nnocence and the darkness of man's
heart, which was what I was getting at. That's half the answer.
The other answer is that if, as in that quotation there, the book is
supposed to show how the detects of society are directly traceable to the
defects of the individual, then you rub that awful moral lesson in much more
by having an ignorant, innocent adult come to the island and say, "Oh,
you've been having fun, haven't you?" Then in the last sentence you let him
turn away and look at the cruiser, and of course the cruiser, the adult
thing, is doing exactly what the hunters do-that is, hunting down and
destroying the enemy-so that you say, in effect, to your reader, "Look, you
think you've been reading about little boys, but in fact you've been reading
about the distresses and the wickednesses of humanity. If this is a gimmick,
I still approve of it.
Q.: I think it fulfills what you said about the use of the gimmick at
the end of a novel, making a reader go back and take another look at things.
Did the work by Richard Hughes, High Wind in Jamaica, have any
influence on your writing Lord of the Flies?
A.: This is an interesting question. I can answer it simply: I've read
this book and I liked it but I read it after I'd written Lord of the Flies.
And if you're going to come around to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, I might as
well confess I've never read that.
Q.: Then if you hadn't read High Wind in Jamaica until you'd written
Lord of the Flies, how do you feel about the thematic presentation, the
parallel between the two works?
A.: There is a parallel, I think, but like so many literary parallels
it's the plain fact that if people engage in writing
about humanity, they're likely in certain circumstances io see
something the same thing. They're both looking, after all at the same
object, so it would really be very surprising if there weren't literary
parallels to be drawn between this book and that.
Q.: I have one more question about Lord of the Flies. Mr. Epstein talks
about sex symbols in this work.6 You have recently said that you
purposely left man and woman off of the island to remove the ...
A.: Remove the "red herring."
Q.: Yes. I wonder if you concur with Mr. Epstein's observations.
A.: You're probably thinking of the moment when they kill apig . . .
Q.: Yes.
A.: And I'm assured that this is a sexual symbol and it has affinities
of the Oedipadian wedding night. What am I to say to this? I suppose the
only thing I can really say is there are in those circumstances, after all,
precious few ways of killing a pig. The same thing's just as true of the
Oedipadian wedding night.
6.See below, p. 279.-Eds.
The Meaning of It All1
Broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, August 28, 1959
KERMODE: I should like to begin, Golding, by talking about an article
on your work which I know you liked which appeared in the Kenyon
Review2 about a year ago in which he says many admiring things
about all your books but introduces a distinction between fable and fiction
and puts you very much on the fable side, arguing, for example, that in Lord
of the Flies you incline occasionally not to give a full-body presentation
of people living and behaving, so much as an illustration of a particular
theme; would you accept this as a fair comment on your work?
GOLDING: Well, what I would regard as a tremendous compliment to myself
would be if someone would substitute the word "myth" for "fable" because I
think a myth is a much profounder and more significant thing than a fable. I
do feel fable as being an invented thing on the surface whereas myth is
something which comes out from the roots of things in the ancient sense of
being the key to existence, the whole meaning of life, and experience as a
whole.
KERMODE: You're not primarily interested in giving the sort of body and
pressure of lived life in a wide society; obviously not, because all your
books have been concerned with either persons or societies, unnaturally
isolated in some sense. It is legitimate to assume from that that you are
concerned with people in this kind of extremity of solitariness.
1.The following interview was reprinted in this form in Books and
Bookmen, 5 (October, 1959), 9-10, and is printed in part here by permission
of Frank Kermode and William Golding.
2.John Peter, "The Fables of William Golding," Kentyon Re-view, 19
(Autumn, 1957), 577-592. Reprinted below, pp. 229-234.-Eds.
GOLDING: Well, no, I don't think it is legitimate. My own feeling about
it is that their isolation is a convenient one, rather than an unnatural
one. Do you see what I mean?
KERMODE: Yes, I do see, but I'm not sure about the word "convenient"
here. Convenient to you because you want to treat boys in the absence of
grown-ups, is this what you mean?
GOLDING: Yes, I suppose so. You see it depends how far you regard
intentions as being readable. Now, you know and I know about teaching
people; we both do it as our daily bread. Well, you see, perhaps, people who
are not quite as immature as those I see, but my own immature boys I watch
carefully and there does come a point which is very legible in their society
at which you can see all those things (as shown in Lord of the Flies) are
within a second of being carried out-it's the master who gets the right boy
by the scruff of the neck and hauls him back. He is God who stops a murder
being committed.
KERMODE: Yes, this is why one of your boys, Piggy, often refers to the
absence of grown-ups as the most important conditioning factor in the
situation. The argument is, then, that out of a human group of this kind,
the human invention of evil will proceed, provided that certain quite
arbitrary checks are not present
GOLDING: Yes, I think so; I think that the arbitrary checks that you
talk about are nothing but the fruit of bitter experience of people who are
adult enough to realise, "Well, I, I myself am vicious and would like to
kill that man, and he is vicious and would like to kill me, and therefore,
it is sensible that we should both have an arbitrary scheme of things in
which three other people come in and separate us."
KERMODE: This makes it interesting, I think, to consider the place
among your boys of the boy, Simon, in Lord of the Flies, who is different
from the others and who understands something like the situation you're
describing. He understands, for example, that the evil that the boys fear,
the beast they fear, is substantially of their own invention, but when, in
fact, he announces this, he himself is regarded as
evil and killed accordingly. Are we allowed to infer from your myth
that there will always be a person of that order in a group, or is this too
much?
GOLDING: It is, I think, a bit unfair not so much because it isn't
germane, but simply because it brings up too much. You see, I think on the
one hand that it is true that there will always be people who will see
something particularly clearly, and will not be listened to, and if they are
a particularly outstanding example of their sort, will probably be killed
for it. But, on the other hand, that in itself brings up such a vast kind of
panorama. What so many intelligent people and particularly, if I may say so,
so may literary people find, is that Simon is incomprehensible. But, he is
comprehensible to the illiterate person. The illiterate person knows about
saints and sanctity, and Simon is a saint.3
KERMODE: Yes, well he's a land of scapegoat, I suppose,
GOLDING: No, I won't agree. You are really flapping a kind of Golden
Bough over me, or waving it over my head, but I don't agree. You see, a
saint isn't just a scapegoat, a saint is somebody who in the last analysis
voluntarily embraces his fate, which is a pretty sticky one, and he is for
the illiterate a proof of the existence of God because the illiterate person
who is not brought up on logic and not brought up always to hope for the
worst says, "Well, a person like this cannot exist without a good God."
Therefore the illiterate person finds Simon extremely easy to understand,
someone who voluntarily embraces this beast goes . . . and tries to get rid
of him and goes to give the good news to the ordinary bestial man on the
beach, and gets killed for it.
KERMODE: Yes, but may I introduce the famous Lawrence caveat here,
"Never trust the teller, trust the tale"?
GOLDING: Oh, that's absolute nonsense. But of course the man who tells
the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about
and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature,
dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the
earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is
nothing like the truth.
3.Compare the following remarks with Donald R. Spangler's essay "Simon"
on pp. 211-215 in this volume.-Eds.
KERMODE: Well, I don't think it's necessary to state it quite so
extremely. What I had in mind here was simply that Simon in fact is coming
down from the top of the hill where he's seen the dead body of the
parachutist, in order to tell the other people that all is well. He's not
embracing his faith which is to be killed by the other people; he thinks
he's going to put them right.
GOLDING: Ah, well, that's again a question of scale, isn't ft? The
point was that out of all the people on that island who would ascend the
mountain, Simon was the one who saw it was the thing to do, and actually did
it; nobody else dared. That is embracing your fate, you see.
KERMODE: Ah, yes, without really any sense that what will happen in the
end is that he shall become the beast, which is what he does.
COLDINC: No, he doesn't become the beast, he becomes the beast in other
people's opinions.
KERMODE: He becomes the beast in the text also: "The beast was on its
knees in the centre, its arms folded over its face." Of course, you're here
reporting what the boys in their orgiastic fury thought Simon was, but I
should have said that that way of reporting allows a certain ambiguity of
interpretation here, which you cannot, in fact, deny us.
GOLDING: I thought of it myself originally, I think, as a metaphor-the
kind of metaphor of existence if you like, and the dead body on the mountain
I thought of as being history, as the past. There's a point a couple of
chapters before where these children on the island have got themselves into
a hell of a mess, they're-it's the things that have crawled out of their own
bones and their own veins, they don't know whether it's a beast from sky,
air or where it's coming but there's something terrible about it as one of
the conditions of existence.
At the moment when they're all most anguished they say, "If only
grown-ups could get a sign to us, if only they could tell us what's
what"-and what happens is that a dead man comes out of the sky. Now that is
not God being dead, as some people have said, that is history. He's dead,
but he won't lie clown. All that we can give our children is to pass on to
them this distressing business of a United States of Europe, which won't
work, because we all grin at each other across borders and so on and so
forth. And if you turn round to your parents and say "Please help me," they
are really part of the old structure, the old system, the old world, which
ought to be good but at the moment is making the world and the air more and
more radioactive.
KERMODE: I find it's extraordinarily interesting to think of that
explanation in connection with the Ballantyne4 treatment of the
same theme. I don't know whether you would like to say just how far and how
ironically we ought to treat this connection.
COLDING: Well, I think, fairly deeply, but again, not ironically in the
bad sense, but in almost a compassionate sense. You see, really, I'm getting
at myself in this. What I'm saying to myself is, "Don't be such a fool, you
remember when you were a boy, a small boy, how you lived on that island with
Ralph and Jack and Peterkin" 5 (who is Simon, by the way, Simon
called Peter, you see. It was worked out very carefully in every possible
way, this novel). I said to myself finally, "Now you are grown up, you are
adult; it's taken you a long time to become adult, but now you've got there
you can see that people are not like that; they would not behave like that
if they were God-fearing English gentlemen, and they went to an island like
that." Their savagery would not be found in natives on an island. As like as
not they would find savages who were kindly and uncomplicated and that the
devil would rise out of the intellectual complications of the three white
men on the island itself. It is really a pretty big connection [with
Ballantyne].
