source of creative genius ('Whatever flames upon the night, Man's own resinous heart has fed.'). Conrad was appalled by this 'heart of darkness,' and existentialists find in the denial of this freedom the source of perversion of all human values. Indeed one could, if one were so minded, go through the entire canon of modern literature, philosophy and psychology and find this great basic drive defined as underlying the most fundamental conclusions of modem thought.
The emergence of this concealed, basic wildness is the theme of the book; the struggle between Ralph, the representative of civilization with his parliaments and his brain trust (Piggy, the intellectual whose shattering spectacles mark the progressive decay of rational influence as the story progresses), and Jack, in whom the spark of wildness burns hotter and closer to the surface than in Ralph and who is the leader of the forces of anarchy on the island, is also, of course, the struggle in modern society between those same forces translated onto a worldwide scale.
The turning point in the struggle between Ralph and Jack is the killing of the sow (pp. 133-144). The sow is a mother: 'sunk in deep maternal bliss lay the largest of the lot . . . the great bladder of her belly was fringed with a row of piglets that slept or burrowed and squeaked.' The killing of the sow is accomplished in terms of sexual intercourse.
They were just behind her when she staggered into an open
space where bright flowers grew and butterflies danced round each
other and the air was hot and still.
Here, struck down by the heat, the sow fell and the
hunters hurled themselves at her. This dreadful eruption from an
unknown world made her frantic; she squealed and bucked and the
air was full of sweat and noise and blood and terror. Roger ran
round the heap, prodding with his spear whenever pigflesh
appeared. Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his
knife. Roger (a natural sadist, who becomes the 'official'
torturer and executioner for the tribe) found a lodgment for his
point and began to push till he was leaning with his whole weight.
The spear moved forward inch by inch, and the terrified squealing
became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat and the
hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed under them and
they were heavy and fulfilled upon her. The butterflies still
danced, preoccupied in the center of the clearing.
The pig's head is cut off; a stick is sharpened at both ends and 'jammed in a crack' in the earth. (The death planned for Ralph at the end of the book involves a stick sharpened at both ends.) The pig's head is impaled on the stick; '. . . the head hung there, a little blood dribbling down the stick. Instinctively the boys drew back too; and the forest was very still. They listened, and the loudest noise was the buzzing of flies over the spilled guts.' Jack offers this grotesque trophy to 'the Beast,' the terrible animal that the littler children had been dreaming of, and which seems to be lurking on the island wherever they were not looking. The entire incident forms a horrid parody of an Oedipal wedding night; these emotions, the sensations aroused by murder and death, and the overpowering and unaccustomed emotions of sexual love experienced by the half-grown boys, plus their own irrational fears and blind terrors, release the forces of death and the devil on the island.
After this occurs the most deeply symbolic incident in the book, the 'interview' of Simon, an embryo mystic, with the head. The head seems to be saying, to Simon's heightened perceptions, that 'everything was a bad business. . . . The half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life.' Simon fights with all his feeble power against the message of the head, against the 'ancient, inescapable recognition,' the recognition of human capacities for evil and the superficial nature of human moral systems. It is the knowledge of the end of innocence, for which Ralph is to weep at the close of the book. ''Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!' said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoes with the parody of laughter. 'You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things are what they are?''
At the end of this fantastic scene Simon imagines he is looking into a vast mouth. 'There was blackness within, a blackness that spread. . . . Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness.' This mouth, * the symbol of ravenous, unreasoning and eternally insatiable nature, appears again in PINCHER MARTIN, in which the development of the theme of a Nature inimical to the conscious personality of man is developed in a stunning fashion. In LORD OF THE FLIES, however, only the outline of a philosophy is sketched, and the boys of the island are figures in a parable or fable which like all great parables or fables reveals to the reader an intimate, disquieting connection between the innocent, time-passing, story-telling aspect of its surface and the great, 'dimly appreciated' depths of its interior.
((* cf. Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness': 'I saw (the dying Kurtz) open his mouth wide-it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.' Indeed Golding seems very close to Conrad, both in basic principles and in artistic method.))
