Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations The Adventures of The Grapes of Wrath Portnoy’s Complaint Huckleberry Finn Great Expectations A Portrait of the Alice’s Adventures in The Great Gatsby Artist as a Young Wonderland Hamlet Man All Quiet on the The Handmaid’s Tale Pride and Prejudice Western Front Heart of Darkness Ragtime As You Like It I Know Why the The Red Badge of The Ballad of the Sad Caged Bird Sings Courage Café The Iliad The Rime of the Beloved Jane Eyre Ancient Mariner Beowulf The Joy Luck Club The Rubáiyát of Billy Budd, Benito The Jungle Omar Khayyám Cereno, Bartleby the Long Day’s Journey The Scarlet Letter Scrivener, and Other Into Night A Separate Peace Tales Lord of the Flies Silas Marner Black Boy The Lord of the Rings Song of Solomon The Bluest Eye Love in the Time of The Stranger Cat on a Hot Tin Cholera A Streetcar Named Roof Macbeth Desire The Catcher in the The Man Without Sula Rye Qualities The Sun Also Rises Catch-22 The Metamorphosis The Tale of Genji The Color Purple Miss Lonelyhearts A Tale of Two Cities Crime and Moby-Dick The Tempest Punishment Night Their Eyes Were The Crucible 1984 Watching God Darkness at Noon The Odyssey Things Fall Apart Death of a Salesman Oedipus Rex To Kill a Mockingbird The Death of Artemio The Old Man and the Ulysses Cruz Sea Waiting for Godot The Divine Comedy On the Road The Waste Land Don Quixote One Flew Over the White Noise Dubliners Cuckoo’s Nest Wuthering Heights Emerson’s Essays One Hundred Years of Young Goodman Emma Solitude Brown Fahrenheit 451 The Pardoner’s Tale Frankenstein Persuasion Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations William Golding’s Lord of the Flies New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Lord of the Flies—New Edition Copyright © 2008 Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2008 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data William Golding’s Lord of the flies / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-7910-9826-4 (acid-free paper) 1. Golding, William, 1911–1993. Lord of the flies. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title: Lord of the flies. III. Series. PR6013.O35L649 2008 823’.914—dc22 2008002451 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Pamela Loos Cover designed by Ben Peterson Cover photo Mark William Perry and Chad Littlejohn/Shutterstock.com Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of pub- lication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Vision and Structure in Lord of the Flies: A Semiotic Approach 3 K. Chellappan The Fictional Explosion: Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors 11 James Gindin The Nature of the Beast: Lord of the Flies 27 S.J. Boyd Lord of the Flies 45 L.L. Dickson Grief, Grief, Grief: Lord of the Flies 59 Lawrence S. Friedman The Savages in the Forest: Decolonising William Golding 71 Stefan Hawlin Golding and Huxley: The Fables of Demonic Possession 85 James R. Baker vi Contents Literature of Atrocity: Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors 103 Paul Crawford Lord of the Flies 133 Virginia Tiger Chronology 161 Contributors 163 Bibliography 165 Acknowledgments 169 Index 171 Editor’s Note My Introduction, regarding Lord of the Flies as a period piece, argues that British schoolboy savagery is not in itself an adequate emblem of universal evil. K. Chellappan generously finds in the novel “the total fusion of form and meaning”; while James Ginden commends both Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors as presages of greater works to come. Lord of the Flies is praised by S.J. Boyd with a dangerous comparison to King Lear, a contrast which sinks poor Golding’s scholastic allegory without trace. L.L. Dickson and Lawrence S. Friedman contribute to the chorus of overvaluation, after which Stefan Hawlin fashionably applies postcolonialism to the work. The influenceof Aldous Huxley upon Golding is James R. Baker’s concern, while Paul Crawford goes so far as to connect Lord of the Flies to the Holocaust, and Virginia Tiger discovers an amazing richness in the novel’s meanings. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction Popular as it continues to be, Lord of the Flies essentially is a period piece. Published in 1954, it is haunted by William Golding’s service in the Royal Navy (1940–45), during the Second World War. The hazards of the endless battles of the North Atlantic against German submarines culminated in Golding’s participation in D-Day, the Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944. Though Lord of the Flies is a moral parable in the form of a boys’ adventure story, in a deeper sense it is a war story. The book’s central emblem is the dead parachutist, mistaken by the boys for the Beast Beelzebub, diabolic Lord of the Flies. For Golding, the true shape of Beelzebub is a pig’s head on a stick, and the horror of war is transmuted into the moral brutality implicit (in his view) in most of us. The dead parachutist, in Golding’s own interpretation, represents History, one war after another, the dreadful gift adults keep presenting to children. Golding’s overt intention has some authority, but not perhaps enough to warrant our acceptance of so simplistic a symbol. Judging Lord of the Flies a period piece means that one doubts its long- range survival, if only because it is scarcely a profound vision of evil. Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies does not sustain a critical comparison with his best narratives: The Inheritors, Pincher Martin (his masterpiece), Free Fall and the much later Darkness Visible. All these books rely upon nuance, irony, intelligence, and do not reduce to a trite moral allegory. Golding acknowledged the triteness, yet insisted upon his fable’s truth: 1 2 Harold Bloom Man is a fallen being. He is gripped by original sin. His nature is sinful and his state perilous. I accept the theology and admit the triteness; but what is trite is true; and a truism can become more than a truism when it is a belief passionately held. Passion is hardly a standard of measurement in regard to truth. Lord of the Flies aspires to be a universal fable, but its appeal to American schoolchildren partly inheres in its curious exoticism. Its characters are implausible because they are humorless; even one ironist among them would explode the book. The Christlike Simon is particularly unconvincing; Golding does not know how to portray the psychology of a saint. Whether indeed, in his first novel, he knew how to render anyone’s psychology is disputable. His boys are indeed British private school boys: regimented, subjected to vicious discipline, and indoctrinated with narrow, restrictive views of human nature. Golding’s long career as a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury was a kind of extension of his Naval service: a passage from one mode of indoctrination and strict discipline to another. The regression to savagery that marks Lord of the Flies is a peculiarly British scholastic phenomenon, and not a universal allegory of moral depravity. By indicating the severe limitations of Golding’s first novel, I do not intend to deny its continued cultural value. Any well-told tale of a reversion to barbarism is a warning against tendencies in many groups that may become violent, and such a warning remains sadly relevant in the early twenty-first century. Golding’s allegorical fable is no Gulliver’s Travels; the formidable Swiftian irony and savage intellectualism are well beyond Golding’s powers. Literary value has little sway in Lord of the Flies. Ralph, Piggy, Simon, and Jack are ideograms, rather than achieved fictive characters. Compare them to Kipling’s Kim, and they are sadly diminished; invoke Huck Finn, and they are reduced to names on a page. Lord of the Flies matters, not in or for itself, but because of its popularity in an era that continues to find it a useful admonition. K . C hellappan Vision and Structure in Lord of the Flies: A Semiotic Approach t was Frank Kermode who said that “Golding’s novels are simple in so far as theyI deal in the primordial patterns of human experience and in so far as they have skeletons of parable. On these simple bones the flesh of narrative can take extremely complex forms. This makes for difficulty, but of the most acceptable kind, the difficulty that attends the expression of what is profoundly simple.”1 Yes, the difficulty that attends the expression of what is profoundly simple is the essence of his art, just as the complexity of being simply human is his vision And the triumph of most of his novels, particularly, Lord of the Flies, is due to the total fusion of form and meaning.