KERMODE: In fact it's a kind of black mass version of Ballantyne, isn't
it?
GOLDING: Well, I don't really think I ought to accept that. But I think
I see what you mean. No, no, I disagree with ft entirely, I think it is in
fact a realistic view of the Ballantyne situation.
4.R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island was published in 1857 in England.
See Carl Niemeyer's "The Coral Island Revisited," College English, 22
(January, 1961), 241-245. Reprinted in this volume on pp. 217-223.-Eds.
5.Characters in The Coral Island.-Eds.
The Novels of William Golding]
FRANK KERMODE
Lord of the Flies has "a pretty big connection" with
Ballantyne.2 In The Cored Island Ralph, Jack and Peterkin are
cast away on a desert island, where they live active, civilised, and
civilising lives. Practical difficulties are easily surmounted; they light
fires with bowstrings and spy-glasses, hunt pigs for food, and kill them
with much ease and a total absence of guilt-indeed of bloodshed. (They are
all Britons-a term they use to compliment each other-all brave, obedient and
honourable.) There is much useful information conveyed concerning tropical
islands, including field-workers' reporting of the conduct of cannibals: but
anthropology is something nasty that clears up on the arrival of a
missionary, and Jack himself prevents an act of cannibalism by telling the
flatnoses not to be such blockheads and presenting them with six newly
slaughtered pigs. The parallel between the island and the Earthly Paradise
causes a trace of literary sophistication: "Meat and drink on the same tree!
My dear boys, we're set up for life; it must be the ancient paradise-hurrah!
. . . We afterwards found, however, that these lovely islands were very
unlike Paradise in many things." But these "things" are non-Christian
natives and, later, pirates; the boys themselves are
1.This selection is taken from a longer essay that appeared in the
International Literary Annual, III (1961), 11-29, and is reprinted by
permission of John Calder Limited.
2. The relationship of R. M. Ballantyne's novel The Coral Island to
Lord of the Flies is taken up by Carl Niemeyer, "The Coral Island
Revisited," reprinted on pp. 217-223 in this volume. See also the Foreword
to this volume.-Eds.
cleanly (cold baths recommended) and godly-regenerate, empire-building
boys, who know by instinct how to turn paradise into a British protectorate.
The Coral Island could be used as a document in the history of ideas;
it belongs inseparably to the period when boys were sent out of Arnoldian
schools certified free of Original Sin. Golding takes Ralph, Jack and
Peterkin (altering this name to Simon "called Peter")3 and
studies them against an altered moral landscape. He is a schoolmaster, and
knows boys well enough to make their collapse into savagery plausible, to
see them as cannibals; the authority of the grown-ups is all there is to
prevent savagery. If you dropped these boys into an Earthly Paradise "they
would not behave like God-fearing English gentlemen" but "as like as not . .
. find savages who were kindly and uncomplicated. . . . The devil would rise
out of the intellectual complications of the three white men." Golding
leaves the noble savages out of Lord of the Flies, but this remark is worth
quoting because it states the intellectual position in its basic simplicity.
It is the civilised who are corrupt, out of phase with natural rhythm. Their
guilt is the price of evolutionary success; and our awareness of this fact
can be understood by duplicating Ballantyne's situation, borrowing his
island, and letting his theme develop in this new and more substantial
context. Once more every prospect pleases; but the vileness proceeds, not
from cannibals, but from the boys, though Man is not so much vile as "heroic
and sick." Unlike Ballantyne's boys, these are dirty and inefficient; they
have some notion of order, symbolised by the beautiful conch which heralds
formal meetings; but when uncongenial effort is required to maintain it,
order disappears. The shelters are inadequate, the signal fire goes out at
the very moment when Jack first succeeds in killing a pig. Intelligence
fades; irrational taboos and blood rituals make hopeless the task of the
practical but partial intellect of Piggy; his glasses, the firemakers, are
smashed and stolen, and in the end he himself is broken to pieces as he
holds the conch. When civilised conditioning fades-how tedious Piggy's
appeal to what adults might do or think!-the children are capable of neither
savage nor civil gentleness. Always a
3. It is interesting to ask why Golding changed the name. See the
Foreword to this volume.-EDS.
little nearer to raw humanity than adults, they slip into a condition
of animality depraved by mind, into the cruelty of hunters with their
devil-liturgies and torture: they make an unnecessary, evil fortress, they
steal, they abandon all operations aimed at restoring them to civility. Evil
is the natural product of their consciousness. First, the smallest boys
create, a beastie, a snake-"as if it wasn't a good island." Then a beast is
created in good earnest, and defined in a wonderful narrative sequence. The
emblem of this evil society is the head of a dead pig, fixed, as a
sacrifice, on the end of a stick and animated by flies and by the
imagination of the voyant, Simon.
Simon is Golding's first "saint, and a most important figure." He is
for the illiterate a proof of the existence of God because the illiterate
(to whom we are tacitly but unmistakably expected to attribute a correct
insight here) will say, "Well, a person like this cannot exist without a
good God." For Simon "voluntarily embraces the beast . . . and tries to get
rid of him." What he understands-and this is wisdom Golding treats with
awe-is that evil is "only us." He climbs up to where the dead fire is
dominated by the beast, a dead airman in a parachute, discovers what this
terrible thing really is, and rushes off with the good news to the beach,
where the maddened boys at their beast-slaying ritual mistake Simon himself
for the beast and kill him. As Piggy, the dull practical intelligence, is
reduced to blindness and futility, so Simon, the visionary, is murdered
before he can communicate his comfortable knowledge.4 Finally,
the whole Paradise is destroyed under the puzzled eyes of an adult observer.
Boys will be boys.
The difference of this world from Ballantyne's simpler construction
from similar materials is not merely a matter of incomparability of the two
talents at work; our minds have, in general, darker needs and obscurer
comforts. It would be absurd to suppose that the change has impoverished us;
but it has seemed to divide our world into "two cultures"-the followers of
Jack and the admirers of Simon, those who build fortresses and those who
want to name the beast.
4.Cf. Donald R. Soangler's "Simon" on pp. 211-215 in this volume and
also Golding's remarks on Simon in the interview with James Keating, p.
192.-Eds.
Lord of the Flies "was worked out carefully in every possible
way,"5 and its author holds that the "programme" of the book is
its meaning. He rejects Lawrence's doctrine, "Never trust the artist, trust
the tale" and its consequence, "the proper function of the critic is to save
the tale from the artist." He is wrong, I think; insofar as the book differs
from its programme there is, as a matter of common sense, material over
which the writer has no absolute authority. This means not only that there
are possible readings which he cannot veto, but even that some of his own
views on the book may be in a sense wrong. The interpretation of the dead
parachutist is an example. This began in the "programme" as straight
allegory; Golding says that this dead man "is" History.6 "All
that we can give our children" in their trouble is this monstrous dead
adult, who's "dead, but won't lie down"; an ugly emblem of war and decay
that broods over the paradise and provides the only objective equivalent for
the beasts the boys imagine. Now this limited allegory (I may even have
expanded it in the telling) seems to me not to have got out of the
"programme" into the book; what does get in is more valuable because more
like myth- capable, that is, of more various interpretation than the
rigidity of Golding's scheme allows. And in writing of this kind all depends
upon the author's mythopoeic power to transcend the "programme."
5.Golding makes this statement in the interview with Frank Kermode, The
Meaning of It All." See above, p. 201.-Eds.
6.In the interview "The Meaning of It All," p. 200.-Eds.
Introduction1
E. M. FORSTER
It is a pleasure and an honour to write an introduction to this
remarkable book, but there is also a difficulty, for the reason that the
book contains surprises, and its reader ought to encounter them for himself.
If he knows too much he will lean back complacently. And complacency is not
a quality that Mr. Golding values. The universe, in his view, secretes
something that we do not expect and shall probably dislike, and he here
presents the universe, under the guise of a school adventure story on a
coral island.
How romantically it starts! Several bunches of boys are being evacuated
during a war. Their plane is shot down, but the "tube" in which they are
packed is released, falls on an island, and having peppered them over the
jungle slides into the sea. None of them are hurt, and presently they
collect and prepare to have a high old time. A most improbable start But Mr.
Golding's magic is already at work and he persuades us to accept it. And
though the situation is improbable the boys are not. He understands them
thoroughly, partly through innate sympathy, partly because he has spent much
of his Me teaching. He makes us feel at once that we are with real human
beings, even if they are small ones, and thus lays a solid foundation for
the horrors to come.
Meet three boys.
Ralph is aged a little over twelve. He is fair and well built, might
grow into a boxer but never into a devil, for he
1. Mr. Forster's Introduction appears in Lord of the Flies, New York:
Coward-McCann, Inc., 1962. It is reprinted here by permission of the
publisher.
is sunny and decent, sensible, considerate. He doesn't understand a
lot, but has two things clear: firstly, they will soon be rescued-why, his
daddy is in the Navy!-and secondly, until they are rescued they must hang
together. It is he who finds the conch and arranges that when there is a
meeting he who holds the conch shall speak. He is chosen as leader. He is
democracy. And as long as the conch remains, there is some semblance of
cooperation. But it gets smashed.
Meet Piggy.
Piggy is stout, asthmatic, shortsighted, underprivileged and wise. He
is the brains of the party. It is the lenses of his spectacles that kindle
fire. He also possesses the wisdom of the heart. He is loyal to Ralph, and
tries to stop him from making mistakes, for he knows where mistakes may lead
to in an unknown island. He knows that nothing is safe, nothing is neatly
ticketed. He is the human spirit, aware that the universe has not been
created for his convenience,2 and doing the best he can. And as
long as he survives there is some semblance of intelligence. But he too gets
smashed. He hurtles through the air under a rock dislodged by savages. His
skull cracks and his brains spill out.
