chance that those weapons will be used and we'll be done for. I think that
democratic attitude of voluntary curbs put on one's own nature is the only
possible way for humanity, but I wouldn't like to say that it's going to
work out, or survive.
Q.: You recently stated your belief that humanity would either be
saved, or save itself. Is that correct?
A.: Yes, but here again this is because I'm basically an optimist.
Intellectually I can see man's balance is about fifty-fifty, and his chances
of blowing himself up are about one to one. I can't see this any way but
intellectually. I'm just emotionally unable to believe that he will do this.
This means that I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a
pessimist, I suppose.
Q.: The reason I posed that comment was because in your published notes
in Lord of the Flies...
A.: They aren't my notes.
Q.: I'm sorry. I thought Mr. Epstein2 quoted you.
A.: Did he?
Q.: In the summation...
A.: Oh, yes.
Q.: In the end the question is, who will rescue the adult and his
cruiser? This seems to me a little fatalistic; it conveys the notion that
there isn't really any hope.
A.: Yes, but there again you can take... there are two answers here;
I think they are both valid answers. The first one is the one I made before,
and that is that the quotation there is what I said is intellectual
fatalism. It's making the thing a sort of series of Chinese boxes, one
inside of the Other. The other thing is to say that as the fabulist is
always
2.E. L. Epstein, "Notes on Lord of the Flies" reprinted below, p.
277.-Eds.
a moralist, he is always overstating his case, because he has a point
he wishes to drive home. I would prefer to say if you don't curb yourself,
then this is what will happen to you.
Q.: Again, in Lord of the Flies, I noticed a very definite relationship
between Simon and his brutal death and Christ and his crucifixion. Would you
care to discuss this, or give any omniscient judgment?
A.: Well, I can't give an omniscient judgment. I can only say what I
intended. First you've got to remember I haven t read this book for ten
years, so I may be a bit off. I intended a Christ figure in the novel,
because Christ figures occur in humanity, really, but I couldn't have the
full picture, or as near as full a possible picture of human potentiality,
unless one was potentially a Christ figure. So Simon is the little boy who
goes off into the bushes to pray. He is the only one to take any notice of
the little 'uns-who actually hands them food, gets food from places where
they can't reach it and hands it down to them. He is the one who is tempted
of the devil: he has this interview with the pig's head on the stick, with
Beelzebub, or Satan, the devil, whatever you'd like to call it, and the
devil says, "Clear off, you're not wanted. Just go back to the others. We'll
forget the whole thing."
Well, this is, of course, the perennial temptation to the saint, as I
conceive it, to just go and be like ordinary men and let the whole thing
slide. Instead of that, Simon goes up the hill and takes away from the
island, removes, discovers what this dead hand of history is that's over
them, undoes the threads so that the wind can blow this dead thing away from
the island, and then when he tries to take the good news back to ordinary
human society, he's crucified for it. This is as far as I was able to find a
Christ parallel, you see.3
Q.: You mentioned that you couldn't give any omniscient judgment, and
you've earlier said that an author cannot really say, after he has written a
work, what he has given from himself or created.4 What do you
feel the role of the
4.For a further discussion of the role of Simon, see Donald R.
Spangler, "Simon," p. 211 in this volume.-Eds.
5. Compare Gelding's remarks here with his statements in the interview
with Frank Kermode, p. 199 in this volume.-Eds.
critic is here? Do you feel the critic has the right to bring these
things out?
A.: Well, isn't this really a question without much meaning? Because
whether a critic has rights or not he is going to do these things to a book
which has got out of the author's control, and therefore you might just as
well ask whether a man has a right to five fingers on each hand. This is a
thing that happens. Are you really meaning do I think the critic has, by his
nature or by his training, a better chance of saying what's in this book
than the author has? Is that at all it?
Q.: Yes, that's mainly it. As an artist, do you feel the critics are
justified?
A.: Some of them. As a practical matter some of them say things which I
agree with and some say things which I don t agree with. I don't see there's
much generalization that can be made here. The critic has as much right as
any man to get what he can out of a book, and I would say that I think some
critics that I've read have been extremely perceptive -or else I've been
very lucky-in that they've seemed to put their fingers on certain things
which I had deliberately intended and which I would have thought were rather
subtle, and they have contrived to get hold of these. Equally, I would have
to say that some critics seem to me to be miles off beam.
