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

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

Ionides, "the learned mountebank of the gods" (162), is at this stage happily but cynically playing out his role but is self-deceived about its clout. Arieka, on the other hand, who has approached her role as Pythia with trepidation and respect, is now actually invested in it, her struggles making her the god's plaything. In this sense, Ionides is appropriately rewarded: he creates an immediate sensation but is unchanged; Arieka, on the other, is reshaped by her encounter (even physically, by the breaking of her hymen). Of equal weight is her appreciation that "the gods were there!" (93), that the powers that took and used her were to herself, at any rate, embodied and present. Her moment of ecstasy confirms her uncertain belief not only in the Olympian pantheon but also in herself. Not having experienced any sense of special election to fulfill the duties of the Pythia--from her family's and society's point of view she was an expedient choice--Arieka, with some sense of wonder and awe, wins a sense of vocat ion: "I had spoken words and not known I had spoken them. They were the god's words" (97). Indeed, the unconscious lies at the very root of her (and, as Golding has it, his own) experience. The experience itself, while a struggle, is numinous, yielding to articulation only by metaphor--the double tongue--as the literal event and its various meanings separate and conjoin, much as do Arieka and Ionides, Delphi and Athens, Greece and Rome, and the writer and his or her writing.

Golding's incarnation of his own sense of artistic experience and his vocation in prior historical forms--Delphi, the Pythia, the high priest of Apollo--has a dual purpose: while acknowledging his own intellectual inheritance from classical culture, the wholesale borrowing of a metaphoric system from an earlier culture stresses the atemporality and impersonality of art. This, too, is a double-tongued choice. The setting and characters do duty for Greek antiquity while serving to explore the nature of Golding's individual, late-twentieth-century artistic sensibility. Like Eliot and Joyce, Golding finds the classics ineluctable. Their understanding of the imagination and art are definitive in that any later expression is bound to allude to, quarrel with, or repeat what the Greeks have already said about them, much as any mathematician, regardless of his or her branch of mathematics, extends the work of Pythagoras. The multiplicity of Pythias in the novel's opening chapters, the two and eventually the three ladi es, is thus explained. Whatever their individual aspects--the First Lady's conventional blindness, the Second's incongruous obesity--they fulfill a role that others have taken in a long, seemingly uninterrupted line stretching back to the original mythical moment of Apollo's slaying of the python. His taking over the oracle, that instant when a new dispensation was initiated in the relationship between gods and men, is significantly recalled and repeated at the novel's close when the office of the Pythia itself moves toward extinction and renewal in a novel and unexpected shape--that of St. Paul--to serve the new Rome-based mystery religion of Christianity.