12.Dodds, p.XVI

13. Lord of the Flies, p. 185. All quotations are taken from the

edition contained in this volume. Subsequent page references will appear in

parentheses.

In the chapter called "Beast from Water" the parliamentary debate

becomes a blatant allegory in which each spokesman caricatures the position

he defends. Piggy (the voice of reason) leads with the statement that life

is scientific," adds the usual Utopian promises ("when the war's over

they'll be traveling to Mars and back"), and his assurance that such things

will come to pass if only we control the senseless conflicts that impede

progress. He is met with laughter and jeers (the crude multitude), and at

this juncture a littlun interrupts to declare that the beast (ubiquitous

evil) comes out of the sea. Maurice interjects to voice the doubt which

curses them all: "I don't believe in the beast of course. As Piggy says,

life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly . . ." (81). Then

Simon (the inarticulate seer) rises to utter the truth in garbled,

ineffective phrases: there is a beast, but "it's only us." As always, his

saving words are misunderstood, and the prophet shrinks away in confusion.

Amid speculation that he means some kind of ghost, there is a silent show of

hands for ghosts as Piggy breaks in with angry rhetorical questions: "What

are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?" (84). Taking his cue, Jack

(savagery in excelsis) leaps to his feet and leads all but the "three blind

mice" (Ralph, Piggy, Simon) into a mad jig of release down the darkening

beach. The parliamentarians naively contrast their failure with the supposed

efficiency of adults, and Ralph, in despair, asks for a sign from that

ruined world.

In "Beast from Air" the sign, a dead man in a parachute, is sent down

from the grownups, and the collapse foreshadowed in the allegorical

parliament comes on with surprising speed. Ralph himself looks into the face

of the enthroned tyrant on the mountain, and from that moment his young

intelligence is crippled by fear. He confirms the reality of the beast and

his confession of weakness insures Jack's spectacular rise to power. Yet the

ease with which Jack establishes his Dionysian order is hardly

unaccountable. In its very first appearance the black-caped choir, vaguely

evil in its military esprit, emerged ominously from a mirage and marched

down upon the minority forces assembled on the platform. Except for Simon,

pressed into service and out of step with the common rhythm, the choir is

composed of servitors bound by the ritual and mystery of group

consciousness. They share in that communion, and there is no real

"conversion" or transfer of allegiance from good to evil when the chorus,

ostensibly Christian, becomes the tribe of hunters. The lord they serve

inhabits their own being. If they turn with relief from the burdens of the

platform, it is because they cannot transcend the limitations of their own

nature. Even the parliamentary pool of intelligence must fail in the attempt

to explain all that manifests itself in our turbulent hearts, and the

assertion that life is ordered, "scientific," often appears mere bravado. It

embodies tile sin of pride and, inevitably, evokes in some form the great

god it has denied.

It is Simon who witnesses his coming and hears his words of wrath. In

the thick undergrowth of the forest the boy discovers a refuge from the war

of words. His shelter of leaves is a place of contemplation, a sequestered

temple, scented and lighted by the white flowers of the night-blooming

candlenut tree, where, in secret, he meditates on the lucid but somehow

over-simple logic of Piggy and Ralph and the venal emotion of Jack's

challenges: There, in the infernal glare of the afternoon sun, he sees the

killing of the sow by the hunters and the erection of the pig's head on the

sharpened stick. These acts signify not only the release from the blood

taboo but also obeisance to the mystery and god who has come to be lord of

the island-world. In the hours of one powerfully symbolic afternoon Simon

sees the perennial fall which is the central reality of our history: me

defeat of reason and the release of Dionysian madness in souls wounded by

fear.

