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THE CONVENTIONAL READING

It is, I think, fair and reasonable to suggest that Lord of the Flies is conventionally read as a text which explores the idea of ‘loss of civilisation’ through the medium of a group of boys marooned on an island without any guidance but their own natures.

In time these personalities manifest themselves in numerous and most violent forms. It is not long into the work before the attempts of organisation, governance and social structure - which mark the early period of the boys isolation - give way to hunting, swimming, dancing and ritual painting. What is emerging is the darker side of humanity; that side which is both fiercely independent and consequently; a great danger to the stability of a social order. Jack, of course, is the key figure here. It is his personal desires and interests at a given moment that become the focus for his existence and the motive for his actions. No longer motivated by anything as noble as group or collective need, he is free to pursue his own personality and it’s tendencies. In so doing, he attracts the attentions of other boys who gradually loose interest in the more demanding regime which Ralph seeks to impose.

ISOLATION AND EXILE

The key moment of the early section of the novel, then is the election of Ralph as leader of the group. The former head of the choir boys, Jack, is now deposed, no longer a king and certainly without any power except that which he has when holding the conch: something anyone else can do as well. The effect of this for Jack is that he feels alienated, rightly or wrongly, by the group. This places Jack on the outside of the group at the moment it is formed. He is not properly understood as being part of the group because, when he was, he was one of the leaders. A former power figure cannot so readily be disposed to the rank of equal by simple election. Either his/her voice continues as a variously significant influence on the group’s opinion, or s/he disappears from the group life. The important point to remember is that whatever happens, the former power figure is no more part of the group than s/he is leader of it. This is because deposing someone, or reducing their authority has the flow on effect of externalising the individual. Jack has been sent a message by the popular vote against him. It is a message he takes as one of dislike and discontent. Jack is not wanted, as leader or as friend.

Jack can either continue on as a constant reminder of how things could have been, or he could simply disappear. Interestingly he appears to do both. For large sections of the text, one is aware of Jack’s absence from the main scene. This adds to a type of presence through which the spectre of Jack, and what he comes to represent, haunts the background consciousness of each scene. In other parts of the text Jack returns to the foreground of public life, directly attacking the existing order and offering an alternative: thus playing the public influencer role.

What happens in this isolation is the key to understanding where the conventional reading of the text comes from. Isolated from power and people to control and influence, he falls upon what he carries with him; his personality and its characteristics. His love of the hunt, of singing, chanting and ritual are given the opportunity to be explored. The choir leader, made an outlaw through an act of civilisation (a popular vote), degenerates into a self-engrossed, self-important primitive.

THE CONCEPTUAL FLAW OF GOLDING AND THE CONVENTIONAL READING

When William Golding wrote The Lord of the Flies, he ventured into a discourse that was not new. His journey through a heart of darkness echoed the novel of the same name by William Conrad. Both tales deliver a story in which the main characters venture far from home, presumably the seat of civilisation, and deep into the jungle (or deserted pacific island in the case of Golding); the presumed home of anti-civilisation. Yet this journey from white to black is not so clear cut as the development from choir boy to face painted savage. Conrad’s work in particular has come in for close scrutiny and scathing criticism by the likes of Appiah who notes that The Heart of Darkness is filled with racist discourse and stereotypical portrayals of black Africa. Appiah’s work is closely and strongly argued. Similar can be said for Golding who’s portrayal of the loss of civilisation and the break down of “all that we hold dear” to quote a cliché, suffers from the persistent imagery of tribalism.

The novel is littered with allusions to tribal life. The very nature of the setting as an island is closely associated in audiences minds with the untamed, unexplored frontier. With thoughts of the frontier come all the exquisite savagery of the beasts that are out there and waiting for the Americans to conquer. This last point is not a glib remark. Repeatedly America has portrayed itself as the frontiersman’s land filled with very successful frontiersmen at that. I am reminded of the interesting television series on Captain James Cook that catalogued the life of one of the great frontiersman. Yet it ended with a profoundly unsuccessful and unrighteous stab in the back (literally) to the great hero himself. Such things are rarely found in American cinema if for no other reason than the fact that America’s self-conception is one of triumph over adversity (partly true but not exclusively and certainly not uniquely so). This sort of an American audience - or an American-influenced audience - is in a position to view this island setting of Lord of the Flies as a place of grave danger but one which we shall rise over and make great, with God's help of course.

Predestination as a viewing perspective can work well in purely dramatic terms. For example; the boys in the recent American cinematic rendition of Lord of the Flies can appear to an American audience instantly as the bright and great future of a strong and predominantly athletic America (I will not question such propositions). When these good little Yankees suffer their descent into savagery, there is always the thought of innate good sitting on the horizon, the prospect of rescue or the determination of the character of Ralph to keep things going. This optimistic view that there will always be some great leader waiting to help us all, is quite prevalent in American texts, and is demonstrated in the cultural importance given to the President figure; the embodiment of the leader waiting in the wings mythology.

