My BOOK TALK on Golding, published in The Bangladesh Post, 11/01/2018 11/01/2018 Education Published : 10 Jan 2018, 15:30 Book Talk From the Modern Library 100 Best Novels Avik Gangopadhyay reads an atavistic quest of regressive instinct through darkness in Golding In 2008, The Times ranked Nobel laureate William Gerald Golding (1911 – 1993) 3rd on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” His novel Lord of the Flies (1954) was named in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, reaching number 41 on the editor's list, and 25 on the reader's list. In 2003 it was listed at number 70 on the BBC's The Big Read poll, and in 2005 Time magazine named it as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. The characters in Golding's Lord of the Flies are a group of schoolboys, aged between 3 to 14, stamped through with Britishness like seaside rock, educated by public schools in a system designed to overwhelm an empire and uses the slang and jargon common to their time. Since Golding is describing a community of children with adult readers in mind, the credibility of the characters is a prerequisite. In addition, they have to be made convincing in an imaginary situation, and this is Golding's particular achievement--Golding has apparently chosen a conventional technique of isolating people in an island. This has enabled him to examine how human beings behave away from the influences of civilization and choosing' only children as characters, Golding further complicates his tusk, since the children are completely uninhibited and free from sophisticated social conventions as adults are. The conflict between the two instincts is the driving force of the novel, explored through the dissolution of the young English boys’ civilized, moral, disciplined behavior as they accustom themselves to a wild, brutal, barbaric life in the jungle. The nodal concern of Lord of the Flies is the conflict between two competing impulses that exist within all human beings: the instinct to live by rules, act peacefully, follow moral commands, and value the good of the group against the instinct to gratify one’s immediate desires, act violently to obtain supremacy over others, and enforce one’s will. This conflict is expressed in a number of ways: civilization vs. savagery, order vs. chaos, reason vs. impulse, law vs. anarchy. The novel is framed by the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. The novel presents four boys as major characters- Ralph, Jack, Piggy and Simon. At the beginning of our acquaintance with each of the characters we are given certain hints about them, and then with the development of the novel, the boys become a representative of types. Regressive instinct devours the civilized codes in all of them--civilization denotes their "authoritative morality" within. But in each, the interplay of withering codes and conflict manifests with respect to their psychic potential. Ralph represents the common sense of the individual; Piggy, the sense of reasoning; Jack, the forceful rush of instinctive domination; and Simon, a silent truth-seeker. In their growing psyche these elements are shown in perfect limitation, as they ought to be. Simon's quest places the extreme ranges of mind of the other characters in a woven perspective. In fact, whether it is child psychology, or uninhibition or regressive instinct that makes the fable-structure a complete novel of times. In the chapter, Huts on the Beach, Golding explores the distinction of Simon and the differences between the boys, and it is Simon’s perspective which thematically enables the readers to penetrate into the layers beneath. Both Ralph and Jack, who consider Simon faintly crazy are also worlds apart from him. Simon acts as a peace-maker between Jack and Piggy; he is to be seen suffering the little children to come to him and getting them fruits. He is timid, his movements are silent and he withdraws himself from the realm of hot exchanges; and from these initial exposition one can see easily enough what Golding meant by calling Simon a 'saint' even a 'Christ-like' figure. He is in fact, not so much a character in the sense that the other boys are, but the most inclusive sensibility among the children at this stage. As Simon moves through the jungle we find the forest is alien to man and how its fecundity is rooted in dissolution. The storyline takes us into a wartime evacuation-- a British aeroplane crashes on or near an isolated island in a remote region of the Pacific Ocean. Simon is the first child, to register fully, what the island and its jungle are like in themselves. The qualities that were present in Ralph's day-dreaming at the finding of the conch are fully realised in Simon. On the other hand, in solitary communion with nature, he taps Jack's sensitivity to the creepy as well as the beautiful. But he is outside the hunter mentality, the leader mentality, outside even himself--like Meursault is Albert Camus' The Outsider. He exists in terms of his sensitivity to what is outside him. This allows him to know comprehensively. He not only registers the heat, the urgency, the riot, the dampness and decay; he also registers the cool mysterious submergence of the forest in darkness, the pure beauty and fragrance of starlight and night flower, the peace. Finally he not only registers both, but accepts them equally, as two parts of the same reality. From Chapter Five onwards, Simon gains importance along with the disintegration and brutal degeneration of the boys. Chapter Five, Beast from Water presents the superstition which leads to the inward fear which sparks off savagery. In this chapter the worst contempt of the meeting, however, is reserved for Simon, who thinks that there may be a Beast that is not any kind of animal: 'What I mean is ....maybe it's only us'. But Simon is howled down even more than Piggy; and when the vote comes to be taken Ralph