William Golding’s Island of Savagery

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) is a profoundly – even unsettlingly – historical novel. Granted, it doesn’t look like one at first. Set either in Golding’s own day, or in the very near future, it follows a group of modern schoolboys who descend into savagery after being marooned on an uninhabited island. Even now, what makes it so shocking is its immediacy – the sense that it wouldn’t take much for the same fate to befall our own ‘civilised’ society. But for Golding, it was a challenge to ‘optimistic’ readings of history.

Golding had a life-long fascination with the past. As a boy, his most ardent wish was that he had the ‘mind of an antiquarian’. He adored classical Greek. He was a keen amateur archaeologist. And, in his days as a schoolmaster, he was surrounded by history. He was fascinated by Salisbury Cathedral and encouraged his pupils to hunt for pottery shards and arrowheads in the West Country Downs – a habit that was to find its way, in modified form, into the pages of Lord of the Flies.

Many – if not most – of his later works would be framed by this passion. Either they are set in the past, or else they derive their force from their dialogue with history – personal or encompassing. As Golding later wrote in the foreword to To the Ends of the Earth (1980-89), fiction and history were two poles of the same imaginative discipline. The Inheritors (1955), his second work, follows a group of Neanderthals as they come into contact with the ‘new people’ – human beings; The Spire (1964) is set in a medieval cathedral; and The Double Tongue (1995), his last, posthumously published novel, explores the fate of the Delphic Oracle as the Romans tighten their grip on Greece.

Onwards and upwards

Yet long before Golding began writing Lord of the Flies, he had also been a rationalist. The son of a science teacher, he studied Natural Sciences at Oxford before switching to English, and grew up believing that humanity was not only capable of change, but was actually progressing. Like many students in the 1920s and 1930s, he agreed with Karl Marx that history moves in one direction: forwards. He believed that, even if the process might sometimes be painful, even violent, the conditions of life would inexorably improve and mankind become happier, more ‘enlightened’, and fulfilled. It was inevitable.

The Second World War disabused him of that illusion. After joining the Royal Navy in December 1940, he first saw action in the North Atlantic. He then took part in the D-Day landings and later commanded a craft in the attack on Walcheren, at the mouth of the Scheldt Estuary. The slaughter appalled him. In ‘Through the Dutch Waterways’ (1962), he remembered seeing:

Ships mined, ships blowing up into a Christmas tree of exploding ammunition, ships burning, sinking – and smoke everywhere slashed by sudden spats of tracer over the shell fountains and the broken, drowning men.

He had a clear – albeit unreliable – memory of seeing his midshipman hanging onto the side of a sinking ship, saying ‘My legs are gone’. Worse still, the war also revealed an alarming side of his own character – a ‘viciousness’ and ‘cruelty’ of which he had, until then, been only dimly aware. He realised that, beneath the veneer of middle-class civility, he had the same instincts as the Nazis. And it wouldn’t take much for them to break the surface, either.

By the war’s end, he found he could no longer justify his faith in progress. Granted, he never completely abandoned his scientific roots; he was fascinated by the technological leaps of his day. As he told one interviewer many years later, he was captivated by Sputnik. But he came to believe that the rationalism in which he had previously placed such store was not merely flawed – it had actually killed something in humanity. What, he could not say. God? Morality? Perhaps it was just that the pursuit of ‘progress’ had become an end in itself. Everything else had been forgotten. Without any means of orienting himself, man floats aimlessly through chaos, without anchor or compass. As Golding put it in an early draft of his novel Free Fall (1959): ‘We are the masters of ignorance, proud, frightened, and god-haunted. We have no country and no home.’ We are no better than before: worse, in fact. Death has become a calculation; and even cruelty has lost its horror. It might be tempting to compare this to the ‘law of the jungle’, but even that would be an understatement. ‘For’, Golding once told a journalist, ‘in what jungle could you find six million people being processed through a death chamber?’

