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

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

Incongruous a character as Arieka may at first seem for exploring Golding's large themes, she nonetheless serves him well. Her combination of high seriousness, insight, and muddle-headedness establishes, in the earlier parts of the novel, the contiguity of inspiration and comedy. The climactic moment of the novel's first five chapters--the scene of Arieka's rape by Apollo as she takes on her role as Pythia for the first time and is to deliver his answer to a question that two young Romans, Julius Caesar and Metullus Cimber, pose about their respective political futures--is both hedged with solemn ritual and riven by broad comedy. Reviewing her experience, she rightly says, "It's so mixed" (92), and, indeed, at this juncture, Golding mingles truth with contrivance, history with fiction, and wisdom with silliness. The dignified seriousness of his subject is counterpomted with Ionides playing the con artist and Arieka's losing control of her body and tongue. Her "One mouth or the other!" followed by "rollicking laughter" (88) is Golding's irreverent unveiling of the mysteries. His important point is, arguably, that the privilege of creativity (if in fact it is such), while reserved to the few, has little to do with worthiness or unworthiness, a sense of election, or a refined sensibility. The scene demolishes a whole panoply of romantic cliches, and yet in placing his own statements at the center of Delphi, the symbolic world navel, Golding himself performs a feat of meaningful magic, at once undermining and revalidating art and the artist.

Having exposed the holy of holies to the reader--his equivalent of God's buttocks to which Ionides has earlier alluded--Golding establishes, in Ionides' careful stage management of the public experience, that art is, indeed, partly a contrivance, a conjuring trick, and, as Arieka blindly gropes her way to the tripod and through the phases that initiate her into her metier, that it is partly a fortuitous accident. The farcical and debunking note tends to predominate; this is mostly a shell game, and Golding's more serious statements about the sources of inspiration are deferred until the novel's conclusion.

The oracle, appropriately enough at this juncture, is faked; but it is far from being entirely so, for the point is that inspiration is arbitrary and only partly subject to conscious management. In short, while Golding exposes the artifice and posturing that comprise some aspects of artistic production (the part of Ionides), he nonetheless posits it as a mystery (the part of Arieka).

Nor is it incidental that the query posed at this critical moment involves international politics, for by alluding to Julius Caesar's destiny, the text conjoins political and artistic concerns at its center. Caesar's fate is not simply a private question about ambition but a public one about the balance of power and, for Rome, eventually a question about dictatorship or democracy--about control and domination from above or the sharing of power among equals. The scene exposes the ultimate inefficacy of overt and simplistic political art. Ionides' cleverly concocted reply, punning on the names Caesar and Cimber--"There will be a competition and one will be a cut above the other" (89)--is a piece of pure theater that, however flattering to Caesar and historically accurate, exerts no influence on events and is simply a clever and, with hindsight, "inspired" guess.