So it is Ralph who provides the redemptive figure. He maintains his intelligence throughout and even when he begins to loose control over the other boys, and when his lucidity begins to fail, he is at least smart enough to know this is happening. In stark contrast to this is Jack and his friends who are merely swept along the tide of events, unsuspecting the dangerous reefs the lie in their path.

If this is right and Ralph is a redemptive character in the American film, then it becomes clear that he is an all important pressure valve for an audience that needs some hope for the future of these boys. To confront a complete fall into the abyss would be too much to expect from popcorn munchers. That aside, it is perhaps a little too much pessimism for an American audience to deal with.

The book also provides Ralph as a redemptive character. His potential to save the day is clear from the beginning and it is not so much that he personally fails but rather that his environment and its effect upon the people around him take over from him. Events become much larger than he can handle. With the growing awareness on the part of Ralph that the boys are loosing their status as civilised, as humans, a plethora of very complex and quite sophisticated themes and issues open up. These concerns are most definitely philosophy of a high order and, in keeping with such lofty considerations, become increasingly difficult to communicate. Thus it is at the moment that Ralph receives his enlightenment of their plight, that the true nature of their situation becomes to vast, too complex, too much for Ralph to be able to communicate or grapple with. And if he cannot deal with it, then it might as well not exist for the other boys.

When Ralph and Jack go to confront the monster on top of the mountain, it is Ralph that must grapple with it, come to terms with it first. When he has succeeded in dealing with the monster, Jack is then, and only then, able to join in. Very quickly after, the rest of the boys follow suit. In this way the entire tribe of boys live vicariously through Ralph, where he goes, they go.

But when Ralph cannot conceptualise or understand what is happening, even though he knows that it is happening, he becomes increasingly isolated from the group. His desire to understand more and to impress these understandings upon the boys provokes him to try to find a way to communicate his thoughts. But he keeps coming up hard against the enormity of the issues. We are talking about civilisation, what makes us humans, issues which are difficult for most adults, let alone stranded boys. As a result, Ralph begins to be overtaken by his own knowledge and it runs away with him. The other boys, left to their own devices, decided the devil they know and go running of seeking pleasure in the things that have already been well established and have become comfortingly familiar to them (hunting, dancing, partying).

Bereft of Ralph’s leadership, the tribe slowly looses everything that they had and the last remains of the good choir boys are discarded in favour of dancing, self-concerned animals that kill, torture and hunt. The boys loose their civility, their essence as humans. Ralph, hamstrung by his clear yet un-matured understanding of what is happening, can only watch through tears as everything falls apart.

Yet for all the dramatic power of such an story, and it is there in the book and the two films, the real question is does this story truly say and show the story Golding wanted to tell? I think not. His own novel doesn’t do his concept justice; with Golding suffering the same fate that Ralph does: he sees but doesn’t understand, knows but knows not. Quite a nasty thing to say but one that is borne out by looking at the text. Like the American film, the book sets up the initial circumstance by ensuring we read the boys in the best light possible. Straight out of the finest that British education has to offer, and a choir singing glorious praises no less, these boys are more angelic than the cherubim and seraphim combined with scouts on a “help the poor day”. They arrive and almost instantly throw themselves to the task of being British. Minimal tears, minimal concerns or worries of a group of children on a deserted beach in the middle of nowhere, presumably after they had all just fallen out of a plane. Quite apart from the Rambo like beginnings to the novel and the complete disregard of the emotional effects of parental loss and personal isolation; the opening pushes credibility. But in so doing it also pushes forward the image of High Imperial and Majestic Britain. In this way it is the same as the Military Academy boys from America. The problem is that these boys don’t loose civilisation, they alter it. At first everything is in order. Perfect order in fact - they establish meetings and meeting protocols. They work up agendas and other plans all designed to ensure the longevity and security of themselves and, interestingly, of the protocols as well. Yet this is all very quickly mutated and eroded by the insidious, creeping creature that you might call isolation. Isolation and relocation.

All of these considerations lead me to suggest that the conventional reading of The Lord of the Flies misinterprets the contents of the book. I agree whole-heartedly that Golding thought of himself as writing about the loss of civilisation; the way he writes his book with its often overly-simplistic symbolism (ie; long hair and painted faces) shows this is in his mind. So the conventional reading of the text is in that way entirely justified.

What I am more concerned about is whether or not that reading is justified? It is my view that interpreting The Lord of the Flies as a text about the loss of civilisation demonstrates a conceptual approach to understanding the book which is consistent with a colonial reading.

