squeaked." What a prize! Wounded, she flees, "bleeding and mad"; "the hunters followed, wedded to her in lust, excited by the long chase and the dropped blood." The sow finally falters and in a ghastly scene Jack and Roger ecstatically consummate their desires: Here, struck down by the heat, the sow fell and the hunters hurled themselves at her. This dreadful eruption from an unknown world made her frantic; she squealed and bucked and the air was full of sweat and noise and blood and terror. Roger ran round the heap, prodding with his spear whenever pigflesh appeared. Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his knife. Roger found a lodgment for his point and began to push till he was leaning with his whole weight. The spear moved forward inch by inch and the terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her. The butterflies still danced, preoccupied in the center of the clearing. The fifth hunt, moving us even closer to the unbridled impulses of the human heart, is a fine amalgam of the third and fourth. This time Simon is at the center of the hideous circle, yet the pursuit is no more make-believe than it was with the heavy-teated sow. Simon is murdered not only without compunction but with orgiastic delight. The final and climactic abhorrence is the hunt for Ralph. Its terror will not be celebrated here; suffice it to say that one refinement not present in the Simon episode is added -a stick Roger sharpens at both ends. It had indeed been used for the sow, with one point piercing the earth and the other supporting the severed head, but its human use had not yet been tested on that island paradise. Such being Mr. Golding's art and conviction, it is little wonder that some readers have judged him offensive, revolting, depravedly sensational, utterly wicked. He has been impelled to say that many human beings, left unrestrainedly to their own devices, will find the most natural expression of their desires to lie in human head-hunting. Those who affirm that man is made in God's image will be given some pause, but upon reflection they will probably interpret the novel as a portrayal of the inevitable and ultimate condition of a world without grace. Those who affirm that man is basically and inherently good-and becoming better-may simply find the novel a monstrous perpetuation of falsehood. Golding's main offense, I suppose, is that he profanes what many men hold most precious: belief that the human being is essentially good and the child essentially innocent. Yet his offense, as well as his genius, lies not in any originality of view or statement but in his startling ability to make his story real, so real that many readers can only draw back in terror. I would strongly affirm, however, that Golding's intention is not simply to leave us in a negative state of horror. Lard of the Flies has a tough moral and religious flavor,2 one which a study of its title helps make clear. The term "lord of the flies" is a translation of the Hebrew word "Baalzebub" or "Beelzebub." The Baal were the local nature gods of the early Semitic peoples. In II Kings 1:2 Baalzebub is named as the god of Ekron. All three Synoptic Gospels refer to Beelzebub; in Luke 11:15 he is called "the chief of the devils." In English literature among those who refer to him are Christopher Marlowe and Robert Burton, though it is left to Milton to delineate his character at some length. Weltering by Satan's side he is described as "One next himself [Satan] in power, and next in crime, /Long after known in Palestine, and nam'd Beelzebub." His subtle services to the great Adversary of mankind are well known. To disregard the historical background of Golding's title3 or the place of the Lord of the Flies within the novel is to miss a good part of the author's intent; it is, indeed, to leave us with nothing but horror. 2.Thomas M. Coskren, O. P., in "Is Golding Calvinistic?" America, 109 (July 6, 1963), 18-20, also speaks to this point at length. The essay is reprinted on pp. 253-260 in this volume.- Eds. 3. Golding seems to attach no particular significance to the historical Beelzebub but to regard him as simply another manifestation or creation of the human heart. (See James Keating and William Golding, "The Purdue Interview," p. 192 in this volume.) It is difficult to see how the "historical background" for the title enhances understanding of Golding's basic fable, although it certainly figures as a due to the theme.-Eds. At the conclusion of the fourth hunt, after the boys have hacked the multiparous sow, they place its head on a stick as a sacrificial offering for some reputedly mysterious and awesome beast-actually a dead parachutist who had plummeted to the ground, now unrecognizable as his body rises and falls each time the wind fills the parachute and then withdraws from it. Meanwhile Simon, whose love for his companions and desire to protect them instill a courage extraordinary, leaves them to search out the darksome creature. He finds himself confronted by the primitive offering, by "the head grinning amusedly in the strange daylight, ignoring lie flies, the spilled guts, even ignoring the indignity of being spiked on a stick." As he is impelled to stare at the gruesome object, it undergoes a black, unholy transfiguration; he sees no longer just a pig's head on a stick; his gaze, we are told, is "held by that ancient, inescapable recognition." And that which is inescapably recognized by Simon is of primordial root. Its shrewdness and devastation have long been chronicled: it is on center stage in the third chapter of Genesis; it gained the rapt attention of Hosea and Amos and the prophets who followed them. As Simon and the Lord of the Flies continue to face each other, the nature of the latter is clearly and explicitly set forth in an imaginary conversation which turns into a dramatic monologue. The head speaks: "What are you doing out here all alone? Aren't you afraid of me?" Simon shook. "There isn't anyone to help you. Only me. And I'm the Beast." Simon's mouth labored, brought forth audible words. "Pig's head on a stick." "Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill" said the head. . . . "You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, dose, close! I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things are what they are?" A moment later, the Beast goes on: "I'm warning you, I'm going to get angry. D'you see? You're not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island! So don't try it on, my poor misguided boy, or else-" Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was blackness within, a blackness that spread. "-Or else," said the Lord of the Flies, "we shall do you. See? Jack and Roger and Maurice and Robert and Bill and Piggy and Ralph. Do you. See?" Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness. The "ancient, inescapable recognition" is that the Lord of the Flies is a part of Simon, of all the boys on the island, of every man. And he is the reason "things are what they are." He is the demonic essence whose inordinate hunger, never assuaged, seeks to devour all men, to bend them to his will. He is, in Golding's novel, accurately identified only by Simon. And history has made clear, as the Lord of the Flies affirms, that the Simons are not wanted, that they do spoil what is quaintly called the "fun" of the world, and that antagonists will "do" them. Simon does not heed the "or else" imperative, for he bears too important a message: that the beast is "harmless and horrible." The direct reference here is to the dead parachutist whose spectrally moving form had terrified the boys; the corpse is, obviously, both harmless and horrible. But it should also be remembered that the Lord of the Flies identified itself as the Beast and that it too might be termed "harmless and horrible." Simon alone has the key to its potential harmlessness. It will become harmless only when it becomes universally recognized, recognized not as a principle of fun but as the demonic impulse which is utterly destructive. Simon staggers on to his companions to bear the immediate good news that the beast (the rotting parachutist) is harmless. Yet he carries with him a deeper revelation; namely, that the Beast (the Lord of the Flies) is no overwhelming extrinsic force, but a potentially fatal inner itching, recognition of which is a first step toward its annihilation. Simon becomes, of course, the suffering victim of the boys on the island and, by extension, of the readers of the book.4 4.Compare Donald R. Spangler, "Simon" on pp. 211-215 in this volume.-Eds. IV To me Lord of the Flies is a profoundly true book. Its happy offense lies in its masterful, dramatic and powerful narration of the human condition, with which a peruser of the daily newspaper should already be familiar. The ultimate purpose of the novel is not to leave its readers in a state of paralytic horror. The intention is certainly to impress upon them man's, any man's, miraculous ingenuity in perpetrating evil; but it is also to impress upon them the gift of a saving recognition which, to Golding, is apparently the only saving recognition. An orthodox phrase for this recognition is the "conviction of sin," an expression which grates on many contemporary ears, and yet one which the author seemingly does not hold in derision. Lecturing at Johns Hopkins University in the spring of 1962, Golding said that Lord of the Flies is a study of sin. And he is a person who uses words with precision. Sin is not to be confused with crime, which is a transgression of human law; it is instead a transgression of divine law. Nor does Golding believe that the Jacks and Rogers are going to be reconstructed through social legislation eventuating in some form of utopianism-he and Conrad's Mr. Kurtz are at one in their evaluation of societal laws which, they agree, exercise external restraint but have at best a slight effect on the human heart. Golding is explicit: "The theme [of Lord of the Flies]" he writes, "is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable," William Golding's story is as old as the written word. The figure of the Lord of the Flies, of Beelzebub, is one of the primary archetypes of the Western world. The novel is the parable of fallen man. But it does not close the door on that man; it entreats him to know himself and his Adversary, for he cannot do combat against an unrecognized force, especially when it lies within him. Is Golding Calvinistic?1 A more optimistic interpretation of the symbolism found in Lord of the Flies THOMAS MARCELLUS COSKREN, O. P. IN an issue of America last winter, two critics gave their interpretations of William Golding's remarkably successful Lord of the Flies.2 While the approach of each of these critics differed, Mr. Kearns being concerned with the sociopolitical implications of the work and Fr. Egan with the theological, both reached the same conclusion: Lord of the Flies presents the Calvinist view of man as a creature essentially depraved. As one of the professors who has placed the novel on his required reading list, I should like to raise a dissenting voice. While I am prepared to admit that Lord of the Flies is hardly the most optimistic book that has appeared in recent times, I find it difficult to accept the conclusion reached by Fr. Egan and Mr. Kearns. Both, it seems to me, have left too much of the novel unexplained; indeed, their view of the work seems to render important sections inexplicable. If Golding has presented man as essentially depraved, why are three of his four major characters good people? Granted that Ralph, Piggy and Simon possess a limited goodness, the condition of all men, they are decidedly boys of high 1.This article is reprinted with permission from America, the National Catholic Weekly Review, 920 Broadway, New York City. It appeared in the issue of July 6, 1963, Volume 109, pp. 18-20. 