Golding and Huxley: The Fables of Demonic Possession - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2000 by James R. Baker

With regard to Greek, you are quite right that I go to that literature for its profound engagement with first and last things. But though a few years ago it was true I'd read little but Greek for twenty years, it's true no longer. The Greek is still there and I go back to it when I feel like that; now I must get in touch with the contemporary scene, and not necessarily the literary one; the scientific one perhaps. (Baker and Golding, letter 12 August 1965)

Science? What could he mean? Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, as many readers recognized, had displayed a broad knowledge of anthropological literature. Pincher Martin, the third novel, was not such an obvious case, but it did focus on an arrogant rationalist who repudiated any belief in a god and claimed for himself the god-like power to create his own world, his own virtual reality. Free Fall (1959) had more obviously employed scientific metaphor--the state of free fall or freedom from gravitational law--to describe the moral drift and lawlessness of the narrator, Sammy Mountjoy; and his mentor, the science teacher Nick Shales, is found in Sammy's retrospective search for pattern in his life to be an incredibly one-sided and naive man. And the little comic play, The Brass Butterfly (1958), satirized the ancient Greek scientist Phanocles, a brilliant but dangerously destructive inventor who specializes in explosive devices. Was Piggy, the precocious protoscientist of Lord of the Flies, first in this ser ies of negative and satirical portraits? At the urging of his father, a devotee of science, Golding had gone up to Oxford in 1930 to study science, but after two years he threw it over to study literature. Some of the student poems written at Oxford, published in 1934, mock the rationalist's faith that order rules our experience, and these seem to evidence that turning point. Years later he wrote a humorous autobiographical sketch, "The Ladder and the Tree" (1965), recalling the conflict that had troubled him as he prepared to enter the university. The voice of his father joined with Einstein and Sir James Jeans (and no doubt the authors of all those scientific classics found in the household), while the voice of Edgar Allan Poe, advocate for darkness and mystery, urged him to choose the alternative path.

When I interviewed Golding in 1982 I was determined to question him about this early confrontation with the two cultures. Had there been a "classic revolt," I asked, against his father's scientific point of view? After some defense of the father's complexity of mind, the conclusion was clear: "But I do think that during the formative years I did feel myself to be in a sort of rationalist atmosphere against which I kicked" (130). I also asked whether he felt he belonged to the long line of English writers who, especially since Darwin, had taken scientist and the scientific account of things into their own work--a line running from Tennyson and including among others Hardy, Wells, Huxley, Snow, Durrell, and Fowles. And Golding? His reply was oblique, equivocal, and we hurried on to other matters. In 1988 I tried to sum up what had been achieved and what needed to be done: