"LORD OF THE FLIES" -- PARABLE FOR OUR TIMES!

"LORD OF THE FLIES" – PARABLE FOR OUR TIMES!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 17, 2010

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REFERENCE:

My granddaughter, fourteen, going into ninth grade this month, had LORD OF THE FLIES by Nobel Laureate Sir William Golding as one of the required books of her summer reading. I asked her, a voracious reader, how she liked the book. She confessed she was having difficulty getting into it.

That surprised me as the Nobel Committee cited the Golding novella, his first book, when they awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. I had read it more than sixty years ago with stirring interest.

“I’ll read it again,” I told her, “and then let’s have a seminar.” Well, we haven’t had that seminar, and may not as school starts next week.

I express here the impact the book has on me now, and why I think now more than ever how important a book it is and why.

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THE FICKLE NATURE OF BOOK PUBLISHING

LORD OF THE FLIES sold fewer than 3,000 copies in 1955 in the United States, a year after it was published in England, and then quietly went out of print. The radical 1960s and the struggle between rhetoric and reality that embraced the times saw the book resurface as a bestseller. It became required reading in colleges and universities, and a film in 1963 and again in 1990. Today many public schools and most preparatory schools for college make it required reading in high school.

Even so, to this day many members of the literati are less than impressed with this symbolic loaded rendition of a Robin Crusoe kind of existence of children isolated on an island. The literati were never comfortable with Golding’s winning the Nobel Prize anymore than they were when John Steinbeck won.

Were Golding a budding novelist today chances are he would have to self-publish LORD OF THE FLIES, or bury it in another genre. The preference is for novels of family pathos, vampire fantasy, or huff and puff fiction to blow down institutional barriers.

Then there is the category of mystery and horror novels of escape fiction. The irony is serious mystery novelists, many coming out of such Nordic countries as Iceland, Norway and Sweden engage in social and cultural commentary in the process of providing escape.

Consider such writers as Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and Arnaldur Indridason of Iceland, Jo Nesbo of Norway, and Stieg Larsson, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahlloo, Kjell Ericksson, Nakan Nesser, and Camilla Lackberg of Sweden. If you haven’t read them already, you might give yourself a treat.

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SELF-RIGHTEOUS GENERATION, THE COLLAPSE OF WESTERN SOCIETY?

The twentieth century was marked by two world wars mainly fought in the West with more than one hundred million Westerners perishing in those conflagrations.

Sixty-five years after WWII, Russia is still unable to grow its population. Erich Maria Remarque captured the insanity of war in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1928). He didn’t celebrate heroes, but ripped away the platitudes and glorification of war. James Hillman did it in A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR (2004).

Golding is in league with these voices. He manages to get to the underbelly of self-deception by tracing the defects of society back to our collective defects in our human nature.

He insists the moral shape of society depends on a modicum of good sense, and good sense depends on the ethical constitution of the individual not on any religious or political system.

LORD OF FLIES is a symbolic adventure into this reality. The child conscious state is rescued by adult consciousness in the person of a British Naval officer. The irony here is that he is a member of a British cruiser in WWII hunting to sink enemy submarines. He is as savage as these children become isolated on this island; only he is in the embrace of Western culture.


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THE POWER OF SYMBOLS

This allegory takes place in the dawn of the atomic age of WWII. A British plane crash-lands into a paradisiacal island with no survivors older than twelve and many as young as six.

The symbolism begins with the title “the lord of flies,” which refers to Beelzebub or the devil. It is not a religious devil but a devil devoted to decay, destruction, demoralization, hysteria, panic and recreational violence. This devil is the equivalent of an amoral personality, or a collection of “true believers” with anarchic inclinations. It finds the host society being eaten away from the inside by its diseased construction. Golding is saying this is the psychic structure of Natural Man.

Natural Man is a living contradiction in conflict with himself. He has impulses towards society to live by rules and counter impulses to defy such limitations. Golding touches on themes popular in his time, themes which continue to have traction in ours. There is the conflict between groupthink versus individualism, between rational and irrational reaction to common stimuli, between morality and immorality. This plays out as the major subtext of LORD OF THE FLIES.

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THE ALLEGORICAL STORY

This story can be approached at several levels. The storyline is that of fair-haired Ralph and pudgy “Piggy” finding a conch shell, which becomes the talisman of authority.

Ralph uses it to call the children to assemble. He embodies the public school autocrat as parliamentarian. He is the action figure, Piggy is the intellectual and reflective figure.

The other dominant boy is Jack, a redhead who was head of the choirboys. Ralph is voted chief, losing only the votes of Jack’s fellow choirboys .