2.Francis E. Kearns, "Salinger and Golding: Conflict on the Campus," America, 108 (January 26, 1963), 136-39, and John M. Egan, "Golding's View of Man," 140-41.-Eds. purpose, who use good means to achieve their ends. Jack may strike many as the perfect symbol of essentially depraved man, but he is only one out of four. Three-to-one seems a rather impressive ratio favoring at least a limited goodness in the human community. Moreover, if Golding hesitates "to view evil in a religious framework," as Mr. Kearns says, why is Simon, on the symbolic level, so cleverly identified with Christ? 3 In fact, this identification is so obvious that one is tempted to agree with Kearns' statement about Lord of the Flies being "too neatly symbolic, too patently artistic." Certainly, the very presence of a Christ-figure in the novel, a presence which pervades the work, implies some kind of religious framework. Again, if man were not good or innocent at some time in the long history of the race, why should Ralph at the end of the novel weep "for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy"? Ralph weeps for an innocence that man once possessed; he laments the loss of goodness, and this is not some vague goodness, but the palpable goodness in his "true, wise friend." Thus far, the objections I have offered to the view presented by Mr. Kearns and Fr. Egan concern only the characters in Lord of the Flies. These objections are serious enough, but there are others which demand examination by the critic. If the world into which these characters have been placed is, as Fr. Egan states, a universe that is "a cruel and irrational chaos," why does Golding indicate, with almost obsessive attention to detail, the pattern, the order of the island world which the boys inhabit? Throughout the novel we find natural descriptions which use metaphors from the world of manufacturing. In other words, the universe of Lord of the Flies is one that has been made, created. The novel is filled with phrases like the following: "a great platform of pink granite"; "a criss-cross pattern of trunks"; "the palms . . . made a green roof "; "the incredible lamps of stars." Further, Golding's adjectives indicate an ordered universe. This indication is especially apparent after the terrible storm accompanying Simon's death. In this section he uses such words as "angu- 2.Cf. Donald R. Spangler's "Simon" on pp. 211-215 in this volume. See also Golding's remarks on Simon in the interview with James Keating, p. 192.-Eds. lar" and "steadfast" to describe the constellations. If William Golding's universe is "a cruel and irrational chaos," he has certainly chosen most inappropriate words to describe it. Basically, it seems to me, the real difficulty with the interpretation of Lord of the Flies offered by Fr. Egan and Mr. Kearns is its failure to treat the novel as a whole. William Golding's novel is not antihuman; it is anti-Rousseau. It does not portray human nature as such; it presents human nature as infected with the romantic chimera of inevitable human progress, a progress which will be achieved because of the innate nobility and innocence of the human species. In theological terms, which are perhaps the most accurate critical tools for explaining this novel, Lord of the Flies is not so much Manichean as it is anti-Pelagian. A more detailed analysis should help to show this anti-Pelagian character of the work. Lord of the Flies begins with all the paraphernalia of the romantic, and sentimental, preconceptions that owe so much to Rousseau's social philosophy. In the first chapter we are presented with a group of children, the contemporary world's symbol of innocence. They are placed on a tropical island, an earthly paradise, Rousseau's habitat for the "noble savage." But these boys are not Adam-figures; they are not innocent. Each of them, in varying degrees, reflects the influence of the serpent-which, by the way, is introduced in the first chapter when Ralph unfastens "the snake-clasp of his belt." Here begins the terrible irony that runs through the whole novel. Romantic man thinks he can rid himself of evil merely by taking off his clothes, the symbol of civilization and its effects. In this superficially idyllic community, made up of refugees from an atomic war, we discover Golding's four major characters: Ralph, Piggy, Jack and Simon. It is with these characters that Golding's symbolism becomes somewhat more complex than either Mr. Keams or Fr. Egan suggests. Lord of the Flies is essentially a fable about contemporary man and contemporary ideas. Thus, Ralph is not only the symbol of the decent, sensible parliamentarian; he is also me figure of an idea: the abstract concept of democratic government. The same double role is filled by the other characters: Jack is at once the dictator and the concept of dictatorship; Piggy is the intellectual, with all his powers and deficiencies, and representative of the Enlightenment or scientific method. Finally, Simon is the mystic and poet, who is also a Christ-figure and thus the symbol of religious faith. The symbolism of Lord of the Flies, therefore, functions on a number of levels, and it seems to be an injustice to Golding's extraordinary dexterity in handling these multiple levels to reduce them to one level, that of universal human nature. Golding suggests the complexity of these symbolic figures in their physical descriptions. Ralph is "the boy with fair hair [who has] a mildness about his mouth and eyes that proclaimed no devil." On the literal level we have the good boy, the "solid citizen." As such, Ralph engages our sympathies. And on the most obvious symbolic level he still has our sympathies, for he represents the decent, sensible parliamentarian, the political ideal of the Western world. But on another, and deeper, level Golding has introduced an ironic twist. The symbolic value Ralph possesses as the abstract concept of the democratic process is presented as a challenge to the reader. If, as the Western world seems to believe, the democratic process of government is the best devised by man throughout his history, why doesn't it work always and everywhere? It is at this level that Golding suggests symbolically the inadequacy, not the depravity, of the solely human; it is at this level that he directs his devastatingly ironic commentary on the Rousseauvian myth of the general will and its unproved presupposition of the natural goodness of the human species. In effect, Golding's modern fable puts Rousseau's social contract to the test: Lord of the Flies takes man back to the primitive condition of things, which the French social reformer had advocated as the one sure way of restoring man to his proper dignity. Then it shows that, far from being naturally good, man has some type of defect for which civilization is not responsible. Rousseau's social philosophy fails the test, and the essentially confused notion of nature which Rousseau bequeathed to the contemporary world is exposed for the fraud that it is. Moreover, the irony implicit in Ralph's inadequacy is extended to the other characters, either as they participate in the same inadequacy or as they question symbolically the solution offered for human ills by Ralph's faith in Rousseauvian democracy. Piggy participates in the "grand design" of restoration. As a figure of the Enlightenment, he cannot accept the extremes of romanticism, and he votes for Ralph only "grudgingly"; but he will use the more popular romantic concept of government and will try to direct ft. Yet, even with his discerning rational assessment of the problem of forming a government for the refugees, his inherent weaknesses are evident Ultimately, he is destroyed, not because his intellectual gifts are depraved, but because he falls into the mistaken belief that they are sufficient unto themselves. Piggy is intelligent enough, for example, to question Ralph's blind faith in rescue by the military (a scathing commentary on the Western democracies' current worship at the shrine of Cape Canaveral), but he remains blind to the limitations of his own reason. Jack and Simon, on the other hand, are not taken in by the Rousseauvian solution. Jack's approach to the human condition is much too twisted for even the remotest comparison with the idealism, fanciful though it is, implicit in Rousseau; Simon's view of humanity is so penetrated with realistic self-appraisal that he transcends the idealism of the French reformer. Jack descends to the subhuman; Simon soars to the superhuman. While Ralph and Piggy exemplify ironically the "noble savage," Jack and Simon provide the necessary counterpoint; Jack exploits the savagery, and Simon explores the nobility. And it is probably through the figure of Jack that William Golding pronounces his severest condemnation of the romantic myth of human progress. For, in the last analysis, it is the dictator who has