****Take note of points 2 and 6****

Title: Good grief: Lord of the Flies as a post-war rewriting of salvation history
Author: Marijke van Vuuren
1. Introduction
"It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr Golding," said King Carl XVI Gustaf, presenting William Golding with the Nobel Prize in 1983. "I had to do Lord of the Flies at school" (Monteith, 1986:63). The Swedish king's words may well be echoed by countless people worldwide who have "had to do" Golding's first novel in various English courses. Indeed, this "unpleasant novel about small boys behaving unspeakably on a desert island" (1) may well have been done to death by exhaustive but reductive reading and teaching.
Where Lord of the Flies has been read reductively, Original Sin writ large over it, readers have tended to respond to the novel in terms of its doleful view of humanity or its perceived theology. Its initial success reflected post-war pessimism, the loss of what Golding (1988a:163) has called his generation's "liberal and naive belief in the perfectability of man". Although the novel does not groan under a dogmatic burden to the extent that some critics have alleged, it has seemed the prime example of Golding's earlier writing, a tightly structured allegory or fable.
…
It is not surprising that the Bible's first and last books, on humankind's "origins and end" beyond the horizons of knowledge, turn to symbolic narrative. In Lord of the Flies Golding draws heavily on imagery from Genesis and the Apocalypse, together with prophetic eschatological imagery, as this article will attempt to indicate.
As the primitive myths were essentially magical and religious, Frazer (1957:169), in his great if a-historical study of mythologies, expressed the belief that the "movement of higher thought ... has on the whole been from magic through religion to science". This faith in the "progress upwards from savagery" is overturned by Golding in Lord of the Flies, as Fleck has shown (1997:31). Science no longer inspires the optimism of the Victorian age. Yet we continue to respond, on a conscious and unconscious level, to myth's enduring symbols and narratives. Myth criticism, much of it building on the work of Levi-Strauss and Northrop Frye, has been faulted as ahistorical --McKeon (1987:5) calls it an "escape" from history. The debate may be traced back to that between the Sophists of the Greek enlightenment, who saw the tales about the gods as theogonic allegories conveying what Aristotle called "greater" truth--because nonhistorical--and the Epicureans, who viewed them as historically-based fabrications bolstering power structures. For the purposes of this study Frye simply provides a framework for studying a novel set "out of place" (on an unnamed island) and "out of time" (in the future) as myth, and particularly for an examination of its intertextual use of the Bible.
Northrop Frye (1957:116), following Frazer and Bodkin, distinguishes four phases of mythical writing. The last two are of interest here: the archetypal phase foregrounds the social environment, civilisation and community, while the anagogic phase concerns myth "in the narrower ... sense of fictions and themes relating to divine or quasi-divine beings and powers". In Frye's theory of archetypal meaning, apocalyptic and demonic imagery are the two poles, with analogical imagery between them. While the apocalyptic world is a projection of desire, the demonic realm is one of nightmare. The apocalyptic and demonic worlds, being structures of pure metaphorical identity, suggest the eternally unchanging, and lend themselves very readily to being projected existentially as heaven and hell (Frye, 1957:158).
Frye's elaborate but flexible categorisation further identifies kinds of images: in the archetypal phase these are images of the divine, human, animal, vegetable and mineral. Biblical apocalyptic imagery centres in one God, one Man, one Lamb, one Tree (or vine), one Stone (or temple)--all identifying Christ. In the anagogic phase fire and water imagery are added, and alchemical imagery belongs to this phase as well (Frye, 1957:145, 146).
While Lord of the Flies has been exhaustively analysed as archetypal myth, foregrounding the socio-political and moral content, not much attention was given to it initially as anagogic myth, but this has changed with the recognition of Golding as primarily a religious writer, and with numerous studies on intertextuality and possible mythic sources. (5) This article will examine the writer's use of Biblical symbolism, including the anagogic tropes of fire and water, with reference to Frye's poles of apocalyptic and demonic imagery.
These poles are reflected in the novel's dualities. It is structured in two parts, each beginning with an air battle followed by an exploration of the island. But the harmony of the first expedition gives way to the divisive fear pervading the second search--a search for the "Beast"--as the romance of the first part is engulfed in irony in the second. The children turn their paradisal island into a hell--and the imagery, at first apocalyptic, finds its demonic counterpart in the second part.