It was this which Golding sought to explore in Lord of the Flies. Amid rising international tensions the boys are evacuated by plane from their homes; and before crashing they are told that an atomic bomb has been dropped – killing everyone, one child surmises. It is this acme of reason that has brought them to the island. Yet when they try to organise themselves, in the absence of adults, they have little to fall back upon. The old norms have been destroyed. The boys are frightened and tearful, harsh and unforgiving. Dividing into two groups, they fail to improve their lives. They become convinced that there is a ‘beast’ lurking in the forest. Yet when Simon – a dreamy, Christ-like figure – discovers that the beast is actually a dead fighter pilot, hanging in the trees by his parachute, he is killed before he can reveal the truth. A murderous frenzy ensues. Only the arrival of a naval officer brings them to their senses. But as he gazes out at his warship offshore it is clear that there is little difference between him and the boys. Man has become a beast unto man.

The fall of man

For all the originality of its conception, there was nothing unusual about the criticisms laid out in Lord of the Flies. Golding was certainly not the first to be shocked out of his optimism by the Second World War. Nor was he unique in suggesting that rationalism had ‘killed’ something in mankind. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) had already pointed to a dystopian future in which rationalism and science have run amok, destroying morality. And in 1941 a Mass Observation Report found that a majority of British people believed that science was ‘out of control’.

But Golding was unique in one important respect. While he recognised the Second World War as a singularly catastrophic experience, he nevertheless believed that it reflected a universal tendency in human history – a recurring predisposition to oscillate between ‘progress’ and destruction.

In all of Golding’s later, more overtly historical, works, his characters find themselves on the precipice of something new. They are drawn to it, whether through simple, wide-eyed curiosity (like the Neanderthals in The Inheritors) or by an irresistible urge to explore its potential (as in the case of Dean Jocelin in The Spire).

At first, they do not realise that the novelty that captivates them contains the seeds of their own destruction. In some stories they actually spurn those who warn them. Only slowly do Golding’s characters realise the danger. But even then, they are unable to turn away from it. Indeed, at times they actually hasten their own demise. In The Spire Jocelin grimly presses ahead with building his spire, despite the fact that the cathedral is simply unable to bear its enormous weight and will surely collapse. So too, in The Inheritors, the Neanderthals Lok and Fa are more intrigued by the humans as time goes by. Even after it becomes clear that members of their group are being killed, they cannot tear themselves away. Their deaths become inevitable; and the waterfall – symbolising the flow of time – sweeps their bodies away.

Those rare figures who see the danger and try to avert it invariably meet with failure. Ionides, the cynical high priest of The Double Tongue, is robbed of his dignity when the Romans uncover his plot against their rule; while in ‘Envoy Extraordinary’ (1956) the Roman emperor is offered dazzling new inventions by the Greek inventor Phanocles, but after seeing off an attempted coup by his heir refuses to build further steam-powered warships and – instead of embracing the printing press – sends Phanocles to China, thereby (Golding implies) assuring the latter’s rise.

The cycle repeats

Humanity does not fizzle out, of course. Something always comes along to replace what has gone before: a new society, a new people, a new way of life. In an essay on W.B. Yeats, Golding expressed this in scientific terms: ‘The Satan of our cosmology is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which implies that everything is running down. Life is … a local contradiction of this law … [it] refuses to submit … and simply winds itself back up again.’

This was not to say that what comes next is necessarily better. Humanity, as Golding never tired of pointing out, never improves. It often gets worse. In The Inheritors the human beings are just as terrified of the Neanderthals as they are of them; but, despite their greater ‘intelligence’, they appear to have far fewer scruples – and are capable of more shocking atrocities.

Nor did Golding mean that each new iteration is free from what has gone before. As he noted in the draft of Free Fall, ‘the worst terror’ for humanity is that ‘we have a past behind us that is with us’. And there is always a horrible chance that it will repeat itself – so that ‘the present will become the future’.

But in this, Golding nevertheless saw a glimmer of hope. Just like the shipwrecked sailor in Pincher Martin (1956), we are all caught in Purgatory, stuck on a rock in the ocean of our ignorance, and lashed by the storms of our past; yet it is still possible for us to grapple with the legacy of our shortcomings – and to imagine a different future. At a time of ever-accelerating technological ‘progress’, and renewed fears of humanity’s destruction, it is perhaps an encouraging message. But whether we will heed it is another matter.

• Born 19 September 1911, Newquay, England

• Died 19 June 1993, Perranarworthal, England

• Notable works Lord of the Flies (1954) l The Inheritors (1955) l The Spire (1964)

   

Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick.