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

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

This sense of tradition--and, for that matter, of the individual talent--accounts for some of the novel's most calculated intertextual gestures, from its first teasing words, "Blazing light" (3), recalling the opening of Genesis, to its closing ones, from the New Testament. The opening and closing words thus frame the whole work within a sacred text, not, significantly, from classical antiquity but from the new dispensation that replaced it. By this gesture Golding acknowledges his dual cultural inheritance as an English writer from the classics and the Bible. (9) By it, as well as by his setting, he suggests how the past is never only the past, is always in the process of becoming, shaping the future as new works arise from an originating point that, whatever the dislocations of time and place, like the Pythia constantly withers and is renewed.

At the same time, Golding's conclusion points to what, at first sight, appears to be the genuinely new, as the novel leaps forward in time to the Christian era and St. Paul's new god. While it teasingly mingles fiction with history, it projects into the future a work that has prophecy as a major preoccupation. In thus refusing closure, The Double Tongue insists on the continuity and perpetual restatement of its principal concerns and methods. And in alluding in its final sentence to St. Paul--the god-struck visionary who suffered a Pythia-like compulsion to deliver the message of his god--Golding situates his central ideas at the point when the old gods are replaced by new ones that necessarily resemble them, much as postmodernism, rather than breaking altogether with the "isms" that preceeded it, tends to revisit old debates. Finally, Golding concludes that writing, whether taken up with worldly matters or spiritual ones, is always about itself, and, truth to tell, about the writer too.

Notes

(1.) The publishers chose the novel's title from among several that Golding had considered. Its opening pages are "what we take to be one of the latest versions" (Faber & Faber i), and at the end of chapter 4 a manuscript passage is missing.

(2.) For Miligate, testamentary acts are varied valedictory activities that a writer undertakes to attempt to control posterity's perception and assessment of his or her work.

(3.) Golding records his own highly nuanced response to modern and ancient Delphi in his 1967 travel article "Delphi" (reprinted in A Moving Target).

(4.) On metanarrative as a major thematic concern in Golding's later fiction, see the essays by Stape and Whiteley.

(5.) Knowing full well that the modern status of homosexuals and women signally differs from their positions in Greek society, Golding is deliberately anachronistic in his handling of these topics. Homosexuality and homosociality had major social and even political roles in classical Greece, while women, peripheral in the latter area, were central to its religious practice as well as to the identity of the polis, as witnessed, for example, by the Athena cult at Athens. See Dover's classic study as well as Stewart's more recent discussion of these topics.