The problem quite simply is this: the boys do cease to be what most choir boys their age are: uniform wearing, card carrying members of the “Royal Club of Enlightenment and Sense of Social Duty.” They have long hair, paint their faces, strip off their clothes and throw themselves into all the experiences that the freedoms of an ungoverned and unscheduled environment offer them. But does this make them uncivilised? No: it makes them non-western.

This is what I call the conceptual flaw that is made by Golding and, subsequently, most of his readers – to mistake the non-western human for an uncivilised human. I will return to the reasons for and the substance of this mistake shortly.

LORD OF THE FLIES IN THE 1990s

And therein lies the key to understanding the conceptual error which Golding fell into, he did not describe 'uncivilisation' in his novel, rather he described civilisation gone wrong. The conventional readings of Ralph - the classic good-guy - and Jack - the classic bad-guy - can be upset by a more liberal reading. Ralph can appear to be an overly idealistic sort of ‘head in the clouds guy’ while Jack, undoubtedly a brute and not a very nice guy, is none-the-less appealing in the sense that he is a proud anarchist, demanding the right to live as he wants. He is a rebel, a concept which Golding, writing in the early fifties, had not had the benefit of coming to grips with.

The rebel is now popular (James Dean is still on countless teenage and twenty-something women throughout the world!). Jack is nothing but a rebel and although it costs others their lives, this can be quickly overlooked when looking at the larger picture. Freedom. Indeed, this process of looking at the larger picture is precisely what happens each time America consolidates and persists in its gun-ownership philosophy.

Perhaps the biggest lesson to be drawn from Lord of the Flies then, is not what the ‘uncivilised’ is like, but rather what extent civilisation can be taken to. Just how far it can go in accommodating and encompassing just about everything.

The play (which I am writing) looks to what Golding is commonly understood to have been aiming at; the concept of ‘uncivilised’. As a result, I have aimed to push the story telling further than mere chest beating and chanting, face painting and murder. The play becomes truly uncivilised by eventually loosing all meaning. The medium of theatre is a tremendous facilitator for a discourse of this type for it is one of the most ritual and form-laden institutions in existence. At the end of this play, the plot breaks up, ceasing to exist and instead a multiplicity of events happen with no regard to time or space nor with any concern as to identity or motive. Time, space, identity and motive have always been, for me at least, key concepts in most theatrical productions. This is one production where the aim has been to abandon these concepts or, more accurately, to collapse them into an anarchy. It is for this reason that the play has been given the subtitle Lord of the Anarchies.

This is the true tragedy of this play; the horror of the alien environment of true anarchy. The unknown, the unknowable or the unknowing.

LOSS OF MEANING AND THE FALL TO ANARCHY

When relocated to a place of isolation where nothing that applied formerly need apply presently, one quickly looses any interest in maintaining the past protocol. Not necessarily because past protocols and behaviour are bad, but simply because it serves no purpose in the present situation. Or at very least it serves no personal purpose. Why? Primarily because the nature of the protocols of the past (British society) are self-depriving. The Brit is a gentlemen for his stiff-upper lip and rigid attention to protocol regardless of the personal considerations. One is reminded of the classic Monty Python sketch where a crusader has his arms, then legs then entire torso chopped off, leaving only his head. The response from the severed head: ‘It’s only a flesh wound!’ Indeed, carry on, fight on, do not give up regardless of personal loss. But where one finds oneself on an island, lacking any attachment to others (an island that provides food, shelter and all the essentials), then one can indulge oneself. In that indulgence born of relocation and isolation, lies the path to the loss of civilisation.

Yet is the behaviour of the boys truly non-civilised or is it tribal? It is my view that dancing up and down, the wearing of conveniently posed loincloths, the painting of warrior tattoos on one’s face, and the general joy of foot stamping, growling and beastly chanting is not uncivilised but rather, not ‘our’ civilisation. There are far too many elements of tribal or what western society may classify as primitive culture present in the novel for us to accept it as being a depiction of anarchy or loss of civilisation. Civilisation is something far more than mere suites, collars and short, back, and sides. It is the way in which meaning is attached to otherwise meaningless acts. In other words the ability to render meaning to something which does not innately call for that meaning – ie; symbolism. Call a cup a chalice and wine blood and you have it there already. Draw a stroke on a wall and say that it means “I” and you have written symbolism, after a fashion. The point is that civilisation lies not in the manner of dress but the manner of thought. Lord of the Flies, for all it’s fine motives of investigating the woes of society, does not delve into thought, but into action and costume.

Well you might say that there is a discussion of thought: the question of guilt and moral culpability of one person to another, particularly with death of Simon (or Piggy or whoever). Agreed that this may be a momentary glimpse into the mental element of civilisation, yet it comes too late. The majority of the book spends its time demonstrating the creation of scary myths and the way in which we might deal with such things when civilisation and order are not around to help us out. Yet these boys are still civilised. Certainly they are not as morally great or ethically empowered as good westerners, but therein lies the point. By the end of the novel they have not ceased to be human but ceased to be western. And although most non-western cultures aren’t as bad as the boys on the island, the point remains that these boys have become not like us, but like those we consider less than us.

