Golding’s Quest for Moral Vision

K. SATAYANARAYANA

[William Golding, the Nobel Prize Winner, who has passed away very recently, was one of the leading fiction-writers of the post-war era with a penchant for originality, fertile imagination, ethical vision and study of the intricacies and inner workings of human nature. The following article is published as Triveni’s homage to him.
–Editors]

THE PRESENT STUDY seeks to examine William Golding’s quest for moral vision as evidenced in his early novels, viz., Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin; Free Fall and The Spire. Golding is one of the most significant experimentalists among the contemporary British novelists. With the intensity of his moral vision and freshness of imagination he has provided a new impetus to the novel writ­ing technique in the post-war era.
Golding’s novels are known for his in­cisive insight into human nature. He recognises the evil in man and yearns for man’s redemption from it. What sets him apart from the rest of the contemporaries is his ability to convey his comprehensive view of man’s exis­tence through his fictional medium without ever becoming didactic. How­ever, he has acquired the titles of “fabulist” and “myth maker” in the process of reconstructing certain myths as significant analogies for contemporary man.

Golding is very much aware of the far-reaching effects of the Industrial Revolution in the socio-political, economic, ethical structures in Europe and elsewhere in the world. The Age of Machine marked the beginning of the Age of Reason. The emergence of a new but powerful middle class, growing urbanization, increasing comforts, the growing sense of alienation, the neurosis of individualism together greeted the turn of the twentieth century. Traditional societies were found wanting in their accommodation of desires, tastes and comforts. A gradual, if not systematic, demolition of the traditional societies is followed by a ques­tioning of traditional, religious and philosophical systems. The rapid growth of science and technology has revolutionized the existing modes of living threatening to replace religion. Man has distanced himself from na­ture and God. He has created a spiri­tual vacuum.

As a novelist, Golding is very much concerned with the artificial patterns man has tried to impose upon the “natural chaos of existence.” He sets out to break down the false illu­sions of man about himself and the physical world in this sense. Golding is very much a religious novelist who is engaged in the task of resolving the moral choice between good and evil and man’s relation to the universe and God. Much as he is concerned with the depravity of human condition, his re­ligious sense does not drag him from the reality of human life but makes him observe and comment upon human fate with deep sympathy and compassion.

In Golding, the awareness of the futility of human existence in the face of wars has led to a comprehensive vision of human life. A sensitive writer, Golding feels the need to rescue man from self-destruction. Although he does not explicitly refer to war in his novels, it has shaken his faith in modem man and prompted him to search for a viable, harmonious and natural order. Having joined the Royal Navy in the second world war, Golding had close encounters with man’s inhu­manity to man. The nauseating experi­ence of war cruelties made him realize the aggressive triviality of man’s gigan­tic enterprises. This first-hand experi­ence led him to probe into the me­chanics of human mind and the valid­ity of human existence.

Like a cultural primitivist, Gold­ing derides the nihilistic and self-de­structive tendencies of modern civiliza­tion. The intellectual awareness of the situation around him makes Golding feel like a pessimist but his moral idealism and the authenticity of his religious viewpoint leave the stamp of an optimist engaged in the art of crea­tivity. Golding confesses:

“I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pes­simist. I suppose.”

Golding’s conviction in the omi­nous portents of human nature does not in itself make him a cynic or a pessimist. His moral insights are guided by a profound humanistic concern for the predicament of man. The unmistakable stamp of the novel­ist as a moral guide is evident in the fictional strategy of Golding in pointing out the folly of human nature without ever being lost in despair. A moralist’s vision is always focussed on the future and in Golding’s fiction a re-definition of the details of the human existence, by implication, becomes an act in defence of man. By nature and convic­tion Golding is an optimist, a “spiritual cosmologist.” He recognises the complexity of human nature. He says:

“I am very serious. I believe that man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view, in the belief that it may be something like the truth. I am fully engaged in the human di­lemma but see it as far more fundamental than a complex of taxes and astronomy.”

Golding’s moral vision distin­guishes him from the post-war British fiction writers dominated by the neo-­realism of Dorris Lessing. Kingsley Amis, Anthony Powell and C.P. Snow. Golding is concerned about the lack of understanding among men of their own nature. The choice for modern man is very limited forcing him into a world of success and comforts through devious means. He has opted for a society in which “it is better to be envied than ignored.” Golding prefers to call this sort of dehumanization a sign of ignorance.

He questions the excessive reli­ance on the scientific and rational alone as an alternative to passion and violence. In fact, he seems to strike a balance between intellect and senti­ment, reason and passion. He is not interested in the relationships of men in a given society or in the realistic portrayal of their response to the soci­ety. He goes beyond the conventional themes of contemporary novel and attempts to show how man looks like when shorn of artificiality and self-­made patterns. He closely observes the inner working of a man struggling for survival, much like a metaphysical or an existential novelist. In Lord of the Flies, the passionate Jack and his group are pitted against the rational Ralph and Piggy. The Inheritors shows the rational means with which the new men developed hew techniques and devices in their struggle for existence. Pincher Martin is doomed to self-de­struction because of his passionate faith in himself. Free Fall is concerned with the absurdity of human predica­ment and man’s rationality. The Spire shows how a man’s commitment to his own reason and morals could ulti­mately turn out to be amoral and self­-deceptive.