Ralph has two goals: have fun and work towards rescue by keeping a constant fire signal. The fire is created with Piggy’s glasses. Shelters are erected. Assignments are laid out for gathering food and water, and keeping the fire going.

Jack is charged with rotating choirboys to maintain the fire. He fails to do so as he envisions himself and his group as “hunters,” which distracts him from his command assignment.

The fourth principal is a black-haired boy named Simon, who heads the crew erecting the huts. He is a dreamy boy suffering from epileptic seizures who takes a special interest in protecting the “littluns,” the younger boys.

Time passes, and with it enthusiasm for structure and function. Piggy notes this. He informs Ralph, who does nothing. Piggy is the most sensible of the bunch as well as the most aware of the growing tension between Ralph and Jack. He sees it leading to chaos, derailing Ralph from the main objective, being rescued. Ralph is blind to this choosing to see Piggy as an outsider and a source of natural derision.

A ship passes while Jack and the choirboys are hunting. No one is manning the fire. It goes out so there is no smoke signal. The tension between Ralph and Jack is now palpable. Jack attempts to ease the strain by promising as the hunter to kill the beast and bring back meat. The beast is a sow, nursing her piglets.

The stalking and killing of the sow is erotic and has the overtones of a sexual rape and the denouement of a brutal murder. The head of the dead pig is placed on a stick as the new talisman of the hunters. It quickly collects flies.

Simon sees the pig’s head swarming with flies and calls it the “Lord of the Flies.” He believes it talks to him. He also discovers the wild “Beast” near the Castle Rock to be a dead parachutist. Simon “interview” with the pig’s head identifies itself as the real “Beast,” disclosing to Simon the truth about itself, and that is that the boys themselves created the beast, and that the real beast was inside them all.

Simon arrives back at the camp with his discovery of parachutist and his new insight into the nature of the beast, not being a sleeping monster but a cadaver, and the truth about the true beast being in all of them.

Heady with this information he arrives in the dark, when the tribal ritual of the hunters are in a state of delirium celebrating the sow kill, decked out in war paint, still reeling with blood lust, blindly swarming around Simon as they did the sow, attacking and killing him as he is mistaken as the “Beast.” Ralph and Piggy took part in the feast but convinced themselves they were no part of the murder.

All Piggy’s advice to Ralph that had been ignored. It was now coming to roost. Ralph had lost his confidence and direction but not Piggy. He tells Ralph that they are in danger, as they retreat back to their hut, only to have it invaded and Piggy’s glasses stolen to make fire.

Not satisfied with being dominant and ruling a savage group, Jack feels he must hunt and kill Ralph and Piggy to cement his control. In the process of looking for them, Piggy is killed accidentally, and the mountain is set afire in an attempt to flush out Ralph. This brings the British Naval officer to the rescue, where Ralph again emerges as the head boy.

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CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT WITH A FREUDIAN PERSPECTIVE

Without careful tone and construction, a symbolic morality play can fall on deaf ears, and even be ridiculed as bizarre. Dostoyevsky took such high risk when he had Christ coming back to earth in the time of the Inquisition in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (1879 – 1880). Dostoyevsky found salvation in freedom, but also damnation in it.

Joseph Conrad’s novella, HEART OF DARKNESS (1902), was a passion play of the gloss of civility covering the nascent brute of wildness.

Freud, however, is most evident symbolically in the characters of Golding’s story. It was also a dominant theme in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).

Briefly we might look at the main characters in terms of this perspective.

RALPH represents Freud’s Superego, the Parent, or the Morality Principle.

This is the Parent who plays the dual judgmental role of being the critical and nurturing as the case may be. He is the authority figure and the personification of a rule of law, policies and procedures, acceptable and unacceptable conduct, and the consequences of thereof.

The Parent embodies the tradition of the establishment, institutional authority and culture.

Separated from that culture on an isolated island, Ralph draws upon what he knows and how he has been programmed to think and behave as a Parent. He attempts to establish that climate as the chief with the talisman of his authority, the conch.

In social psychological terms, the Parent sees itself as a thinker, but it is a feeler, and can be driven to distraction by emotions. The Parent’s mind is built on righteousness in terms of what should be or ought to be. The Parent needs an outside source to provide balance and perspective to keep it on mission. Piggy supplies this role in mainly an OD manner.

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JACK represents Freud’s Id, the Child, or the Pleasure Principle.

This is the Child, where wildness and primitive reptilian behavior crave fulfillment. It is in everyone, but society is organized to repress and suppress its expression, and ultimately subdue it into compliance with cultural dictates.

The Child is the person of any age consumed with reckless abandon games.