Meet Jack.
Jack is head of a choir-a bizarre assignment considering his destiny.
He marches them two and two up the sundrenched beach. He loves adventure,
excitement, foraging in groups, orders when issued by himself, and though he
does not yet know it and shrinks from it the first time, he loves shedding
blood. Ralph he rather likes, and the liking is mutual. Piggy he despises
and insults. He is dictatorship versus democracy. It is possible to read the
book at a political level, and to see in its tragic trend the tragedy of our
inter-war world. There is no doubt as to whose side the author is on here.
He is on Ralph's. But if one shifts the
2.While there is no question as to Piggy's intelligence, one must not
overestimate the range of his awareness. His physical deficiencies suggest
the weakness in his point of view. Piggy denies the existence of the beast
and insists that "life is scientific"; even after the triumph of the
hunters, he expects to enter Jack's fortress and reason with him for return
or the bifocals. Like all of Golding's rationalists, Piggy has a
one-dimensional view of human nature: he fails to perceive "the darkness of
man's heart."-Eds.
vision to a still deeper level-the psychological-he is on the side of
Piggy. Piggy knows that things mayn't go well because he knows what boys
are, and he knows that the island, for all its apparent friendliness, is
equivocal.
The hideous accidents that promote the reversion to savagery fill most
of the book, and the reader must be left to endure them-and also to embrace
them, for somehow or other they are entangled with beauty. The greatness of
the vision transcends what is visible. At the close, when the boys are duly
rescued by the trim British cruiser, we find ourselves on their side. We
have shared their experience and resent the smug cheeriness of their
rescuers. The naval officer is a bit disappointed with what he
finds-everyone filthy dirty, swollen bellies, faces daubed with clay, two
missing at least and the island afire. It ought to have been more like Coral
Island, he suggests.
Ralph looked at him dumbly. For a moment he had a fleeting picture of
the strange glamour that had once invested the beaches. But the island was
scorched up like dead wood-Simon was dead-and Jack had . , . The tears began
to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now for the first
time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench
his whole body. His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning
wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys
began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body,
matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the
darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise
friend called Piggy.
This passage-so pathetic-is also revealing. Phrases like "the end of
innocence" and "the darkness of man's heart" show us the author's attitude
more clearly than has appeared hitherto. He believes in the Fall of Man and
perhaps in Original Sin. Or if he does not exactly believe, he fears; the
same fear infects his second novel, a difficult and profound work called The
Inheritors. Here the innocent (the boys as it were) are Neanderthal Man, and
the corrupters are Homo Sapiens, our own ancestors, who eat other animals,
discover intoxicants, and destroy. Similar notions occur in his other
novels.
Thus his attitude approaches the Christian: we are all born in sin, or
will all lapse into it. But he does not complete the Christian attitude, for
the reason that he never introduces the idea of a Redeemer. When a deity
does appear, he is the Lord of the Flies, Beelzebub, and he sends a
messenger to prepare his way before him.
The approach of doom is gradual. When the little boys land they are
delighted to find that there are no grown-ups about. Ralph stands on his
head with joy, and led by him they have a short period of happiness. Soon
problems arise, work has to be assigned and executed, and Ralph now feels
"we must make a good job of this, as grown-ups would, we mustn't let them
down." Problems increase and become terrifying. In his desperation the child
cries, "If only they could get a message to us, if only they could send us
something grown-up ... a sign or something." And they do. They send
something grown-up. A dead parachutist floats down from the upper air, where
they have been killing each other, is carried this way and that by the
gentle winds, and hooks onto the top of the island.
This is not the end of the horrors. But it is the supreme irony. And it
remains with us when the breezy rescuers arrive at the close and wonder why
a better show wasn't put up.
Lord of the Flies is a very serious book which has to be introduced
seriously. The danger of such an introduction is that it may suggest that
the book is stodgy. It is not. It is written with taste and liveliness, the
talk is natural, the descriptions of scenery enchanting. It is certainly not
a comforting book. But it may help a few grown-ups to be less complacent and
more compassionate, to support Ralph, respect Piggy, control Jack and
lighten a little the darkness of man's heart. At the present moment (if I
may speak personally) it is respect for Piggy that seems needed most I do
not find it in our leaders.
King's College
Cambridge May 14,
1962
Simon1
DONALD R. SPANGLER
IN Lord of the Flies the character Simon has about him a general aura
of saintliness. Critics have suggested that Simon is a Christ figure. And
William Golding, on the artist's part, has said that he intended to present
a Christ figure in the novel, intimating that Simon is the character he
meant so to present.2 Accordingly, it might be of value to
examine what textual evidence there is to document the function of Simon as
a Christ or "saint" in Lord of the Flies.
Even before identified by name Simon is introduced as the choir boy who
had fainted, an oblique bit of characterization that, in retrospect, is seen
to have impressed upon the reader the hallucinatory, and hence,
mystical-religious proclivities of a boy who is subject to "spells." His
name, when we are given it, reveals in its etymology the distinguishing
"attunedness" of the mystic-Simon, "the hearkening." And the Mother Goose
appellative, simple, hints of the "holy idiot" folk-type.
Simon is skinny, a trait that, in a child, suggests the adult
correlative of ascetic self-abnegation. A "vivid little boy," his face
"glows," radiant after the manner of nimbus and halo. Jungle buds rejected
by the others because inedible, Simon's religious imagination sees as
"candles." (The buds open at night into aromatic white flowers, whose scent-
incense-prayer-and color-white-innocence-confirm the value that he
singularly had sensed them to have.)3 And
1. This article was written for this volume.
2.James Keating, "Interview with William Golding," May 10, 1962. See p.
192 in this volume.
3.The buds also appear in Ballantyne's The Coral Island, but
significant here is the rejection of them by everyone but Simon.
when the lethargic Piggy fails to help gather fire wood, Simon defends
him to the others by observing that the fire had been started with Piggy's
glasses, that Piggy had "helped that way," a ratiocination on Simon's part
the casuistry of which is surely offset by its overriding compassion.
In the scene in which Simon "suffers the little children to come unto
him," Golding's description unmistakably evokes the Biblical accounts of
Christ amid the bread-hungry masses:
Then, amid the roar of bees in the afternoon sunlight, Simon found for
them the fruit they could not reach, pulled off the choicest from up in the
foliage, passed them back down to the endless, outstretched hands. When he
had satisfied them he paused and looked round.
In this passage and elsewhere Simon's abstinence from eating meat
contributes to the impression of his saintliness, particularly since the
novel implies that the hunt for meat as food disguises the blood-lust to
kill for killing's sake, and further, that carnivorousness is linked with
carnality (by the symbolic coitus of the sow killing) ,4
As a repeated object of ridicule, snickered over and laughed at,
Simon's predicament recalls the New Testament details of the centurions'
mocking of Jesus. And as Golding has pointed out, the Biblical temptation of
Christ has its parallel in Lord of the Flies, in the confrontation between
the boy and the "beast," between Simon and the sow's head, which tries to
while him into complacency.
To Ralph, Simon prophesies that, " 'You'll get back where you came
from,' " and by excluding himself from the predicted rescue, prophesies in
that same breath his own fate, not to be rescued. Not to be rescued is not
necessarily to die, but the attendant analogues being what they are, there
seems to be a clear correspondence between Simon's foresight and that of
Christ, as accounts hold Christ to have anticipated the imminence of his
"hour."
Images of Gethsemane and Golgotha amass in the description of Simon's
agony in his thicket sanctum, transfixed by the impaled head-the apparition
of the beast in the
4.Compare E. L. Epstein, "Notes on Lord of the Flies" p. 280 in this
volume and, further, Golding's own remarks in the interview with James
Keating, p. 195 in this volume.-Eds.
forest that induces in Simon his apprehension of the beast in man's
heart, the boy-mystic's vision, to paraphrase Richard Wilbur, of how much we
are the beast that prowls our woods. The incidents of Simon's kneeling and
sweating accord directly with the story of Gethsemane; moreover, Gold-ing's
description reinforces those associations by half raising popular pictorial
renderings of the person of Jesus and of the Agony in the Garden: Simon
kneeling in an "arrow of sun," with "head tilted slightly up," sweat running
from his "long, coarse hair." (The deft advantage to which Golding here puts
calendar-art graphics is noteworthy.)
As the thicket is the setting for incidents that recall Gethsemane, it
is the setting also for events that evoke images of Golgotha. Simon falls,
in accord with gospel accounts of Jesus' ascent to the cross, and losing
consciousness, regains it only after shedding blood, the nosebleed of the
boy analogous to the lance-wounding of Jesus in the details of the
crucifixion.
It is as sacrificial victim, however, that Simon most clearly emerges
as a Christ figure. A lad whose feet "left prints in the soil" (the
dirt-road treks of the teaching Master?), he is described as "burned by the
sun," not tanned to gold like the other boys, but burnt, offering-like.
When, after he has received the revelation that the "beast," the "thing"
really to fear, is man's nature, it is with Christ-like resignation to
inevitability ("What else is there to do?" /"Let Thy will be done.") that
Simon sets out to discover what the "beast on the mountain" really is, since
it is not a thing to fear. When he finds the body of the chutist and
disentangles the lines, Simon is seen as ministering to the dead, committing
the body to the earth so that the processes of decomposition can complete
the return "to earth." However, because the wind takes hold of the chute and
carries off the corpse, Simon becomes the exorcist from the island of the
false menace, the mistakenly feared dead man. (Golding recollects in the
Keating interview-after explaining that his memory of the novel might be
blurred-that Simon releases the body "so that the wind can [italics mine]
blow this dead thing away from the island," implying intention on Simon's
part.) In any event, Simon's Christ-role is confirmed when, following his
discovery that the "beast on the mountain" is only the dead airman, Simon
comes down from the mountain-the "heights of truth"-to save the boys from
their false fears and to turn their sights inward upon their own behavior,
sharing the knowledge that, while the dead are not to be feared, the live
are. (It might better be said that, while the dead are not to be feared, the
killed are.)