Golding does not set out for himself the sole task of finding the evil in man and searching the means to root it out in the manner of an altruist. He analyses the motives of human behaviour, the futility of man’s ration­ality of passion and the question of good and evil in a carefully planned setting and action of the human mind. In whatever he does, he does not lose the touch of sympathy, compassion and humanism. The task he has set for himself is made clear in his own words:

“I’m not saying anyone is evil. I set out to discover whether there is that in man which makes him do what he does, that’s all.” (Sameul Hynes, 34).

Golding deals with the inner chaos of man to explain the outer world of social behaviour. He believes in the Christian faith that man is a “fallen creature” shattered by “origi­nal sin.” But he does not confine himself to the religious implications of the concept of Original Sin. Life, for Golding, has to be grasped with all that is dark and inexplicable in human nature. His profound awareness of “mankind’s essential illness” is worked and re-worked in almost all his novels. Simon in Lord of the Flies says, “There is a beast, but it is only us.” Piggy questions “What are we? Humans or animals or savages?” In The Brass Butterfly Phonocles asks “What is wrong with man?” to which his emperor replies “There is nothing wrong with man’s intelligence. The trouble is his nature.”

In Golding’s view, contemporary man lacks vision. He insists upon the ignored religious dimensions of humanism experience. In his stress on the duality of human nature, he inevitably draws comparison with Graham Greene. Both of them are interested in the metaphysics of human behaviour. But in the clarity of his moral vision, in the task of exposing the image of man toman, and in providing valid gener­alisation about the meaning of life, he stands apart from the rest of the English novelists. The authenticity of his moral viewpoint is marked by interpretation of human experience and strengthened by the belief that life, in spite of the experience of pain, horror and guilt, is worth living.

A novelist with a moral stance inevitably makes use of symbols and myths which are familiar or have sunk into the archetypal consciousness of the audience, primarily to enable the readers to understand his moral view­point. Golding’s literary powers are manifest in the metaphorical structure that governs each of his first five nov­els. Whatever the action – the deserted boys of Lord of the Flies engaged in quarrels, conflicts and prejudices, or an excursion into the mind of man’s anthropological antecedents in The In­heritors or a man clinging to a rock for survival in Pincher Martin – the mas­sive symbolic structure is designed in such a way as tounderline the signifi­cance of human life and experience. It is conceived in terms of religious symbolism and Christian faith.

II

Golding’s first novel. Lord of the Flies, is a fable which deals with the story of a group of children isolated on an island. He presents his view of the human condition with a moralvision. The children typify all human beings with their feelings of love, hatred, pain and guilt. In the initial stages the children find the place a new-found paradise. But soonthey fall upon the blood-thirsty ways and primitive savagery of the adults. The “civilized” standards they impose upon them­selves fall apart by their blood-lust. The beauty of earthly paradise grows stale and finally they leave behind “the burning wreckage of the island.” The boys are afraid of the beast which haunts the island. Simon understands that “the beast” is the evil nature of man. He thinks in hallucination that the pig’s head is the “lord of the flies”, the darkness or evil. But he is killed in a ritual hunt before he revealed the truth. Piggy is also killed by Jack when he tries to oppose the latter. Golding considers evil a product of man’s consciousness. The boys tend to impose an order or pattern upon the vital chaos of their own nature and so they commit the error or sin. Their guilt is the price of evolutionary success. Golding’s thesis concludes that the beast is man’s inability to recog­nise his own responsibility for his self-­destruction. The episode of Simon’s confrontation with the totemic sow’s head i.e., “Lord of the Flies” reveals us the beastly nature of the man. When Simon thought of the beast, he felt “the picture of the man at once heroic and sick”. P. Ralph, at the end of the novel, weeps for the death of his friend Piggy, for the loss of innocence and humanity.

Golding’s second novel The In­heritors is concerned with man’s loss of innocence. The pride of modern man who imagines that he is in complete control of his own destiny is attacked. It attempts to reveal the absurdity that lies under the facade of “civilisation.” It relates the story of Neanderthal man, the last family of man’s ances­tors, conquered by man. Man and his future are measured in terms of the Neanderthal man and his past when man was evolving from his ape-like predecessor. The protagonists of the novel, “The People” or Neanderthal men are neither apes nor human beings. Our knowledge of them is scanty. They are immediately followed by homo sapiens, an advanced race in evolutionary scale like the modem man. The primitiveness of “the people” is difficult to imagine. They constitute a small Neanderthal tribe which is already on the decline. They are not even a dozen altogether – Mal, the old man, the old woman, Ha, Lok, the protagonist, Fa, Lok’s woman com­panion, Liku, the little child and Nil, the mother of the new one. They live together like a family but their rela­tionships are not defined. But we can assume from their deep affection that Liku is Lok and Fa’s child and Mal and the old woman are Lok’s parents. “The people” are not only innocent and harmless but also incapable of under­standing evil. They run to meet their killers in love and they are incapable of preserving themselves. “The people” get extinct consequently and the new men, who are intelligent or strong, become the inheritors. The story does not end with the extinction of “the people.” We see the events through the consciousness of Tuami who is one of the new men. At the end, Tuami and his people are left in dark­ness. As they are found to be sinners, they have to travel towards a line of unending darkness. Tuami sees the world as, “dark amid the light ... untidy, hopeless and dirty.” Golding makes man face the sad fact of his own cruelty and lust once again. While Golding makes Neanderthal men vic­tims of homo spaians in The Inheritors, human beings become the targets of nuclear was in Lord of the Flies. Gold­ing is of the opinion that the world is contaminated with the evil nature of modem man and that man struggle in all ages to rescue himself from that evil which is born out of his own absurd behaviour.