Single interpretations fail to deal with the paradoxical duality or multivalence of the novel's symbolism. The island is both a paradise and a prison. The sea is a translucent film that gently transforms the body of a child, in line with the Scriptural notion of the water of life; in another scene it is a monstrous leviathan that sucks up the body of another. Fire is a rescue signal, sign of hope, and a destructive force by which the children wreck their environment. The "beast", a demonic animal symbol, is both imaginary and real, immanent and transcendent. Golding draws on Biblical symbolism, particularly that of the mystic narratives of origin and end, creation and the "last days". This article will examine some of these symbols in relation to their counterparts in Biblical narratives to trace Golding's rewriting of the salvation story for a post-faith readership.
2. The island: creation and fall
"Lord of the Flies opens in Eden" (Friedman, 1997:65). The novel's uninhabited tropical island is a paradise, but the children who are cast on it cannot reclaim the state of innocence it represents. When things go wrong the island becomes an image of their lost and isolated condition.
The island is that secluded natural environment which in dreams features as the lost paradise, "the romantic dream of the post-Industrial Revolution man: the liberal view of man as essentially noble and being able to recreate the nobility in ... an apeiron, an area of possibility ..." (Whitley, 1970:11). Indeed, the realisation of this dream, "the imagined but never fully realised place, leaping into real life" (p. 16) (6) is, as the boys conclude in the romance of the first part, a "good island" (p. 37). This judgement of a "good island", repeated in the first chapter, echoes the Genesis account of creation, "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good" (Gen. 1:13). Critics have pointed out that the island's trees bearing flowers and fruit simultaneously may be analogous to the trees of Eden, particularly the Tree of Life, which is multiplied in the book of Revelation as trees bearing fruit all year round.
But the island has two distinct sides, the worlds of dream and nightmare. In the novel's second part, with its predominantly demonic tropes, Ralph discovers the island's other aspect, that of nightmarish isolation: Here, on the other side of the island, the view was utterly different. The filmy enchantments of mirage could not endure the cold water and the horizon was hard, clipped blue ...

Wave after wave, Ralph followed the rise and fall until something of the remoteness of the sea numbed his brain. This was the divider, the barrier. On the other side of the island, swathed at midday with mirage, defended by the shield of a quiet lagoon, one might dream of rescue; but here, faced by the brute obtuseness of the ocean, the miles of division, one was clamped down, one was helpless, one was condemned ... (p. 121,122).
The children initially see their stay as temporary. On the gentle side of the island rescue seems likely, but here, on the "other side", that hope becomes illusory. Ralph is faced by the "divider, the barrier"--the endless sea--emphasising their separation from their origin beyond it. In this microcosmic world the realm "beyond" is, in Frye's words, the "vision of an omnipotent personal community beyond an indifferent nature" which, in mythology, corresponds to "the vision of an unfallen world or heaven in religion" (Frye, 1963:19). For the children the adult world represents this omnipotence, and those who are faithful to their origins continue to long for adult intervention. Ralph, Piggy and Simon stand in the darkness after a chaotic meeting, "striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life"' (p. 103) and, though their imaginings are riddled with irony, their view of the adult world as their source of rescue holds true. The other children have by this time all but forgotten rescue and have ceased to be exiles on the island.
Golding's bleak irony leaves no doubt that the adult world is anything but an analogy of heaven--its emblems are a bomb, a corpse, a warship. But for the faithful it remains the source of rescue, and when that possibility fades before the "miles of division" the island becomes a place of "condemnation", figuratively the place of lostness, of separation from God. "The island is now a prison, Eden become Gehenna" (Reilly, 1999:186).
The island is, moreover, never an unambiguous paradise, but a jungle of creepers and roots, obstacles to progress which may denote the curse on nature brought about by the Fall (Gen. 3:17, 18). It is already "scarred" by the crash-landing aeroplane which marked the children's arrival, and is subject to decay.
The Biblical view of nature is that it is the general revelation of the Creator: "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made", writes St. Paul (Rom. 1:20). The paradoxical ability to see the invisible through the visible requires "eyes that see". In this regard a minor episode in the first exploration of the island is significant. Ralph, Jack and Simon come across a clearing with strange bushes. Simon calls them "Candle bushes. Candle buds". "You couldn't light them," says Ralph. "They just look like candles." "Green candles," Jack says contemptuously. "[W]e can't eat them. Come on" (p. 33). For Simon, the clearing will become a sanctuary, a sacred space where the white "candle buds" open at night and spill their scent over the island, intimating prayer. Ralph cannot see beyond what is there: for him the buds only "'look like candles"--rationalism and utilitarianism stand in the way of "seeing clearly". Jack is the natural man whose god is his belly.