The responsibility for the martyrdom of Simon, like the responsibility
for that of Jesus, can be ascribed either to secular or sacred interests. At
first the tribe maintains that it was not Simon they had killed, but the
terrorizing "beast" and Simon is made a scapegoat, the capital-punishment of
whom satisfies the established state (the tribe) by eliminating a supposed
enemy. Later on the boys admit that it was not the "beast" that they had
killed, but Simon, rationalizing that the human sacrifice will finally
appease the "beast," which they have been placating with pigs' heads; and
Simon is made a human offering, the immolation of whom assuages the
established god (the "beast"), the priests of which the "celebrants" of the
sacrificial feast become.
However, the analogue between Golding's Simon and Christianity's
Saviour stops short of soteriology. Only Simon has hearkened. From his life
and death no help accrues to that microcosm of humanity, on its island Earth
in a space of sea, lost, and in need to be "saved." Upon Golding's Simon
Peter no church is founded, no mechanism for salvation. In fact, the
implication of the novel is. that the beast in man can never be recognized
because it causes imagined "beasts" forever to be misidentified and slain
before identified correctly, so that, unrecognized, the beast endures. The
beast is man's inability to recognize his own responsibility for his own
self-destruction.
Of course, what constitutes self-destruction the centuries have
quarreled over. (What "good" is really evil, what "evil" really good? Does
man destroy himself in being himself, or in trying not to be himself? What
is his nature, for him to be guilty in response to, innocent in accord with,
or guilty in accord with and innocent in response to? The physics and
metaphysics of "self" produce the paradoxes of guilt: does man react to a
basically innocent nature with misguided guilt, or react to a basically
guilty nature with unrecognizing innocence?) Apollo and Dionysus still
wrestle. Nevertheless, whatever in man is to blame, what is to blame is
something in man. It is the shifting by man of responsibility onto "beasts"
outside himself, his refusal to confront
his own nature, that the sow's head symbolizes and Golding excoriates.
What finally happens to Simon the saviour the four paragraphs closing
Chapter Nine relate, in detailing the disposition of Simon's body. These
paragraphs emphasize the material assimilation of the corpse back into the
material universe. It is true that the last glimpse Golding provides of the
body is that of its drifting "out to sea," in the ancient symbolic act of
the soul's "crossing over," but the absence of evidence that Simon is to
have a conscious afterlife, that he will remain in any way intact as a
person, makes the decorporealization seem very permanent. The body glows
ironically, with the luminescence of scavengers, metamorphosing it into the
subhuman world of ragged claws. Even as Simon's body is seen, at the close
of Chapter Nine, to be a "silver form under the steadfast constellations"
(the body to disintegrate, the stars to prevail), the intimations of
immortality are quite evanescent. The romantic metaphor of its becoming a
star obviates the urgent practicalities of the Christian's "getting into
heaven," Simon's soul (breath-spirit) leaves him with a last gruesome
"plop." At best the prospect seems to be the certainly non-Christian one of
Simon's disembodied spirit's remaining forever disembodied. The drift of
these paragraphs of Lord of the Flies seems to counter the Christian
anticipation of an eventual hylozoic reunion of human body and soul. And
though the reader's sympathies yearn that the beauty of Simon's spirit
preclude its extinction, that beauty in the end only makes the oblivion
Simon comes to more poignant.
The Coral Island Revisited1
CARL NIEMEYER
ONE interested in finding out about Golding for oneself should probably
begin with Lord of the Flies, now available in a paperback. The story is
simple. In a way not clearly explained, a group of children, all boys,
presumably evacuees in a future war, are dropped from a plane just before it
is destroyed, onto an uninhabited tropical island. The stage is thus set for
a reworking of a favorite subject in children's literature: castaway
children assuming adult responsibilities without adult supervision. Golding
expects his readers to recall the classic example of such a book, R. M.
Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857),2 where the boys rise to the
occasion and behave as admirably as would adults. But in Lord of the Flies
everything goes wrong from the beginning. A few boys representing sanity and
common sense, led by Ralph and Piggy, see the necessity for maintaining a
signal fire to attract a rescue. But they are thwarted by the hunters, led
by red-haired Jack, whose lust for blood is finally not to be satisfied by
killing merely wild pigs. Only the timely arrival of a British cruiser saves
us from an ending almost literally too horrible to think about Since Golding
is using a naive literary form to express sophisticated reflections on the
nature of man and society, and since he refers obliquely
1.This article appeared in College English, 22 (January, 1961), 241-45,
and is reprinted here in slightly shortened form by permission of the
National Council of the Teachers of English and the author.
2.It is worthwhile to compare Frank Kermode's discussion of The Coral
Island with Niemeyer's. See "The Novels of William Golding," reprinted in
this volume on pp. 203-206. See also the Foreword to this volume.-Eds.
to Ballantyne many times throughout the book, a glance at The Coraf
Island is appropriate.
Ballantyne shipwrecks his three boys-Jack, eighteen; Ralph, the
narrator, aged fifteen; and Peterkin Gay, a comic sort of boy, aged
thirteen-somewhere in the South Seas on an uninhabited coral island. Jack is
a natural leader, but both Ralph and Peterkin have abilities valuable for
survival. Jack has the most common sense and foresight, but Peterkin turns
out to be a skillful killer of pigs, and Ralph, when later in the book he is
temporarily separated from his friends and alone on a schooner, coolly
navigates it back to Coral Island by dead reckoning, a feat sufficiently
impressive, if not quite equal to Captain Bligh's. The boys' life on the
island is idyllic; and they are themselves without malice or wickedness,
though there are a few curious episodes in which Ballantyne seems to hint at
something he himself understands as little as do his characters. One is
Peterkin's wanton killing of an old sow, useless as food, which the boy
rationalizes by saying he needs leather for shoes, This and one or two other
passages suggest that Ballantyne was aware of some darker aspects of boyish
nature, but for the most part he emphasizes the paradisiacal life of the
happy castaways. Like Golding's, however, Ballantyne's story raises the
problem of evil, but whereas Golding finds evil in the boys own natures, it
comes to Ballantyne's boys not from within themselves but from the outside
world. Tropical nature, to be sure, is kind, but the men of this
non-Christian world are bad. For example, the island is visited by savage
cannibals, one canoeful pursuing another, who fight a cruel and bloody
battle, observed by the horrified boys, and then go away. A little later the
island is again visited, this time by pirates (i.e., white men who have
renounced or scorned their Christian heritage), who succeed in capturing
Ralph. In due time the pirates are deservedly destroyed, and in the final
episode of the book the natives undergo an unmotivated conversion to
Christianity, which effects a total change in their nature just in time to
rescue the boys from their clutches.
Thus Ballantyne's view of man is seen to be optimistic, like his view
of English boys' pluck and resourcefulness, which subdues tropical islands
as triumphantly as England imposes empire and religion on lawless breeds of
men. Colding`s naval officer, the deus ex machine, of Lord of theFlies, is
only echoing Ballantyne when, perceiving dimly that all has not gone well on
the island, he says (p. 186): "I should have thought that a pack of British
boys-you're all British, aren't you?-would have been able to put up a better
show than that-I mean-"
This is not the only echo of the older book. Golding boldly calls his
two chief characters Jack and Ralph. He reproduces the comic Peterkin in the
person of Piggy.3 He has a wanton killing of a wild pig,
accomplished, as E. L. Epstein points out, "in terms of sexual
intercourse."4 He uses a storm to avert a quarrel between Jack
and Ralph, as Ballantyne used a hurricane to rescue his boys from death at
the hands of cannibals. He emphasizes physical cruelty but integrates it
into his story, and by making it a real if deplorable part of human, or at
least boyish, nature improves on Ballantyne, whose descriptions of
brutality-never of course performed by the boys-are usually introduced
merely for their sensational effect. Finally, on the last page Golding's
officer calls Ralph mildly to task for not having organized things better.
"It was like that at first," said Ralph, "before things-"
He stopped.
"We were together then-"
The officer nodded helpfully.
I know. Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island."
Golding invokes Ballantyne, so that the kind but uncomprehending adult,
the instrument of salvation, may recall to the child who has just gone
through hell the naivete of the child's own early innocence, now forever
lost; but he suggests at the same time the inadequacy of Ballantyne's
picture of human nature in primitive surroundings.
Golding, then, regards Ballantyne's book as a badly falsified map of
reality, yet the only map of this particular reality that many of us have.
Ralph has it and, through harrowing experiences, replaces it with a more
accurate one. The naval officer, though he should know better, since he is
on
3.Golding has declared that Peterkin of The Coral Island becomes Simon
in Lord of the Flies. See Frank Kermode and William Golding, The Meaning of
It AH," p. 201.-Eds.
4.E. L. Epstein, "Notes on Lord of the Flies," p. 280 below.- Eds.
the scene and should not have to rely on memories of his boyhood
reading, has it, and it seems unlikely that he is ever going to alter it,
for his last recorded action is to turn away from the boys and look at his
"trim" cruiser; in other words to turn away from a revelation of the untidy
human heart to look at something manufactured, manageable, and solidly
useful.