benefited most from Rousseau's social view. When man's efforts toward progress and eventual fulfillment, however altruistic his motivation, proceed from sloppy thinking, then brute force takes over to direct the course of progress and subverts even the good in human nature to its own destructive ends. Yet, Golding is not interested merely in the altruism or the subversion; between these two forces in contemporary civilization he places the figure of Simon. He introduces him to the reader in somewhat melodramatic fashion: the boy faints. In this, the first of Simon's actions, we have a possible ironic twist on Swinburne's famous line: "Thou hast conquer'd, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray from thy breath." It is obvious from Simon's subsequent history that he is a Christ-figure; and the romantic view of humanity proposed by Rousseau has so infiltrated every aspect of life in the contemporary world that even Christ is seen through the rose-colored glasses of sentimentality, which is the logical and real successor to romanticism. Thus, the Christ of Lord of the Flies is the "pale Galilean"; yet it is this same weak Christ who, in the first act he performs, forces a concession from Jack, and the choir boys are allowed to rest The irony is evident: even a weak Christ is more than a strong dictator.4 Further, when Simon announces his name (and his name has the strongest biblical overtones), Jack says: "We've got to decide about being rescued." Immediately, Simon is linked, however vaguely, with the idea of salvation. After the boys have elected Ralph as leader by "this toy of voting," Jack, Simon and Ralph begin exploring the mountain. This section of the novel is crucial, for it is here that Golding gives his abbreviated ironical summary of the romantic view of human progress. The passage needs analysis in depth (impossible in an article of this length), but it should be pointed out that Golding has chosen as explorers those who have dominated the history of man: the totalitarian, the parliamentarian and the mystic-poet And, as is clear from the text, Simon is the realist of the triumvirate. When the boys examine the bushes on the mountain, Simon accepts them for what they are. Ralph and Jack are concerned only with how the buds can be used That Golding's figure of religious faith accepts reality as it is provides an interesting comment on the limited approaches of the parliamentarian and the dictator. As we follow Simon through the novel, we discover that he is the mystic who separates himself from the others to ponder the mysteries of existence. Simon is the carpenter who continues building the shelters after the other boys have abandoned the work; Simon feeds the "littluns"; Simon encounters the beast in all its loathsomeness and does not succumb to the beast's temptation to despair. This encounter is the boy's Gethsemane: he comes face to face with evil, recognizes it for what it is, and, despite the agony and horror of the meeting, he is neither defeated 4.Simon's martyrdom, however, indicates that the saint or Christ-like personage (in spite of his spiritual strength) fails to rescue man from the nightmare of history.-Eds. nor intimidated by it. Immediately after he recovers consciousness, he ascends the mountain to free the dead pilot, whose parachute lines have become entangled in the rocks. In other words, Simon climbs the mountain to free "fallen man." He returns then to the boys to announce the good news; they need no longer fear the beast. But the group will not listen to him. Like the One in whose place he stands symbolically, Simon is murdered during a religious festival- the diabolical liturgy of the pig. His death occurs while the island world cowers under the lash of a gigantic storm. And it is only after Simon has actually died that the dead man in the parachute is finally freed and washed out to sea, the sea which is Golding's symbol of mystery, not chaos. Finally, Simon has his symbolic hour of glorification: his body is surrounded by "moonbeam-bodied creatures with fiery eyes"; gleaming in this unearthly phosphorescence, he is carried gently out to sea. And it is difficult not to recognize the hint of a resurrection motif here, for the pattern is that of the hero carried through the waters to his apotheosis. Lord of the Flies, as I have suggested, is not an optimistic novel, but at least it is pessimistic about the right things. It states quite clearly that the time has come for the Western world to abandon its fantastic belief in the Rousseauvian concept of the natural goodness of the human species, which goodness must lead inevitably to the total perfection of the race. It shows what happens to scientific man, when he trusts only in the activity of his unaided reason. It castigates the Western democracies for their blind acceptance of salvation through militarism. It pictures the tragic destruction of any society which nourishes and exalts the dictator. Ultimately, it presents the awesome spectacle of a world which, not satisfied with murdering Simon, continues to neglect the significance of his sacrifice. But William Golding's world is not merely pessimistic. There is goodness in his characters; there is order in his universe.5 However, like all authors who have tried their 5.It might well be noted, however, that the goodness and the order are overcome in every instance. True, Ralph survives and he steps forward to announce himself to the rescuer" as the leader, but the rescue is decidedly ironic; the boys are freed from primitive and childish militarism only by sophisticated adult militarism.-Eds. hand at the intellectual exercise we call fable, he wants to teach man some hard truths about his own .nature. In the complexity and ambiguity of a highly elaborated symbolism, he has reminded modern man of the fact of original sin. This is a reminder that we all need every so often. In a later novel, The Inheritors, Golding places the following ironic words in the mouth of one character: "People understand each other." Lord of the Flies answers: "Perhaps; but not well enough." "Men of a Smaller Growth": A Psychological Analysis of William Golding's Lord of the Flies1 CLAIRE ROSENFIELD When an author consciously dramatizes Freudian theory- and dramatizes it successfully-only the imaginative recreation of human behavior rather than the structure of ideas is apparent. In analyzing William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the critic should assume that Golding knows psychological literature,2 and must then attempt to show now an author's knowledge of theory can vitalize his prose and characterization. The plot itself is uncomplicated; so simple, indeed, that one wonders how it so effortlessly absorbs the burden of meaning. During some unexplained man-made holocaust a plane, evacuating a group of children, crashes on the shore of a tropical island. All adults are conveniently killed. The narrative follows the children's gradual return to the amorality of childhood, a non-innocence which makes them small savages. Or we might make the analogy to the childhood of races and compare the child 1.This essay appeared in Literature and Psychology, 11 (Autumn, 1961), 93-101, and is reprinted in a revised version here by permission of the author and the editor, Leonard F. Manheim. 2.Note Golding's comment that he has read "absolutely no Freud" in "Lord of the Campus," Time, LXXIX (June 22, 1962), 64. Reprinted in this volume, p. 285.-Eds. to the primitive. Denied the sustaining and repressing authority of parents, church, and state, the boys form a new culture, the development of which reflects that of the genuine primitive society, evolving its gods and demons, its rituals and taboos, its whole social structure. On the level of pure narrative, the action proceeds from the gradual struggle between Ralph and Jack, the two oldest boys, for precedence. Consistent clusters of imagery imply that one boy is godlike, the other satanic-thus making a symbolic level of meaning by transforming narrative events into an allegorical struggle between the forces of Good and those of Evil. Ralph is the natural leader by virtue of his superior height, his superior strength, his superior beauty. His mild expression proclaims him "no devil." He possesses the symbol of authority, the conch, or sea shell, which the children use to assemble their miniature councils. Golding writes, "The being that had blown . . . [the conch] had sat waiting for them on the platform with the delicate thing balanced on his knees, was set apart." Jack, on the other hand. is described in completely antithetical terms; he is distinguished by his ugliness and his red hair, a traditional demonic attribute. He first appears as the leader of a church choir, which "creature-like" marches in two columns behind him. All members of the choir wear black; "their bodies, from throat to ankle, were hidden by black cloaks." 3 Ralph initially blows the conch to discover how many children have escaped death in the plane crash. As Jack approaches with his choir from the "darkness of the forest," he cannot see Ralph, whose back is to the sun. The former is, symbolically, sun-blinded. These two are very obviously intended to recall God and the Devil, whose confrontation, in the history of Western religions, establishes the moral basis for all actions. But, as Freud reminds us, "metaphysics" becomes "metapsychology";4 gods and devils are "nothing other than processes projected into the outer world." 5 If Ralph is a projection of man's good impulses from which we derive the authority figures-whether god, king, or father 3.P. 16. All page references are to this edition of Lord of the Flies and will hereafter be noted in parentheses in the text. 4.Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, as quoted by Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1957), III, 53. 