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

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

The author takes his title from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (2.2.118-23):

But man, proud man,

Dress'd in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd--

His glassy essence--like an angry ape

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As makes the angels weep.

His method is to employ an omniscient narrator who introduces the dramatic scenes and follows them with moralizing or sardonic commentary. The setting is a ruined city, Los Angeles in the year 2108. [2] How did the city fall? We are given flash scenes of Einstein and Faraday, representatives of the great men of science we have so revered, enslaved by the ape king and made to serve in an apocalyptic bacteriological and atomic war which ends in "the ultimate and irremediable / Detumescence" (42) of modern civilization. The narrator comments on the ends and means that brought about this great fall:

Surely it's obvious.

Doesn't every schoolboy know it?

Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man's.

Papio's [3] procurer, bursar to baboons,

Reason comes running, eager to ratify;

Comes, a catch-fart, with Philosophy,

truckling to tyrants;

Comes, a Pimp for Prussia, with Hegel's

Patent History;

Comes with Medicine to administer the

Ape-king's aphrodisiac;

Comes, with rhyming and with Rhetoric,

to write his orations;

Comes with the Calculus to aim his rockets

Accurately at the orphanage across the ocean;

Comes, having aimed, with incense to impetrate

Our Lady devoutly for a direct hit. [4] (45)

Soulless reason provides a means to serve animal lusts, especially the lust for power; thus the man becomes the ape, the "beast."

In Golding's island society the man of reason, the scientist, is represented in the sickly, myopic child Piggy, the butt of schoolboy gibes, but unfortunately many readers and most critics have failed to understand his limitations and thus his function in the allegory. This may be explained, in part, by the uncritical adoration of the scientist in our society, but another factor is the misunderstanding found in the prestige introduction by E. M. Forster in the first American edition of Lord of the Flies and subsequently held before our eyes for 40 years. We are asked to "Meet three boys," Ralph, Jack, and Piggy. We do not meet Simon at all. Piggy is Forster's hero, he is "the brains of the party," "the wisdom of the heart," "the human spirit," and as for the author, "he is on the side of Piggy." In a final bit of advice we are admonished: "At the present moment (if I may speak personally) it is respect for Piggy that is most needed. I do not find it in our leaders" (ix-xii). Actually, rightly understood, Pig gy is respected all too much by our leaders, for he provides the means whereby they wield and extend their powers. Jack must steal Piggy's glasses to gain the power of fire. Forster, of course, was the arch-humanist of his day and apparently a subscriber to the "scientific humanism" Golding wished to demean. Contrast Golding's remarks to Jack Biles, a friendly interviewer: "Piggy isn't wise. Piggy is short-sighted. He is rationalist. My great curse, you understand, rationalism-and, well he's that. He's naive, short-sighted and rationalist, like most scientists." Scientific advance, he continues, is useful, yet