Golding, who being a grammar school teacher should know boys well,
gives a corrective of Ballantyne's optimism. As he has explained, the book
is "an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human
nature." 5 These defects turn out, on close examination, to
result from the evil of inadequacy and mistakenness. Evil is not the
positive and readily identifiable force it appears to be when embodied in
Ballantyne's savages and pirates. Golding's Ralph, for example, has real
abilities, most conspicuous among them the gift of leadership and a sense of
responsibility toward the "littluns." Yet both are incomplete. "By now,"
writes Golding, "Ralph had no self-consciousness in public thinking but
would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess." Such
detachment is obviously an important and valuable quality in a leader, but
significantly the next sentence reads: "The only trouble was that he would
never be a very good chess player" (p. 108). Piggy on the other hand no
doubt would have been a good chess player, for with a sense of
responsibility still more acute than Ralph's he combines brains and common
sense. Physically, however, he is ludicrous-fat, asthmatic, and almost blind
without his specs. He is forever being betrayed by his body. At his first
appearance he is suffering from diarrhea; his last gesture is a literally
brainless twitch of the limbs, 'like a pig's after it has been killed" (p.
167). His further defect is that he is powerless, except as he works through
Ralph. Though Piggy is the first to recognize the value of the conch and
even shows Ralph how to blow it to summon the first assembly, he cannot
sound it himself. And he lacks imagination. Scientifically minded as he is,
he scorns what is intangible and he dismisses the possibility of ghosts or
an imaginary beast. " 'Cos things wouldn't make sense. Houses an' streets,
an'-TV- they wouldn't work" (p. 85). Of course he is quite right,
5. Quoted by Epstein, p. 277.-Eds.
save that he forgets he is now on an island where the artifacts of the
civilization he has always known are meaningless.
It is another important character, Simon, who understands that there
may indeed be a beast, even if not a palpable one-"maybe it's only us" (p.
82). The scientist Piggy has recognized it is possible to be frightened of
people (p. 78), but he finds this remark of Simon's dangerous nonsense.
Still Simon is right, as we see from his interview with the sow's head on a
stake, which is the lord of the flies. He is right that the beast is in the
boys themselves, and he alone discovers that what has caused their terror is
in reality a dead parachutist ironically stifled in the elaborate clothing
worn to guarantee survival. But Simon's failure is the inevitable failure of
the mystic-what he knows is beyond words; he cannot impart his insights to
others. Having an early glimpse of the truth, he cannot tell it.
Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express man-kind's essential
illness. Inspiration came to him.
"What's the dirtiest thing there is?"
As an answer Jack dropped into the uncomprehending silence that
followed it the one crude expressive syllable. Release was like an orgasm.
Those littluns who had climbed back on the twister fell off again and did
not mind. The hunters were screaming with delight.
Simon's effort fell about him in ruins; the laughter beat him cruelly
and he shrank away defenseless to his seat (p. 82).
Mockery also greets Simon later when he speaks to the lord of the
flies, though this time it is sophisticated, adult mockery:
"Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!" said
the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated
places echoed with the parody of laughter (p. 133).
Tragically, when Simon at length achieves a vision so clear that it is
readily communicable he is killed by the pig hunters in their insane belief
that he is the very evil which he alone has not only understood but actually
exorcised. Lake the martyr, he is killed for being precisely what he is not.
The inadequacy of Jack is the most serious of all, and here perhaps if
anywhere in the novel we have a personification of absolute evil. Though he
is the most mature of the boys (he alone of all the characters is given a
last name), and though as head of the choir he is the only one with any
experience of leadership, he is arrogant and lacking in Ralph's charm and
warmth. Obsessed with the idea of hunting, he organizes his choir members
into a band of killers. Ostensibly they are to kill pigs, but pigs alone do
not satisfy them, and pigs are in any event not needed for food. The blood
lust once aroused demands nothing less than human blood. If Ralph represents
purely civil authority, backed only by his own good will, Piggy's wisdom,
and the crowd's easy willingness to be ruled, Jack stands for naked ruthless
power, the police force or the military force acting without restraint and
gradually absorbing the whole state into itself and annihilating what it
cannot absorb. Yet even Jack is inadequate. He is only a little boy after
all, as we are sharply reminded in a brilliant scene at the end of the book,
when we suddenly see him through the eyes of the officer instead of through
Ralph's (pp. 185-87), and he is, like all sheer power, anarchic. When Ralph
identifies himself to the officer as "boss," Jack, who has just all but
murdered him, makes a move in dispute, but overawed at last by superior
power, the power of civilization and the British Navy, implicit in the
officer's mere presence, he says nothing. He is a villain (Are his red hair
and ugliness intended to suggest that he is a devil?), but in our world of
inadequacies and imperfections even villainy does not fulfill itself
completely. If not rescued, the hunters would have destroyed Ralph and made
him, like the sow, an offering to the beast; but the inexorable logic of
Ulysses makes us understand that they would have proceeded thence to
self-destruction.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
The distance we have traveled from Ballantyne's cheerful unrealities is
both artistic and moral Golding is admittedly symbolic; Ballantyne professed
to be telling a true story. Yet it is the symbolic tale that, at least for
our times, carries conviction. Golding's boys, who choose to remember
nothing of their past before the plane accident; who, as soon as Jack
commands the choir to take off the robes marked with the cross of
Christianity, have no trace of religion; who demand to be ruled and are
incapable of being ruled properly; who though many of them were once choir
boys (Jack could sing C sharp) never sing a note on the island; in whose
minds the great tradition of Western culture has left the titles of a few
books for children, a knowledge of the use of matches (but no matches), and
hazy memories of planes and TV sets-these boys are more plausible than
Ballantyne's. His was a world of blacks and whites: bad hurricanes, good
islands; good pigs obligingly allowing themselves to be taken for human
food, bad sharks disobligingly taking human beings for shark food; good
Christians, bad natives; bad pirates, good boys. Of the beast within, which
demands blood sacrifice, first a sow's head, then a boy's, Ballantyne has
some vague notion, but he cannot take it seriously. Not only does Golding
see the beast; he sees that to keep it at bay we have civilization; but when
by some magic or accident civilization is abolished and the human animal is
left on his own, dependent upon his mere humanity, then being human is not
enough. The beast appears, though not necessarily spontaneously or
inevitably, for it never rages in Ralph or Piggy or Simon as it does in
Roger or Jack; but it is latent in all of them, in the significantly named
Piggy, in Ralph, who sometimes envies the abandon of the hunters (p. 69) and
who shares the desire to "get a handful" of Robert's "brown, vulnerable
flesh" (p. 106), and even in Simon burrowing into his private hiding place.
After Simon's death Jack attracts all the boys but Ralph and the loyal Piggy
into his army. Then when Piggy is killed and Ralph is alone, only
civilization can save him. The timely arrival of the British Navy is less
theatrical than logically necessary to make Golding's point. For
civilization defeats the beast. It slinks back into the jungle as the boys
creep out to be rescued; but the beast is real It is there, and it may
return.
"A World of Violence and Small Boys"1
J. T. C. GOLDING
PROBABLY he will agree that his real education was picked up, almost by
the way, at home. In those days when the radio was non-existent and the cost
of gramophones prohibitive the only local music was the town band. Bill was
lucky that Mom was good enough to accompany Dad through Handel, Mozart and
others. They were often joined by an ex-bandmaster of the Coldstream Guards.
The walls of that small front room are probably vibrating still. Bill, as a
small boy, was terribly affected by Tosti's "Good-bye." There was painting.
Dad's own paintings of scenery in Wiltshire and Cornwall hung on the walls
and there were a couple of books of cheap reprints of the great ones. There
were books. Chief among them was the Children's Encyclopaedia and of course
Dad had access to the School Library.2 Bill was disappointed when
he got to school to find he'd read most of the library. It was a small one.
One book that was read and re-read was Nat the Naturalisf, by George
Manville Fenn. The scene was set somewhere in the jungle in South East Asia.
Bill could quote whole pages by heart and it often accompanied him to the
top of
1.The following is an excerpt from a letter by J. T. C. Golding
(William Golding's brother) addressed to James R. Baker on December 4, 1962.
The letter appears here by permission of J. T. C. Golding and James R.
Baker.
2. William Golding's father was Senior Master of Marlborough Grammar
School.-Eds.
the chestnut tree in the garden.3 And all the time there was
a father only too willing to give a logical answer to a small boy's
questions.
Eventually he entered Marlborough Grammar School and emerged from a
pretty sheltered life into a world of violence and small boys-and
not-so-small boys. Here he met physical violence and the deliberate
infliction of pain by boys. Also he noticed the tendency of small boys to
gang up against the weak or those with a mannerism that put them out of
step.4 Not that it was a bad school for bullying- official policy
was hot against it and in any case Bill was physically well-equipped enough
to look after himself. Many others will have noticed all this but the
effect, in this case, on an impressionable ten-year-old may have had
important results. The conjunction of the boy in the jungle in Nat the
Naturalist and the school playground may have lain dormant for years until
some later experience pushed it to the surface as Lord of the Flies. On the
other hand the explanation is so obvious and easy that it probably isn't
true.
During these last years at school another writer, I think of
considerable importance to him, entered his life. This was Mark Twain. Not
Mark Twain of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn but of Roughing It and
Innocents Abroad. He swallowed these almost as completely as he had done Nat
the Naturalist. The humour of these books and their irreverence towards many
accepted things encour-
3. The symbolic significance of this tree is made clear in Golding's
autobiographical essay, "The Ladder and the Tree," The Listener, 63 (March
24, 1960), 531-33). The essay is vital to an understanding of the basic
dialectic which is dramatized in all the novels: the conflict between the
rational and the irrational elements in man's nature and the effects of this
conflict on both the individual and historical levels.-Eds.
4. The "tendency" is obvious enough in Lord of the Flies: note Simon's
position in Jack's chorus, Roger's attack on the "litthins," and the general
abuse of Piggy. After fear drives most of the boys into the hunter tribe,
they lose all capacity for dialectic and begin sadistic persecution of those
who stand outside their powerful group. In Free Fall a similar pattern of
behavior appears in the episodes which describe the rough-and-tumble boyhood
adventures of Sammy Mountjoy.-Eds.
aged his own scepticism. It was an attitude he was already adopting
toward the society of 4000 people around him. In addition he had a father
who welcomed criticism of any institution under the sun, though any
deviation in personal conduct produced a muted rumble of thunder.