5. Ibid. -who establish the necessity for our valid ethical and social action, then Jack becomes an externalization of the evil instinctual forces of the unconscious; the allegorical has become the psychological. The temptation is to regard the island on which the children are marooned as a kind of Eden, uncorrupted and Eve-less. But the actions of the children negate any romantic assumptions about childhood innocence. Even though Golding himself momentarily becomes a victim of his Western culture and states at the end that Ralph wept for the "end of innocence," events have simply supported Freud's conclusion that no child is innocent. On a fourth level, Ralph is every man-or every child-and his body becomes the battleground where reason and instinct struggle, each to assert itself. For to regard Ralph and Jack as Good and Evil, as I do in the previous paragraph, is to ignore the role of the child Piggy, who in the child's world of make-believe is the outsider. Piggy's composite description not only manifests his difference from the other boys; it also reminds the reader of the stereotype image of the old man who has more-than-human wisdom: he is fat, inactive because asthmatic, and generally reveals a disinclination for physical labor. Because he is extremely near-sighted, he wears thick glasses- a further mark of his difference. As time passes, the hair of the other boys grows with abandon. "He was the only boy on the island whose hair never seemed to grow. The rest were shock-headed, but Piggy's hair still lay in wisps over his head as though baldness were his natural state, and this imperfect covering would soon go, like the velvet on a young stag's antlers" (59). In these images of age and authority we have a figure reminiscent of the children's past - the father. Moreover, like the father he counsels common sense; he alone leavens with a reasonable gravity the constant exuberance of the others for play or for play at hunting. When they scamper off at every vague whim, he scornfully comments, " Like a pack of kids. " Ungrammatically but logically he tries to allay the "littluns'' fear of a "beast" "Life is scientific, that's what it is. ... I know there isn't no beast-not with claws and all that, I mean-but I know there isn't no fear, either'" (77). He has excessive regard for the forms of order: the conch must be held by a child before that child can speak at councils. When the others neglect responsibility, fail to build shelters, swim in the pools or play in the sand or hunt, allow the signal fire on the mountain to go out or get out of hand and burn up half the island, he seconds Ralph by admonishing the others vigorously and becomes more and more of a spoilsport who robs play of its illusions, like the adult who interrupts the game. Ralph alone recognizes Piggy's superior intelligence, but wavers between what he knows to be wise and the group acceptance his egocentricity demands. Finally, Piggy's role-as man's reasoning faculties and as a father-derives some of its complexity from the fact that the fire which the children foster and guard on the mountain in the hope of communicating with the adult world is lighted with his glasses. In classical mythology, after all, fire brought civilization-and, hence, repression-to man. As the hold of civilization weakens, the new community becomes more and more irrational, and its irrationality is marked by Piggy's progressive blindness. An accident following an argument between Ralph and Jack causes one of the lenses of Piggy's glasses to break. When the final breach between the two occurs and Piggy supports Ralph, his remaining lens is stolen in a night raid by Jack. This is a parody of the traditional fire theft, which was to provide light and warmth for mankind. After this event Piggy must be led by Ralph, When he is making his final plea for his glasses-reasoned as always-he is struck on the head by a rock and fails. "Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back on that square, red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy's arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has been killed" (167). What Golding emphasizes here is the complete animality to which Piggy is reduced, His mind is destroyed; his body is subject to motor responses alone; he is "like a pig after it has been killed." The history of the child Piggy on the island dramatizes in terms of the individual the history of the entire group. When they first assemble to investigate their plight, they treat their island isolation as a temporary phenomenon. They are, after all, still children, wanting only to play games until they are interrupted by the action of parents, until the decisions of their elders take them from make-believe to the actuality of school or food or sleep; until they are rescued, as it were, from "play." This microcosm of the great world seems to them to be a fairy land. A kind of glamour was spread over them and the scene and they were conscious of the glamour and made happy by it (22). The coral was scribbled in the sea as though a giant had bent down to reproduce the shape of the island in a flowing, chalk line but tired before he had finished (25). "This is real exploring," said Jack. "I'll bet nobody's been here before" (23). Echoes and birds flew, white and pink dust floated, the forest further down shook as with the passage of an enraged monster: and then the island was still (24). They compare this reality which as yet they do not accept as reality to their reading experiences: it is Treasure Island or Coral Island or like pictures from their travel books. This initial reaction reaffirms the pattern of play which Johan Huizinga establishes in Homo Ludens6 In its early stages their play has no cultural or moral function; it is simply a "stepping out of real life into a temporary sphere of activity." 7 Ironically, the child of Lord of the Flies who thinks he is "only pretending" or that this is "only for fun" does not realize that his play is the beginning of the formation of a new society which has regressed to a primitive state, with all its emphasis upon taboo and communal action. What begins by being like other games in having a distinct "locality and duration" 8 apart from ordinary life is-or becomes-reality. The spatial separation necessary for the make-believe of the game is represented first by the island. In this new world the playground is further narrowed: not only are their actions limited by the island, but also the gatherings of the children are described as a circle at several points, a circle from which Piggy is excluded: For the moment the boys were a closed circuit of sympathy with Piggy outside (18). They became a circle or boys round a camp fire and even Ralph and Piggy were half-drawn in (67). Piggy approximates the spoilsport who "robs the play of its illusion," 9 who reminds them of space and time outside the charmed circle, who demands responsibility. 6.Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 7.Ibid.,p.8. 8.Ibid.,p.9. 9.Ibid.,p.7. The games of the beginning of the novel have a double function: they, first of all, reflect the child's attitude toward play as a temporary cessation from the activities imposed by the adult world; but, like the games played before the formation of civilization, they anticipate the ritual which reveals a developing society. So the children move from voluntary play to ritual, from "only pretending" to reality, from representation or dramatization to identification. The older strictures imposed by parents are soon forgotten-but every now and then a momentary remembrance of past prohibitions causes restraint. One older child hides in order to throw stones at a younger one. Yet there was a space around Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law (57). Jack hesitates when, searching for meat, he raises his knife to kill his first pig. The pause was only long enough for them to understand what an enormity the downward stroke would be. Then the piglet tore loose from the creepers and scurried into the undergrowth. . . . "Why didn't you-?" They knew very well why he hadn't: because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood (27). The younger children first, then gradually the older ones, like primitives in the childhood of races, begin to people the darkness of night and forest with spirits and demons which had previously appeared only in their dreams or fairy tales. Now there are no comforting mothers to dispel the terrors of the unknown. They externalize these fears into the figure of a "beast." Once the word "beast" is mentioned, the menace of the irrational becomes overt; name and thing become one. Simply to mention the dreaded creature is to incur its wrath. At one critical council when the first communal feeling begins to disintegrate, Ralph cries, "If only they could send us something grown-up ... a sign or something" (87). And a sign does come from the outside. That night, unknown to the children, a plane is shot down and its pilot parachutes dead to earth and is caught in the rocks on the mountain. It requires no more than the darkness of night together with the shadows of the forest vibrating in the signal fire to distort the tangled corpse with its expanding silk parachute into a demon that must be appeased. Ironically, the fire of communication does touch this object of the grown-up world, only to foster superstition. But the assurances of the civilized world provided by the nourishing and protective parents are no longer available. Security in this new situation can only be achieved by establishing new rules, new rituals to reassert the cohesive-ness of the group. During the first days the children, led by Jack, play at hunting. But eventually the circle of the playground extends to the circle of the hunted and squealing pig seeking refuge which itself anticipates the circle of consecrated ground where the children perform the new rites of the kill. The first hunt accomplishes its purpose: the blood of the animals is spilled; the meat used for food. But because Jack and his choir undertake this hunt, they desert the signal fire, the case of which is dictated by the common-sense desire for rescue; it goes out and a ship passes the island. Later the children re-enact the killing with one boy, Maurice, assuming the role of the pig running its frenzied circle. The others chant in unison: "Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in." At this dramatic representation each child is still aware that this is a display, a performance. He is never "so beside himself that he loses consciousness of ordinary reality."10 Each time they re-enact the same event, however, their behavior becomes more frenzied, more cruel, less like dramatization or imitation than identification. The chant then becomes, "Kill the beast. Cut his throat. Spill his blood." It is as if the first event, the pig's actual