As in the Biblical creation myth where man and woman are given dominion over the created world, "to work it and take care of it" (Gen. 2:15), the children too enjoy possession and domination. "This belongs to us," Ralph tells the other two when they have reached the hilltop and surveyed their kingdom (p. 31). "Eyes shining, mouths open, triumphant, they savoured the right of domination" (p. 32).
But the children in the novel represent a race already fallen, and their relationship to the natural world is not custodian, but destructive. They pollute, violate and finally destroy it by fire, blackening the sky in a conflagration reminiscent both of nuclear destruction and of Biblical prophecies of the end. The children reenact the Fall in reversing the process of creation by destroying, in turn, mineral formations, then plant, animal and human life.
The most telling sign of the children's poor stewardship is in the hunt, driven not so much by hunger as by the will to power which for Golding is so often the root of evil. In the Genesis story humans and beasts are given "every plant" and "every tree" for food (Gen. 1:29, 30); there are no predators before the Fall. The prophet Isaiah looks forward to a restoration of the divine order, when predator and prey will lie down together and men will not "hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain". This is the order governed by the Child-King who is to come ("a little child shall lead them") (Is. 11:6-9). In the novel it is the children who become the predators, with choirboys--perhaps too obvious a reversal--at their head. Their progression in hunting charts their degeneration into evil: by the end of the novel the boys are so brutalised that they hunt their own. The mythical return to Eden is impossible because human nature, even in children, is no longer sinless.
…
6. Simon: the Christ-figure
Against the overwhelming preponderance of evil, what little hope the novel affords lies with the visionary boy Simon, whom Golding has referred to as a saint (in Kermode, 1985:54) and a Christ-figure (Golding, 1965:64). Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor (2002:15) argue that "a ten or eleven year old is a slender reed to bear the weight of a saint, let alone a Saviour". And indeed Simon, who seems pitted, alone, against all the forces of evil including the agency of his friends, is a fragile figure.
No literary Christ-figure is messianic in every respect. Ralph, as the "being" who has blown the conch or "tusk" (p. 24)--reminiscent of the priests' ram's horn--is the novel's priest-king figure. Simon is Christlike in his prophetic role and in his priestly function of not only offering, but being a sacrifice for the others.
Emerging from the choir--"something dark" (p. 20)--Simon is set apart almost immediately when he faints and is laid on one side. Reilly argues that it is his sickness, paradoxically, that makes him a saint. ("He is one of the meek" [Reilly, 1999:180].) Like Isaiah's suffering Servant, he is physically unimpressive. He also finds it difficult to speak in assembly, and is soon shouted down when his words are too hard to bear, so fulfilling the hard role of the authentic prophet who is rejected by his peers. (18)
Like Jesus, Simon goes apart alone at night--the only child who is not afraid to move about on the island in the dark. In his sanctuary he sits perfectly quietly. His name means "hearing", and it is in this stillness, at one with the natural world and the world beyond, that he comes to insight.
Simon's prophetic role is evident again when he gives hope to Ralph. Things are going badly, the beast is on the mountain and Ralph has faced the "brute obtuseness of the ocean", the impossibility of rescue. Simon, kneeling on a "higher rock", tells him three times that he will "get back all right" (p. 122). Though Ralph at first responds cynically, they smile at each other, and something passes from Simon to Ralph. Simon will be killed shortly after this.
Simon's confrontation with the Lord of the Flies corresponds with the temptation of Christ: as unwieldy a scene as it is, it depicts a direct confrontation with evil by one who has the capacity to penetrate the spiritual realm. The temptation is aimed at deflecting the protagonist from the chosen or destined path. "Simon's lonely, voluntary quest for the beast is certainly the symbolic core of the book," writes Hynes (1997:62). Simon climbs the mountain to confront the darkness and so defeat the beast of death. His physical frailty (he toils up the mountain "like an old man" [p. 161], "stooping under the heavy burden of revelation" [Friedman, 1997:71]) is another parallel with that of the path to Golgotha.