Q.: Well, perhaps Mr. Gindin5 was a little off beam in his
article which discusses your use of gimmicks. He mentions the saving of the
boys as a gimmick that didn't quite fulfill the manifestations that were
opened in the book... it didn't resolve diem, I should think, as well as he
would have liked. Do you feel this is justifiable criticism?
A.: I've been haunted by that word, "gimmick," ever since I used it in
an interview explaining that I liked a sharp reversal at the end which would
show the book in an entirely different light so that the reader would
presumably be forced to rethink the book, which seems to me a useful thing
to do. I don't know, in that event, whether the saving
5.James Gindin, " 'Gimmick' and Metaphor in the Novels of William
Golding," Modern Fiction Studies, 6 (Summer, 1960), 145-152.-Eds.
of the boys at the end is a gimmick or not. The reason for that
particular ending was twofold. First I originally conceived the book as the
change from innocence-which is ignorance of self-to a tragic knowledge. If
my boys hadn't been saved, I couldn't-at that time, at any rate-see any way
of getting some one of them to the point where he would have this tragic
knowledge. He would be dead. If I'd gone on to the death of Ralph, Ralph
would never have had time to understand what had happened to him, so I
deliberately saved him so that at this moment he could see -look back over
what's happened-and weep for the end of innocence and the darkness of man's
heart, which was what I was getting at. That's half the answer.
The other answer is that if, as in that quotation there, the book is
supposed to show how the detects of society are directly traceable to the
defects of the individual, then you rub that awful moral lesson in much more
by having an ignorant, innocent adult come to the island and say, "Oh,
you've been having fun, haven't you?" Then in the last sentence you let him
turn away and look at the cruiser, and of course the cruiser, the adult
thing, is doing exactly what the hunters do-that is, hunting down and
destroying the enemy-so that you say, in effect, to your reader, "Look, you
think you've been reading about little boys, but in fact you've been reading
about the distresses and the wickednesses of humanity. If this is a gimmick,
I still approve of it.
Q.: I think it fulfills what you said about the use of the gimmick at
the end of a novel, making a reader go back and take another look at things.
Did the work by Richard Hughes, High Wind in Jamaica, have any
influence on your writing Lord of the Flies?
A.: This is an interesting question. I can answer it simply: I've read
this book and I liked it but I read it after I'd written Lord of the Flies.
And if you're going to come around to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, I might as
well confess I've never read that.
Q.: Then if you hadn't read High Wind in Jamaica until you'd written
Lord of the Flies, how do you feel about the thematic presentation, the
parallel between the two works?
A.: There is a parallel, I think, but like so many literary parallels
it's the plain fact that if people engage in writing
about humanity, they're likely in certain circumstances io see
something the same thing. They're both looking, after all at the same
object, so it would really be very surprising if there weren't literary
parallels to be drawn between this book and that.
•••••
Q.: I have one more question about Lord of the Flies. Mr. Epstein talks
about sex symbols in this work.6 You have recently said that you
purposely left man and woman off of the island to remove the...
A.: Remove the "red herring."
Q.: Yes. I wonder if you concur with Mr. Epstein's observations.
A.: You're probably thinking of the moment when they kill apig...
Q.: Yes.
A.: And I'm assured that this is a sexual symbol and it has affinities
of the Oedipadian wedding night. What am I to say to this? I suppose the
only thing I can really say is there are in those circumstances, after all,
precious few ways of killing a pig. The same thing's just as true of the
Oedipadian wedding night.
6.See below, p. 279.-Eds.
The Meaning of It All1
Broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, August 28, 1959
KERMODE: I should like to begin, Golding, by talking about an article
on your work which I know you liked which appeared in the Kenyon
Review2 about a year ago in which he says many admiring things
about all your books but introduces a distinction between fable and fiction
and puts you very much on the fable side, arguing, for example, that in Lord
of the Flies you incline occasionally not to give a full-body presentation
of people living and behaving, so much as an illustration of a particular
theme; would you accept this as a fair comment on your work?
GOLDING: Well, what I would regard as a tremendous compliment to myself
would be if someone would substitute the word "myth" for "fable" because I
think a myth is a much profounder and more significant thing than a fable. I
do feel fable as being an invented thing on the surface whereas myth is
something which comes out from the roots of things in the ancient sense of
being the key to existence, the whole meaning of life, and experience as a
whole.
