Lord of the Flies - William Golding [83]
The Devil is not present in any traditional religious sense; Golding's Beelzebub is the modern equivalent, the anarchic, amoral, driving force that Freudians call the Id, whose only function seems to be to insure the survival of the host in which it is embedded or embodied, which function it performs with tremendous and single-minded tenacity. Although it is possible to find other names for this force, the modern picture of the personality, whether drawn by theologians or psychoanalysts, inevitably includes this force or psychic structure as the fundamental principle of the Natural Man. The tenets of civilization, the moral and social codes, the Ego, the intelligence itself, form only a veneer over this white-hot power, this uncontrollable force, "the fury and the mire of human veins." Dostoievsky found salvation in this freedom, although he found damnation in it also. Yeats found in it the only 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