Comments on Golding's Lord of the Flies

A recent online discussion I stumbled across concerning William Golding's Lord of the Flies had me thinking about the validity of the book, or at least about the validity of its stature. For myself - and I'm sure many others had the same experience - Golding's exploration into the incipient heart of darkness within us was required reading in school, and it is also a perennial entrant in several best-of lists. (Time and Modern Library both list it in their top 100 English language novels of the 20th Century, as well as in Modern Library's online reader's poll, and Radcliffe's list meant to rival M.L.'s has it at number 8. Curiously, Harold Bloom leaves it off the Western Canon in favor of the much more obscure, in comparison, Pincher Martin.) Yet for all the acclaim this novel usually generates, the tone behind the discussion I read was mostly disdainful, veering close to outright contempt. That in itself doesn't mean much: it isn't unusual - especially online - to read critical remarks about literature that might otherwise be highly regarded, whether that criticism is logically rendered or not. (See this blog, for example.) But the author of the particular comments I'm referring to is usually able to invest his writing with enough analytical heft, albeit autocratically, to make it difficult for me to dismiss his ideas out of hand.

First off, before addressing the discussion I read, I should admit that Lord of the Flies makes me uncomfortable. I don't really like the book, nor the films based on it. Although I can - and have - smothered some of that discomfort with intellectual parsing of the book's themes and symbols, the fact remains that I think the book is frightening. To really address the cause of that fear would take a sharper psychoanalyst than me, but essentially it's because the book conforms a great deal to the way I understand the world to work. The boys may be thinly drawn surrogates for larger segments of society, but that doesn't change the fact that these types do exist - I've seen them in action even while constrained by the veneer of civilization that Golding's novel endeavored to remove.

But on to the discussion that I read. Here, the commentator equated the savagery that surfaces with 'original sin', and holds that Golding intimates it is only checked by the artificial structures of authoritarian rules and conventions. (I think this may be too simple of a synopsis, but I'll come back to that later.) After establishing those ground rules, the author of the comments proceeded to attack the many implausibilities within the narrative, as well as the ineffective characters, who were simple representations of types, and to suspect that Golding's ignorance of the natural world in which he placed the boys indicated that he was incapable of rendering an accurate assessment of human nature. The author concludes by judging the work dated, with advances in evolutionary psychology and ethography effectively nullifying Golding's key ideas.

There were other points that the discussion raised, though these were certainly the main thrust. The first one I'd address is the implausibility of many of the events in the novel, such as using Piggy's glasses to start a fire, or the existence of wild hogs on an uninhabited island, or even the tenderfoot boys scampering around an island made of coral and volcanic ash. Here the critic raises some valid points - whether some or all of the inconsistancies can be explained doesn't matter, Golding never does. And, like the poet says, this is where 'two roads diverged'. Either the problems disqualify the novel from serious consideration in your mind, or they don't. I suspect the difficulty will be exacerbated in ardent naturalists, where these flaws will sound extremely jarring; they may even give rise to the idea that inaccurate representation of nature negates the ability to comment on human nature. The first part of that is reasonable, the second nonsense. Commenting on human nature is not dependent on environmental factors, otherwise novels reflecting the author's experience in urban settings could never plumb the depths of the human psyche.

If you've chosen the more traveled road, and are opting to stick with the novel past its superficial faults, I think the next hurdle is each boy's character, which is admittedly one dimensional, and exists purely to illustrate a type. Again, it's understandable if this prevents you from maintaining enough interest to attempt to penetrate deeper themes. Still, I personally don't consider this a flaw, since to make the larger points, it was probably necessary to draw the boys in broad strokes, and because I don't remember ever thinking that the boys were all that unrealistic. I have known people who were all Jack, all Ralph, all Roger, and all Piggy. And even if Simon is a bit too angelic, the plausibility of the others compensates for his symbolic, Christ-like appearance.

Still hanging on? I think you should, but that's just me. The discussion I read equated Lord of the Flies with an examination of 'original sin', or our innate bestiality. With the preponderance of religious symbolism in the book (not least the appearance of Beelzebub as the Lord of the Flies), it seems like an obvious conclusion, yet regardless of what Golding may have intended, I think it transcends that limiting theme and, intentional or no, succinctly addresses the role of fear in society. Both Jack and Ralph metaphorically propose methods that they feel will provide for the tribe's safety and insulate them from despair; the vast majority of the boys are only looking for a leader, someone to do their thinking for them, and they unquestioningly surrender to the one who seems to promise the greatest security. That it happens to be Jack is at once circumstantial and, one suspects, somewhat artificial, yet at the same time, it has a feeling of inevitability about it.