KERMODE: You're not primarily interested in giving the sort of body and
pressure of lived life in a wide society; obviously not, because all your
books have been concerned with either persons or societies, unnaturally
isolated in some sense. It is legitimate to assume from that that you are
concerned with people in this kind of extremity of solitariness.
1.The following interview was reprinted in this form in Books and
Bookmen, 5 (October, 1959), 9-10, and is printed in part here by permission
of Frank Kermode and William Golding.
2.John Peter, "The Fables of William Golding," Kentyon Re-view, 19
(Autumn, 1957), 577-592. Reprinted below, pp. 229-234.-Eds.
GOLDING: Well, no, I don't think it is legitimate. My own feeling about
it is that their isolation is a convenient one, rather than an unnatural
one. Do you see what I mean?
KERMODE: Yes, I do see, but I'm not sure about the word "convenient"
here. Convenient to you because you want to treat boys in the absence of
grown-ups, is this what you mean?
GOLDING: Yes, I suppose so. You see it depends how far you regard
intentions as being readable. Now, you know and I know about teaching
people; we both do it as our daily bread. Well, you see, perhaps, people who
are not quite as immature as those I see, but my own immature boys I watch
carefully and there does come a point which is very legible in their society
at which you can see all those things (as shown in Lord of the Flies) are
within a second of being carried out-it's the master who gets the right boy
by the scruff of the neck and hauls him back. He is God who stops a murder
being committed.
KERMODE: Yes, this is why one of your boys, Piggy, often refers to the
absence of grown-ups as the most important conditioning factor in the
situation. The argument is, then, that out of a human group of this kind,
the human invention of evil will proceed, provided that certain quite
arbitrary checks are not present
GOLDING: Yes, I think so; I think that the arbitrary checks that you
talk about are nothing but the fruit of bitter experience of people who are
adult enough to realise, "Well, I, I myself am vicious and would like to
kill that man, and he is vicious and would like to kill me, and therefore,
it is sensible that we should both have an arbitrary scheme of things in
which three other people come in and separate us."
KERMODE: This makes it interesting, I think, to consider the place
among your boys of the boy, Simon, in Lord of the Flies, who is different
from the others and who understands something like the situation you're
describing. He understands, for example, that the evil that the boys fear,
the beast they fear, is substantially of their own invention, but when, in
fact, he announces this, he himself is regarded as
evil and killed accordingly. Are we allowed to infer from your myth
that there will always be a person of that order in a group, or is this too
much?
GOLDING: It is, I think, a bit unfair not so much because it isn't
germane, but simply because it brings up too much. You see, I think on the
one hand that it is true that there will always be people who will see
something particularly clearly, and will not be listened to, and if they are
a particularly outstanding example of their sort, will probably be killed
for it. But, on the other hand, that in itself brings up such a vast kind of
panorama. What so many intelligent people and particularly, if I may say so,
so may literary people find, is that Simon is incomprehensible. But, he is
comprehensible to the illiterate person. The illiterate person knows about
saints and sanctity, and Simon is a saint.3
KERMODE: Yes, well he's a land of scapegoat, I suppose,
GOLDING: No, I won't agree. You are really flapping a kind of Golden
Bough over me, or waving it over my head, but I don't agree. You see, a
saint isn't just a scapegoat, a saint is somebody who in the last analysis
voluntarily embraces his fate, which is a pretty sticky one, and he is for
the illiterate a proof of the existence of God because the illiterate person
who is not brought up on logic and not brought up always to hope for the
worst says, "Well, a person like this cannot exist without a good God."
Therefore the illiterate person finds Simon extremely easy to understand,
someone who voluntarily embraces this beast goes... and tries to get rid
of him and goes to give the good news to the ordinary bestial man on the
beach, and gets killed for it.
KERMODE: Yes, but may I introduce the famous Lawrence caveat here,
"Never trust the teller, trust the tale"?
GOLDING: Oh, that's absolute nonsense. But of course the man who tells
the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about
and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature,
dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the
earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is
nothing like the truth.
3.Compare the following remarks with Donald R. Spangler's essay "Simon"
on pp. 211-215 in this volume.-Eds.
KERMODE: Well, I don't think it's necessary to state it quite so
extremely. What I had in mind here was simply that Simon in fact is coming
down from the top of the hill where he's seen the dead body of the
parachutist, in order to tell the other people that all is well. He's not
embracing his faith which is to be killed by the other people; he thinks
he's going to put them right.
