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The Two Worlds of William Golding
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12476 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
4,121 Words |
| Author
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Walter Sullivan
Walter Sullivan, a novelist and literary critic, is professor
of English and director of the program in creative writing at
Vanderbilt University. His most recent novel is The War the
Women Lived: Voices From the Confederate South (1996). |
If, as Yeats claimed, a source of literature is the author's argument with himself, William Golding's success as a novelist is easy to account for. When he was young, as he has said many times, he was a political liberal who believed that the human condition could be ameliorated by social action. Redistribute the wealth and abolish poverty: End poverty and eradicate crime. The fault was not in us, but in the system. Then came World War II and Golding underwent not so much a change of heart as of understanding. It was not, he said, that people were killing each other. As a classicist, he knew this had been going on for millennia. But the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were, he thought, peculiar to our unhappy century; beyond that - and perhaps of most importance - he discovered during his service in the navy that his fellow countrymen were innately evil. Forced to live close to each other aboard ship, they lost their civilized veneer of manners and morals and grew petty, selfish, and sometimes vicious. Finally, Golding concluded that most people of whatever nationality were potential Nazis: England and America had escaped such a fate because of accidental turns in the historical process.
Such was the genesis of Lord of the Flies, Golding's first novel, which is the story of a group of boys placed on an edenic island beyond the influence of organized society. Here, as Golding meant for them to, they reprise the fall of man and the evil that follows. "Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill," the Lord of the Flies says to Simon, the mystic. "You knew, didn't you? I'm a part of you?...I'm the reason why it's no go?" The boys make rules by which they hope to govern themselves, but their dark natures turn some of them into sadists and murderers. They kill first Simon and the Piggy, who represents the rational aspect of human nature, and are trying to kill Ralph, the hero of the narrative, when help arrives. That the book made Golding's point was evidenced by the mail he received congratulating him on telling the truth about people. But as he thought about the novel later, Golding was not entirely comfortable with what he had done. He continued to believe in original sin. But he believed too that the best way to deal with it was by a socialistic system, which, with modifications, was what he had believed before he wrote Lord of the Flies.
Golding's divided psyche is also present in the mystical force that pervades much of his other work. Pincher Martin, the story of a naval officer who dies in the war, is a direct and orthodox treatment of Christian eschatology. Christopher Martin is called "Pincher" because he pinches everything: the wives and sweethearts of his friends; the best parts of plays;
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