death, is forgotten in the recesses of time; it is as if it happened so long ago that the children have lost track of their history on the island; facts are distorted, a new myth defines the primal act. Real pig becomes mythical beast to children for whom the forms of play have become the rituals of a social order. Jack's ascendancy over the group begins when the children's fears distort the natural objects around them: twigs 20 Ibid., p. 14. become creepers, shadows become demons. I have already discussed the visual imagery suggesting jack's demonic function. He serves as a physical manifestation of irrational forces. After an indefinite passage of time, he appears almost dehumanized, his "nose only a few inches from the humid earth." He is "dog-like" and proceeds forward "on all fours" into the "semi-darkness of the undergrowth." His cloak and clothing have been shed. Indeed, except for a "pair of tattered shorts held up by his knife-belt, he was naked." His eyes seemed "bolting and nearly mad." He has lost his ability to communicate with Ralph as he had on the first day. "He tried to convey the compulsion to track down and kill that was swallowing him up" (46). "They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate" (49). When Jack first explains to Ralph the necessity to disguise himself from the pigs he wants to hunt, he rubs his face with clay and charcoal. At this point he assumes a mask, begins to dance, is finally freed from all the repressions of his past. "He capered toward Bill, and the mask was a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness" (58). At the moment of the dance the mask and Jack are one. The first kill, as I have noted, follows the desertion of the signal fire and the conterminous passage of a possible rescue ship. Jack, however, is still revelling in the knowledge that they have "outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long and satisfying drink" (64). Note that the pig is here described as a "living thing" not as an animal; only if there is equality between victor and victim can there be significance in the triumph of one over the other. Already he has begun to obliterate the distinction between animals and men, as do primitives; already he thinks in terms of the metaphor of a ritual drinking of blood, the efficacy of which depended on the drinker's assumption of his victim's strength and spirit. Ralph and Piggy confront him with his defection of duty, his failure to behave like a responsible member of Western society. 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. Jack transferred the knife to his left hand and smudged blood over his forehead as he pushed down the plastered hair (65). Jack's unconscious gesture is a parody of the ritual of initiation in which the hunter's face is smeared with the blood of his first kill. In the subsequent struggle one of the lenses of Piggy's spectacles is broken. The dominance of reason is over; the voice of the old world is stilled. The primary images are no longer those of fire and light but those of darkness and blood. The initial link between Ralph and Jack "had snapped and fastened elsewhere." The rest of the group, however, shifts its allegiance to Jack because he has given them meat rather than something as useless as fire. Gradually, they begin to be described as "shadows" or "masks" or "savages" or "demoniac figures" and, like Jack, "hunt naked save for paint and a belt." Ralph now uses Jack's name with the recognition that "a taboo was evolving around that word too." Name and thing again become one; to use the word is to incite the bearer, who is not here a transcendent or supernatural creature but rather a small boy. But more significant, the taboo, according to Freud, is "a very primitive prohibition imposed from without (by an authority) and directed against the strongest desires of man." 11 In this new society it replaces the authority of the parents, whom the children symbolically kill when they slay the nursing sow. Now every kill becomes a sexual act, is a metaphor for childhood sexuality, an assertion of freedom from mores they had been taught to revere. The afternoon wore on, hazy and dreadful with damp heat; the sow staggered her way ahead of them, bleeding and mad, and the hunters followed, wedded to her in lust, excited by the long chase and the dropped blood. . . . The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her (125). Every subsequent ritual fulfills not only a desire for communication and for a security to substitute for that of civilization, but also a need to liberate themselves from both the repressions of the past and those imposed by Ralph. Indeed, the projection into a beast of those impulses that they cannot accept in themselves is the beginning of a new mythology. The earlier dreams and nightmares of individual children are now shared in this mutual creation. 11.Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), p. 834. When the imaginary demons become defined by the rotting corpse and floating parachute on the mountain which the boys' terror distorts into a beast, Jack wants to track the creature down. After the next kill, the head of the pig is placed upon a stake to placate the beast. Finally one of the children, Simon, after an epileptic fit, creeps out of the forest at twilight while the others are engaged in enthusiastic dancing following a hunt. Seized by the rapture of re-enactment or perhaps terrorized by fear and night into believing that this little creature is a beast, they circle Simon, pounce on him, bite and tear his body to death. He becomes not a substitute for beast but beast itself; representation becomes absolute identification, "the mystic repetition of the initial event." 12 At the moment of Simon's death, nature speaks as it did at Christ's crucifixion: a cloud bursts; rain and wind fill the parachute on the hill and the corpse of the pilot falls or is dragged among the screaming boys. Both Simon and the dead man, beast and beast, are washed into the sea and disappear. After this complete resurgence of savagery in accepted ritual, there is only a short interval before Piggy's remaining lens is stolen, he is intentionally killed as an enemy, and Ralph, the human being, becomes hunted like beast or pig. Simon's mythic and psychological role has earlier been suggested in this essay. Undersized, subject to epileptic fits, bright-eyed, and introverted, he constantly creeps away from the others to meditate among the intricate vines of the forest. To him, as to the mystic, superior knowledge is intuitively given which he cannot communicate. When the first report of the beast-pilot reaches camp, Simon, we are told, can picture only "a human at once heroic and sick." He predicts that Ralph will " 'get back all right,' " only to be scorned as "batty" by the latter. In each case he sees the truth, but is overwhelmed with self-consciousness. During the day preceding his death, he walks away as if in a trance and stumbles upon a pig's head left in the sand in order to appease the demonic presence the children's terror has created. Shaman-like, he holds a silent and imaginary colloquy with it, a severed head covered with innumerable flies. It is itself the titled Lord of the Flies, a name applied to the Biblical demon Beelzebub and later used in Goethe's Faust, 12. Ibid., p. 834. Part 1, to describe Mephistopheles.13 From it he learns that it is the Beast, and the Beast cannot be hunted because it dwells within each child. Simon feels the advent of one of his fits. His visual as well as his auditory perception becomes distorted; the head of the pig seems to expand, an anticipation or intuition of the discovery of the pilot's corpse, whose expanding parachute causes the equally distorted perceptions of normal though frightened children. Suddenly Golding employs a startling image, "Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness" (133). Laterally, this image presents the hallucination of a sensitive child about to lose control of his rational faculties. Such illusions, or auras, frequently attend the onset of an epileptic seizure. Mythologically and symbolically, it recalls the quest in which the hero is swallowed by a serpent or dragon or beast whose belly represents the underworld, undergoes a ritual death in order to win the elixer to revitalize his stricken society, and returns with his knowledge to the timed world as a redeemer. So Christ, after his descent to the grave and to Hell, returns to redeem mankind from his fallen state. Psychologically, this figure of speech connoting the descent into the darkness of death represents the annihilation of the individual ego, an internal journey necessary for self-understanding, a return from the timelessness of the unconscious. When Simon wakes from his symbolic death, he suddenly realizes that he must confront the beast on the mountain because "what else is there to do?" Earlier he had been unable to express himself or give advice. Now he is relieved of "that dreadful feeling of the pressure of personality." When he discovers the corrupted corpse hanging from the rock, he first frees it in compassion though it is surrounded by flies, and then staggers unevenly down to report to the others. He attempts to assume a communal role from which his strangeness and nervous seizures formerly isolated him. Redeemer and scapegoat, he becomes the victim of the group he seeks to enlighten. In death- before he is pulled into the sea-the flies which have moved to his head from the bloodstained pig and from the decomposing body of the man are replaced by the phosphorescent creatures of the deep. Halo-like, these "moonbeam-bodied creatures" attend the seer who has been denied into the 13.Ibid. formlessness and freedom of the ocean. "Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon's dead body moved out toward the open sea" (142).14 Piggy's death, soon to follow Simon's, is foreshadowed when the former proclaims at council that there is no beast, " 'What would a beast eat?' " " 'Pig.' " " 'We eat pig,' " he rationally answers. " 'Piggy' " (77) is the emotional response, resulting in a juxtaposition of words which imply Piggy's role and Golding's meaning. At Piggy's death his body twitches "like a pig's after it has been killed." Not only has his head been smashed, but also the conch, symbol of order, is simultaneously broken. A complex group of metaphors unite to form a total metaphor involving Piggy and the pig, hunted and eaten by the children, and the pig's head which is at once left to appease the beast's hunger and is the beast itself. But the beast is within, and the children are defined by the very objects they seek to destroy. In these associated images we have the whole idea of a communal and sacrificial feast and a symbolic cannibalism, all of which Freud discussed in Totem and Taboo. Here the psychology of the individual contributes the configurations for the development of religion. Indeed, the events of Lord of the Flies imaginatively parallel the patterns which Freud detects in primitive mental processes. Having populated the outside world with demons and spirits which are projections of their instinctual nature, these children-and primitive men-must then unconsciously evolve new forms of worship and laws, which manifest themselves in taboos, the oldest form of social repression. With the exception of the first kill-in which the children still imagine they are playing at hunting-the subsequent deaths assume a ritual form; the pig is eaten communally by all and the head is left for the "beast," whose role consists in sharing the feast. This is much like the "public ceremony" 15 described by Freud in which the sacri- 14.The reader will find it worthwhile to compare Donald R. Spangler's "Simon," reprinted on pp. 211-215 in this volume, with Professor Rosenfield's view of Simon.