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

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

We need more work on the role of science in Golding's fiction (perhaps beginning with the impact of Poe on the formation of his attitudes) and we need to reassess his accomplishment in the larger context made up of his contemporaries. ("William Golding" 11)

No scholar has responded. Since Golding's death in 1993 his work has gone into partial eclipse, as he himself predicted. While we wait for recovery, if it ever comes, we should adjust our accounts. We shall find that much of the fiction was oriented and directly influenced by his knowledge of science and that there is an evolution from the extreme negativism of Lord of the Flies toward greater respect for the scientist and scientific inquiry. The much discussed sources for the dark fable lie in Golding's experience of the war, in his connection with Lord Cherwell's research into explosives, in the use of the atomic bombs on Japan, in the postwar revelations of the Holocaust and the horrors of Stalinist Russia--quite enough to bring on the sense of tragic denouement and, as he said in "A Moving Target" (163), "grief, sheer grief' as inspiration, if that is the proper word.

Was there a contemporary literary source or precedent on which he could build his own account of the failure of humanity and the likelihood of atomic apocalypse? There have been a few unfruitful forays into this question. Craig Raine, for example, finds occasional stylistic parallels in Golding with Huxley (Antic Hay, Eyeless in Gaza) as well as Dostoyevsky, Henry James, and Kipling but concludes that these or others that might be hunted down are not "real sources" (108) worthy of serious attention. We get more specific guidance from Golding himself. In an address titled "Utopias and Antiutopias" he comes, inevitably, to Aldous Huxley:

As the war clouds darkened over Europe he and some of our most notable poets removed themselves to the new world. . . . There Huxley continued to create what we may call antiutopias and utopias with the same gusto, apparently, for both kinds. One antiutopia is certainly a disgusting job and best forgotten... . Yet I owe his writings much myself, I've had much enjoyment from them-in particular release from a certain starry-eyed optimism which stemmed from the optimistic rationalism of the nineteenth century. The last utopia he attempted which was technically and strictly a utopia and ideal state, Island (1962), is one for which I have a considerable liking and respect. (181)

Huxley arrived in America in 1937, toured part of the country, then wrote most of Ends and Means (1937) at the Frieda Lawrence ranch in New Mexico, and settled in Los Angeles that fall. He wrote only two books in the genre Golding discusses before his death in 1963, Island and an earlier antiutopia--undoubtedly the "disgusting job... best forgotten"--Ape and Essence (1948). Golding's harsh judgment on this book (shared by several reviewers and critics) may reflect disappointment in a literary idol. Again there is talk of Huxley in one of the last interviews, "William Golding Talks to John Carey," when the interviewer asks about the four novels the apprentice Golding tried to write. He abandoned all of them (they have never come to light) because they were merely imitations, "examples of other people's work":