GOLDING: Ah, well, that's again a question of scale, isn't ft? The
point was that out of all the people on that island who would ascend the
mountain, Simon was the one who saw it was the thing to do, and actually did
it; nobody else dared. That is embracing your fate, you see.
KERMODE: Ah, yes, without really any sense that what will happen in the
end is that he shall become the beast, which is what he does.
COLDINC: No, he doesn't become the beast, he becomes the beast in other
people's opinions.
KERMODE: He becomes the beast in the text also: "The beast was on its
knees in the centre, its arms folded over its face." Of course, you're here
reporting what the boys in their orgiastic fury thought Simon was, but I
should have said that that way of reporting allows a certain ambiguity of
interpretation here, which you cannot, in fact, deny us.
GOLDING: I thought of it myself originally, I think, as a metaphor-the
kind of metaphor of existence if you like, and the dead body on the mountain
I thought of as being history, as the past. There's a point a couple of
chapters before where these children on the island have got themselves into
a hell of a mess, they're-it's the things that have crawled out of their own
bones and their own veins, they don't know whether it's a beast from sky,
air or where it's coming but there's something terrible about it as one of
the conditions of existence.
At the moment when they're all most anguished they say, "If only
grown-ups could get a sign to us, if only they could tell us what's
what"-and what happens is that a dead man comes out of the sky. Now that is
not God being dead, as some people have said, that is history. He's dead,
but he won't lie clown. All that we can give our children is to pass on to
them this distressing business of a United States of Europe, which won't
work, because we all grin at each other across borders and so on and so
forth. And if you turn round to your parents and say "Please help me," they
are really part of the old structure, the old system, the old world, which
ought to be good but at the moment is making the world and the air more and
more radioactive.
KERMODE: I find it's extraordinarily interesting to think of that
explanation in connection with the Ballantyne4 treatment of the
same theme. I don't know whether you would like to say just how far and how
ironically we ought to treat this connection.
COLDING: Well, I think, fairly deeply, but again, not ironically in the
bad sense, but in almost a compassionate sense. You see, really, I'm getting
at myself in this. What I'm saying to myself is, "Don't be such a fool, you
remember when you were a boy, a small boy, how you lived on that island with
Ralph and Jack and Peterkin" 5 (who is Simon, by the way, Simon
called Peter, you see. It was worked out very carefully in every possible
way, this novel). I said to myself finally, "Now you are grown up, you are
adult; it's taken you a long time to become adult, but now you've got there
you can see that people are not like that; they would not behave like that
if they were God-fearing English gentlemen, and they went to an island like
that." Their savagery would not be found in natives on an island. As like as
not they would find savages who were kindly and uncomplicated and that the
devil would rise out of the intellectual complications of the three white
men on the island itself. It is really a pretty big connection [with
Ballantyne].
KERMODE: In fact it's a kind of black mass version of Ballantyne, isn't
it?
GOLDING: Well, I don't really think I ought to accept that. But I think
I see what you mean. No, no, I disagree with ft entirely, I think it is in
fact a realistic view of the Ballantyne situation.
4.R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island was published in 1857 in England.
See Carl Niemeyer's "The Coral Island Revisited," College English, 22
(January, 1961), 241-245. Reprinted in this volume on pp. 217-223.-Eds.
5.Characters in The Coral Island.-Eds.
The Novels of William Golding]
FRANK KERMODE
Lord of the Flies has "a pretty big connection" with
Ballantyne.2 In The Cored Island Ralph, Jack and Peterkin are
cast away on a desert island, where they live active, civilised, and
civilising lives. Practical difficulties are easily surmounted; they light
fires with bowstrings and spy-glasses, hunt pigs for food, and kill them
with much ease and a total absence of guilt-indeed of bloodshed. (They are
all Britons-a term they use to compliment each other-all brave, obedient and
honourable.) There is much useful information conveyed concerning tropical
islands, including field-workers' reporting of the conduct of cannibals: but
anthropology is something nasty that clears up on the arrival of a
missionary, and Jack himself prevents an act of cannibalism by telling the
flatnoses not to be such blockheads and presenting them with six newly
slaughtered pigs. The parallel between the island and the Earthly Paradise
causes a trace of literary sophistication: "Meat and drink on the same tree!
My dear boys, we're set up for life; it must be the ancient paradise-hurrah!
