The artful equivocation of William Golding's The Double Tongue - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2001 by J.H. Stape

I practise a craft I do not understand and cannot describe.

Golding, "Belief and Creativity" (195)

William Golding's last novel, The Double Tongue, was left "unfinished" at his death in the summer of 1993. Its publishers reassure the reader that it survives as a draft neither so incomplete as to be a mere fragment nor, on the other hand, as polished as Golding would undoubtedly have wished it to be had he lived to revise it. (1) Not surprisingly, and even in light of the prevailing postmodernist hostility to notions of finality, reviewers displayed considerable anxiety about the novel's "completeness" and authority. One suggested that it lacked "both the absolute verbal precision and slight tendency to overwriting that characterise much of his work" (Kaveney). Another remarked that one result of the lack of revision was that "some of it--notably the last pages--seems rather rushed" (Hensher). Refusing to take the hesitantly phrased "Publisher's Note" at face value, another reviewer more bluntly, and somewhat unfairly, observed that "One of the perks--or plagues--of being a Nobel Prize winner is that your h eirs get to publish whatever they find on your desk" (McCullagh). The tepid reception for Golding's last work was of a piece with the increasingly ambivalent assessments of his oeuvre that had set in with the publication of Darkness Visible (1979), and critics repeated some of the reservations expressed about his writing when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

Whatever its incompleteness and failures, The Double Tongue has a signal place in Golding's canon as his final statement about a number of issues that had concerned him throughout his career. It is at once an implicit defense of the aims and methods of his writing, an assessment of his own achievement, and by the choice of setting and plot, an act of homage to his muse--an admittedly unfashionable term--toward the close of his creative life. It also gives fictional expression to the sense of mystery that he felt was an ineluctable part of the creative process: "The heart of our experience [that of the novelist] is not unlike that of the poet at his height. There is a mystery about both trades-a mystery in every sense of that ancient word" ("Belief and Creativity" 192). Like The Paper Men (1984), the novel is also a response to his critics. Dependent for the continued life of his work on their curatorship, Golding resents the inherent possibility of misinterpretation and misrepresentation of his ideas. He con cedes, however, that, much as he may dislike this state of affairs, he can exert only limited control over it, a more optimistic stance than that taken in The Paper Men where despite Wilf Barclay's heroic efforts to maintain his independence and identity he ultimately perishes at the hands of the vulgar and vulgarizing biographer-critic, Professor Rick L. Tucker.

The Double Tongue continues Golding's exploration of trends in contemporary fiction, relying, like The Paper Men, on postmodernist gesture to probe current notions of textual control and finality. But whereas Golding uses a contemporary setting to explore these issues in The Paper Men, The Double Tongue is, to use Northrop Frye's term, "displaced," a fact that comprises part of its postmodernist gesturing as its distinctly twentieth- century concerns at times deliberately collide against its historical setting. At the same time, while both novels variously play with indeterminacy and end in compromised finality--in The Paper Men the narrator's death in midsentence, in The Double Tongue in a belief posited in incertitude--Golding yearns for absolutes.

The novel is, moreover, clearly what Millgate calls a testamentary act, (2) with the octogenarian writer cocking a final snook at impercipient critics as well as at the legion of readers, in particular schoolteachers, who had badgered him about what exactly he had "meant" in Lord of the Flies. Brute circumstance has also made The Double Tongue a prime exemplar of a socialized text (McGann 115), the result of collaboration, whether willed or not, between the writer and the individuals responsible for seeing his or her work into print. It thus manifestly enjoys dual authority in embodying both authorial and editorial intentions, and is an equivocal product both by design and default.

Set principally in Delphi in the first century BC, (3) the novel is superficially concerned with a doomed attempt to reinvigorate Hellenic culture in the face of the Roman political and cultural onslaught, moving toward a pessimistic conclusion with Greek values and Greek religious practices doomed to disappear before the coming order. From another point of view, however, it has a "happy ending," since the conclusion promises the continuation of Greek culture under new guises. But The Double Tongue is no more "about" the eclipse of the Greek world than Pincher Martin was "about" the Second World War. Rather, it meditates on the nature of the writer and writing or, more broadly, on the varied facets of creativity, returning to a theme that is dealt with in much of Golding's late fiction. (4) The novel is an elaborately crafted allegory about the elusive and ultimately mysterious sources of the creative act, the artist's only partial and intermittent control over these, the instability of texts and textuality, and the role of the critic as a mediator between author and audience. The thematic territory resembles that of The Paper Men, where Golding--making various postmodernist gestures, considers the fate of the writer in the hands of the critic and vice versa--but it goes much further in its exploration of the creative impulse.