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STEVEN MARCUS
it.
Yet
Lord of the Flies
is Golding's most "novelistic" work of fiction.
It is also the only recent novel of imaginative originality that I am
aware of which implies that society, insane and self-destroying as it
undeniably is, is necessary. Despite its striking freshness and serious–
ness, however, Golding's notion of society, in this novel and in his
others, is rudimentary, restricted, and strangely abstract. In Golding's
novels society as we know it is largely an idea, a confused memory
recollected in the midst of catastrophe; while the pre-social and the
post-social have become the paramount actualities.
From the post-historic future of
Lord of the Flies,
Golding turned
to the pre-historic past, and his second novel,
The Inheritors,
is about
a family of pre-historic creatures. The conception is daring, since it
could so easily lapse into the ludicrous or maudlin. (Consider what
it would be like were the last book of
Gullive'fs Travels
written from
the point of view of one of the Yahoos. On second thought, consider
the same from the point of view of a Houyhnhnm).
It
is a measure
of Golding's artistic sincerity and his virtuoso talents that he makes
this story credible and touching. His ancient group of "people," as
they call themselves, are food-gatherers, have only the rudiments of
a language-though they seem to possess a kind of group conscious–
ness-have only fragmentary powers of memory, and are unaggres–
sive, affectionate, and innocent in the radical sense. They are brought
into contact with another group of creatures who are equipped
with a primitive technology, weapons, art, and even liquor, and who
thereupon proceed to exterminate the brutes. Prepared as we are,
it still gives us a jolt to realize that the pre-human creatures are being
exterminated by the "Inheritors," who are our ancestors and our–
selves, human beings.
Golding's third novel,
The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin
(published in England as
Pineher Martin)
moves still further in this
a-historical, a-temporal direction. It is about a man thrown off a
torpedoed destroyer into the North Atlantic and then cast up on a
single, bare rock in the midst of the ocean, where he is slowly driven
by exposure and illness into delirium and insanity. In the course of
his disintegration, fragments of his past heave themselves up into
consciousness, and though we are given no sense of the chronological
shape of his life, certain images and symbols which recur obsessively
in his recollections reveal a familiar kind of unpleasant character.
