home and her love. She is forced to wander the earth, and she changes her aspect by veiling her beauty in black.

Impossible Tasks and Found Family

She is then forced to undertake a series of impossible tasks assigned by the Venus analog, the goddess Ungit. Whereas the hero has to go out on their own into the wilderness to complete these tasks, Psyche undertakes these tasks with the help of found family attracted to her through her innocence and beauty. In this case, the found family is actually her sister Orual, who is given the opportunity to bear the pain and difficulty of Psyche’s plight through waking visions.

The Restoration

At the end of the heroine’s journey, there’s a restoration of what was lost. This happens in a less triumphant manner than the hero’s journey and is usually accompanied by a degree of compromise and moral ambivalence. It’s a happy ending, but it still bears the fruits of bitterness that were present at the beginning. 

The Resolution of Both Journeys

In Till We Have Faces, both journeys are unresolved on some level. The hero returns home and then there’s an assumed transformation of the community, but we don’t see it. The heroine’s journey requires a degree of compromise. Both journeys reflect reality. Both tropes are fraught with the tragedy of the human condition. There is no ultimate happy ending without a eucatastrophe that is largely outside the realm of the story itself.

There is really compelling evidence to believe that the deeper we enter into storytelling realms, the more they affect our everyday lives. The kinds of stories we read, the kinds of audiobooks we listen to, and the kinds of movies we watch do have a palpable influence on how we live, how we see ourselves, and how we interact with others. 

Lewis understood this power of storytelling and how it can transform lives. What he’s doing at the end of Till We Have Faces is offering a way out of both the hero and heroine’s journeys that is transcendent through an encounter with the divine. 

Interacting with the Divine

Orual consistently fights off the divine, playing the role of the angry atheist. Psyche, on the other hand, is almost too eager, too gullible, and too happy in her experience of the divine, especially before she is married to the god of the mountain. She is almost naive in her expectation that the divine will always have our best interest at heart in the sense that this best interest results in our happiness in this life. 

Both Orual and Psyche are found to be wrong. And both come to realize that 

1. The way the divine and human interact in this world is primarily through pain, and 

2. This pain is actually both good and inevitable, because it is the pain of acquiring a face. 

Usually when we think of encountering the transcendent, we think of taking off layers to get to the true layer underneath, but here Orual is like the blank face of a stone. Her true aspect needs to be carved out of the rock, and the only one who can carve it is the god of love. Of course, that process in a rock that is living is going to be excruciatingly painful. 

But once Orual passes through the pain, and once Psyche passes through the difficulty of her trials, they both come to see themselves in the reflection of the lake in the country of the gods, and they are both far more human and far more beautiful than they ever were in life. 

The Ultimate Fulfillment of the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey

This is the ultimate fulfillment of both the hero’s journey and the heroine’s journey. Often when we encounter these journeys in literature, they can only take us to a certain point before we’re left again to our own devices, left to figure out our own lives, left to repeat the cycles again and again and again.

But Till We Have Faces is reminding us that the ultimate end of these journeys is a fulfillment, a catharsis, a way out of the constant cycle found in an unveiling and an unmediated encounter with the divine that can be partially experienced here on earth. 

That is C.S. Lewis’s message, and it is beautiful for all readers, no matter their belief, because it is realistic and honest. Too often, people of all faiths and traditions tend to see the divine as something that is benevolent and smiling at us at all times. Then, when catastrophe comes, we look up to the heavens with surprise and pain and say, “Why, God, aren’t you good to us?” Even atheists do this.

It’s naive to think that the divine, as it is manifested in our world, is always out for our pleasure. Oftentimes, the way it encounters us, because of its surpassing transcendence and our limitation as humans, will necessarily be one of pain. But we must pass through the pain, because through that passage we acquire faces. That is a profoundly beautiful thought.

I would like you to consider this as you continue to read good stories, because these stories do help us deal with the harsh realities of our lives. Whatever we pass through, the stories remind us that pain helps us acquire a face.