Interview with William Golding - Tripod
Interview with William Golding
James Keating
Purdue University, May 10, 1962
Question: It has often been said that wars are caused by the
dictatorial few. Do you feel this to be so, or do you think anyone given the power is capable of such inhuman atrocity?
Answer: Well, I think wars are much more complicated than that. Some of them have been caused by a few. On the other hand if some of them are surely the bursting of some vicious growth, almost, in civilization, then who knows who applies the lancer to it? There's all the difference in the world between the wars of 1917-the Communist Revolution-on the one hand, and the wars of Genghis Khan on the other, isn't there?
Q.: Yes. Obviously, in Lord of the Flies society plays little part in determining the corruption and violence in man. You've said this is true in society, that it does play a minor role, but do you feel that there are societies that will enhance the possibility of man becoming good? And are we working toward this in democracy?
A.: By instinct and training, and by birth and by position on the face of the globe, I'm pretty well bound to subscribe to a democratic doctrine, am I not? This is so deeply woven into the way we live, or at least the way we live at home in England, that I don't suppose one really questions it much. I think I would say democracy is moving in the right direction, or the democratic way is the way in which to move; equally, it seems to me that a democracy has inherent weaknesses in it-built-in weaknesses. You can't give people freedom without weakening society as an implement of war, if you like, and so this is very much like a sheep among wolves. It's not a question with me as to whether democracy is the right way
so much, as to whether democracy can survive and remain what it is. Every time democracy pulls itself together and says, "Well, now I'm being threatened by a totalitarian regime," the first thing it has to do is give up some of its own principles. In England during the Second World War we had to give up a tremendous number of principles in order to achieve the one pointed unity which could possibly withstand Hitler. It's possible to look at the question in this way and say, "Is the remedy not as bad as the disease?" I don't know.
Q.: Well, the innocence in man, for example, that you bring out among the boys in this novel, would you say it was an inherent kind of thing which materializes, or is it a thing from without which is taken on during a transitional process from innocence to non-innocence? Are the boys innocent of themselves or are they innocent of evil from without and evil of others?
A.: They're innocent of their own natures. They don't understand their own natures and therefore, when they get to this island, they can look forward to a bright future, because they don't understand the things that threaten it. This seems to me to be innocence; I suppose you could almost equate it with ignorance of men's basic attributes, and this is inevitable with anything which is born and begins to grow up. Obviously, it doesn't understand its own nature.
Q.: Then it's more a combination of innocence of their own and other's attributes?
A.: Yes. I think, quite simply, that they don't understand what beasts there are in the human psyche which have to be curbed. They're too young to look ahead and really put the curbs on their own nature and implement them, because giving way to these beasts is always a pleasure, in some ways, and so their society breaks down. Of course, on the other hand, in an adult society it is possible society will not break down. It may be that we can put sufficient curbs on our own natures to prevent it from breaking down. We may have the very common sense to say that if we have atom bombs and so
on-H-bombs-well, we cannot possibly use these things.
Now that is, in a sense, the lowest possible bit of common
sense-obviously we can't-but you know as well as I do that there is a large chance that those weapons will be used and we'll be done for. I think that democratic attitude of voluntary curbs put on one's own nature is the only possible way for humanity, but I wouldn't like to say that it's going to work out, or survive.
Q.: You recently stated your belief that humanity would either be
saved, or save itself. Is that correct?
A.: Yes, but here again this is because I'm basically an optimist. Intellectually I can see man's balance is about fifty-fifty, and his chances of blowing himself up are about one to one. I can't see this any way but intellectually. I'm just emotionally unable to believe that he will do this. This means that I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist, I suppose.
Q.: The reason I posed that comment was because in your published notes in Lord of the Flies . . .
A.: They aren't my notes.
Q.: I'm sorry. I thought Mr. Epstein2 quoted you.
A.: Did he?
Q.: In the summation . . .
A.: Oh, yes.
Q.: In the end the question is, who will rescue the adult and his
cruiser? This seems to me a little fatalistic; it conveys the notion that there isn't really any hope.
A.: Yes, but there again you can take . . . there are two answers here; I think they are both valid answers. The first one is the one I made before, and that is that the quotation there is what I said is intellectual fatalism. It's making the thing a sort of series of Chinese boxes, one inside of the other. The other thing is to say that as the fabulist is always a moralist, he is always overstating his case, because he has a point he wishes to drive home. I would prefer to say if you don't curb yourself, then this is what will happen to you.
Q.: Again, in Lord of the Flies, I noticed a very definite relationship between Simon and his brutal death and Christ and his crucifixion. Would you care to discuss this, or give any omniscient judgment?
A.: Well, I can't give an omniscient judgment. I can only say what I intended. First you've got to remember I haven’t read this book for ten years, so I may be a bit off. I intended a Christ figure in the novel, because Christ figures occur in humanity, really, but I couldn't have the full picture, or as near as full a possible picture of human potentiality, unless one was potentially a Christ figure. So Simon is the little boy who goes off into the bushes to pray. He is the only one to take any notice of the little 'uns—who actually hands them food, gets food from places where they can't reach it and hands it down to them. He is the one who is tempted of the devil: he has this interview with the pig's head on the stick, with Beelzebub, or Satan, the devil, whatever you'd like to call it, and the devil says, "Clear off, you're not wanted. Just go back to the others. We'll forget the whole thing."
