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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a paper on William Golding's survival tale -- without reading the book. This summer, I thought I'd see if it was truly as dreadful as I imagined.
Aug 15, 2005 | How did I get here, in Summer School, a knot of assignment angst tightening my stomach in the midst of my 31st year?
It begins with an undone piece of homework from 17 years ago. Back in 8th grade English, under the watchful eye of Laura Sharpless, I willfully failed to read William Golding's "Lord of the Flies." I did start it, with the best of intentions. But it lost me, soon after I realized there was a character named Piggy. According to the copy I have sitting in front of me, which happens to be the same edition that I chucked in a corner almost two decades ago, that's on Page 11.
Up until the "LOTF" incident (I think of it as "LOTF" because that's how Laura -- Quaker school, teachers went by first names -- used to write it on the board when assigning pages that I had no intention of reading) I had been a diligent student. But this was the (text-appropriate) moment at which I broke free of the dictates of academic structure and behaved badly, the instant when I realized that I could pass tests and even write papers without reading the book. It was an exercise that would be repeated occasionally in high school and college, but "LOTF" was my maiden backsliding voyage.
I was not without my reasons. See, even without having read the book, I managed to glean -- from the class discussion I tuned in for and thanks to the helpful cover illustration of a little boy all done up like a savage -- that Golding's novel was not one of the subtler texts in the Western canon. I got the point: Young men left to their own devices will go wild, massacring pigs and eventually each other; human nature, outside of controlled conditions, is a destructive and untamed force. Yawn.
I know how it sounds, especially with my being a female writer, one who often writes about women. It sounds like I don't like "boys books." But I do! Some of my favorite books are about boys; I love boys books more than most boys! I love Heinlein; I love Pullman; I love the freakin' Tripods!
"LOTF's" setup is just as I remembered: A gaggle of boys are on a plane that crashes onto a deserted island. The backdrop to the book, published in 1954, is a hazy wartime apocalyptic vision of the civilization the boys have left; perhaps the developed world has finally destroyed itself. Standing in contrast is the island on which they land; it's untouched by profane humanity, until now. And, in case you miss the imagery, Golding helpfully refers to the plane crash site as a "scar" about 100 times in the first few chapters.
I haven't even made it 20 pages before I remember why I stopped reading the last time. Piggy. Poor Piggy. One of the first characters we meet, Piggy is overweight, asthmatic and bespectacled, which puts him at a social disadvantage. His first island acquaintance, Ralph, is fair and lanky and fit. When Piggy confesses his nickname to Ralph as a gesture of intimacy, and begs him not to repeat it to anyone, it's pretty easy to guess that this is going nowhere good. When Piggy tells Ralph how to blow through a conch shell to make a sound, Ralph promptly appropriates the instrument.
The saddest thing about Piggy is that he understands his lowly standing on the power scale. "Piggy bore this with a sort of humble patience," is a Golding sentence that fairly sums up everything we imagine to be true about our doomed, and depressingly resigned, hero.
Sure enough, when the surviving boys gather to determine who'll be their leader, Ralph wins. "There was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch," writes Golding of the circumstances surrounding Ralph's rise to power, an eerie reminder that the subtleties of our democratic process have not advanced much beyond a fictionalized vision of wilderness chaos.
The short version of what happens among these young men is both simple and brutal: They screw everything up. Ralph realizes that they need a fire to send smoke signals to potential rescuers, but in their enthusiasm they set half the island ablaze, destroying their dry timber and probably killing a number of the youngest children -- we're never sure. A birthmarked "littl'un" who first reports a sighting of a local "beastie" is never seen again. It is the first and most innocent of the tribe's blunders.
The chief fire tender, Jack, once a boys choir leader, is initially a pragmatic organizer. At first Jack demurs from spilling the blood of one of the piglets that roam the island. The boys, writes Golding, "knew very well why he hadn't: because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh." But it's not long before Jack gets over that minor hang-up, sheds his society-dictated ambivalence, and becomes consumed by the hunting of the local porky population. It's not that the boys are starving; there's fruit on the trees and crabs in the sea. It's just that this dude really, really wants to kill a pig.
Jack's obsession with the kill leads him to neglect the fire, which goes out just as a ship is passing; the boys' hopes of being found are dashed. But Jack cares nothing of rescue. Instead, when confronted about his whereabouts, Jack "tried to convey the compulsion to track down and kill that was swallowing him up."
Soo-eeeeey!!!
