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The Problem of 'Darkness' in Golding's Novels

Yasunori SUGIMURA

(Received on 31, October, 1984)

In 's fictional world, we can find the pattern of duality which seems schematic rather than complicated. Even the imagery follows this pattern. Beauty and ugliness, light and darkness are al­ ways paired. But his main purpose does not lie in this schematic duality but in more inclusive dimension. While constructing the disrupted imagery, he criticises this situation. When he depicts the darkness, he seems to point out the inability of the common Christianity to cope with it. I think the 'darkness' in Gold­ ing's novels is all the more important because he takes special interest in this dark phase characterised by cloacal, fetid and perverted imagery. In this paper I'd like to investigate the 'darkness' by focusing on his two works, and Darkness Visible, and further to approach a kind of mysticism distinct from ordinary religion.

A few years ago I discussed the disrupted imagery in Golding's novels and concluded that 'Golding regards universe as one harmonious unity to which our broken worlds should be restored by the coopera­ tion of science and religion.' 1 With the development of modern science, the relationship between God and man is partly broken and nothingness invades the interstice. Golding's view of God does not stop at the personal level but proceeds further toward the impersonal universe. The current Christianity Golding seems to criticise is apt to pay attention only to the personal level and disregards the other phase. Those who consider God only from tke personal points of view always put emphasis on life, spirit, and soul, rejecting death or inanimate beings as opposed to religion - as belonging to scientific category. But Golding's God is 'THE LORD OF THE EARTH AND TEH SUN AND THE PLANETS AND ALL THE CREATURES THAT ARE ON THEM.' 2 Golding often shows us the heartlessness and indifference of nature3 toward human beings' happiness or misery, and modern natural science also proves this fact. Golding seems to wonder if the current view of God can cope with this heartless indifference of universe. In this sense Gold­ ing's view of God gives us a new horizon in the field of religion. He often refers to the characters who stick only to their lives. If they cling to nothing but the up­ wardness, the contrary force represses them downward. In Pincher Martin Golding vividly represents these details, using the imagery of the Cartesian diver in a jam jar.

The pleasure of the jar lay in the fact that the little glass figure was so delicately balanced between opposing forces. Lay a finger on the membrane and you would compress the air below it which in turn would press more strongly on the water. Then the water would force itself farther up the little tube in the figure, and it would begin to sink. 4

The vast pressure on the glass sailor comes from the heavens5 - the universe. Darkness arises where characters catch a glimpse of death in the midst of life. When Sophy in Darkness Visible accidentally kill­ ed a chick with a large pebble, the germ of darkness got on her. It settled at the back of her head like night when she knew Gran was going to die. Instead of accepting her own mortality, she cried out, 'I shan't die I' (p. 112) She was 'sitting at the mouth of a tunnel' but dared not to go through it. - 135 - The Problem of 'Darkness' in Golding's Novels

There are eyes in the back of my head .... With her front eyes shut it was as if those other eyes opened in the back of her head and stared into a darkness that stretched away infinitely, a cone of black light. (p. 134)

Such a state of mind easily falls into nihilism. Sophy regards sex as 'the long, long convulsions, the un­ knotting, the throbbing and disentangling of space and time on,on, on into nothingness - .' (P. 167) At first sight she seems to accept nothingness and abandon her attachment to self. But like Pincher Martin she had an ingenious artifice to contrive the situation of 'nothingness' within herself. By clinging to 'noth­ ingness' inside herself, she still clings to self. This is, as it were, multiplied self-attachment. The real self­ liberation should be acquired beyond the darkness - at the exit of a tunnel. But her faked 'nothingness' was set at the mouth of it.

2

The imagery betrays itself as the index of this fake. The deliberate contrivance of 'nothingness' IS shown in the following scene of extreme grotesqueness and perversion .

... reaching far in, her lower lip hurting between clenched teeth ... she felt the pear-shaped thing stuck inside the front of her stomach where it ought to be, inert, a time bomb, though that was hard to be­ lieve of yourself or your body. The thought of the possible explosion of the time bomb started her even more elaborately probing and washing, pain or not ; and she came on the other shape, lying op­ posite the womb but at the back, a shape lying behind the smooth wall but easily to be felt through it, the rounded shape of her own turd working down the coiled gut and she convulsed, ... The feel­ ing was pure. (p. 138)

Before this behaviour Sophy had allured a passing motorist to make love with her. But she couldn't gain the 'nothingness' which sex lectures refer to as orgasm-self-liberation. After she had succeeded in gaining the pure feeling somehow or other by her grotesque and perverted masturbation, she continued to contrive 'nothingness' at the mouth of the 'darkness'. 'It(sex) became nothing more than playing with yourself lazily in bed to the accompaniment of quite unusual or what seemed like quite unusual imaginings, very private indeed.' (p. 139) From what we have discussed above, we know why almost all the sexual images Golding depicts are shadowed by 'darkness'. Especially in Darkness Visible, we can notice various types of 'dark' sexual rela­ tionships. Among them the close connection between sex and scatology is one of Golding's striking char­ acteristics. As early as in we can perceive the scatological imagery combined with sexual desire. 6 In Pincher Martin 'Swiftian intensity in its association of basic bodily functions with uncleanness and sin'7 is achieved.