-Eds. 15.There are further affinities to Sartre's Les Mouches. fice of an animal provided food for the god and his worshipers. The complex relationships within the novel between the "beast," the pigs which are sacrificed, the children whose asocial impulses are externalized in the beast-this has already been discussed. So we see that, as Freud points out, the "sacrificing community, its god [the 'beast'], and the sacrificial animal are of the same blood," 16 members of a clan. The pig, then, may be regarded as a totem animal, an "ancestor, a tutelary spirit and protector";17 it is, in any case, a part of every child. The taboo or prohibition against eating particular parts of the totem animal coincides with the children's failure to eat the head of the pig. It is that portion which is set aside for the "beast." Just as Freud describes the primitive feast, so the children's festive meal is accompanied by a frenzied ritual in which they temporarily release their forbidden impulses and represent the kill. To consume the pig and to re-enact the event is not only to assert a "common identity" 18 but also to share a "common responsibility" for the deed. By this means the children assuage the enormity of having killed a living thing. None of the boys is excluded from the feast. The later ritual, in which Simon, as a human substitute identified with the totem, is killed, is in this novel not an unconscious attempt to share the responsibility for the killing of a primal father in prehistoric times, as Freud states; rather, it is here a social act in which the participants celebrate their new society by commemorating their severance from the authority or the civilized state. Because of the juxtaposition of Piggy and pig, the eating of pig at the communal feast might be regarded as the symbolic cannibalism by which the children physically partake of the qualities of the slain and share responsibility for their crime. (It must be remembered that, although Piggy on a symbolic level represents the light of reason and the authority of the father, as a human being he shares that bestiality and irrationality which to Golding dominate all men, even the most rational or civilized.) In the final action, Ralph is outlawed by the children and hunted like an animal. One boy, Roger, sharpens a stick at 16. Totem and Taboo, p. 878. 17. Ibid., p. 808, 18. Ibid., p. 914. both ends so that it will be ready to receive the severed head of the boy as if he were a pig. Jack keeps his society together because it, like the brother horde of William Robertson Smith19 and Freud, "is based on complicity in the common crimes."20 All share the guilt of having killed Simon, of hunting Ralph down. In his flight Ralph, seeing the grinning skull of a pig, thinks of it as a toy and remembers the early days on the island when all were united in play. In the play world, the world of day, the world of the novel's opening, he has become a "spoilsport" like Piggy; in the world based upon primitive rites and taboos, the night world where fears become demons and sleep is like death, he is the heretic or outcast, the rejected god. This final hunt, after the conch is broken, is the pursuit of the figure representing civilized law and order; it is the law and order of a primitive culture. Finally, Jack, through misuse of the dead Piggy's glasses, accidentally sets the island on fire. A passing cruiser, seeing the fire, lands to find only a dirty group of sobbing little boys. " 'Fun and games,' said the officer. . . . 'What have you been doing? Having a war or something?' " (185). But are all the meanings of the novel as clear as they seem? To restrict it to an imaginative re-creation of Freud's theory that children are little savages, that no child is innocent whatever popular Christian theology would have us believe, is to limit its significance for the adult world. To say that the "beasts" we fear are within, that man is essentially irrational-or, to place a moral judgment on the irrational, that man is evil-that, again, is too easy. In this forced isolation of a group of children, Golding is making a statement about the world they have left-a world that we are told is "in ruins." According to Huizinga's theory of play, war is a game, a contest for prestige which, like the games of primitives or of classical athletes, may be fatal. It, too, has its rules, although the modern concept of total war tends to obscure both its ritualistic and its ennobling character. It, too, has its spatial and temporal limitations, as the rash of "limited" wars makes very clear. More than once the children's acts are compared to those of the outside 19.William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 3rd ed., with an introduction by Stanley A. Cook (New York: Macmillan, 1927). 20.Totem and Taboo, p. 916. world. When Jack first blackens his face like a savage, he gives his explanation: " 'For hunting. Like in the war. You know-dazzle paint. Like things trying to look like something else' " (57). Appalled by one of the ritual dances, Piggy and Ralph discuss the authority and rationality of the apparently secure world they have left: "Grownups know things," said Piggy. "They ain't afraid of the dark. They'd meet and have tea and discuss. Then things 'ud be all right-" "They wouldn't set fire to the island. Or lose-" "They'd build a ship-" The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life. "They wouldn't quarrel-" "Or break my specs-" "Or talk about a beast-" "If only they could get a message to us," cried Ralph desperately. "If only they could send us something grown-up . . . a sign or something" (86-87). The sign does come that night, unknown to them, in the form of the parachute and its attached corpse. The pilot is the analogue in the adult world to the ritual killing of the child Simon on the island; he, like Simon, is the victim and scapegoat of his society, which has unleashed its instincts in war. Both he and Simon are associated by a cluster of visual images. Both are identified with beasts by the children, who do see the truth-that all men are bestial-but do not understand it. Both he and Simon attract the flies from the Lord of the Flies, the pig's head symbolic of the demonic; both he and Simon are washed away by a cleansing but not reviving sea. His position on the mountain recalls the hanged or sacrificed god of Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, in which an effigy of the com god is buried or thrown into the sea to insure fertility among many primitives; here, however, we have a parody of fertility. He is dead proof that Piggy's exaggerated respect for adults is itself irrational. When the officer at the rescue jokingly says, "What have you been doing? Having a war or something?" this representative of the grown-up world does not understand that the games of the children, which result in two deaths, are a moral commentary upon the primitive nature of his own culture. The ultimate irrationality is war. Paradoxically, the children not only regress to a primitive and infantile morality, but they also degenerate into adults. They prove that, indeed, "children are but men of a smaller growth" Notes on Lord of the Flies1 E. L. EPSTEIN IN answer to a publicity questionnaire from the American publishers of Lord of the Flies, William Golding (born Cornwall, 1911) declared that he was brought up to be a scientist, and revolted; after two years of Oxford he changed his educational emphasis from science to English literature, and became devoted to Anglo-Saxon. After publishing a volume of poetry he "wasted the next four years," and when World War II broke out he joined the Royal Navy. For the next five years he was involved in naval matters except for a few months in New York and six months with Lord Cherwell in a "research establishment." He finished his naval career as a lieutenant in command of a rocket ship; he had seen action against battleships, submarines and aircraft, and had participated in the Walcheren and D-Day operations. After the war he began teaching and writing. Today, his novels include Lord of the Flies (Coward-McCann), The Inheritors (which may loosely be described as a novel of prehistory but is, like all of Golding's work, much more), and Pincher Martin (published in this country by Harcourt Brace as The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin). He lists his Hobbies as thinking, classical Greek, sailing and archaeology, and his Literary Influences as Euripides and the anonymous Anglo-Saxon author of The Battle of Maldon. The theme of Lord of the Flies is described by Golding as follows (in the same publicity questionnaire): "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back 1.This article appeared in the original Capricorn edition of Lord of the Flies (New York: Putnam's, 1959), 249-55. to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable. The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island. The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?" This