... We afterwards found, however, that these lovely islands were very
unlike Paradise in many things." But these "things" are non-Christian
natives and, later, pirates; the boys themselves are
1.This selection is taken from a longer essay that appeared in the
International Literary Annual, III (1961), 11-29, and is reprinted by
permission of John Calder Limited.
2. The relationship of R. M. Ballantyne's novel The Coral Island to
Lord of the Flies is taken up by Carl Niemeyer, "The Coral Island
Revisited," reprinted on pp. 217-223 in this volume. See also the Foreword
to this volume.-Eds.
cleanly (cold baths recommended) and godly-regenerate, empire-building
boys, who know by instinct how to turn paradise into a British protectorate.
The Coral Island could be used as a document in the history of ideas;
it belongs inseparably to the period when boys were sent out of Arnoldian
schools certified free of Original Sin. Golding takes Ralph, Jack and
Peterkin (altering this name to Simon "called Peter")3 and
studies them against an altered moral landscape. He is a schoolmaster, and
knows boys well enough to make their collapse into savagery plausible, to
see them as cannibals; the authority of the grown-ups is all there is to
prevent savagery. If you dropped these boys into an Earthly Paradise "they
would not behave like God-fearing English gentlemen" but "as like as not..
. find savages who were kindly and uncomplicated.... The devil would rise
out of the intellectual complications of the three white men." Golding
leaves the noble savages out of Lord of the Flies, but this remark is worth
quoting because it states the intellectual position in its basic simplicity.
It is the civilised who are corrupt, out of phase with natural rhythm. Their
guilt is the price of evolutionary success; and our awareness of this fact
can be understood by duplicating Ballantyne's situation, borrowing his
island, and letting his theme develop in this new and more substantial
context. Once more every prospect pleases; but the vileness proceeds, not
from cannibals, but from the boys, though Man is not so much vile as "heroic
and sick." Unlike Ballantyne's boys, these are dirty and inefficient; they
have some notion of order, symbolised by the beautiful conch which heralds
formal meetings; but when uncongenial effort is required to maintain it,
order disappears. The shelters are inadequate, the signal fire goes out at
the very moment when Jack first succeeds in killing a pig. Intelligence
fades; irrational taboos and blood rituals make hopeless the task of the
practical but partial intellect of Piggy; his glasses, the firemakers, are
smashed and stolen, and in the end he himself is broken to pieces as he
holds the conch. When civilised conditioning fades-how tedious Piggy's
appeal to what adults might do or think!-the children are capable of neither
savage nor civil gentleness. Always a
3. It is interesting to ask why Golding changed the name. See the
Foreword to this volume.-EDS.
little nearer to raw humanity than adults, they slip into a condition
of animality depraved by mind, into the cruelty of hunters with their
devil-liturgies and torture: they make an unnecessary, evil fortress, they
steal, they abandon all operations aimed at restoring them to civility. Evil
is the natural product of their consciousness. First, the smallest boys
create, a beastie, a snake-"as if it wasn't a good island." Then a beast is
created in good earnest, and defined in a wonderful narrative sequence. The
emblem of this evil society is the head of a dead pig, fixed, as a
sacrifice, on the end of a stick and animated by flies and by the
imagination of the voyant, Simon.
Simon is Golding's first "saint, and a most important figure." He is
for the illiterate a proof of the existence of God because the illiterate
(to whom we are tacitly but unmistakably expected to attribute a correct
insight here) will say, "Well, a person like this cannot exist without a
good God." For Simon "voluntarily embraces the beast... and tries to get
rid of him." What he understands-and this is wisdom Golding treats with
awe-is that evil is "only us." He climbs up to where the dead fire is
dominated by the beast, a dead airman in a parachute, discovers what this
terrible thing really is, and rushes off with the good news to the beach,
where the maddened boys at their beast-slaying ritual mistake Simon himself
for the beast and kill him. As Piggy, the dull practical intelligence, is
reduced to blindness and futility, so Simon, the visionary, is murdered
before he can communicate his comfortable knowledge.4 Finally,
the whole Paradise is destroyed under the puzzled eyes of an adult observer.
Boys will be boys.
The difference of this world from Ballantyne's simpler construction
from similar materials is not merely a matter of incomparability of the two
talents at work; our minds have, in general, darker needs and obscurer
comforts. It would be absurd to suppose that the change has impoverished us;
but it has seemed to divide our world into "two cultures"-the followers of
Jack and the admirers of Simon, those who build fortresses and those who
want to name the beast.
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