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

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

As an allegory about the role of art and the artist in society, The Double Tongue is appropriately nostalgic, longing for its far-distant generic origins in myth and the sacred, and recalling the sacred status of the word. Arieka's autobiographical narrative's essential retrospectivity of impulse is Golding's response to the disintegrative pressures of modernity, even formally so in its recourse to the confessional mode of St. Augustine.

His protest involves, however, no retreat into a mythical golden age and sternly rejects any hints of aestheticism. At the same time, the narrative's metaphors harken back to the high modernist artist parable with its artist-priests and aristocratic sense of the epiphanic moment, conveniently, if somewhat headily, summarized in Northrop Frye's catalogue: "Rimbaud's illumination, Joyce's epiphany, the Augenblick of modern German thought, and the kind of non-didactic revelation implied in such terms as symbolisme or imagism" (61). The perpetually refrained question at the heart of this experience, whatever name it goes by, is one of control: does the artist exert control over his or her materials, or do they in some wise take control of their maker? Golding replies in an appropriately Delphic mode that allows him to have it both ways: although Arieka is compelled, undergoing rape and having her mouth "torn" by the god, she learns to give shape and form to his words and her experience in the antique manner, skil lfully adopting hexameter to impress her audience and bring the crowds back to Delphi. The charlatan/conjurer unstably coexists with the genuine article.

The question of control is also at the center of the fraught relationship between art and politics. Ionides, as it turns out, is a fumbler in a game of uneven odds, and his ruses and subterfuges, well employed in his role as charlatan priest, fail him entirely in the political arena, since Rome not only controls the sources of knowledge but also possesses a will to power that Greece now lacks. In the end, so goes the argument of the parvenu Corinthian businessman whose generosity provides needed repairs to the Pythion, Greece is hedged in by Rome for its own good, purchasing peace and order at the price of a dignity well lost or not worth having. In this sense, control is achieved by a loss of control, an ambiguity that finds its most complete expression in the image of Arieka in her role as Pythia, mounted upon the tripod, under the god's influence, intoxicated by the burning laurel leaves, and speaking doubly, both in the sense of her pronouncements being cryptic and equivocal and in the sense that her wor ds are either interpreted or directly quoted by lonides. Fully engaged in her role as Pythia, Arieka descends in order to rise upon the tripod, positioned at the nexus point that is a working out of Golding's view of his own position as a writer: "I'm neither a philosopher nor a psychologist, I'm a story-teller. I really am a rhapsodist" (qtd. in Haffenden 113).