            Pincher Martin deals with the fall of man and it describes a man’s struggle for survival in the face of alien nature. Christopher Martin, a naval officer is blown into the Atlantic when a s.ubmarine attacks his ship. Fighting the water, he eventually finds the surface of a rock. Convinced of his intelligence he organises his routine on the rock. All his rational efforts fail as he is forced toward death and damnation. Pincher Martin’s predica­ment is shown in micro-cosmic im­agery to emphasise the fact that the real meaning of the novel lies in spiri­tual torment and self-awareness. In the first chapter he is seen trying to kick off his sea boots to avoid drown­ing. But on the last page it is made clear that he was drowned before he had time to kick them off. The whole action of the novel takes place in a few seconds of his actual drowning or per­haps in an after death stage. Golding dramatises “a modem ego” which has no belief in “purgatory.” Martin’s confrontation with the facts of his selfish life is the only hell he has to experience. Pincher admantly refuses the validity of spiritual experience. He believes the only hope for humanity is self-knowledge attained and practised by the individual. Pincher symbolises the entire humanity.

Golding’s fourth novel, Free Fall is anchored in social surroundings but it also deals with the illusion that man can control his world rationally. The myth of “Free Fall” is central to all Golding’s novels. The fall of Sammy Mountjoy, again, is the fall from inno­cence. Unlike Martin, Sammy realises his guilt and yearns for divine grace.

Guilt-ridden Sammy traces his career in a flash. Sammy Mountjoy is an artist at Tate’s gallery. He spends his childhood days with his mother in Rotten Row, a rural slum locality. As he grows up, he develops artistic talent and asserts himself. He seduces a quiet girl. Beatrice Ifor and deserts her for Taffy. Thereafter he goes to Europe as an Official war artist and becomes a prisoner of war camp. He is subjected to interrogation and torture by Dr. Halde in a dark cell. Suffering makes him contemplate on human relationships. He recalls his own past deeds and realises his guilt to Beatrice. After his release, he searches for Beatrice and finds her in a lunatic asylum. Appalled by her destruction and inability to identify him Sammuy is left with deep re­morse. He is now in search of a pat­tern “which will give experience, moral coherence.” He desperately tries to locate the moment of his fall. He says:

I am looks for the beginning of responsibility, the beginning of the­ darkness, the point whee I began.

The frantic search takes his memory to the stage of his se­duction of Beatrice. Sammy Mountjoy is a sorry specimen of the human predicament but unlike Pincher he is not condemned to self-destruction. The saving grace of Sammy Mountjoy lies in his belated realisation.

            The Spire, golding’s fifth novel, tells the story of Jocelin, Dean of a cathedral and his inspired dedication to the erection of a crowning four­ hundred-foot spire. The story is set in the Middle Ages and told in Jocelin’s point of view. Jocelin has a vision of God asking him to built to highest spire. He takes up this work with the financial support of his aunt, Lady Alison who is the king’s mistress. Jocelin is appointed dean at her re­quest. He involves other people ­– Roger Mason, the master builder, Pangall, the cathedral servant and his wife Goody pangall besides the “army” of workers. As the worked pro­gresses, they are confronted with the problem of inadequate foundations. However, the spire is erected but it claims the “blood and sin of the world.” Jocelin regrets:

I never guessed in my folly that there would be a new lesson at every level and new power.

The massive enterprise involves heavy cost – physical, material and spiritual. The obsession of one man, even if it was thrust upon him by God, becomes a nightmare for the persons engaged in the construction of the spire. The construction is started with­out proper foundations. The persons in the divine task commit adultery, sin, murder and guilt. Joceline re­mains a silent witness to all this but refuses to give up his vision in spite of the evil surrounding the holy place. As he pushes on with his ambition, he is forced to come to grips not only with external factors, but his own internal forces. The progress of the construc­tion with its own pitfalls also marks the progress of understanding that is the chief movement in the novel. Jocelin comes to understand his own past, his motives and his connivance, with the evil. The novel, much as it deals with human will, is full of para­doxes. The foundation of the massive construction is fragile and yet the spire stands. The divine place, the physical and mental states are in confrontation with the evil. The fainal paradox is the unresolved tension between Joceline’s blindness versus his visionary capabilities.