is forced to realize that fear cannot be dispelled by voting. And only Simon starts his quest which continues as long as he lives. In Simon, Golding dramatised an atavistic quest through darkness. The mythopoeia of a beast is central in Lord of the Flies. It is dramatised in the crucial confrontation scene in the Chapter Eight, Gift of the Darkness, where two apparently irreconcilable views of one situation are slapped up against each other. The meaning of the fable ultimately depends on the meaning of the beast, the creature which haunts the children's imagination and which Jack hunts and tries to propitiate with a totemic beast. Only Simon cannot believe in ‘a beast with claws that scratched, that sat on mountain top, that left no tracks and yet was not fast enough to catch Samneric'. Simon's quest then, is the fable's major pursuit, for he is used as a mouthpiece for what Golding, in conversation, has called 'one of the conditions of existence, this awful thing.' Simon, the strange visionary child, encounters and recognises the beast. In the confrontation scene he recognises his own capacity for evil as well as his ability to act without evil. He is thus able to realise the dead parachutist and try to tell the boys below about 'mankind's essential illness.' (Chapter Five) : 'Whenever Simon thought of the beast, there arose before his inward sight the pictures of a human at once heroic and sick' (Chapter Six). The confrontation scene (Chapter Eight) brings about a single crystallisation of the fable's total structure, since it brings together the concepts of 'evil-and-innocence.' At the heart of the fable's mythopoeia is the visual hieroglyphic or symbol of the severed Head of the pig to which Simon turns in distaste and awe, and from which he first tries to escape. Grinning cynically, its mouth gaping and its eyes half-closed, the Head .is placed on a rock before Simon's 'cabin-island.' What Simon 'sees' is the Lord of the Flies, Beel-Zebub, the Evil. The title of the book tells us we have reached its heart with Simon's quest. Simon broods before the totemic head. The pig's head speaks in 'the voice of a school master' and delivers 'something very much like sermon to the boy'. It insists that the island is corrupt and all is lost and shifting by the ironic motif of 'fun' into schoolboy language the Head assures him: 'We are going to have fun on this island' even though 'everything' is 'a bad business.' Such counselling of acceptance of evil is 'the infinite cynicism of adult life,' the cynicism of Simon's conscious mind, the cynicism that can ignore even 'the indignity of being spiked on a stick', the cynicism that 'grins' at the obscenities that even 'the butterflies must desert.' But this Lord of the Dung is Simon : the head that counsels acceptance is his own strategic consciousness. These voices only tell him what he already knows. Evil exists but not as a Beast. In spite of hallucination, he knows quite clearly that he 'sees' not the Beast, but 'Pig's' head on the stick'. Speaking in schoolboy language, the Lord's head has 'half-shut eyes' and Simon keeps 'his eyes shut, and then sheltered them with his hand', so that his vision is partial. He 'sees' things 'without definition and illusively' behind a "luminous veil'. Simon feels his own savagery and "at last.., gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes". It is himself he is looking at and submits to the terror of his own evil and penetrates his own evil. Returning from non-being, to do something he discovered and with releasing the figure 'from the rocks and the wind's indignity', he frees himself. In the Ninth chapter, both the 'View' and the 'Death' of its title are Simon's; he climbs the mountain and goes down to the others to tell them that the Beast is 'harmless and horrible' because 'What else is there to do ?' So Simon moves to lay rest the 'history' of man's inhumanity and falls amidst the hysteric frenzy to be mistaken for the Beast, they 'do him in' and 'leapt on the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore.' Thus, Simon is a life as well as a symbol. Truth becomes the first casualty and Simon's struggle and fate bring him with the long tradition of truth-seekers. Simon's attempt to tell the truth synchronises with his death. Golding gives an epic dimension to Simon's death when the entire elemental nature pays a tribute to Simon--the infinite dark sky, ceaseless waves of eternal sea, the thunder and rain. The whole vision of sea-burial reflects nature's glorification of a 'crucified martyr' and places the 'saint' to a cosmic perspective. The necessity of Simon's character in Lord of the Flies is ideographically suggested by Golding. If seen as a 'moral fable', Simon is a 'saint' -Golding's term for the boy--precisely because he tries to know comprehensively and inclusively; he possesses a quality of imagination which forces an 'ancient, inescapable recognition'. If seen as a 'social and political fable,' Simon is a 'truth-seeker' gripped by the 'political nightmare of authoritarianism, 'Charismatic' and who is eventually murdered because a truth-seeker has no place in the modern world and becomes a 'victim of totalitarian butchery.' If seen as a 'religious fable', Simon is a 'martyr'; Golding admits in 'theological terms' that man is a 'fallen being' and 'is gripped by original sin' and thus Simon’s “Edenic island also turns into a fiery hell." To place the fable in a mythic frame will not be irrelevant. Simon is a ritual hero, who is metaphorically swallowed by a serpent or dragon “whose belly is the world; he undergoes a symbolic death in order to gain the elixir to revitalize his stricken society, and returns with his knowledge to the timid world as a redeemer". The certainty of truth is incomprehensible to the rest. Avik Gangopadhyay, an author, columnist and educationist, writes from Kolkata, India View in Publication Site