is, of course, merely a casual summing-up on Mr. Golding's part of his extremely complex and beautifully woven symbolic web which becomes apparent as we follow through the book, but it does indicate that Lord of the Flies is not, to say the least, a simple adventure story of boys on a desert island. In fact, the implications of the story go far beyond the degeneration of a few children. What is unique about the work of Golding is the way he has combined and synthesized all of the characteristically twentieth-century methods of analysis of the human being and human society and used this unified knowledge to comment on a "test situation." In this book, as in few others at the present time, are findings of psychoanalysts of all schools, anthropologists, social psychologists and philosophical historians mobilized into an attack upon the central problem of modern thought: the nature of the human personality and the reflection of personality on society.2 2.Epstein perhaps overstates here. The novel cannot be taken as a final synthesis of modern thought or as the ultimate comment on the "nature of the human personality." The boys are not completely free agents; they have been molded by British civilization for some years before being deposited on the island. They attempt to establish a government that imitates democracy, they retain confidence in adults, they, at least for a while, behave in accord with prior training, as when Roger throws the stones near but not at Henry, pp. 56-57. Some events that occur depend on circumstance rather than cause and effect. For example, when the boys ask for a sign from the adult world (p. 87), the sign conveniently appears (pp. 88-89). The fortuitous arrival of the cruiser at the climactic moment is also a result of obvious manipulation on the part of Golding. These maneuvers militate against the authenticity of the theme. They are not good "evidence."-Eds. Another feature of Golding's work is the superb use of symbolism, a symbolism that "works." The central symbol itself, "the lord of the flies,"' is, like any true symbol, much more than the sum of its parts; but some elements of it may be isolated. "The lord of the flies" is, of course, a translation of the Hebrew Ba`alzevuv (Beelzebub in Greek) which means literally 'lord of insects." It has been suggested that it was a mistranslation of a mistransliterated word which gave us this pungent and suggestive name for the Devil, a devil whose name suggests that he is devoted to decay, destruction, demoralization, hysteria and panic and who therefore fits in very well with Golding's theme. He does not, of course, suggest that the Devil is present in any traditional religious sense; Golding's Beelzebub is the modern equivalent, the anarchic, amoral, driving Id whose only function seems to be to insure the survival of the host in which it is embedded or embodied, which function it performs with tremendous and single-minded tenacity. Although it is possible to find other names for this force, the modern picture of the personality, whether drawn by theologians or psychoanalysts, inevitably includes this force or psychic structure as the fundamental principle of the Natural Man. The tenets of civilization, the moral and social codes, the Ego, the intelligence itself, form only a veneer over this white-hot power, this uncontrollable force, "the fury and the mire of human veins." Dostoievsky found salvation in this freedom, although he found damnation in it also. Yeats found in it the only source of creative genius ("Whatever flames upon the night,/ Man's own resinous heart has fed."). Conrad was appalled by this "heart of darkness," and existentialists find in the denial of this freedom the source of perversion of all human values. Indeed one could, if one were so minded, go through the entire canon of modern literature, philosophy and psychology and find this great basic drive defined as underlying the most fundamental conclusions of modern thought. The emergence of this concealed, basic wildness is the theme of the book; the struggle between Ralph, the representative of civilization with his parliaments and his brain trust (Piggy, the intellectual whose shattering spectacles mark the progressive decay of rational influence as the story progresses), and Jack, in whom the spark of wildness burns hotter and closer to the surface than in Ralph and who is the leader of the forces of anarchy on the island, is also, of course, the struggle in modern society between those same forces translated onto a worldwide scale. The central incident of the book, and the turning point in the struggle between Ralph and Jack, is the killing of the sow on pp. 123-127). The sow is a mother: "sunk in deep maternal bliss lay the largest sow of the lot ... the great bladder of her belly was fringed with a row of piglets that slept or burrowed and squeaked." The killing of the sow is accomplished in terms of sexual intercourse. They were just behind her when she staggered into an open space where bright flowers grew and butterflies danced around each other and the air was hot and still. Here, struck down by the heat, the sow fell and the hunters hurled themselves at her. This dreadful eruption from an unknown world made her frantic; she squealed and bucked and the air was full of sweat and noise and blood and terror. Roger ran round the heap, prodding with his spear whenever pigflesh appeared. Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downwards with his knife. Roger [a natural sadist, who becomes the "official" torturer and executioner for the tribe] found a lodgment for his point and began to push till he was leaning with his whole weight. The spear moved forward inch by inch, and the terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her. The butterflies still danced, preoccupied in the center of the clearing. The entire incident is a horrid parody of an Oedipal wedding night and these emotions, the sensations aroused by murder and death, and the overpowering and unaccustomed emotions of sexual love experienced by the half-grown boys, release the forces of death and the devil on the island.3 The pig's head is cut off; a stick is sharpened at both ends and "jammed in a crack" in the earth. (The death planned for Ralph at the end of the book involves a stick sharpened at both ends.) The pig's head is impaled on the stick; "... the head hung there, a little blood dribbling down the stick. Instinctively the boys drew back too; and 3. The reader will wish to compare Epstein's psychoanalytic interpretation with Claire Rosenfield`s "Men of a Smaller Growth," reprinted on pp. 261-276.-Eds. the forest was very still. They listened, and the loudest noise was the buzzing of flies over the spilled guts." Jack offers this grotesque trophy to "the Beast," the terrible animal that the littler children had been dreaming of, and which seems to be lurking on the island wherever they were not looking. After this occurs the most deeply symbolic incident in the book, the "interview" of Simon, an embryo mystic, with the head. The head seems to be saying, to Simon's heightened perceptions, that "Everything is a bad business. . . . The half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life." Simon fights with all his feeble power against the message of the head, against the "ancient, inescapable recognition." The recognition against which he struggles is the revelation to him of human capacities for evil and the superficial nature of human moral systems. It is the knowledge of the end of innocence, for which Ralph is to weep at the close of the book. The pigs head seems to threaten Simon with death and reveals that it is "the Beast." " '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 the parody of laughter. 'You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things are what they are?' " At the end of this fantastic scene Simon imagines he is looking into a vast mouth. "There was blackness within, blackness that spread . . . Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness." This mouth,4 the symbol of ravenous, unreasoning and eternally insatiable nature, appears again in Pincher Martin, in which the development of the theme of a Nature inimical to the conscious personality of man is developed in a stunning fashion. In Lord of the Flies, however, only the outline of a philosophy is sketched and the boys of the island are figures in a parable or fable which like all parables or fables contains an inherent tension between the innocent, time-passing, storytelling aspect of its surface and the great, "dimly appreciated" depths of its interior. 4.Cf. Conrad's "Heart of Darkness": "I saw [the dying Kurtz] open his mouth wide-it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him." Indeed Golding seems very dose to Conrad, both in basic principles and in artistic method. Lord of the Campus1 BACK in England last week after a year in the U. S., British Author William Golding recalled his interrogation by American college students. "The question most asked was, 'Is there any hope for humanity?' I very dutifully said 'yes.' " Golding's credentials for being asked such a monumental query-and for answering it-rest on one accomplishment: his Lord of the Flies, a grim parable that holds out precious little hope for humanity, and is the most influential novel among U. S. undergraduates since 'Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.2 When Lord of the Flies was first published in the U. S. in 1955, it sold only 2,383 copies, and quickly went out of print. But British enthusiasm for it has been gradually exported to Ivy League English departments, and demand for the book is now high. The paperback edition, published in 1959, has already sold more than 65,000 copies. At the Columbia University bookstore, it outsells Salinger. Lord of the Flies is required reading at a hundred U. S. colleges, is on the list of suggested summer reading for freshmen entering colleges from Occidental to Williams. At Harvard it is recommended for a social-relations course on "interpersonal behavior." An M. I. T. minister uses it for a discussion group on original sin. At Yale and Princeton-where Salinger, like the three-button suit, has lost some of his mystique as he 1.The following article is reprinted by permission from Time The Weekly Newsmagazine; copyright (c) Time Inc. 1962. See "Lord of the Campus," Time, LXXIX (June 22, 1982), 84. 