William Golding's Platonic Myth
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING William Golding's Platonic Myth By Stanley Edgar Hyman William Golding is the most maverick novelist publishing today. He chooses the least promising fictional subjects and...
...they sacrifice food, drink and their own fingers to the stag god...
...The characteristic thinking of the 19th century, Kenneth Burke has pointed out, is the temporalization of essence, the expression of logical priority as temporal priority...
...Most of all, The Inheritors is Freudian...
...Reconstructing the lifeways, thinking and speech of Neanderthals, Golding constantly risks absurdity...
...Put this way, Golding's fable is very like the Christian myth of original sin, Adam's Fall...
...Rarely, however, has any novel dealt with them quite so explicitly as The Inheritors...
...and like him they are guilt-ridden, murderous and wicked...
...To anyone familiar with prehistory, this conflict of cultural medleys is not anthropologically convincing, but it is imaginatively convincing...
...It is the history of any pacific primitive culture destroyed by a warlike higher culture: the extinction of the Tasmanians by the white settlers...
...eventually the surviving woman, Fa, is killed too, and the surviving man, Lok, gives up and lies down to die...
...Golding told Maurice Dolbier, in an interview in the New York Herald Tribune Books, that World War II had changed his generation's view of human nature...
...Golding's new men, on the other hand, walk erect and look like modern man...
...If class struggle or Oedipal tension is seen as the essence of the situation, it is put as a Platonic myth of origins...
...the survival of those species which do in fact survive shows that they were fittest to survive...
...Golding deals centrally with the ambiguity at the heart of The Origin of Species: that "survival of the fittest" sounds like a value judgment but is actually a tautology...
...I have not read Free Fall, Golding's latest novel, but it is described as an exercise in self-examination by a ruined man, and I do not doubt that it is as comfortless as the others...
...In Darwin's case, it plays variations on two of his major themes...
...They use fire although they cannot make it, use natural stone tools without working them, and carry thorn bushes for protection...
...the abyss on which his book teeters is "Me Tarzan, you Jane.' But the rewards are correspondingly great...
...The Inheritors is such a Platonic myth...
...The old man dies, the old woman and one couple are murdered by the new men, the children are carried off...
...Deprived of their weapons, they are of course cowards and weaklings...
...They have an advanced material culture, including bows and arrows (the Neanderthals think that these are friendly offerings of sticks), canoes with sails, which they transport over land on rollers, skin clothing and shoes, even hairpins and combs...
...If they are much less than Prince Myshkin, they are much more than Steinbeck's Lenny...
...At its best, Golding's deliberately simplified prose, seeing Lok's world through his eyes, is spare and supple, and the repetitive conversation is incantatory and effective...
...Golding's Neanderthals are wishfully pre-Freudian and innocent...
...The new men, on the other hand, are ripe for the couch: neurotically aggressive, cruelly lustful, torn, driven and unhappy...
...The Inheritors tells the story of a family of Neanderthal Men, consisting of two mature couples, the aged father and mother of some or all of them, and two children...
...Relying on a strongly developed sense of smell, they live by gathering shoots, fungi and grubs, and by scavenging animals killed and abandoned by sabretooth tigers...
...his gentle innocent Neanderthals at times catch the imagination and move the spirit...
...In the course of the novel's action they encounter a band of the new men, Homo sapiens...
...It is clear that these are the last Neanderthals, and that we have witnessed the extinction of the only other human species evolved...
...the slaughter of the Bushmen by the Boers...
...These naked primitives have a highly developed religion involving a nature goddess, Oa, and a creation myth in which she is the mother of all life...
...their sex life is sado-masochistic and perverse...
...In Darwin's terms, Golding's Neanderthals are the highest animals, and his new men, despite their advanced culture, the lowest humans...
...Golding agrees with Marx in seeing man as wolf to man, and like Marx he can imagine a time before man was, but unlike Marx he cannot imagine a social order under which man might cease to be...
...He is quite aware of it...
...Turning their destructive impulses alternately against themselves and against the world, they find no joy in either...
...IT is a commonplace that the ideas of Darwin, Marx and Freud have shaped the modern mind...
...The Inheritors shows us that act of primitive accumulation, with its proper accompaniment of murder...
...As such, taking the onus off society, it seems profoundly anti-Marxian, yet it is not really so far from Marx's origin myth of capitalism, a primary theft of property that he called "primitive accumulation" in Capital...