The Fables of William Golding1
JOHN PETER
A useful critical distinction may be drawn between a fiction and a
fable. Like most worthwhile distinctions it is often easy to detect, less
easy to define. The difficulty arises because the clearest definition would
be in terms of an author's intentions, his pre-verbal procedures, and these
are largely inscrutable and wholly imprecise. For a definition that is
objective and specific we are reduced to an "as if," which is at best clumsy
and at worst perhaps delusive.
The distinction itself seems real enough. Fables are those narratives
which leave the impression that their purpose was anterior, some initial
thesis or contention which they are apparently concerned to embody and
express in concrete terms. Fables always give the impression that they were
preceded by the conclusion which it is their function to draw, though of
course it is doubtful whether any author foresees his conclusions as fully
as this, and unlikely that his work would be improved if he did. The effect
of a fiction is very different. Here the author's aim, as it appears from
what he has written, is evidently to present a more or less faithful
reflection of the complexities, and often of the irrelevancies, of life as
it is actually experienced. Such conclusions as he may draw-he is under much
less compulsion to draw them than a writer of fables-do not appear to be
anterior but on the contrary take their origin from the fiction itself, in
which they are latent, and occasionally unrecognized. It is a matter of
approach, so far as that can be
1. This article first appeared in the Kenyon Review, 19 (Autumn, 1957),
577-592. It is reprinted in part here through the courtesy of the Kenyon
Review and the author.
gauged. Fictions make only a limited attempt to generalize and explain
the experience with which they deal, since their concern is normally with
the uniqueness of this experience. Fables, starting from a skeletal
abstract, must flesh out that abstract with the appearances of "real life"
in order to render it interesting and cogent. 1984 is thus an obvious
example of a fable, while The Rainbow is a fiction. Orwell and Lawrence, in
these books, are really moving in opposite directions. If their movements
could be geometrically projected to exaggerate and expose each other,
Lawrence's would culminate in chaotic reportage, Orwell's in stark allegory.
. . . [The distinction] has a particular value for the critic whose
concern is with novels, in that it assists him in locating and defining
certain merits which are especially characteristic of novels and certain
faults to which they are especially prone. Both types, the fiction and the
fable, have their own particular dangers. The danger that threatens a
fiction is simply that it will become confused, so richly faithful to the
complexity of human existence as to lose all its shape and organization. . .
. The danger that threatens a fable is utterly different, in fact the
precise opposite. When a fable is poor-geometrically projected again-it is
bare and diagrammatic, insufficiently clothed in its garment of actuality,
and in turn its appeal is extra-aesthetic and narrow. Satires like Animal
Farm are of this kind.
It will be said that any such distinction must be a neutral one, and
that the best novels are fictions which have managed to retain their due
share of the fable's coherence and order. No doubt this is true. But it also
seems to be true that novels can go a good deal farther', without serious
damage, in the direction of fiction than they can in the direction of fable,
and this suggests that fiction is a much more congenial mode for the
novelist than fable can ever be. The trouble with the mode of fable is that
it is constricting. As soon as a novelist has a particular end in view the
materials from which he may choose begin to shrink, and to dispose
themselves toward that end. . . . The fact is that a novelist depends
ultimately not only on the richness of his materials but on the richness of
his interests too; and fable, by tying these to a specific end, tends to
reduce both. Even the most chaotic fiction will have some sort of emergent
meaning, provided it is a full and viable reflection of the life from which
it derives, if only because the unconscious preoccupations of the novelist
will help to impart such meaning to it, drawing it into certain lines like
iron filing sprinkled in a magnetic field. Fables, however, can only be
submerged in actuality with difficulty, and they are liable to bob up again
like corks, in all their plain explicit-ness. It may even be true to say
that they are best embodied in short stories, where' economy is vital and
"pointlessness" (except for its brevity) comparatively intolerable.
***
Lord of the Flies, which appeared in 1954, is set on an imaginary South
Sea island, and until the last three pages the only characters in it are
boys. They have apparently been evacuated from Britain, where an atomic war
is raging, and are accidentally stranded on the island without an adult
supervisor. The administrative duties of their society (which includes a
number of "littluns," aged about six) devolve upon their elected leader, a
boy of twelve named Ralph, who is assisted by a responsible, unattractive
boy called Piggy, but as time passes an independent party grows up, the
"hunters," led by an angular ex-choir leader named Jack Merridew. This
party, soon habituated to the shedding of animal blood, recedes farther and
farther from the standards of civilization which Ralph and Piggy are
straining to preserve, and before very long it is transformed into a savage
group of outlaws with a costume and a ritual of their own. In the course of
one of their dance-feasts, drunk with tribal excitement, they are
responsible for killing the one individual on the island who has a real
insight into the problems of their lives, a frail boy called Simon, subject
to fainting fits, and after this more or less intentional sacrifice they
lose all sense of restraint and become a band of criminal marauders, a
threat to everyone on the island outside their own tribe. Piggy is murdered
by their self-constituted witch doctor and torturer, the secretive and
sinister Roger, and Ralph is hunted by them across the island like the pigs
they are accustomed to kill. Before they can kill and decapitate him a naval
detachment arrives and takes charge of all the children who have survived.
It is obvious that this conclusion is not a concession to readers who
require a happy ending-only an idiot will suppose that the book ends
happily-but a deliberate device by which to throw the story into focus. With
the appearance of the naval officer the bloodthirsty hunters are instantly
reduced to a group of painted urchins led by "a little boy who wore the
remains of an extraordinary black cap," yet the reduction cannot expunge the
knowledge of what they have done and meant to do. The abrupt return to
childhood, to insignificance, underscores the argument of the narrative:
that Evil is inherent in the human mind itself, whatever innocence may cloak
it, ready to put forth its strength as soon as the occasion is propitious.
This is Golding's theme, and it takes on a frightful force by being
presented in juvenile terms, in a setting that is twice deliberately likened
to the sunny Coral Island of R. M. Ballantyne.2 The boys' society
represents, in embryo, the society of the adult world, their impulses and
convictions are those of adults incisively abridged, and the whole narrative
is a powerfully ironic commentary on the nature of Man, an accusation
levelled at us all. There are no excuses for complacency in the fretful
conscientiousness of Ralph, the leader, nor in Piggy's anxious commonsense,
nor are the miscreants made to seem exceptional. When he first encounters a
pig, Jack Merridew is quite incapable of harming it, "because of the
enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh," and even
the delinquent Roger is at first restrained by the taboos of "parents and
school and policemen and the law." Strip these away and even Ralph might be
a hunter: it is his duties as a leader that save him, rather than any
intrinsic virtue in himself.3 Like any orthodox moralist Golding
insists that Man is a fallen creature, but he refuses to hypostatize Evil or
to locate it in a dimension of its own. On the contrary Beelzebub, Lord of
the Flies, is Roger and Jack and you and I, ready to declare himself as soon
as we permit him to.
The intentness with which this thesis is developed leaves
2.A discussion of the relationship between Ballantyne's novel The Coral
Island, published in 1857 in England, and Lord of the Flies occurs in Carl
Niemeyer's "The Coral Island Revisited," College English, 22 (January,
1961), 241-245. Reprinted in this volume, pp. 217-223.-Eds.
3. As an illustration of this argument, note Ralph's actions when the
boys attack Robert as the substitute pig, p. 106 and when Simon is killed as
the beast, p. 141.-Eds.
no doubt that the novel is a fable, a deliberate translation of a
proposition into the dramatized terms of art, and as usual we have to ask
ourselves how resourceful and complete the translation has been, how fully
the, thesis has been absorbed and rendered implicit in the tale as it is
told. A writer of fables will heat his story at the fire of his convictions,
but when he has finished, the story must glow apart, generating its own heat
from within. Golding himself provides a criterion for judgment here, for he
offers a striking example of how complete the translation of a statement
into plastic terms can be. Soon after their arrival the children develop an
irrational suspicion that there is a predatory beast at large on the island.
This has of course no real existence, as Piggy for one points out, but to
the littluns it is almost as tangible as their castles in the sand, and most
of the older boys are afraid they may be right. One night when all are
sleeping there is an air battle ten miles above the sea and a parachuted
man, already dead, comes drifting down through the darkness, to settle among
the rocks that crown the island's only mountain. There the corpse lies
unnoticed, rising and falling with the gusts of the wind, its harness
snagged on the bushes and its parachute distending and collapsing. When it
is discovered and the frightened boys mistake it for the beast, the sequence
is natural and convincing, yet the implicit statement is quite unmistakable
too. The incomprehensible threat which has hung over them is, so to speak,
identified and explained: a nameless figure who is Man himself, the boys'
own natures, the something that all humans have in common.
This is finely done and needs no further comment, but unhappily the
explicit comment has already been provided, in Simon's halting explanation
of the beast's identity: "What I mean is ... maybe it's only us." And a
little later we are told that "However Simon thought of the beast, there
rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and
sick." This over-explicitness is my main criticism of what is in many ways a
work of real distinction, and for two reasons it appears to be a serious
one. In the first place the fault is precisely that which any fable is
likely to incur: the incomplete translation of its thesis into its story so
that much remains external and extrinsic, the teller's assertion rather than
the tale's enactment before our eyes. In the second place the fault is a
persistent one, and cannot easily be discounted or ignored. It appears in
expository annotations like this, when Ralph and Jack begin to quarrel:
The two boys faced each other. There was the brilliant world of
hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of
longing and baffled commonsense.