Because this is the real point behind the book, regardless of what meaning one draws from it: if one were to imagine a setting and condition where real children were set adrift in an environment in which they were able to survive, would they develop (or devolve) along similar lines as the children from Lord of the Flies? Depending on how you answer that question will determine whether the novel holds any insights for you. This is precisely what makes it so disturbing to me - I do absolutely believe that Golding more or less nails it because I have simply witnessed too many incidents that dovetail with the book's events, even in adults. This also answers the question of whether the book is dated or not - to me, the answer is no, no matter what breakthroughs happen in evolutionary psychology or ethology, because the result is still the same. The best they might be able to do is tell us why these things happen.

One last observation, which does tend to date the book some, but seems relevent still, is the note that Golding wrote his book as a refutation of another called The Coral Island, written in 1857, and concerning a group of English boys who are confronted with similar circumstances, yet win over the Polynesian natives with their Christian beliefs. Golding even apparently took the proper names from the older work and used them to name his own characters. If The Coral Island was indicative of the mindset that believed the European was superior to indidgenous peoples simply because of his civilization, then certainly LoF could also be looked at as an anti-colonial tract, especially given its publication date of 1954. By claiming that civilization is only a temporary mirage, he struck the greatest blow he could strike against the idea of 'the white man's burden' - to make the colonizer the equal of the colonized.
What do you think?

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Welcome to those of you who are visiting my site from Russia. This blog is concerned with what I'm reading, and how I think different books compare with one another. I do not speak or read Russian - I am using the Google translator feature to write these few words, so if my words sound strange, that is the reason why. But if anyone would like to leave a comment about whatever is on your mind, I will definitely respond as best I'm able.
 
Tell me what you're reading, or some of your favorite books and authors - or anything else you're interested in.  Don't worry if you're not able to write in English - I'll translate using Google. It may not work perfectly, but I should be able to get the basic meaning.

Welcome!

In Search of Lost Times; or, Whose History is it?

Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany, 1815 - 1871 by Theodore S. Hamerow

The Hummingbird and the Hawk: Conquest and Sovereignty in the Valley of Mexico 1503-1541 by R. C. Padden

Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy  by John R. Hale

Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock


These four examples of historical writing are worth comparing because they vary so widely in technique, methodology and intent.  Since I've read them all in the last six months, there is also a synchronicity factor at work - their differences show up in sharper relief because of it.  Lastly, it does no harm that they are all entertaining and worthwhile in their own way.

Even though I enjoyed Restoration, Revolution, Reaction, I can't pretend it will be to every one's liking.  Full of statistical data on the economic conditions of the German Confederation prior to the revolution of 1848, it seeks to illuminate the various factors that combined to initiate the uprising, and to show that the seeds of failure were rooted in those same factors.  Once the liberal parliamentarians lost control of the revolution, forces sympathetic to the German princes and nobility gained the support of various disenfranchised groups, and returned to a policy of enlightened despotism - at least until Industry and Progress forced them to adapt.  The ultimate conclusion is that since the German people never became accustomed to democratic culture, they were susceptible to an autocrat like Bismark and those who followed him in the 20th Century.  

Published in 1958, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction seems to me to exemplify the type of dense, scholarly work from the social sciences that was common at the time.  As a broad generalization, these volumes are not designed to reach out to the reader - they are asking the reader to extend himself toward the information they offer.  There is as much a mental challenge to gleaning the information as in following the author's conclusions.  So, if I'm already in tune with the subject, then there's a twofold pleasure in stumbling across these books.  (This one I picked up in a Goodwill store for 88 cents.)  Unfortunately, works from this time also tend to be Eurocentric, often seeking to explain the previous war, or lay the groundwork for post-war culture.  Literary critics such as Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, and cultural ones such as Jacques Barzun in The House of Intellect both fall into this category in a general way.

The Hummingbird and the Hawk (1967) marks a diversion from this mold.  Still highly scholarly, this history of the Aztecs and of Spanish conquest is a result of the slow realization that other periods and places besides Europe and antiquity deserved a closer look.  Prof. R. C. Padden's reevaluation of the chronological evidence available concerning the Aztec led him to draw some conclusions that he felt were significantly different than the popular narrative at that time, though his retelling of the events alone make the book well worthwhile. 