Simon, however, meets his Golgotha "down there", where the boys have camped, as the Lord of the Flies has said ("You'll only meet me down there" [p. 158 ]). When Simon stumbles into the "demented" ring of boys, crying out his good news, he is killed by the beast incarnate. Yet Simon himself is referred to throughout this horrifying scene as the "beast" (p. 168), as he becomes the beast they need him to be.
Simon continues to cry out against the noise, "something about a dead man on a hill" (p. 168). His message concerns the corpse on the mountain, but since this is the only time the mountain is referred to as a "hill", his message invites comparison with the dying man on Golgotha and its messianic content provides the meaning of his own martyrdom. In becoming the "beast" Simon "becomes sin" in Christlike fashion (2 Cor. 5:21; John 1:29). Jesus used a strange analogy for this, that of a serpent or snake--a demonic image--"lifted up ... in the wilderness" (John 3:14, 15). It alludes to an incident from the exodus, recorded in Numbers 21, when the Israelites were bitten by poisonous snakes, and could live only by an act of faith: turning to look at a copper snake held up on a pole by Moses--the image of death which would defeat death. Simon's death as the beast, similarly, precedes the removal of the beast of death--but the children cannot appropriate the liberation he has wrought.
A storm erupts over the children's murderous ritual, but then, as in the end of the gospels' three hours of darkness, the night sky is illuminated by "the incredible lamps of the stars" (p. 169) and images of light abound. The phosphorescent sea water is imbued with light and energy, "moonbeam-bodied creatures" (p. 169), which surround Simon's broken body as it lies on the beach and dress it with "brightness", surrounding it with an aura of light and transforming it into something rich and strange. Unlike Piggy, whose body is brutally dispensed with, swallowed by a monstrous mass of water, Simon is borne out to the open sea "beneath the steadfast constellations". Simon's sea change, so different from the dreadful decay of the "poor body" on the mountain, so different from Piggy's abrupt end, is given a cosmic backdrop as the heavens bear witness to his transformation and transition to infinity. "Why did Golding create him," asks Reilly, "and why is the hideous death followed by so beautiful a requiescat ...?" ... [T]he gentle escort of his body towards the infinite ocean is as close to a resurrection scene as any novel dare come ... [T]his beauty is clearly the servant of some greater purpose--it points to an alternative world to the nightmare world of blood and taboo, a world, in Hopkins' words, charged with the glory of God. The passage provides a sacramental guarantee that creation is ... the product of an organising power, a power which promises resurrection to those who sacrifice themselves for its sake (Reilly, 1999:181, 182).
Water, archetypal symbol of both life and death, is apocalyptic in this scene, in line with the biblical image of the river of life. In Ezekiel's vision this river gives life to the Dead Sea ("everything will live where the water goes") (Ez. 47:1-12), so that death is overcome by life, and in the Apocalypse it flows through the City of God. The water of life symbolises the regenerating power of the Spirit of God.
While the political fable of Lord of the Flies focuses on the contest between Ralph and Jack, a reading of the novel as myth is more concerned with the difference between Piggy and Simon, both outsiders, both victims, but otherwise opposites. It is Simon's mystic consciousness which is valorised in the novel. Slight as it is when weighed against the darkness of the novel, his transformation scene, filled with images of light and life, affords hope, not for society, but for an alternative consciousness such as that of the "hearkener". "It is an arresting peripeteia", writes Reilly (1999:182): "the dark epiphany is pierced by a shaft of light from that other epiphany promising salvation". Though the powers of evil hold sway, Simon's vindication suggests that, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, it may be overcome--and has been overcome--by the power of sacrificial love. (19)
Golding once referred to himself as a "pint-sized Jeremiah". Jeremiah's was a fierce, passionate voice to an unbelieving generation. But perhaps more significantly, he is the writer of Lamentations, a cry wrung from the heart at the suffering of his people. Barbara Everett (1986:110 f.) has written about Golding's pity, and this may be connected to the author's own statement on the theme of Lord of the Flies being an emotion: "grief, sheer grief, grief, grief, grief". "It was like lamenting the lost childhood of the world," he recalls about writing it (1988a:163). The relation between this novel and Biblical salvation history is not one of parody; the parallels and significant differences are a lamentation for the spiritual predicament of a disillusioned post-war generation.
Source Citation: van Vuuren, Marijke. "Good grief: Lord of the Flies as a post-war rewriting of salvation history." Literator: Journal of Literary Criticism, comparative linguistics and literary studies. 25.2 (Aug. 2004): p1. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Abington Sr High School. 25 Jan. 2009 .