Interview with William Golding
James Keating
Purdue University, May 10, 1962
Question: It has often been said that wars are caused by the
dictatorial few. Do you feel this to be so, or do you think anyone
given the power is capable of such inhuman atrocity?
Answer: Well, I think wars are much more complicated than that.
Some of them have been caused by a few. On the other hand if some of
them are surely the bursting of some vicious growth, almost, in
civilization, then who knows who applies the lancer to it? There's
all the difference in the world between the wars of 1917-the
Communist Revolution-on the one hand, and the wars of Genghis Khan
on the other, isn't there?
Q.: Yes. Obviously, in Lord of the Flies society plays little
part in determining the corruption and violence in man. You've said
this is true in society, that it does play a minor role, but do you
feel that there are societies that will enhance the possibility of
man becoming good? And are we working toward this in democracy?
A.: By instinct and training, and by birth and by position on the
face of the globe, I'm pretty well bound to subscribe to a
democratic doctrine, am I not? This is so deeply woven into the way
we live, or at least the way we live at home in England, that I
don't suppose one really questions it much. I think I would say
democracy is moving in the right direction, or the democratic way is
the way in which to move; equally, it seems to me that a democracy
has inherent weaknesses in it-built-in weaknesses. You can't give
people freedom without weakening society as an implement of war, if
you like, and so this is very much like a sheep among wolves. It's
not a question with me as to whether democracy is the right way
so much, as to whether democracy can survive and remain what it is.
Every time democracy pulls itself together and says, "Well, now I'm
being threatened by a totalitarian regime," the first thing it has
to do is give up some of its own principles. In England during the
Second World War we had to give up a tremendous number of principles
in order to achieve the one pointed unity which could possibly
withstand Hitler. It's possible to look at the question in this way
and say, "Is the remedy not as bad as the disease?" I don't know.
Q.: Well, the innocence in man, for example, that you bring out
among the boys in this novel, would you say it was an inherent kind
of thing which materializes, or is it a thing from without which is
taken on during a transitional process from innocence to noninnocence? Are the boys innocent of themselves or are they innocent
of evil from without and evil of others?
A.: They're innocent of their own natures. They don't understand
their own natures and therefore, when they get to this island, they
can look forward to a bright future, because they don't understand
the things that threaten it. This seems to me to be innocence; I
suppose you could almost equate it with ignorance of men's basic
attributes, and this is inevitable with anything which is born and
begins to grow up. Obviously, it doesn't understand its own nature.
Q.: Then it's more a combination of innocence of their own and
other's attributes?
A.: Yes. I think, quite simply, that they don't understand what
beasts there are in the human psyche which have to be curbed.
They're too young to look ahead and really put the curbs on their
own nature and implement them, because giving way to these beasts is
always a pleasure, in some ways, and so their society breaks down.
Of course, on the other hand, in an adult society it is possible
society will not break down. It may be that we can put sufficient
curbs on our own natures to prevent it from breaking down. We may
have the very common sense to say that if we have atom bombs and so
on-H-bombs-well, we cannot possibly use these things.
Now that is, in a sense, the lowest possible bit of common
sense-obviously we can't-but you know as well as I do that there is
a large chance that those weapons will be used and we'll be done
for. I think that democratic attitude of voluntary curbs put on
one's own nature is the only possible way for humanity, but I
wouldn't like to say that it's going to work out, or survive.
Q.: You recently stated your belief that humanity would either be
saved, or save itself. Is that correct?
A.: Yes, but here again this is because I'm basically an
optimist. Intellectually I can see man's balance is about fiftyfifty, and his chances of blowing himself up are about one to one. I
can't see this any way but intellectually. I'm just emotionally
unable to believe that he will do this. This means that I am by
nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist, I
suppose.
Q.: The reason I posed that comment was because in your published
notes in Lord of the Flies . . .
A.: They aren't my notes.
Q.: I'm sorry. I thought Mr. Epstein² quoted you.
A.: Did he?
Q.: In the summation . . .
A.: Oh, yes.
Q.: In the end the question is, who will rescue the adult and his
cruiser? This seems to me a little fatalistic; it conveys the notion
that there isn't really any hope.
A.: Yes, but there again you can take . . . there are two answers
here; I think they are both valid answers. The first one is the one
I made before, and that is that the quotation there is what I said
is intellectual fatalism. It's making the thing a sort of series of
Chinese boxes, one inside of the other. The other thing is to say
that as the fabulist is always a moralist, he is always overstating
his case, because he has a point he wishes to drive home. I would
prefer to say if you don't curb yourself, then this is what will
happen to you.
Q.: Again, in Lord of the Flies, I noticed a very definite
relationship between Simon and his brutal death and Christ and his
crucifixion. Would you care to discuss this, or give any omniscient
judgment?
A.: Well, I can't give an omniscient judgment. I can only say
what I intended. First you've got to remember I haven’t read this
book for ten years, so I may be a bit off. I intended a Christ
figure in the novel, because Christ figures occur in humanity,
really, but I couldn't have the full picture, or as near as full a
possible picture of human potentiality, unless one was potentially a
Christ figure. So Simon is the little boy who goes off into the
bushes to pray. He is the only one to take any notice of the little
'uns—who actually hands them food, gets food from places where they
can't reach it and hands it down to them. He is the one who is
tempted of the devil: he has this interview with the pig's head on
the stick, with Beelzebub, or Satan, the devil, whatever you'd like
to call it, and the devil says, "Clear off, you're not wanted. Just
go back to the others. We'll forget the whole thing."
