“Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words.”
― Till We Have Faces
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Transform Memory into Immediate Experience Through Narrative Technique
Novelist or memoir writer, there is much about truth and the truth of being human (to include the smallness we refuse to see), to be learned by Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis. In it lies the essence of what we are doing here at The Blackbird Studio (or trying to do) which is to transform good writers into great authors through lessons that challenge them to explore the moral and philosophical depths of literature. We attempt to guide writers to create stories that resonate with timeless human truths and values. We unveil not just the writers literary voice, but the higher purpose as storytellers in a complex world.
We’ve stumbled upon a writer and a thinker who has arrived at that destination. In this teaching, lets examine how!
Memoir-as-accusation
Enter Orual, our heroine, who begins writing what she believes is a righteous complaint against the gods, essentially saying, “Let me show everyone how unfair the gods have been to me.” But through the very act of writing her testimony, she becomes her own prosecutor. Lewis masterfully uses this format to show how our narratives about ourselves unravel when we’re forced to tell them completely and honestly.
Orual starts as the seemingly reasonable skeptic – why won’t the gods show themselves clearly? Why must they be so mysterious? Why did they take Psyche from her? Her complaint feels legitimate, even modern in its rationality. But as she writes, cracks appear in her own story. Her “love” for Psyche begins to look more like possession and her “rationality” reveals itself as a shield against truths she doesn’t want to face creating a devastating portrayal of how we can be utterly convinced of our own righteousness while being blind to our true motives.
What makes Lewis’s approach so powerful is that Orual’s revelation doesn’t come through a voice from heaven or a dramatic supernatural event (though those elements exist in the story). Instead, it comes through the simple, brutal process of having to write her story down completely. It’s like what happens in therapy or confession – the mere act of having to put our grievances into words often reveals their hollow places. The key moment comes when Orual realizes: “When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years…you’ll find that you had already spoken it, and hadn’t heard yourself.” This captures how divine truth often works – not by overwhelming our reason, but by letting us hear ourselves clearly for the first time.
A few other memoir-as-accusation examples from the past century:
- Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky (slightly over 100 years but hugely influential on the genre)
- The Fall by Albert Camus – where the narrator’s confession in an Amsterdam bar becomes an indictment of both himself and society
- Pale Fire by Nabokov – where Charles Kinbote’s commentary on a poem becomes an unwitting self-revelation
- Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth – structured as a monologue to a psychiatrist that becomes self-incriminating
- The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro – where Stevens’ attempt to justify his life choices gradually reveals their tragic flaws
Writing in scene:
Faces is written in what’s called retrospective first-person. We saw this in Jane Eyre and in David Copperfield. That is, a narrator looking back. “Reader, I married him.” And like both those books, Faces seems, upon first reading, to be largely told but look closer. Lewis, like Bronte and Dicken’s actually keeps to scene through Orual’s consciousness. It feels like “telling” because she’s ostensibly writing it down after the fact, but the reader actually experiences the events moment by moment through her perceptions and realizations. His scenes are vivid and immediate, even as Lewis shoves the reader deep in Orual’s consciousness. This technique allows the reader to begin to see the patterns she can’t see, even as she’s writing about them. For example her repeated insistence that she’s acting out of pure love for Psyche becomes more and more suspect precisely because we’re so close to her thought process. For instance, the scene where she visits Psyche on the mountain. We’re not getting a distant retelling – we’re right there with her confusion, her inability to see the palace, her growing horror and conviction that Psyche has gone mad. We feel her rationalistic mind trying to make sense of what’s happening, even as her deeper fears and possessive love are driving her reactions.
“I looked at the valley. There was no palace. The rough, steep bank of the Mountain, with its rocky walls and leafy crannies, rose up before me. What I had taken for fair courts and pillared halls might, I now saw, be quite ordinary combes and clefts in the moonlit stone.”
The present-tense narrating Orual lets us experience both what she saw then and her interpretation of it. She’s remembering, but we’re right there with her, seeing through her eyes. The tension between what she sees and what Psyche sees becomes immediate and painful.
Then there’s this devastating moment: “Psyche,” I said, taking her hand. “Feel the grass. Press it with your feet. You see? It’s all damp. There’s been a mountain fog. That’s what you’ve mistaken for your palace walls.”
The intimacy here is crushing. We feel Orual’s desperate need to make Psyche see “reality” even as we begin to suspect that Orual might be the one who can’t see truly. But what makes this even more complex is how the older Orual, writing this account, starts to see new layers in her own memory. Late in the book, she realizes: “I saw myself rising from my bed, saw my face (that same thin face) in the mirror, saw the room all golden with curtains… But now I know that I had never tasted real joy. All that I had experienced had been no more than a kind of scratching on the surface of my soul.”
We see both the young Orual’s experience and the older Orual’s new understanding of that experience. The narration maintains scene-level intimacy while simultaneously showing how memory itself becomes a path to self-knowledge.
Perhaps most powerful is when she finally confronts her own true motives: “I was a craver. My love for Psyche had been more like hunger… We say it is natural in us to love the gods and seek their company. The Priest and the Fox both said this. But that kind of love was not at all what I felt.”
Even in this moment of terrible self-recognition, we’re still in intimate narration. We’re with her as she discovers these truths about herself through the very act of writing her complaint. Such passages show how masterfully Lewis handles what we might call “double vision” in that the reader gets both the immediate experience AND the revelatory understanding through memory and writing. It’s like watching someone read their old diary and suddenly seeing what they couldn’t see when they wrote it.
Side bar: That final passage about being “a craver” is one of the most honest descriptions of possessive love I’ve ever encountered in literature. The way Orual finally sees her “love” for what it was (hunger rather than love) is devastating precisely because we’ve been so close to her justifications throughout.
What’s particularly brilliant is how he maintains dramatic tension even though we know Orual survives to write this. The real suspense isn’t in what happens, but in what she will come to understand about what happened. So to the original list in Part I, we can add psychological and spiritual thriller.
🧐 PONDER:
- Where in your story could the act of writing/telling itself become the vehicle for your character’s self-discovery? What truths might emerge through this process?
- How can you use ‘double vision’ narration (past experience + present understanding) to reveal your character’s growth while maintaining scene-level immediacy?
- What scenes in your story could benefit from allowing memory to act as both narrator and revealer? How might this deepen your character’s journey toward truth?
BONUS: This book could be required reading for every would-be memoirist, and even a re-read requirement at the final draft in order to really see, clearly, any holes in your own accusations, rationalizations, delusions and expectations. Could you, possibly, be able to rise through the muck of the story you’ve lived to reach another peak? Lewis’ work offers us that staircase to climb. Give it some thought.
In Sum
We’ve explored how Lewis crafted what he considered his finest work. Part I revealed the theological architecture of Till We Have Faces through its unique “Rebellion Against The One” plot structure, its sophisticated use of value lines, and its profound spiritual underpinnings. Part II then showed us how Lewis implemented these grand themes through masterful technical choices – using the memoir-as-accusation format and sophisticated scene work to create what amounts to a double-visioned narrative. The genius of Faces lies in how these elements work together: the plot structure provides the framework for spiritual transformation, while the narrative techniques make that transformation immediate and visceral. Through Orual’s journey from accusation to understanding, Lewis demonstrates how literary craft can serve the highest aims of storytelling – not just to entertain, but to reveal truth about both human nature and divine reality.