Well, this is, of course, the perennial temptation to the saint, as I conceive it, to just go and be like ordinary men and let the whole thing slide. Instead of that, Simon goes up the hill and takes away from the island, removes, discovers what this dead hand of history is that's over them, undoes the threads so that the wind can blow this dead thing away from the island, and then when he tries to take the good news back to ordinary human society, he's crucified for it. This is as far as I was able to find a Christ parallel, you see.
Q.: You mentioned that you couldn't give any omniscient judgment, and you've earlier said that an author cannot really say, after he has written a work, what he has given from himself or created. What do you feel the role of the critic is here? Do you feel the critic has the right to bring these things out?
A.: Well, isn't this really a question without much meaning? Because whether a critic has rights or not he is going to do these things to a book which has got out of the author's control, and therefore you might just as well ask whether a man has a right to five fingers on each hand. This is a thing that happens. Are you really meaning do I think the critic has, by his nature or by his training, a better chance of saying what's in this book than the author has? Is that at all it?
Q.: Yes, that's mainly it. As an artist, do you feel the critics are justified?
A.: Some of them. As a practical matter some of them say things which I agree with and some say things which I don t agree with. I don't see there's much generalization that can be made here. The critic has as much right as any man to get what he can out of a book, and I would say that I think some critics that I've read have been extremely perceptive -or else I've been very lucky-in that they've seemed to put their fingers on certain things which I had deliberately intended and which I would have thought were rather
subtle, and they have contrived to get hold of these. Equally, I would have to say that some critics seem to me to be miles off beam.
Q.: Well, perhaps Mr. Gindin was a little off beam in his article which discusses your use of gimmicks. He mentions the saving of the
boys as a gimmick that didn't quite fulfill the manifestations that were opened in the book ... it didn't resolve diem, I should think, as well as he would have liked. Do you feel this is justifiable criticism?
A.: I've been haunted by that word, "gimmick," ever since I used it in an interview explaining that I liked a sharp reversal at the end which would show the book in an entirely different light so that the reader would presumably be forced to rethink the book, which seems to me a useful thing to do. I don't know, in that event, whether the saving of the boys at the end is a gimmick or not. The reason for that particular ending was twofold. First I originally conceived the book as the change from innocence-which is ignorance of self-to a tragic knowledge. If my boys hadn't been saved, I couldn't-at that time, at any rate-see any way of getting some one of them to the point where he would have this tragic knowledge. He would be dead. If I'd gone on to the death of Ralph, Ralph would never have had time to understand what had happened to him, so I
deliberately saved him so that at this moment he could see -look back over what's happened-and weep for the end of innocence and the darkness of man's heart, which was what I was getting at. That's half the answer.
The other answer is that if, as in that quotation there, the book is supposed to show how the detects of society are directly traceable to the defects of the individual, then you rub that awful moral lesson in much more by having an ignorant, innocent adult come to the island and say, "Oh, you've been having fun, haven't you?" Then in the last sentence you let him turn away and look at the cruiser, and of course the cruiser, the adult thing, is doing exactly what the hunters do-that is, hunting down and destroying the enemy-so that you say, in effect, to your reader, "Look, you think you've been reading about little boys, but in fact you've been reading about the distresses and the wickedness of humanity. If this is a gimmick, I still approve of it.
Q.: I think it fulfills what you said about the use of the gimmick at the end of a novel, making a reader go back and take another look at things.
Did the work by Richard Hughes, High Wind in Jamaica, have any
influence on your writing Lord of the Flies?
A.: This is an interesting question. I can answer it simply: I've read this book and I liked it but I read it after I'd written Lord of the Flies. And if you're going to come around to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, I might as well confess I've never read that.
Q.: Then if you hadn't read High Wind in Jamaica until you'd written Lord of the Flies, how do you feel about the thematic presentation, the parallel between the two works?
A.: There is a parallel, I think, but like so many literary parallels it's the plain fact that if people engage in writing about humanity, they're likely in certain circumstances to see
something the same thing. They're both looking, after all at the same object, so it would really be very surprising if there weren't literary parallels to be drawn between this book and that.
•••••
Q.: I have one more question about Lord of the Flies. Mr. Epstein talks about sex symbols in this work.6 You have recently said that you purposely left man and woman off of the island to remove the ...
A.: Remove the "red herring."
Q.: Yes. I wonder if you concur with Mr. Epstein's observations.
A.: You're probably thinking of the moment when they kill a pig…
Q.: Yes.
A.: And I'm assured that this is a sexual symbol and it has affinities of the Oedipadian wedding night. What am I to say to this? I suppose the only thing I can really say is there are in those circumstances, after all, precious few ways of killing a pig. The same thing's just as true of the Oedipadian wedding night.
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