While a book like Restoration, Revolution, Reaction is likely safe from much revision, The Hummingbird and the Hawk, or so I imagine, is probably outdated by now due to the half century of study in this field.  But it does bridge a gap between the older style of staid historical universalism and the trends that would dominate the late 60's and 70's.  These trends, sparked, I believe, by the shift in cultural paradigms brought about by societal change from the mid-sixties onward, were an reflection of the larger attempt to break the choke hold that conventional and patriarchal obeisance had on many disciplines.  The Hummingbird and the Hawk doesn't quite leap that far, but it does preview glimpses of an historicity centered more toward the individual than toward large groups. 

And that, I think, is where we can begin to see how a book like Lords of the Sea, and to a lesser extent Charlatan, get the basis for their structure.  Make no mistake about it, the scholarly effort involved in Lords of the Sea had to be as great - perhaps greater - than either of the two previous books mentioned.  Yet there is a less significant feel to the book, as if it is somehow 'history lite'.  Initially, I was quite taken with it, and I can still appreciate its overall narrative, but after reading both of the other examples, I've begun to feel somewhat shortchanged.  Due to the extensive research - both physical and scholarly - that went into Mr. Hale's book, I can't point to his methodology or his intent as the problem.  That leaves me with style as the hurdle.   

Both Mr. Brock and Mr. Hale are capable storytellers, and they disassociate the story they intend to tell from the dusty convention of fact piled on sturdy fact until a solid structure is built.  I don't mean to imply that there accounts are not factual - what I mean is that they are doing their best not to let them impede the story they have to tell.  In Restoration, Revolution, Reaction, the fact, the statistic, the quantifiable, triumphantly trotted out, flexed its muscles, and like a member of a human pyramid, calmly took its spot while its fellows climbed up and into their spaces.  With Lords of the Sea, those facts are hidden away in the end notes and source lists.  While these new authors are relating a historical tale, the last thing they want anyone to think is that they are reading History.  They are offering entertainment instead.  Not that there's anything wrong with that!

A few last notes - look at the clauses that follow the main titles of these books, and I think you will see a trend.  The earlier books are no-nonsense statements of intent.  The latter two are like tag lines at the bottom of movie posters.  If you don't believe me, here are a few other examples, all from recent books in the history field:

Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II

Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars, and

Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

Picking on these titles is unfair - I've not read any of them.  But there is a similarity to them that I find offputting.  They remind me of the superficial output of the History Channel, or A&E.  Well, that's judging a book by its cover for you.  

As always, these are opinions that are always open for discussion.

Affaires de Coeur

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry


Here there be spoilers!

Having finished and set aside Orhan Pamuk's Snow, I am reminded most of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano: There are a variety of similarities, although for reasons I'll get to later, one deserves classic status, and the other doesn't. For the moment, I'd like to concentrate on the aspects they share, because in the end, I think that one way to understand the modern work is to look at the old.

First, both novels deal with a protagonist who is an outsider. The case for Geoffrey Firmin in Volcano is fairly clear, I think. Even though he has lived in Mexico for some time as an English Consul, he is still a foreigner, and drink has cut him off from other contacts. His half-brother has only recently come to stay with him, and his wife only returns the day of the novel. Ka, from Snow, is also isolated; visiting the border city of Kars from Istanbul, he has only recently returned to Turkey from exile in Germany. Unfamiliar with his own country after a twelve-year absence, he is doubly uncertain in a city he had only briefly visited as a young man.

Both men also hold nominal positions of respect - Firmin is an official of the British Government in Mexico, while Ka is a minor celebrity -- especially in the backwater town of Kars -- due to some published poetry. Yet in both cases, the men will find that any privilege associated with these positions are self-composed illusions. Furthermore, because they believe their rank insulates them from the ordinary dangers by which they are surrounded, there comes a moment when they discover that those who hold the true power in their lives also hold these two in contempt. Geoffrey Firmin discovers this during his fateful encounter with the police, and Ka when the special operative Z Demirkol presents his damning evidence against his lover Ipek.