...Neanderthals, obviously, and Golding may plan to stick around to chronicle our extinction by some more advanced and ruthless civilization, complete with drunken orgies and whips...
...They drink it up, get wildly drunk and euphoric, pass out, then have hangovers with headache and vomiting the next day...
...He chooses the least promising fictional subjects and pursues them with stubborn integrity, making no slightest concession to the reading public...
...Lord of the Flies shows a group of boys cast away on an island quickly reverting to savagery, a Freudian return of the repressed (and a schoolmaster's sly revenge, surely...
...One other thing that Golding told Dolbier seems significant...
...Protected against the dangers of nature by culture, they are at peace with neither...
...Can Golding go on producing his unique and cheerless fictional visions...
...They live inside protective stockades, and can of course make fire, tools and stone pots...
...His first novel, Lord of the Flies, nevertheless achieved a considerable popular success, but that is unlikely to happen to his second, The Inheritors, published in England in 1955 and now brought out here (Harcourt, Brace and World, 233 pp., $4.50...
...Sacrifices are made to her by the women in cave sanctuaries, and animals are not killed because killing is a crime against the goddess, resulting in "blame...
...It is a remarkable tour de force, and it is said to be the author's favorite of his books...
...These inheritors, our ancestors, have a sophisticated religion and art that includes dancing in stag costume and painting stag pictures...
...There is a feeling among the people that meat-eating is wicked, and they do not like the taste of flesh but accept it as a necessity...
...In his travels through the United States last year, he said, he found Americans "a very mild, friendly, helpful people...
...the open season on California Indians as late as 1870...
...Maimed and maiming, they parody our condition...
...They go naked, shelter in caves in winter, dread water, and bury their dead under the hearth, sometimes eating their brains and bone marrow first...
...We all saw a hell of a lot in the war," he explained, "that can't be accounted for except on the basis of original evil...
...Set him free, and he will be a sinner, not Rousseau's 'noble savage.' " The pattern of Golding's work to date circles around this gloomy vision...
...Their social organization is so developed that they have bands of laborers supervised by an overseer with a whip...
...The Inheritors develops this vision of innate human evil by rooting it in our ancestors, with a benign human species who lost out held up to us as a vision of individual moral possibility...
...These Neanderthals have a complex language, they think and communicate ideas as mental pictures, and by great effort they can achieve simple comparison and generalization...
...The dead are believed to return to Oa's belly...
...They love children and have strong cooperative and social feelings...
...Most like their descendants, they have an alcoholic beverage and spend their evenings in drunken orgies...
...Man is born to sin...
...Golding's third novel, Pincher Martin, is an elaborate vision of resourceful survival as it passes through the mind of a drowning sailor...
...If man is by nature evil, then "in the beginning" the evil men from whom we descend must have wiped out the good men from whom we might have descended, our potential good essence or nature...
...Golding's Neanderthals are by their innocent goodness ironically rendered unfit to survive in his ultra-Darwinian jungle, and Homo sapiens replaces them...
...The novel he is now writing is said to be built around the unifying symbol of the spire of Salisbury cathedral, which shows some progress out of the bloody wood and the cruel sea...
...Once upon a time there was a primary exploitation, or once upon a time a band of sons united to kill the father and take his women...
...and they are ruthless killers of all that lives, including each other...
...The moral gap between them is immense...
...Perhaps the children will survive to interbreed with their captors...
...There is a scene in The Inheritors where Lok and Fa find a pot of fermented honey left as a sacred offering...
...Literally, this is nonsense: primitives do not drink unfamiliar beverages on sight, and one would have to consume oceanic quantities of fermented honey to get even tipsy...
...It has the nightmarish power of James Gould Cozzens' Castaway, but its depressing point seems to be the futility of even the struggle for life...
...Golding has described Lord of the Flies as "an attempt to trace the defects in society back to the defects in human nature,' and this description equally characterizes The Inheritors...
...I do not think that it is a good novel or even interesting primarily as a novel, but it is of the highest interest in other terms...
...But the scene has an imaginative truth, it encapsulates all the blessings of demoralization and misery, disguised with a sweet taste, that our civilization has brought to primitive peoples throughout the world...
...Golding's Neanderthals are brutal looking and apelike in posture, but they are innocent, gentle and good...
...At the same time, The Inheritors dramatizes the mythic core of The Descent of Man, Darwin's odd vision of an ethical collapse in the evolution from intelligent animal to what he called "savage...
Vol. 45 • August 1962 • No. 17