The Child is a Type “T” Personality committed to high-risk-taking, thrill seeking, rule-breaking, creative-abandon games. Being primarily “left brain” dominated, such an individual’s reasoning easily gravitates to the bizarre. Paranoia, which is busily fermenting under the surface, comes to dominate the mind.

The individual is obsessed with looking for trouble, and invariably finds it. He looks for enemies and finds himself surrounded by them. He feels he is under siege, and must do something precipitously to rid him of the terror.

In social psychological terms, the Child is guided by impulse and behaves in a state of “whatever” regardless of the consequences.

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PIGGY represents Freud’s Ego, the Adult, or the Reality Principle.

The Adult deals with “what is” as opposed to “what should be.” Data is taken in, processed, assimilated, conceptualized and articulated as to what appears to be the case.

The Adult is a thinker with the mature mindset of a pragmatist. The compelling drive is to be and stay on the right track. The interest is not obtrusive, political or the need to take credit but to get the desired results.

This was captured in an exchange between Ralph and Piggy when Ralph’s resolve was dissolving. They encountered Jack’s tribe in all its war paint glory. Ralph was taken back hiding his edginess in disjointed meanderings.

“Well, we won’t be painted,” said Ralph, “because we aren’t savages.”

Samneric (Sam and Eric, the twins) looked at each other. “All the same—“

Ralph shouted. “No paint!” He tried to remember (what his role was). “Smoke,” he said, “we need smoke.” He turned on the twins fiercely. “I said ‘smoke’! We’ve got to have smoke.”

There was silence, except for the multitudinous murmur of the bees. At last Piggy spoke, kindly. “Course we have. Cos the smoke’s a signal and we can’t be rescued if we don’t have smoke.”

“I knew that!” shouted Ralph. He pulled his arm away from Piggy. “Are you suggesting--?”

“I’m jus’ saying what you always say,” said Piggy hastily. “I’d thought for a moment”

“I hadn’t,” said Ralph loudly. “I knew it all the time. I hadn’t forgotten.”

Piggy nodded propitiously. “You’re chief, Ralph. You remember everything.”

“I hadn’t forgotten.”

“Course not.”

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Ralph often wondered why he didn’t think of the things that seemed to come so naturally to Piggy. He wondered, too, why Piggy took all the abuse but yet was loyal to him.

Piggy thought like the Adult, and the Adult in him had only one interest, being rescued. He knew that took finding a way to alert a passing ship that they were there, which was the idea of the smoke. The relationship of rescue and smoke increasingly became lost in Ralph’s consciousness as he became increasingly distracted by the exploits of Jack. Piggy knew they might self-destruct if they were not rescued soon.

In social psychological terms, he was guided by his mind through cognitive reflection.

ROGER is worse than the disturbed Child.

He is the Child without conscience, the brute that is in us all, but the brute that is attracted to the likes of Jack, which gives it free reign. He kills Piggy accidentally on purpose with a stone, and represents the evil element that Freud claimed is just under the surface in us all.

SIMON is a Christ-like figure with kindness and caring for the littluns.

He is in tune with Nature and hears her music. The pig’s head throws him into hallucinations, and I suspect an epileptic seizure. He emerges from his interview with “Lord of the Flies” recognition of our human capacity for evil and the superficial nature of human morality.

He attains knowledge of the end of innocence of which Ralph is to weep at the end of the book. Simon, like Christ, predicts his death and the manner it would occur, in the middle of the tribal festivities.

NAVAL OFFICER arrives, and with that arrival, the world of Ralph and Jack dissolves, as they return to being little boys.

He represents society and civilization of the West. He is an officer of a warship hunting submarines, not unlike the savagery of Jack hunting wild boars, but he is civilized, mannered, well groomed, and wears the tribal colors of his country and military discipline..

The boys are rescued from one existence and swallowed up by another.

THE CONCH represents civility, order, democracy and all the other artificial symbols of authority. National flags are talismans, as are churches, temples, synagogues and mosques.

The conch was smashed into a thousand pieces by the same rock that killed Piggy. This symbolism demonstrates how fragile order is, how quickly we can retreat from good sense by reliance on talismans.

THE BEAST is a figment of the imagination but it goes through much iteration until Simon realizes the Beast is a creation of the imagination.

Often when someone penetrates the myths of society, or society’s duplicity and double standards the truth bearer suffers for the exposure. Simon was beaten to death before he could reveal his truth.

THE LORD OF THE FLIES is a physical manifestation of evil in the boys, here personified in the pig’s head on the stick.

Below the veneer of innocence, Golding is saying, evil lurks. We should take little comfort when the likes of Piggy and Simon perish, while the ambivalence of Ralph and the unhinged Jack endure.

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