“Man produces evil as a bee produces honey”
– this was the theme of William Golding’s work. Golding, who died on June
19,1993, at the age of 81, made a special place for himself in Modern English
Literature. Belonging to no school of writing, with no obvious models, he was a
writer who went his own way and charted the world of his own imagination.
Critics
argued bitterly, when Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983, over whether
he deserved it. History will probably not record him as a great writer. But he
will be remembered for one novel, Lord of the Flies, one of the first
and most significant books to describe the end of the Atomic Age.
Lord
of the Flies is the story of a group of English boys whose plane crashes on an
uninhabited island after a nuclear war. In a situation which would be the envy
of any child – the ocean to swim in, sandy beaches, plenty of fruit to eat and
best of all, the absence of any grown-ups:
the boys run into savages and imitate the crimes of the grown-up worlds
they have left, not stopping at murder.
In
these days of the Green Movement, what the boys do on their island is easily
recognized as what we have done to the planet Earth. But Golding’s story is
also a cruel distortion of a book, which had been a favourite of schoolboys for
generations. In R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, which was
published in 1858 (and which perhaps some of you have read, thought it is not
as popular now as it used to be) three British boys, shipwrecked on a Coral
Island, build an orderly and civilized
life there. In a sense, this asserted the supremacy of the British race,
and all the values of the Age of Empire.
But
in 1953, when Golding published Lord of the flies the British Empire
had come to an end, and mankind had capable of destroying itself and all life. Lord
of the Flies thus reflects a reality, which harsh as it is, is closer
to what history tells.
The
Nobel Prize citation in 1983 said that Golding had ‘portrayed the darkest side of human nature and the depths of human
misery’.
Interestingly,
Alfred Nobel in his Will, establishing the Nobel Prizes, had directed that they
be awarded ‘to those who… Shall have
conferred the greatest benefit on mankind’. Referring specifically to the
prize for literature, he asked the works with an ‘idealistic tendency’ be selected. Perhaps the choice of Golding,
and few other writers in recent times, reflects the possibility that great
literature is also about dark and cruel things; as long as it accurately
reflects what is in the minds of men and women, it has the virtue of
truth.
By
the way, one of the most famous blooms in English Literature occurs in Lord of
the Flies. The boys on the island need to light fire – both to cook and as a
signal to any ships that might pass by. One of the boys, a plump and harmless
child nicknamed Piggy, wears spectacles. These are used to light the fire. Can
you figure what if wrong with that?
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