The works ofLewis and Girard share several central interests but seem divided by opposite views ofmyth. Lewis' novelistic retelling ofthe myth ofCupid and Psyche, however, provides a bridge: it depicts an ancient society organized around sacrifice and myth as understood in Girard's cultural theory and tells a Girardian story ofconversion, in which the narrator discovers the imitative and rivalrous nature ofher desire. Her rivalry and reconciliation with the storys true god carries the novel beyond Girardian myth to a contrary kind of narrative identified with fairy stories, which can extend Girards approach to Christian conversion.In 1961, Rene Girard published a landmark work of literary criticism, translated four years later as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which began one of the great intellectual projects of the second half of the twentieth century: a theory of culture that offers new ways of understanding desire, myth, the historical importance of the biblical revelation, and much else. While working on this book, Girard had experienced a conversion to Christianity and joined the Roman Catholic Church, in which he remains a regular participant (Girard, "Epilogue" 283-86). C. S. Lewis was perhaps the most Author's Note: Earlier versions of this article were presented at the meeting of the Colloquium on Religion and Violence in Riverside, California, in June 2008 and at the meeting of the C. S. Lewis and Inklings Society in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in March 2009. I would also like to thank my colleagues Charles Huttar, Martin Kevorkian, and Peter Schakel, and my student Peter Kleczynski for their comments.

The most successful attempts to demonstrate the unity of Fragment VII of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the longest and most diverse grouping of tales as they have come down to us, have treated it as a statement of Chaucer's artistic principles. Alan Gaylord's influential view of this as "the Literature Group" emphasizes how the links between these six tales give us, through the Host of the tale-telling contest, Harry Bailly, a counterexample of how Chaucer would have us read his tales: "if Harry is the Apostle of the Obvious, Chaucer is the Master of Indirection" (235). Adroitly pursuing the Master of

Tolmie, and the readers for Speculum as well as my students Katherine Masterton and Peter Kleczynski for their comments on versions of this article. It is part of a larger project on the medieval poetics of enigma in Piers Plowman and its contemporaries, and I am very grateful for the support I have received for this work from an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant at the Huntington Library and from Hope College's Sluyter Fellowship, Jacob E. Nyenhuis Faculty Development Grants, and CrossRoads Project. 1 1 Corinthians 13.12, my translation of the Vulgate, "Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate; tunc facie ad faciem," in Biblio sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, ed. Robert Weber et al., 3rd corr. ed. (Stuttgart, 1983), which is in turn a direct translation from the original Greek. The better-known English phrase, "We see now through a glass darkly," which comes from the 1560 Geneva Bible by way of the King James Version, obscures the Greek term ainigma. The Challoner edition of the Douay-Rheims translation, which I use elsewhere for translations from the Vulgate, reads, "We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face"

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