The reasons for the contempt is much the same also; neither Geoffrey nor Ka have any interest other than self interest. They are not interested in -- and barely cognizant of -- the driving emotions and passions of the competing political ideologies with which the people around them are obsessed. Each man has their own obsession -- a woman, whom each assumes is intrinsic to his happiness. Through the course of events, both relationships end, and each man then hurtles toward his own destruction, one to go on in a sort of living death, one to receive more immediate results, but both consumed by self-pity.

Even the situations surrounding the women they are in love with is similar.  Both men are suffering from the particular heart-sickness that comes from betrayal:  Geoffrey Firmin was cuckolded by his wife and best friend a year prior to the events in Volcano, and it precipitated his descent into mescal and a chasm of self-pity.  Ka has become obsessed with Ipek, a beautiful woman he barely knows, and after she eventually accepts his offers of love and escape, he uncovers a past affair of hers, one that affects his ability to believe that she can ever feel about him the way he does about her.   Regardless of whether either man's reaction is justified, both assume the posture of victim and betrayed. 
One last note, one more about the tone rather than characterization: Both novels are gloom-ridden and melancholic, with heavy foreshadowing that makes them both emotional reads. Here though, it is a matter of style; Lowry's prose is difficult, stream-of-conscious wanderings that make use of symbols and parallelism to generate a feeling of impending doom, while Pamuk uses an intrusive narrator. Each technique will have its supporters: I prefer Lowry, although I don't object to Pamuk's effort.

Those are the broad descriptions of the similarities I found between these two novels; following the particular thread of the two men's emotional situations, what I notice most is the striking difference in the authors' final pronouncements --or even judgments -- on their characters inability to overcome these problems. In Under the Volcano, Geoffrey Firmin is murdered by a corrupt faction of the police, and his body is thrown into a ditch. In his last sentence,as if in summing up everything that Lowry intended to convey about his Consul, he simply remarks, "Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine."

Pamuk takes a different approach. The narrator, who happens to be a writer named Orhan Pamuk, has reconstructed Ka's days in Kars -- days that could very well be said to be his last as a living man. After interviewing the people who were most important during his friend's stay in the border town, Pamuk boards his train and ends his story.  "I sat down and as I looked out the window through the snow at the orange lights of the outermost houses of the outlying neighborhoods, the shabby rooms full of people watching television, and the last snow-covered rooftops, the thin and elegantly quivering ribbons of smoke rising from the broken chimneys at last seemed a smudge through my tears."

Pamuk is begging us here, hoping that we will accept his narrator's emotional response as something Ka deserves, though in truth, there was little throughout the story that suggested Ka was worthy of such grand, melodramatic tears. Ka, as made obvious through his reconstructed notes of his time in Kars, felt sorry enough for himself, and yet Pamuk wants to legitimize Ka's self-pity as tragedy. It's a neat trick, and it almost works. Lowry, on the other hand, leaves no one to cry for the Consul: he is a small man who dies a dirty death. And although Geoffrey Firmin was also consumed with self-pity, Lowry refuses to put him on a pedestal.

Impressions and Speculations:

Despite the attempt of Stephen Spender, writing in the introduction to the 1965 edition of Under the Volcano, to make Lowry's novel more about the political events of 1938 than about the character of Geoffrey Firmin, I emphatically believe that Lowry's main thrust is getting down the last day of his Consul, and that Firmin is an expression of Lowry's inner opinion of himself. (An idle observation is that Firmin is a near homophone for vermin.)

It is tempting to draw the same conclusion about Orhan Pamuk and Ka -- and by virtue of Ka coming from the consciousness (and sub-consciousness) of his author, it would probably be correct to some degree or another. Still, what really matters to this reader, despite that Snow is labeled a political novel, is that the emotional resonance Pamuk intended for his readers to feel about Ka is, to me, the primary emphasis of the book. Thus, stripped of all the other circumstances, both novels are about the destruction of self-absorbed men who, treated roughly by their affaires de coeur, find it impossible to recover. Pamuk cries for his friend the luckless lover, and, by extension, asks us to also; Lowry throws a dead dog on top of his.

The difference, as I see it, is that one author understands that his character is full of self-pity, and judges that emotion rather harshly, while the other is either unaware of his character's true mental state, or else feels as if it is a valid, worthy emotion. And that is why one reads like a skillfully manipulative melodrama, and the other like a punch in the stomach.

As always, I gladly welcome comments and dissenting opinions.