Less tolerably, it obtrudes itself in almost everything- thought,
action, and hallucination-that concerns the clairvoyant Simon, the "batty"
boy who understands "mankind's essential illness," who knows that Ralph will
get back to where he came from, and who implausibly converses with the Lord
of the Flies. Some warrant is provided for this clairvoyance in Simon's
mysterious illness, but it is inadequate. The boy remains unconvincing in
himself, and his presence constitutes a standing invitation to the author to
avoid the trickiest problems of his method, by commenting too baldly on the
issues he has raised. Any writer of fables must find it hard to ignore an
invitation or this kind once it exists. Golding has not been able to ignore
it, and the blemishes that result impose some serious, though not decisive,
limitations on a fiery and disturbing story.
Introduction1
IAN GREGOR and MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES
The urge to put things into categories seems to satisfy some deep human
need and in this matter at least, critics and historians of literature are
very human people indeed. A brief glance at the English Literature section
of any library catalogue will show what I mean. There we find literature
divided up into various lands of writings, and within the kinds we nave
historical periods, and within the periods we have groups or movements, and
within the groups individuals who write various kinds. . . . Now up to a
point of course this sort of classification serves a very useful purpose. We
need a map if we are going to do any exploring, and the fact that it is the
countryside we have come to enjoy, not the map, doesn't make the map any
less necessary. If we take out a map of The Novel we find, if it is a
general one, that it falls into three sections-the eighteenth-century novel,
the Victorian novel, and the modern novel. And these descriptions point not
simply to three centuries, but to decisive changes that have taken place
within the form of the novel. These changes are often due to historical
circumstances, and sometimes they can be described in terms of the ruling
ideas of the age or the literary expectations of the readers, out there are
other changes and shifts in fiction which seem to arise from the very nature
of the novel itself. A shift of this land may be seen in a useful
classification into "fables" and "fictions." It is a little
1. This essay appears as the Introduction to the "School Edition" of
Lord of the Flies published by Faber and Faber, Ltd., London, 1962, pp.
i-xii. It is reprinted here by permission of Faber and Faber and the
authors.
difficult to define this difference satisfactorily in the abstract, but
it is fairly easy to see what is meant in practice. When, for instance, D.
H. Lawrence wrote in one of his letters, "I am doing a novel which I have
never grasped. Damn its eyes, here I am at page 145 and I've no notion what
it's about . . . it's like a novel in a foreign language which I don't know
very well," he was almost certainly occupied in writing a fiction and not a
fable. In other words, a fiction is something which takes the form of an
exploration for the novelist, even if it lacks the very extreme position
which Lawrence describes; the concern is very much with trying to make clear
the individuality of a situation, of a person; for these reasons it is
extremely difficult to describe a fiction satisfactorily in abstract terms.
With a fable, on the other hand, the case is very different Here the writer
begins with a general idea-"the world is not the reasonable place we are led
to believe," "all power corrupts" -and seeks to translate it into fictional
terms. In this kind of writing the interest of the particular detail lies in
the way it points to the generalization behind it. It is generally very easy
to say what a fable is "about," because the writers whole purpose is to make
the reader respond to it in precisely that way. Clear examples of fiction in
the way I am using the word would be works like D. H. Lawrence's Sons and
Lovers or Emily Bronte's Withering Heights; clear examples of fable, Swift's
Gulliver's Travels or Orwell's Animal Farm. But these are extreme works and
most novels have elements of both. Oliver Twist, for instance, is certainly
a fiction in its portrayal of the intensely imagined criminal world; but it
also moves towards fable when ft describes the world of the poorhouse, and
the people who finally rescue Oliver from that world, because here Dickens
is moved to write primarily by abstract ideas, the educational hardships of
children, the wisdom of benevolence. You will notice I said that Oliver
Twist "moves towards" fiction, "moves towards" fable, and in this kind of
alternation it is typical of many novels which lie between such extreme
examples as I mentioned above. Now when we turn to Mr. Golding's Lord of the
Flies we find that what is remarkable is that it is a fable and a fiction
simultaneously. And I want to devote the remainder of this Introduction to
developing that remark.
When we first begin to write and talk about Mr. Golding's novel, it is
the aspect of fable which occupies our attention. And this is very natural
because the book is a very satisfying one to talk about Mr. Golding, our
account might run, is examining what human nature is really like if we could
consider it apart from the mass of social detail which gives a recognizable
feature to our daily lives. That "really" is important and you may want to
argue about it, but Mr. Golding's assumption here is one that most of us
make at one time or another. "Of course," we say of someone, "he's not
really like that at all," and then we go on to construct an account which
assumes that a distorting film of circumstance hate come between us and the
man's "real self." What Mr. Golding has done in Lord of the Flies is to
create a situation which will reveal in an extremely direct way this "real
self," and yet at the same time keep our sense of credibility, our sense of
the day-to-day world, lively and sharp. It is rather like performing a
delicate heart operation, but feeling that the sense of human gravity comes
not through the actual operation but through the external scene -the
green-robed figures, the arc light which casts no shadow, the sound of a car
in the street outside. And it was in Ballantyne's Coral Island, a book
published in the middle of the last century, that Mr. Golding found the
suggestion for his "external scene." This is not a question of turning
Ballantyne inside out, so that where his boys are endlessly brave,
resourceful and Christian, Mr. Golding's are frightened, anarchic and
savage; rather Mr. Golding's adventure story is to point up in a forceful
and economic way the terrifying gap between the appearance and the reality.
We do not need to know Coral Island to appreciate Lord of the Flies, but if
we do know it we will appreciate more vividly the power of Mr. Golding's
book. If we take Ralph's remark about "the darkness of man's heart" as
coming very close to the subject of the book, it is worth just remembering
that this book, published in 1954, was written in a world very different
from Ballantyne's, one which had seen within twenty years the systematic
destruction of the Jewish race, a world war revealing unnumbered atrocities
of what man had done to man, and in 1945 the mushroom cloud of the atomic
bomb which has come to dominate all our political and moral thinking.
Turning from these general considerations of Mr. Golding's fable to the
way it is actually worked out, we find the novel divided into three
sections. The first deals with the arrival of the boys on the island, the
assembly, the early decisions about what to do; the emphasis falls on the
paradisal landscape, the hope of rescue, and the pleasures of day-to-day
events. Everything within this part of the book is contained within law and
rule: the sense of the aweful and the forbidden is strong. Jack cannot at
first bring himself to kill a pig because of "the enormity of the knife
descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood."
Roger throws stones at Henry, but he throws to miss because "round the
squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and
the law." The world in this part of the book is the world of children's
games. The difference comes when there is no parental summons to bring these
games to an end. These games have to continue throughout the day, and
through the day that follows. And it is worth noting that Mr. Golding
creates his first sense of unease through something which is familiar to
every child in however protected a society-the waning of the light. It is
the dreams that usher in the beastie, the snake, the unidentifiable threat
to security.
The second part of the book could be said to begin when that threat
takes on physical reality, with the arrival of the dead airman. Immediately
the fear is crystallized, all the boys are now affected, discussion has
increasingly to give way to action. As the narrative increases in tempo, so
its implications enlarge. Ralph has appealed to the adult world for help,
"If only they could send us something grown-up ... a sign or something," and
the dead airman is shot down in flames over the island. Destruction is
everywhere; the boy's world is only a miniature version of the adult's. By
now the nature of the destroyer is becoming clearer; it is not a beastie or
snake but man's own nature. "What I mean is ... maybe it's only us," Simon's
insight is confined to himself and he has to pay the price of his own life
for trying to communicate it to others. Simon's death authenticates this
truth, and now that the fact of evil has actually been created on the
island, the airman is no longer necessary and his body vanishes in a high
wind and is carried out to sea.
The third part of the book, and the most terrible, explores the meaning
and consequence of this creation of evil. Complete moral anarchy is
unleashed by Simon's murder. The world of the game, which embodied in
however an elementary way, rule and order, is systematically destroyed,
because hardly anyone can now remember when things were otherwise. When the
destruction is complete, Mr. Golding suddenly restores "the external scene"
to us, not the paradisal world of the marooned boys, but our world. The
naval officer speaks, we realize with horror, our words, "the kid needed a
bath, a hair-cut, a nose wipe and a good deal of ointment." He carries our
emblems of power, the white drill, the epaulettes, the gilt-buttons, the
revolver, the trim cruiser. Our everyday sight has been restored to us, but
the experience of reading the book is to make us re-interpret what we see,
and say with Macbeth "mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses."
If we are to look at Lord of the Flies from the point of view of it
being a fable this is the kind of account we might give. And, as far as it
goes, it is a true account. The main weakness in discussing Lord of the
Flies is that we are too often inclined to leave our description at this
point. So we find a Christian being deeply moved by the book and arguing
that its greatness is tied up with the way in which the author brings home
to a modem reader the doctrine of Original Sin; or we find a humanist
finding the novel repellent precisely because it endorses what he feels to
be a dangerous myth; or again, on a different level, we find a Liberal
asserting the importance of the book because of its unwavering exposure or
the corruptions of power. Now whatever degree of truth we find in these
views, it is important to be dear that the quality or otherwise of Lord of
the Flies is not dependent upon any of them. Whether Mr. Golding has written
a good novel or not is not because of "the views" which may be deduced from
it, but because of his claim to be a novelist. And the function of the
novelist as Joseph Conrad once said is "by the power of the written word to
make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see." And it
is recognition of this that must take us back from Mr. Golding's fable,
however compelling, to his fiction. Earlier I suggested that these two
aspects occur simultaneously, so that in moving from one to the other, we
are not required to look at different parts of the novel, but at the same
thing from a different point of view.
