‘Pincher Martin’: Hell at Sea
A review of ‘Pincher Martin’, by William Golding; Faber & Faber, 1956.
Golding is of course best known for Lord of the Flies, in which a group of boys are stranded on an uninhabited island and try to govern themselves, with rather harrowing results that cast light on the tension between civility and chaos. Pincher Martin is in many ways a simpler but more difficult story, for it deals with just one man clinging to life and sanity after being stranded, alone, on a barren rock in the Atlantic. Christopher ‘Pincher’ Martin is thrown overboard the Wildebeeste, a Allied ship hit by a torpedo, and drifts by his lifejacket to an islet. There, he tries to last long enough to be rescued.
The violent opening of the story, in which Martin claws his way onto this jagged rock, sets the tone for the novel. His survival is not heroic. It is ugly, desperate, visceral. On the rock, Martin scavenges for food, fights off the elements — and starts to unravel. His biggest challenge is to hang onto his sanity as the sea, a ‘living enemy’, beats ceaselessly against the rock, and painful memories starts to bubble up from his consciousness. He builds a three-foot rock-figure that he dubs ‘The Dwarf’ and hopes will catch the attention of a passing ship. He gives parts of the rock names like ‘The Red Lion’ and ‘The High Street’. And he repeats, almost like mantras, ‘education’ and ‘intelligence’, as if these magic words will ward off his looming madness. Speech is key: ‘Speech was proof of identity and his lips began to move again.’
His survival is not heroic. It is ugly, desperate, visceral.
Identity connects to selfhood, and the self is a fickle friend. Martin’s memories reveal a thoroughly selfish man. The reason for his nickname, ‘Pincher’, become clear. His many and various sins now play out, projected onto the screen of his consciousness. And as they do, his descent into madness grows steeper. ‘I am Atlas. I am Prometheus,’ he mumbles to himself. ‘I am winning.’ That ‘I am’ is precisely the problem with Martin. His flaws and failings are rooted in ego, (as they are for all of us) not its absence. I, I, I, my, me, mine—this is the wellspring of our misery. Soon, he starts talking to The Dwarf.
The ego is the hard shell that surrounds our consciousness. What Martin fears is allowing that shell to crack or splinter or disintegrate, so revealing the consciousness beneath. The rock, stripped bare of life, is a fitting stage for this moral reckoning, for there is nothing on it: it is just raw reality. Martin experiences a kind of contrapasso, like the souls in Dante’s hell: thoughtless in his life before, he is oppressed by thoughts in his life on the rock. Greedy for satisfaction in his life before, he ‘can get no satisfaction’ (to quote the Stones) in his life on the rock. The water he drinks is harsh. The food he eats turns his stomach. And the rescuers he longs for still won’t come. He is a hungry ghost, addicted to sating his every passing desire.
Golding plays with themes of identity, morality, redemption. We are trapped in Martin’s unstable mind, and Golding’s narrative scope is so constrained as to create a climate that is intensely claustrophobic. The story feels like an accelerating downward slide into an abyss. We are with Martin, unable to seek distraction in what is outside of ourselves, raking over the past, reckoning with our sins, trying and failing to escape. The experience is dreamlike, evoked by the play of light on the water and the intricate texture of the rock. The water stands for tranquility and turbulence, life and death, hiddenness, depth, the unknown.
Golding’s narrative scope is so constrained as to create a climate that is intensely claustrophobic.
It is not a survival story. It is a psychological portrait. Golding is uninterested in what happens practically to Martin, that is, whether he is saved from the rock or not. He is interested in what is happening in his interior, in his essence, and in the relation between his self, his essence, and his capacity to endure. We think of those who cannot be alone, who cannot sit with themselves, who cannot stand themselves, who need others to entertain them—and why that is, and what might happen were they to find themselves, like Martin, with no company but their own and nothing to distract themselves from themselves.
Pincher Martin is an intense, demanding, unsettling, rewarding story. It is not comfortable, exactly, for it forces us (or at any rate, invites us) to mull over our own innumerable sins (innumerable in the case of this reviewer) and whether we have come to some kind of resolution or are merely pushing down and away those thoughts that will, the moment they can, rise to the surface of our consciousness. This is an uncompromising work of literary psychology, in some respects redolent of Dostoevsky, and with a twist that changes everything.
