g, 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.