Until Our Faces Have Been Blown Away

« 1 2 3 View All»

The cliché states, “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.” Sitting in the muggy English classroom one spring quarter of college, I experience my own epiphany. We, as a class replete with friends of mine from Christian ministries across campus, are reading Till We Have Faces, and I sympathize with Orual, trapped in the incense smog within the temple of Ungit with no way out. The classroom is stifling and even with open windows I am sweating. What I realize is the universal discussion that has found two of my favorite authors on the same side of an issue.

There comes a moment, near the end of Till We Have Faces, long after Psyche been exiled from god and husband, and longer still since Orual has last seen her. Orual’s demands have worn her guard Bardia to death, and she realizes that she devours everything and everyone she encounters, savoring those she loves most in the worst ways. It is at this moment—the moment Orual goes to offer Bardia’s wife her condolences and is berated with accusations—that she sees, as though in a mirror, her own disfigured face as that of the misshapen idol known to be the goddess Ungit. Ungit, whose house is filled with harlot priestesses and whose altar is stained with fountains of innocent blood, sacrifices in exchange for empty promises of good fortune and love. And in this, Orual realizes her own semblance: the blood on her own hands, demanded in return for her just ruling of the kingdom, all the while she is an unstoppable force of selfishness and destruction. The love she has looked for, the return she has expected was the very lives of those she desired, and when even that does not satisfy her, her mind spirals into hatred, bitterness, and resentment.

Through the lens of Lewis’s myth, I finally understand the innate magnetism I feel toward Palahniuk. In everything between them, the situations are reduced to the same paradox of humanity: love cannot be unconditional until we are made perfect, and perfection is unattainable without love. The love between Orual and Psyche was flawed, but only on Orual’s side because of her insatiable taking. Because of Psyche’s perfection, through sacrifice and kindness, both sisters become more than the sum of their parts. Shannon McFarland sees only that she must consume in order to feel love—she does her best to destroy the man she loves and eradicate the other woman he has loved, to take what she can get, ultimately attempting to destroy herself—but it is Brandy Alexander’s affection and self-sacrifice that eventually offers her a more complete transformation and the opportunity to redeem herself beyond any she could contrive on her own, a singular experience of real, unconditional love.

True fact: while cause and effect are disparate, the physical defects of the narrators in both stories are the catalyst by which the love-as-destruction deformity of their souls unites them. With her congenital deformity, Orual becomes hardened and cynical early, slowly growing more jaded over years of being reviled for her looks; and, Shannon McFarland’s self-hatred ultimately leads to her mutilation. She states, “What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.” And it is the common language of love-as-destruction that unites Palahniuk with Lewis. The alignment of ideas and equal recognition of the love paradox exposes similarity between these two authors. They are discussing the same condition—the human need for love and redemption—and it’s impediment—punishing the beloved for any perceivable refusal. The way I have experienced love, with specific circumstances aside, so much resembles that which Lewis and Palahniuk describe, frequently testing the limit of affection against jealousy and bitterness, only to find myself the solitary culprit.

It is obvious when I read Lewis, in all his multiplicity, that love is a theme he has been profoundly affected by. He, I’m sure, attributed this to God, and felt compelled to write about it to his death. My suspicion is that Palahniuk does not feel the same way. However, I do find it an interesting element to his story telling. Remember formulaic? Well, I’m beginning to see Palahniuk and Lewis not as argumentative men, but rather writers of exploration and experimentation. On the one hand, we have Lewis searching far and wide for the best way to speak of the unspeakable, to know the unknowable about such an intangible, indefinable experience as love. On the other, there is Palahniuk. He looks to the depths of human depravity to find that, yes, community, romance, and love are possible even there. He tests the formula again and again in the most debased situations imaginable and, still, it is all possible.

Someone once asked Palahniuk if he was a nihilist. He said no: he said his work is essentially about community. They are romances, and it took connecting Palahniuk to C.S. Lewis, whose work is more obviously connected to my own beliefs, for me to understand why I feel so inexplicably connected to Palahniuk’s despicable characters. True fact: C.S. Lewis and his willingness to step outside strict religious conventionality into the mind of a malicious matriarch and Chuck Palahniuk’s unflinching proclivity to shock his audience work together to expose the most relatable of human crimes, that of loving others less than they deserve, stripping away every possible excuse to prove that when love turns sour, only a purer version will suffice.

« 1 2 3 View All»