Well, this is, of course, the perennial temptation to the saint,
as I conceive it, to just go and be like ordinary men and let the
whole thing slide. Instead of that, Simon goes up the hill and takes
away from the island, removes, discovers what this dead hand of
history is that's over them, undoes the threads so that the wind can
blow this dead thing away from the island, and then when he tries to
take the good news back to ordinary human society, he's crucified
for it. This is as far as I was able to find a Christ parallel, you
see.
Q.: You mentioned that you couldn't give any omniscient judgment,
and you've earlier said that an author cannot really say, after he
has written a work, what he has given from himself or created. What
do you feel the role of the critic is here? Do you feel the critic
has the right to bring these things out?
A.: Well, isn't this really a question without much meaning?
Because whether a critic has rights or not he is going to do these
things to a book which has got out of the author's control, and
therefore you might just as well ask whether a man has a right to
five fingers on each hand. This is a thing that happens. Are you
really meaning do I think the critic has, by his nature or by his
training, a better chance of saying what's in this book than the
author has? Is that at all it?
Q.: Yes, that's mainly it. As an artist, do you feel the critics
are justified?
A.: Some of them. As a practical matter some of them say things
which I agree with and some say things which I don t agree with. I
don't see there's much generalization that can be made here. The
critic has as much right as any man to get what he can out of a
book, and I would say that I think some critics that I've read have
been extremely perceptive -or else I've been very lucky-in that
they've seemed to put their fingers on certain things which I had
deliberately intended and which I would have thought were rather
subtle, and they have contrived to get hold of these. Equally, I
would have to say that some critics seem to me to be miles off beam.
Q.: Well, perhaps Mr. Gindin was a little off beam in his article
which discusses your use of gimmicks. He mentions the saving of the
boys as a gimmick that didn't quite fulfill the manifestations that
were opened in the book ... it didn't resolve diem, I should think,
as well as he would have liked. Do you feel this is justifiable
criticism?
A.: I've been haunted by that word, "gimmick," ever since I used
it in an interview explaining that I liked a sharp reversal at the
end which would show the book in an entirely different light so that
the reader would presumably be forced to rethink the book, which
seems to me a useful thing to do. I don't know, in that event,
whether the saving of the boys at the end is a gimmick or not. The
reason for that particular ending was twofold. First I originally
conceived the book as the change from innocence-which is ignorance
of self-to a tragic knowledge. If my boys hadn't been saved, I
couldn't-at that time, at any rate-see any way of getting some one
of them to the point where he would have this tragic knowledge. He
would be dead. If I'd gone on to the death of Ralph, Ralph would
never have had time to understand what had happened to him, so I
deliberately saved him so that at this moment he could see -look
back over what's happened-and weep for the end of innocence and the
darkness of man's heart, which was what I was getting at. That's
half the answer.
The other answer is that if, as in that quotation there, the book
is supposed to show how the detects of society are directly
traceable to the defects of the individual, then you rub that awful
moral lesson in much more by having an ignorant, innocent adult come
to the island and say, "Oh, you've been having fun, haven't you?"
Then in the last sentence you let him turn away and look at the
cruiser, and of course the cruiser, the adult thing, is doing
exactly what the hunters do-that is, hunting down and destroying the
enemy-so that you say, in effect, to your reader, "Look, you think
you've been reading about little boys, but in fact you've been
reading about the distresses and the wickedness of humanity. If this
is a gimmick, I still approve of it.
Q.: I think it fulfills what you said about the use of the
gimmick at the end of a novel, making a reader go back and take
another look at things.
Did the work by Richard Hughes, High Wind in Jamaica, have any
influence on your writing Lord of the Flies?
A.: This is an interesting question. I can answer it simply: I've
read this book and I liked it but I read it after I'd written Lord
of the Flies. And if you're going to come around to Conrad's Heart
of Darkness, I might as well confess I've never read that.
Q.: Then if you hadn't read High Wind in Jamaica until you'd
written Lord of the Flies, how do you feel about the thematic
presentation, the parallel between the two works?
A.: There is a parallel, I think, but like so many literary
parallels it's the plain fact that if people engage in writing about
humanity, they're likely in certain circumstances to see
something the same thing. They're both looking, after all at the
same object, so it would really be very surprising if there weren't
literary parallels to be drawn between this book and that.
•••••
Q.: I have one more question about Lord of the Flies. Mr. Epstein
talks about sex symbols in this work.⁶ You have recently
said that you purposely left man and woman off of the island to
remove the ...
A.: Remove the "red herring."
Q.: Yes. I wonder if you concur with Mr. Epstein's observations.
A.: You're probably thinking of the moment when they kill a pig…
Q.: Yes.
A.: And I'm assured that this is a sexual symbol and it has
affinities of the Oedipadian wedding night. What am I to say to
this? I suppose the only thing I can really say is there are in
those circumstances, after all, precious few ways of killing a pig.
The same thing's just as true of the Oedipadian wedding night.