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
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