2.See Golding's remarks on Salinger's novel in the interview by Douglas M. Davis, "A Conversation with Golding," New Republic, 148 (May 4, 1963), 28-30.-Eds. becomes adopted by the outlanders-the in-group popularity of Golding's book is creeping up. At Smith, where Lord of the Flies runs a close second in sales to Salinger's Franny and Zooey, 1,000 girls turned out for a lecture by Golding. The reception was the same at the thirty campuses Golding visited during his year as a rarely writer-in-residence at Virginia's Hollins College.3 CREATING THEIR OWN MISERY. The British schoolboys in Lord of the Flies are a fe.w years younger than Salinger's Holden Caulfield-they are six to twelve-but are not self-pitying innocents in a world made miserable by adults. They create their own world, their own misery. Deposited unhurt on a deserted coral island by a plane during an atomic war, they form the responsible vacation-land democracy that their heritage calls for, and it gradually degenerates into anarchy, barbarism and murder. When adult rescue finally comes, they are a tribe of screaming painted savages hunting down their elected leader to tear him apart. The British naval officer who finds them says, "I should have thought that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that." Then he goes back to his own war. Says Golding: "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. Before the war, most Europeans believed that man could be perfected by perfecting society. We all saw a hell of a lot in the war that can't be accounted for except on the basis of original evil." "PEOPLE I KNEW IN CAMP." What accounts for the appeal? Part of it is, of course, pure identification. A Harvard undergraduate says the book "rounds up all the people I knew in camp when I was a counselor." On another level, Golding believes students "seem to have it in for the whole world of organization. They're very cynical. And here was someone who was not making excuses for society. It was 3. See Golding's series of four articles on his visit to the United States. "Touch of Insomnia," Spectator, 207 (October 27, 1961), 569-70; "Glass Door," Spectator, 207 (November 24, 1961), 732-33; "Body and Soul," Spectator, 208 (January 19, 1962), 65-66; "Gradus ad Parnassum," Spectator, 208 (September 7, 1962), 327-519.-Eds. new to find someone who believes in original sin." The prickly belief in original sin is not Golding's only unfashionable stand. Under questioning by undergraduates, he cheerfully admitted he has read "absolutely no Freud"4 (he prefers Greek plays in the original) and said there are no girls on the island because he does not believe that "sex has anything to do with humanity at this level." At 51, bearded, scholarly William Golding claims to have been writing for 44 years-through childhood in Cornwall, Oxford, wartime duty as a naval officer, and 19 years as a schoolmaster. Golding claims to be an optimist-emotionally if not intellectually-and has a humor that belies the gloomy themes of his allegories. One critical appraisal of Lord of the Flies that impressed him came from an English schoolboy who went to an island near Puerto Rico last year to make a movie based oh the book. Wrote the little boy from the idyllic island, surrounded by his happy peers and pampered by his producer: "I think Lord of the Flies stinks. I can't imagine what I'm doing on this filthy island, and it's all your fault." In Golding's view, a perfectly cast savage. 4. An excellent "Freudian" analysis of Lord of the Flies appears in Claire Rosenfield's "Men of a Smaller Growth: A Psychological Analysis of William Golding's Lord of the Flies," Literature and Psychology, XI (Autumn, 1961), 93-101. Reprinted, in a revised version, on pp. 261-276 in this volume.-Eds. A Checklist of Publications Relevant to Lord of the Flies Allen, Walter, "New Novels." New Statesman, XLVIII (September 25, 1954), 370. Amis, Kingsley, New Maps of Hell. New York: Ballantine Books, 1960, pp. 17 (note), 24, and 152. Baker, James R., "Introduction." In Lord of the Flies: Text, Notes and Criticism, edited by James R. Baker and Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr. New York: Capricorn Books, 1964. An earlier version entitled "Why It's No Go" appeared in Arizona Quarterly, 19 (Winter, 1963), 293-305. Bowen, John, "Bending Over Backwards." Times Literary Supplement (October 23,1959), 608. "One Man's Meat: The Idea of Individual Responsibility to Golding`s Fiction." Times Literary Supplement, (August 7,1959), 146. Broes, Arthur T., "The Two Worlds of William Golding." Carnegie Series in English, No. 7 (1963), 1-7. Golby, Vineta, "William Golding." Wilson Library Bulletin, XXXVII (February, 1963), 505. Coskren, Thomas M., O. P., "Is Golding Calvinistic?" America, 109 (July 6,1963), 18-20. Cox, C. B., "Lord of the Flies." Critical Quarterly, 2 (Summer, 1960), 112-17. Davis, Douglas M., "Golding, The Optimist, Belies His Somber Pictures and Fiction." National Observer (September 17, 1962), 17. Drew, Philip, "Second Reading." Cambridge Review, 78 (1956), 78-84. Egan, John M., "Golding's View of Man.' America, 108 (January 26, 1963), 140-41. Epstein, E. L., "Notes on Lord of the Flies" In Lord of the Flies. New York; Capricorn Books, 1959, pp. 249-55. Forster, E. M., "Introduction." In Lord of the Flies. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1962, pp. ix-xii. Freedman, Ralph, "The New Realism: The Fancy of William Golding." Perspective, 10 (Summer-Autumn, 1958), 118-28. Fuller, Edmund, "Behind the Vogue: A Rigorous Understanding." New York Herald Tribune (November 4, 1962), 3. Gindin, James, " 'Gimmick' and Metaphor in the Novels of William Golding." Modern Fiction Studies, 6 (Summer, 1960), 145-52. Reprinted in Gindin's Postwar British Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962, pp. 196-206. Golding, J. T. C., "Letter to James R. Baker." In Lord of the Flies: Text, Notes and Criticism, edited by James R. Baker and Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr. New York: Capricorn Books, 1964. Golding, William, "The Ladder and the Tree." The Listener, 63 (March 24, 1960), 531-33. "Islands." Spectator, 204 (June 10, 1960), 844-46. ''Billy the Kid." Spectator, 205 (November 25, I960), 808. Grande, Luke M., "The Appeal of Golding." Commonweal, LXXVII (January 25, 1963), 457-59. Green, Peter, "The World of William Golding." A Review of English Literature, 1 (April, 1960), 62-72. Gregor, Ian, and Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, "Introduction." In Lord of the Flies. London: Faber and Faber School Editions, 1962, pp. i-xii. "The Strange Case of Mr. Golding and His Critics." The Twentieth Century, CLXVII (February, 1960), 115-25. Halle, Louis J. "Lord of the Flies" Saturday Review, 38 (October 15,1955), 16. Hannon, Leslie, "William Golding: Spokesman for Youth." Cavalier, 13 (December, 1963), 10-12, 92-93. Hewitt, Douglas, "New Novels." The Manchester Guardian LXXI (September 28, 1954), 4. Hynes, Sam, "Novels of a Religious Man." Commonweal, 71 (March 18, 1960), 673-75. Irwin, Joseph J., "The Serpent Coiled Within." Motive, 23 (May 1963), 1-5. Karl, Frederick R., "The Novel as Moral Allegory." In Karl's The Contemporary English Novel. New York: The Noonday Press, 1962, pp. 254-60. Kearns, Francis E., "Salinger and Golding: Conflict on the Campus." America, 108 (January 26, 1963), 136-39. Kearns, Francis E., and Grande, Luke M., "An Exchange of Views." Commonweal, LXXVII (February 22, 1963), 569-71. Keating, James, and William Golding, "The Purdue Interview." Printed in part in Lord of the Flies: Text, Notes and Criticism, edited by James R. Baker and Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr. New York: Capricorn Books, 1964. Kermode, Frank, "Coral Island." The Spectator, CCI (August 22,1958), 257. ----, "The Novels of William Golding." International Literary Annual, No. 3 (1961), 11-29. Reprinted in Kermode's Puzzles and Epiphanies. New York: Chilmark Press, 1962, pp. 198-213. Kermode, Frank, and William Golding, "The Meaning of It All." Books and Bookmen, 5 (October, 1959), 9-10. Leed, Jacob R., "Lord of the Flies." Dimension, Supplement to Daily Northwestern (January, 1963), 7-11. "Lord of the Campus." Time, 79 (June 22, 1962), 64. "Lord of the Flies" America, 109 (October 5, 1963), 398. Maclure, Millar, 'William Golding's Survival Stories." Tamarack Review, 4 (Summer, 1957), 60-67. Maclure, Millar, "Allegories of Innocence." Dalhousie Review, 40 (Summer, 1960), 144-56. MacShane, Frank, "The Novels of William Golding." Dalhousie Review, 42 (Summer, 1962), 171-83. Marcus, Steven, "The Novel Again." Partisan Review, 29 (Spring, 1962), 179-84. Mueller, William R., "An Old Story Well Told." Christian Century, 80 (October 2,1963), 1203-06. Nelson, William, William Golding's Lord of the Flies: A Source Book. New York: Odyssey Press, 1963. Niemeyer, Carl, "The Coral Island Revisited." College English, 22 (January, 1961), 241-45. Nordell, Roderick, "Book Report." Christian Science Monitor (December 27,1962), n.p. Oldsey, Bern, and Weintraub, Stanley, "Lord of the Flies: Beelzebub Revisited." College English, 25 (November, 1963), 90-99. Peter, John, "The Fables of William Golding." Kenyon Review, 19 (Autumn, 1957), 577-92. Pritchett, V. S., "Secret Parables." New Statesman (August 2, 1958), 146-47. Rosenfield, Claire, "Men of a Smaller Growth: A Psychological Analysis of William Golding's Lord of the Flies." Literature and Psychology, 11 (Autumn, 1961), 93-101. Spangler, D. R., "Simon." In Lord of the Flies: Text, Notes and Criticism, edited by James R. Baker and Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr. New York: Capricorn Books, 1964. Stem, James, "English Schoolboys in the Jungle." New York Times Book Review (October 23, 1955), 38. Trilling, Lionel, "Lord of the Flies" The Mid-Century, Issue 45 (October, 1962), 10-12. Wain, John, "Lord of the Agonies." Aspect, No. 3 (April, 1963), 56-57. Walters, Margaret, 'Two Fabulists: Golding and Camus." Melbourne Critical Review, No. 4 (1961), 18-29. Wasserstrom, William, and Rosenfield, Claire, "An Exchange of Opinion Concerning William Golding's Lord of the Flies." Literature and Psychology, 12 (Winter, 1962), 2-3, 11-12. Young, Wayland, "Letter from London." Kenyon Review, 19 (Summer, 1957), 477-82.