Awed by the hideousness of the dripping head (an image of the hunter's

own nature) the apprentice bacchantes suddenly run away, but Simon's gaze is

"held by that ancient, inescapable recognition" (128)-an incarnation of the

beast or devil bom again and again out of the human heart. Before he loses

consciousness the epileptic visionary "hears" the truth which is

inaccessible to the illusion-bound rationalist and the unconscious or

irrational man alike: " 'Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could

hunt and kill!' said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the

other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. 'You

knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why

it's no go? Why things are as they are?' " (133). When Simon recovers from

this trauma of revelation he finds on the mountain top that the "beast" is

only a man. Like the pig itself, the dead man in the chute is fly-blown,

corrupt, an obscene image of the evil that has triumphed in the adult world

as well. Tenderly, the boy releases the lines so that the body can descend

to earth, but the fallen man does not die. After Simon's death, when the

truth is once more lost, the figure rises, moves over the terrified tribe on

the beach, and finally out to sea -a tyrannous ghost (history itself) which

haunts and curses every social order.

In his martyrdom Simon meets the fate of all saints. The truth he

brings would set us free from the repetitious nightmare of history, but we

are, by nature, incapable of receiving that truth. Demented by fears our

intelligence cannot control, we are at once "heroic and sick" (96),

ingenious and ingenuous at the same time. Inevitably we gather in tribal

union to hunt the molesting "beast," and always the intolerable frustration

of the hunt ends as it must: within the enchanted circle formed by the

searchers, the beast materializes in the only form he can possibly assume,

the very image of his creator; and once he is visible, projected (once the

hunted has become the hunter), the circle closes in an agony of relief.

Simon, call him prophet, seer or saint, is blessed and cursed by those

intuitions which threaten the ritual of the tribe. In whatever culture the

saint appears, he is doomed by his unique insights. There is a vital, if

obvious, irony to be observed in the fact that the lost children of

Golding's fable are of Christian heritage, but when they blindly kill their

savior they re-enact an ancient tragedy, universal because it has its true

source in the defects of the species.

The beast, too, is as old as his maker and has assumed many names,

though of course his character must remain quite consistent The particular

beast who speaks to Simon is much like his namesake, Beelzebub. A prince of

demons of Assyrian or Hebrew descent, but later appropriated by Christians,

he is a lord of the flies, an idol for unclean beings. He is what all devils

are: an embodiment of the lusts and cruelties which possess his worshipers

and of peculiar power among the Philistines, the unenlightened, fearful

herd. He shares some kinship with Dionysus, for his powers and effects are

much the same. In The Bacchae Dionysus is shown "as the source of ecstasies

and disasters, as the enemy of intellect and the defense of man against his

isolation, as a power that can make him feel like a god while acting like a

beast. ..." As such, he is "a god whom all can recognize." ¹⁴

Nor is it difficult to recognize the island on which Golding's

innocents are set down as a natural paradise, an un-corrupted Eden offering

all the lush abundance of the primal earth. But it is lost with the first

rumors of the "snake-thing," because he is the ancient, inescapable presence

who insures a repetition of the fall. If this fall from grace is indeed the

"perennial myth" that Golding explores in all his work,¹⁵ it does

not seem that he has found in Genesis a metaphor capable of illuminating the

full range of his theme. In The Bacchae Golding the classicist found another

version of the fall of man, and it is clearly more useful to him than its

Biblical counterpart. For one thing, it makes it possible to avoid the

comparatively narrow moral connotations most of us are inclined to read into

the warfare between Satan (unqualifiedly evil) and God (unqualifiedly good).

Satan is a fallen angel seeking vengeance on the godhead, and we therefore

think of him as an autonomous entity, a being in his own right and prince of

his own domain. Dionysus, on the other hand, is a son of God (Zeus) and thus

a manifestation or agent of the godhead or mystery with whom man seeks

communion, or, perverse in his pride, denies at his own peril. To resist

Dionysus is to resist nature itself, and this attempt to transcend the laws

of creation brings down upon us the punishment of the god. Further, the

ritual-hunt of The Bacchae provides something else not found in the Biblical

account. The hunt on Golding's island emerges spontaneously out of childish

play, but it comes to serve as a key to psychology underlying human conflict

and, of course, an effective symbol for the bloody game we have played

throughout our history. This is not to say that Biblical metaphor is

unimportant in Lord of the Flies, or in the later works, but it forms only a

part of the larger mythic frame in which Golding sees the nature and destiny

of man.