‘Lord of the Flies’: The Thin Veneer of Civilisation—and the Evil It Conceals
A review of ‘Lord of the Flies’, by William Golding; Faber & Faber, 1954.
The Genevan philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau was, by all accounts, incurably self-involved and vain. He yearned for much of his life for celebrity. So when, at the age of 37, he heard of a contest sponsored by the Academy of Dijon, he saw his chance to be great. The Academy would award a prize for the best essay on the theme of whether the development of the arts and sciences had been morally beneficial. It was a chance for the very best Francophone writers to wax poetic on the myriad gains made since man threw off the fetters of organised religion and worshipped at the cult of Reason instead.
Rousseau went against the grain. He argued that man is ‘by nature good, and that only our institutions have made him bad’. Discourse on the Arts and Sciences torched 2,500 years of classical and Christian anthropology overnight. Man was not fallen: there was no original sin. No, said Rousseau: if we act badly, it is our institutions that are to blame. Rousseau got the fame he craved. But he also threw open the door to utopianism, Marxism, totalitarianism, and the modern obsession with self-invention. In Rousseau’s view, political or social revolution will fix everything. There is no need for quaint ideas like grace, discipline, or self-restraint. If we would only find the courage to burn down this poisoned world, we would return to paradise.
Of course, not everyone agrees. Life in the state of nature, wrote Hobbes, is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Machiavelli called men ‘ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, (and) covetous’, arguing that if man had the ability to do good, it was only when it was in his own self-interest to do so. In Lord of the Flies, William Golding lends his voice to that conversation and grapples with a question that perhaps animates all philosophy at bottom. Per Plotinus, ‘But we; who are we?’
The story opens with a group of English schoolboys. They find themselves marooned on an apparently uninhabited island after their plane crashes. The pilot is dead, and the boys must fend for themselves. At first, they set about attempting to establish order. Ralph, who is fair-haired, self-confident and pragmatic, meets chubby, bespectacled Piggy and uses a conch shell to call the other survivors. The boys elect Ralph as their leader; though Jack, the red-headed leader of the choirboys, is resentful of this. Ralph makes rescue their highest priority, and marshals the others to build shelters and a signal fire. Piggy, his right-hand man, commands little respect on account of his appearance, but is intelligent and has Ralph’s ear.
Jack is not thinking of rescue. He is put in charge of the hunters, made up of members of the choir including Simon and Roger, and grows increasingly obsessed. While the younger boys, called ‘littluns’, struggle with nightmares and believe a ‘beast’ is lurking on the island, Jack grows frustrated with Ralph’s leadership. The days pass, and the trappings of civilisation soon fade. Fear grows. Division follows. The boys grow more savage, and Jack and his hunters, now streaked with paint, look to profit from the growing terror and claim power for themselves.
We hear Golding’s message as loudly and clearly as the call of the conch shell — that symbol of order and democracy. Civilisation is a mask, and behind it lies something violent and primitive. The novel resounds with the echoes of the recent war, which brought home to all the frailty of democracy, the ease with which civility and common decency could go out of the window given the right conditions. The boys, left to their own devices, create not a paradise but a nightmare. Even the innocent become complicit in the savagery. The ‘beast’ that terrifies the ‘littluns’ lies within the boys themselves: it is man’s capacity to surrender to the worst aspects of his nature.
The transformation of the island from a sunlit Eden to a place of dread and darkness is slow, steady and credible. The imagery, as in Pincher Martin, evokes the biblical: good and evil, chaos and order, darkness and light, the fall of man. Even Jack, leader of the choirboys, stands for another Lucifer, promising rule and rejecting service. Some interpretations of the Bible and some folk exegeses claim Lucifer’s led heaven’s choirs. The name of the novel, Lord of the Flies, is a literal translation of the name Beelzebub, a powerful demon in hell sometimes seen as the devil himself. That some of the angels fought with Lucifer against God, as some of the boys side with Jack over Ralph, sprang not from rational assessment but weakness to charisma, combined with a need to agree and ‘fit in’. After their first successful hunt, Jack’s party chant together, evoking the joy and thrill of groupthink and mob violence, in which the individual loses himself in the crowd.
Golding writes largely in stark, visceral prose befitting the story, balancing lean narration with bursts of rich description, as when violence, moments of revelation or nature:
The shore was fledged with palm trees. These stood or leaned or reclined against the light and their green feathers were a hundred feet up in the air. The ground beneath them was a bank covered with coarse grass, torn everywhere by the upheavals of fallen trees, scattered with decaying coconuts and palm saplings. Behind this was the darkness of the forest proper and the opens pace of the scar. Ralph stood, one hand against a grey trunk, and screwed up his eyes against the shimmering water. Out there, perhaps a mile away, the white surf flinked on a coral reef, and beyond that the open sea was dark blue. Within the irregular arcof coral the lagoon was still as a mountain lake — blue of all shades and shadowy green and purple. The beach between the palm terrace and the water was a thin stick, endless apparently, for to Ralph’s left the perspectives of palm and beach and water drew to a point at infinity; and always, almost visible, was the heat.
As in The War of the Worlds, Golding attempts to show that the human being in the state of nature is no ‘noble savage’, as Rousseau would have us think, but naturally selfish, moved by primal urges toward brutality and the lust to dominate, as well as a reluctance to stand up for others if it does not suit our purposes. This is a deeply pessimistic view but—perhaps—truer to experience than of Rousseau’s.