Let us begin by looking at the coral island. We have mentioned the
careful literary reference to Ballantyne ("Like the Coral Island," the naval
officer remarks), the theological overtones with the constant paradisal
references, "flower and fruit grew together on the same tree," but all these
things matter only because Mr. Golding has imaginatively put the island
before us. The sun and the thunder come across to us as physical realities,
not because they have a symbolic part to play in the book, but because of
the novelist's superb resourcefulness of language. Consider how difficult it
is to write about a tropical island and avoid any hint of the travel poster
cliche or the latest documentary film about the South Seas. To see how the
difficulty can be overcome look at the following paragraph:
Strange things happened at midday. The glittering sea rose up, moved
apart in planes of blatant impossibility; the coral reef and the few,
stunted palms that clung to the more elevated parts would float up into the
sky, would quiver, be plucked apart, run like raindrops on a wire or be
repeated as in an odd succession of mirrors. Sometimes land loomed where
there was no land and flicked out like a bubble as the children watched, (p.
53.)
It is this kind of sensitivity to language, this effortless precision
of statement that makes the novel worth the most patient attention. And what
applies to the island applies to the characters also. As Jack gradually
loses his name so that at the end of the novel he is simply the Chief we
feel this terrible loss of identity coming over in his total inability to do
anything that is not instinctively gratifying. He begins to talk always in
the same way, to move with the same intent. But this is in final terrible
stages of the novel. If we turn back to the beginning of the novel we find
Mr. Golding catching perfectly a tone of voice, a particular rhythm of
speech. Ralph is talking to Piggy shortly after they have met:
"I could swim when I was five. Daddy taught me. He's a commander in the
Navy. When he gets leave he'll come and rescue us. What's your father?"
Piggy flushed suddenly.
"My dad's dead," he said quickly, "and my mum-"
He took off his glasses and looked vainly for something with which to
clean them.
"I used to live with my auntie. She kept a candy store. I used to get
ever so many candies. As many as I liked. When'll your dad rescue us?"
"Soon as he can." (p. 11.)
Notice how skillfully Mr. Golding has caught in that snatch of
dialogue, not only schoolboy speech rhythms,2 but also, quite
unobtrusively, the social difference between the two boys. "What's your
father?", "When'll your dad rescue us?" There are two continents of social
experience hinted at here. I draw attention to this passage simply to show
that in a trivial instance, in something that would never be quoted in any
account of "the importance" of the book, it is the gifts which are peculiar
to a novelist, "to make you hear, to make you feel . . . to make you see,"
that are being displayed.
Perhaps, however, we feel these gifts most unmistakably present not in
the way the landscape is presented to us, nor the characters, but rather in
the extraordinary momentum and power which drives the whole narrative
forward, so that one incident leads to another with an inevitability which
is awesome. A great deal of this power comes from Mr. Golding's careful
preparation for an incident: so that the full significance of a scene is
only gradually revealed. Consider, for instance, one of these. Early in the
book Ralph discovers the nickname of his companion with delight:
"Piggy! Piggy!"
Ralph danced out into the hot air of the beach and then returned as a
fighter plane, with wings swept back, and machine-gunned Piggy.
Time passes, games give way to hunting, but still the hunting can only
be talked about in terms of a game and when Jack describes his first kill,
it takes the form of a game:
"I cut the pig's throat---"
The twins, still sharing their identical grin, jumped up and ran round
each other. Then the rest joined in, making pig-dying noises and shouting.
2.In their notes for this edition the authors define all of the
schoolboy slang terms that are likely to confuse adult readers.- Eds.
"One for his nob!"
"Give him a fourpenny one!"
Then Maurice pretended to be the pig and ran squealing into the centre,
and the hunters, circling still, pretended to beat him. As they danced, they
sang.
"Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in."
Ralph watched them, envious and resentful. Not till they flagged and
the chant died away, did he speak "I'm calling an assembly."
There is an exasperation in Ralph's statement which places him outside
the game, the fantasy fighter plane has no place in this more hectic play;
the line between pretense and reality is becoming more difficult to see. The
first incident emerged from an overflow of high spirits, the second from the
deeper need to communicate an experience. When the game is next played, the
exuberant mood has evaporated. Maurice's place has been taken by Robert:
Jack shouted.
"Make a ring!"
The circle moved in and round. Robert squealed in mock terror, then in
real pain.
"Ow! Stop it! You're hurting!"
The butt end of a spear fell on his back as he blundered among them.
"Hold him!"
They got his arms and legs. Ralph, carried away by a sudden thick
excitement, grabbed Eric's spear and jabbed at Robert with it.
"Kill him! Kill him!"
All at once, Robert was screaming and struggling with the strength of
frenzy. Jack had him by the hair and was brandishing his knife. Behind him
was Roger, fighting to get close. The chant rose ritually, as at the last
moment of a dance or a hunt.
"Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!"
Ralph too was fighting to get near, to get a handful of that brown,
vulnerable flesh. The desire to squeeze and hurt was over-mastering.
The climax is reached when the game turns into the killing of Simon-the
pig, first mentioned in Ralph's delighted mockery of Piggy's name, made more
real in the miming of Maurice and then in the hurting of Robert, becomes
indistinguishable from Simon who is trampled to death. This series of
incidents, unobtrusive in any ordinary reading, nevertheless helps to drive
the book forward with its jet-like power and speed. Just before Simon's
arrival at the feast, there is a sudden pause and silence, the game is
suspended. "Roger ceased to be a pig and became a hunter, so that the centre
of the ring yawned emptily," It is that final phrase which crystallizes the
emotion, so that we feel we are suddenly on the brink of tragedy without
being able to locate it. It is now, after the violence, that the way is
clear for the spiritual climax of the novel. As Simon's body is carried out
to sea we are made aware, in the writing, of the significance of Simon's
whole function in the novel; the beauty of the natural world and its order
hints at a harmony beyond the tortured world of man and to which now Simon
has access. And Mr. Golding has made this real to us, not by asserting some
abstract proposition with which we may or may not agree, but by "the power
of the written word."
During the last part of this Introduction when I have been urging the
importance of Lord of the Flies as a fiction, you may think that I am
putting forward some claim for Mr. Golding as a stylist, a writer of fine
prose, rather in the manner of Oscar Wilde saying that there is no such
thing as good books and bad books, only well written and badly written
books. This is dangerously misleading if we interpret this as meaning we can
separate what is being said from how it is being said. If, on the other
hand, we intend that the content of a novel only "lives" in direct relation
to the writer's ability to communicate it imaginatively, then Wilde's remark
is surely true. Ultimately, Mr. Golding's book is valuable to us, not
because it "tells us about" the darkness of man's heart, but because it
shows it, because it is a work of art which enables us to enter into the
world it creates and live at the level of a deeply perceptive and
intelligent man. His vision becomes ours, and such a translation should make
us realize the truth of Shelley's remark that "the great instrument for the
moral good is the imagination."
An Old Story Well Told1
WILLIAM R. MUELLER
I
Lord of the Flies uncovers the fallen and unredeemed human heart; it
sketches the enormities of which man, unrestrained by human law and
resistant to divine grace, is capable. The varying degrees of goodness, as
manifested by Simon, Piggy and Ralph, are simply no match for a murderous
Jack or a head-hunting Roger. When we first meet the boys, recently dropped
onto an island after escaping from their bomb-ravaged part of the world,
they are still trailing faint clouds of glory. Even Roger, who shares with
Jack the most diabolic potentialities of them all, early in the novel
manifests a thin sheath of decency and restraint; in throwing stones at one
of the smaller boys he is careful to miss, to leave untouched and inviolate
a small circle surrounding his teased victim: "Here, invisible yet strong,
was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection
of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger's arm was conditioned
by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins." The novel
delineates the gradual unconditioning of the arm and the unveiling of the
heart of Roger and some of his companions.
Lord of the Flies is, of course, more than an expository disquisition
on sin. Were it only that, it would have gone virtually unnoticed. The book
is a carefully structured work of art whose organization-in terms of a
series of hunts- serves to reveal with progressive clarity man's essential
core. There are six stages, six hunts, constituting the dark-
1.This article is reprinted in part by permission of The Christian
Century, 80 (October 2, 1963), 1203-06. Copyright (c) 1963 by the Christian
Century Foundation.
est of voyages as each successive one takes us closer to natural man.
To trace the hunts-with pigs and boys as victims-is to feel Gelding's full
impact.
As Ralph, the builder of fires and shelters, is the main constructive
force on the island, Jack, the hunter, is the primary destructive force.
Hunting does of course provide food, but it also gratifies the lust for
blood. In his first confrontation with a pig, Jack fails, unable to plunge
his knife into living flesh, to bear the sight of flowing blood, and unable
to do so because he is not yet far enough away from the "taboo of the old
life." But under the questioning scrutiny of his companions he feels a bit
ashamed of his fastidiousness, and, driving his knife into a tree trunk, he
fiercely vows that the next time will be different.
And so it is. Returning from the second hunt he proclaim; proudly that
he has cut a pig's throat. Yet he has not reached the point of savage
abandonment: we learn that he "twitched" as he spoke of his achievement-an
involuntary gesture expressing his horror at the deed and disclosing the
tension between the old taboo and the new freedom. His reflection upon the
triumph, however, indicates that pangs of conscience must certainly fade
before the glorious feeling of new and devastating power: "His mind was
crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when
they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a
living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long
satisfying drink."
The third hunt is unsuccessful; the boar gets away. Nonetheless it
plants the seed of an atrocity previously undreamed, and it is followed by
an ominous make-believe, a mock hunt in which Robert, one of the younger
boys, plays pig, the others encircling him and jabbing with their spears.
The play becomes frenzied with cries of "Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill
the pig! Bash him in!" An almost overwhelming dark desire possesses the
boys. Only a fraction of the old taboo now remains; the terrified Robert
emerges alive, but with a wounded rump. What is worse, the make-believe is
but the prelude to an all too real drama.
II
The fourth hunt is an electrifying success, a mayhem accomplished with
no twitch of conscience, no element of pretense. The boys discover a sow
"sunk in deep maternal bliss," "the great bladder of her belly . . . fringed
with a row of piglets that slept or burrowed and