He felt the cold trickle of the sea water in his bowels. He pumped and squeezed until the bladder was squashily flat. ... And the cadenza was coming-did come. It performed with explosive and triumphant completeness of technique into the sea. It was like the bursting of a dam, the smashing of all hind­ rance.Spasm after spasm with massive chords and sparkling arpeggios, the cadenza took of his strength till he lay straining and empty on the rock and the orchestra had gone. (p. 165)

Even if the rites of the defecation performed by Sophy and Martin symbolize the purification of their sins, the 'nothingness' gained from it is still set at the mouth of darkness. The contrived 'nothingness' is - 136- Yasunori SUGIMURA set at the entrance of 'darkness' forever. It can't go through it by any means. It can't purify any sin. On the contrary, the faked self-renunciation will make it more and more difficult for them to penetrate the 'darkness', and will multiply their sins. Both Sophy and Martin made their 'factitious universe's to stave off the 'darkness'. But finally 'there was now nothing visible but darkness' (p.253) when Sophy picked her way back along the towpath. In case of Martin, 'he was reduced to complete nothingness by God's black lightning. '9 The only salvation Golding prepares for us exists where we break off the illusion and take us as we are. We must accept our mortality as original sin. If we are to restore correspondence with God, our pre­ liminary step is to penetrate the darkness and overcome it. In so far as we fear death and refuse to con­ front the darkness, we multiply our sins and cannot avoid annihilation. Simon in Lord of the Flies, Nathaniel Walterson in Pincher Martin and Matthew Septimus Windrove in Darkness Visible are mystics who pay more attention to the impersonal side of God which Christianity sometimes fails to notice.

3

Of these three mystics, the profoundest thinker is Matthew Windrove. Simon, like Tuami in The In­ heritors, confronts the darkness but can't transcend it. Nathaniel, a grown-up Simon, knows how to tran­ scend the darkness and acquire eternity. In this case, however, G()d conceived by Nathaniel has black lightning which reduces man to nothingness. If God has the darkness which engulfs us, our possibility of transcending the darkness is the possibility of penetrating God. Thus, God and man interpenetrate each other. This means that God and man are united on the basis of nothigness. Matthew Windrove achieved such a union of God and man by transcending the darkness of the fetid bog. He is no longer at the mercy of the God's will. Unlike those who were hit by black lightning, Matty(Matthew) actively advanced toward it. This is quite different from nihilism in quality, because in case of nihilism we confront the darkness outside God. Matty saw the darkness inside Him. He read the Bible intensively before plunging into half water half mud which gave off the stink of vegetable and animal decay. If he had done nothing but read the Bible and had not experienced this submergence, he could not have communicated with God. The deep shuddering he experienced after rising from the bog means something not only physical but spiritual. I think he united with God in 'a darker darkness, a more secret secrecy' -in the background of absolute nothingness.

The water at past this midpoint of the pool was at the man's chin; and then suddenly, higher. The man floundered and the water washed. For a yard it may be, he was out of sight·· . ·Then black hair floated wide on the water. Down there underneath he was thrusting strongly into the ooze with his feet and he got his head up and grabbed a breath. After that he rose steadily towards the other side and the water ran from him and from his hair and his wheels; but not from the lamp. Now he stood; and though the air was hot and the water steamed he began to shudder, shudder deeply, convulsively, so that he had to hold the lamp with both hands to keep it upright and from falling in the mud. (pp. 75-76)

His body was completely submerged, but the lamp held over his head was not extinguished. By throwing his life away in the darkness, he got his spiritual light. This is the contrary experience of Pincher Martin or Sophy. After this experience, Matty became quite another man. The scales fell from his eyes.

