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
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