In that regard I would consider Lord of the Flies as a novel which employs latent racism, unconsciously or otherwise.

The question of humanity is important. Continuing from what has been said above with regard to where civilisation begins, it should be clear that if we become civilised at the moment of symbolism and meaning, then one has to go fairly far back into history before you encounter someone who is truly uncivilised. It is my view that the uncivilised, in true and non-racist terms, is not non-western but rather non-human. These boys act like humans, the questions they face (to kill or not to kill) are quintessential human questions. No boy acts by reflex but by intent and therein lies the difference between a human and a non-human. If this is all correct then that would mean that the notion of civilisation automatically attaches to the word human. Still you may not be comfortable with this because you may consider murderers, rapists and others uncivilised. Yet there is a difference between being unhuman and being inhuman. An inhuman person, like an immoral one, act in full awareness of the rules and, at the same time, in direct, intentional contravention of them. An un-human acts without concern for morals at all, unaware of their existence or even any concept of why they, or things like them, might be necessary.

This latter creature does not enter into any of the pages of the Lord of the Flies in book or in movie and it is this I bemoan when I suggest, with respect, that Golding did not do justice to the concept: the loss of civilisation.

But how do you portray non-humanity/anti-civilisation using people that are, aesthetically at least, human? The answer lies within anarchy. And it is to that which we now turn.

WHAT, NOT WHO, IS THE LORD OF THE ANARCHIES?

The savage criticism of the world’s art press to the American cinematic version of the book provides us with insights into some of the problems the book faces in telling its story to a modern audience. Much of the criticism was directed at what was considered the problem of the text’s irrelevance. It seems, particularly to many American critics, that the novel no longer appears as enlightening and original as what it once did. This, so the critics argue, is largely due to the fact that the sort of violence depicted in the novel is far surpassed by what the youths of today do to each other with great regularity on the streets of urban western cultures.

I think that the argument that today’s youth-violence renders the story of The Lord of the Flies invalid, or at least not as enlightening, is demonstrative of the conceptual fault that the story contains. The fact that the violence we see in The Lord of the Flies is amply demonstrated (and amplified) by the conduct of youths today; points to the way in which the novel’s description of civilisation broken down, is problematic in its oversimplification of the distinction between civilised and non-civilised. That the sort of behaviour we see in American High Schools can exist in the context of a modern state, demonstrates that cruelty and violence beyond the descriptions of the book are entirely possible in civilised communities. The same could have been said of the novel in reference to its historical context: World War Two was more violent than anything children do today. The point that Golding didn’t notice was that violence is in civilisation; it is a part of it. He was trying to show civilisation break down, but he didn’t go far enough. He only showed civilisation of a different kind to that which most middle-class readers would have otherwise experienced.

What needs to be done, to make the work poignant for today’s audiences (and to justify the sort of conventional reading that is usually attached to the work), is to take it to the depths that Golding didn’t. The reasons why he didn’t are interesting in themselves and I tend to think that it was probably an unconscious thing. I have no doubt that for Golding, killing and physical violence may very well have appeared to be on the opposite end of civilisation. But this way of thinking centres on a romantic ideal of civilisation which is, I suggest, a relic of the colonial; empire building days of the past. Although murder and death was rife in the colonies, it was the savages that dealt with all of this and thus to be expected. A good Britishman only took to the gun for King and Country.

Thus, we can see in Jack’s painted face, slicked back hair and rampart savage nudity “countless savages of numerous islands infested with the uncultivated indigenous that would later come to be thankful for their imperial salvation?” (!). The truth is that for all the chest beating and ‘boys who will be boys will become savages’ mentality, we come no closer to ‘uncivilised’. Instead we hover closer to contemporary experiences of youth violence which show bad behaviour better than the novel itself did (as the critiques of the recent American film adaptation pointed out: the violence is not a patch on what is happening in ‘urban islands’.).

In Lord of the Flies/Lord of the Anarchies we have chosen to follow the path of complete abandonment to anarchy. We accept the concept of civilisation requires meaning and embrace the presentation of events, happenings and acts that are without meaning. A crime is one thing but one that is truly meaningless and serves no purpose, not even that of self-gratification, is without doubt the most horrible of all things. And so we travel through modern concepts of immorality and amorality. But we, unlike Golding and others, do not stop here. We descend further in the quest for the heart of darkness and we find it in a portrayal of something that isn’t human and quite indescribable by reference to humanity. The interesting thing is that while this darkness is found in the hearts of non-humans, that heart is nonetheless one just like ours – a thought worth consideration by all races and nations, particularly those given to self-presentation. And that is where this paper finishes and allows you, the audience the opportunity to consider the rest for yourself.