For certainly he now moved easily among women as among men, looked and was struck no more by the one than the other, and would not have avoided the Wanton with her cup of abominations in fear for his peace of mind or virtue. (p. 76) - 137 - The Problem of 'Darkness' in Golding's Novels

His spiritual awakening reminds us of the Great Death 10 in Zen Buddhism. The self-centredness hitherto hanging on to Matty was cut off, and he achieved inner freedom. He is liberated from the burden of self­ consciousnessll In the denouement of Darkness Visible, the spirit of Matthew Windrove haunted Sebastian Pedigree who was once a schoolmaster in charge of Matthew at the Foundlings School at Greenfield. Pedigree had a homosexual peculiarity which had led to his dismissal and imprisonment. Even after he came out of prison, he often appeared among the schoolboys and played ball with them. The ball is, in fact, contaminated with his disgusting appetite. On a fine autumn day Pedigree, as usual, waited for the schoolboys to play ball with him in the park, nestling into .the coat to take a little rest before action. The spirit of Matty entered the park through the main gate and came slowly to Pedigree. It stood before him. Its face seemed to speak; Freedom. Its hands took the ball from Pedigree and drew it away. Matty had already been dead, engulfed in flames of a petrol tank, but his spirit was entrusted with a mission of re­ moving the obsession from others.

4

A promise of freedom is sometimes symbolized by the colour 'blue' in Golding's art. This 'blue' dis­ 'appears and leaves only the darkness behind when the protagonist is obsessed with egotistical intentions. If it keeps flitting over the darkness, there is some possibility of attaining the freedom. When Matty was climbing the tree to meet Angy, a school girl, the 'blue' patches suddenly disappeared 'as if they had been knocked off by shot. '(po 25) But at the surface of the soupy water where he decided to submerge himself, the lambent 'blueness' of the flames of marsh gas appeared. (p. 73) Jocelin in saw the blue of the sky condensed to a kingfisher, but it flashed but once12 It was gone and never came back. Robert James Colley, a parson in Rites of Passage, saw the dense blue of the morning sky and the white-flecked blue of the broad ocean, but the weather was soon changed to the heavy rai'n,13 Thus the colour 'blue' is often unstable and transient. If the 'blue' light has the perfect combustion, it turns to the silver or golden brightness which symbolizes the perfect freedom. Golding depicts Simon's dead body as follows:

The water rose further and dressed Simon's coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble., .. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisi­ tive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon's dead body moved out towards the open sea,14

In just the same way, the spirit of Matty was brilliant with gold in front of Sebastian Pedigree who got panic-stricken as he found he was not dreaming.

For the golden immediacy of the wind altered at its heart and began first to drift upwards, then swirl upwards then rush upwards round Matty. The gold grew fierce and burned. Sebastian watched 111 terror as the man before him was consumed, melted, vanished like a guy in a bonfire; (p. 265)

Now we can understand the positioning of 'darkness' in Golding's novels. If we keep avoiding the 'darkness', it remains unchanged forever. The 'blue' flame can't be turned into incandescence. It is always overshadowed or extinguished by 'darkness'. The silver or golden brightness, a symbol of complete free­ dom, can't be achieved until we have passed through the dark tunnel. In this sense, Nathaniel's lectures on 'the technique of dying into heaven' is still imperfect. According to Nathaniel, all we can do is submit to 'an overwhelmingly greater power'15 Can this submission be called freedom? To this total submission Chritopher Martin and Sophia Stanhope were antipathetic. For Matthew Windrove, his attitude toward f1l:HD 60 if. 2 FJ - 138- Yasunori SUGIMURA

God is not submission but interpenetration. Weare told that he threw his Bible into the sea. What does this mean? In the Bible, God is regarded as 'Gott-zum=Menschen=hin' and man as 'Menschen=von= Gott her'.1 6 Anyway, man is completely dependent upon God. God may annihilate us at any moment so long as 'darkness' belongs to His will. If so, human freedom is not real but illusory. In this sense, there is some truth in the mutiny of Christopher Martin against God. At least he tried to preserve his own person­

ality or to assert identity17 But he is too conscious of the image of God in the Bible. The essence of God is far deeper than God in the Bible. If we are to reach the essence of God, we should penetrate God in the Bible by going through the 'darkness'. Among the characters of Golding's novels Matthew Windrove is the first to reach the essence of God, which is 'a darker darkness, a more secret secrecy' -absolute nothingness. In the background of such absolute nothingness he got over the 'darkness' and won the brightness. In this background, he was one with God. As is inferred from what I have discussed above, Matthew Windrove distinguishes the essence of God (Gottheit) from God in the Bible. I think his religious idea draws a clear line of demarcation against the common Christianity.

NOTES

1 "The Two Worlds in William Golding," Studies in English Literature (English Number 1982), 147. 2 William Golding, Darkness Visible (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 92. All the subsequent page references to this novel are from this edition. 3 Virgini

18 ; III/2, pp. 71-88. 17 Samuel Hynes, William Golding (New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 28.

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