Mithyl Banymandhub
SPEAK MEMORY
I was first introduced to William Golding way back in 1967, the year in which I sat for my Cambridge School Certificate examinations. It was one of the few novels to make a deep impact on my immature psyche which, up till then, had been fed on a diet of books written by Zane Grey, Ian Fleming, Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, Henri Vernes, André Gomez and the abridged versions of some classics like A Tale of Two Cities and Gulliver’s Travels. 
Golding’s first novel was taught to the cohort I belonged at the Collège du Saint-Esprit by the Reverend Ellis C.S.Sp. I seize this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to the teachers who willingly shared their knowledge with me and have, in no small measure, contributed to make of me the person I am.
Despite the passage of time, I am still haunted by memories of the plot and characters of Lord of the Flies. To this day I remember verbatim, one of the final sentences of the novel, part of which reads,”… Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.” The mind of the young person I was started to look for new horizons which also enabled me to give expression to my imagination without, for that matter, forgetting that reality is a totally different matter.
A CLASSIC FICTIVE STUDY
William Gerard Golding was born on September 19, 1911, in St. Columb Minor in Cornwall, England. His father was an extremely well-educated schoolmaster while his mother was a strong-minded suffragette. Golding grew up in the family home at Malborough. When he left to join Brasnose College, Oxford, it was his intention to study science but he later decided to opt for English Literature instead. After graduation, he worked for a while in a London theatre group, writing, acting and producing. In 1939, he followed in his father’s footsteps and became a schoolmaster at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. He left the institution to serve in the Royal Navy during World War II. He witnessed action at sea as a lieutenant on board a rocket launcher and was deeply affected by the violence people were capable of. He returned to the school in 1945 and taught there till 1961. 
In his childhood, Golding felt a fascination for words. It comes as no surprise then that he started writing when he reached adulthood. The muse did not inspire him much. A small volume, Poems (1934), was published when he was twenty-three. In its aftermath, he came to the conclusion that he was not a poet.
He wrote several novels which he himself described as being too derivative. He resorted to a new tactic and wrote Lord of the Flies (1954) – a classic fictive study in the dark side of human nature. Stevie Smith, literary critic of the Observer, hailed it as “Beautiful and desperate…. something quite out of the ordinary. For this novel, he adopted an unusual perspective that he altered at the end. He went back to his experience with small boys to explore the dark side of humanity, which the war had brought to his attention. This time, Golding felt satisfied with his efforts. Nevertheless, twenty-one publishers rejected the novel before Faber and Faber limited published it in 1954. William Golding was forty-three at the start of his literary career which also involves The Brass Butterfly, a play which was staged at the New Theatre, Oxford.
RESPECT OF SCHOLARS AND INCREASING READERSHIP
In the course of time, a regular stream of novels followed: The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), first published in the United States as The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin, Free Fall (1959) and The Spire (1964). To his credit also goes a collection of essays and book reviews, The Hot Gates and other occasional pieces (1965). By 1964, Golding was already enjoying the respect of scholars. He had an increasing readership and his financial security was guaranteed. He left Bishop Wordsworth’s College and after spending a year as writer-in-residence in Virginia, he devoted himself solely to writing.
However, with the publication of The Pyramid (1967), Golding’s reputation suffered a slight decline. The publication of three novellas in The Scorpion God: Three Short Novels (1971) did not help him to recover his reputation and nor did the twelve-year hiatus before Darkness Visible was published in 1979. That novel, however, attracted favourable critical attention and won for its author the James Tail Black Memorial Prize in 1979. Golding’s fame was on the rise again. Rites of Passage, the first novel of The Sea Trilogy, followed in 1980, winning the prestigious Booker Prize and was praised for Golding’s parody of eighteenth-century prose and for its adaptation of the traditional sea journals. He also won the Booker Prize for his collection of essays, A Moving Target (1982). Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983 and was knighted in 1986.
Before he completed The Sea Trilogy, three other books appeared: A Moving Target (1982), The Paper Men (1984), a novel which was not appreciated by most critics and An Egyptian Journal (1985), an account of a trip to Egypt in the winter of 1984. The publication of Close Quarters in 1987 and Fire Down Below in 1989 completed The Sea Trilogy and confirmed the critical praise won for Rites of Passage. The triology, in fact, reestablished William Golding as a major novelist of the twentieth century.
THE CONDITION OF HUMANKIND
Critics have hailed Golding as an allegorist, a fabulist, and a mythmaker. The citation when he was awarded the Nobel Prize acknowledged the mythic quality of his work, his capacity to illuminate the condition of humankind by means of a concrete story.
In framing the concrete stories, Golding often goes back to literary precedents, both specific works and genres. For Lord of the Flies Golding turns to the genre of boy’s adventure stories and to R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1958), in particular. Yet, whereas Ballantyne’s boys stranded on a desert island, enjoy a pleasant time and live in harmony, Golding’s boys turn into little savages. He thus uses the literary precedent as a starting point for his own unique view.
Golding also draws on his interests and his biography in his works. For example, he grew up near the sea, served in the navy, and has written essays on the pleasure and pain of sailing his own boat. Thus, in The Sea Trilogy, Golding is able to give a first-hand description of the tension on shipboard proximity, the moods of the ocean, and the nautical details with which the crew must be concerned.
Golding has said that although he is, by nature an optimist, he hopes that a defective logic makes of him a pessimist. This view in many ways sums up the themes that are prevalent in his novels. In other words, his logic and observation reveal the dark side of human nature that people prefer to deny or ignore deliberately. There may be hope, some reason for optimism, however, if that dark side can be laid bare and acknowledged, for humankind has the potential for good as well as evil.
The exploration of the dark side of humanity is a major thematic focus in virtually every novel and Golding has often been criticized as limiting himself to this one dimension. Even as he explores human depravity, however, Golding implies or asserts a second theme so dear to me: the value of self-awareness and love as the means of dealing with and facing this inherent evil. In some works, such as Lord of the Flies, mostly depravity is shown. In Darkness Visible, an expression which he borrows from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, however, the potential for good is explored to a greater extent. Matty Windrave, the protagonist, devotes himself to the powers of good and saves one character from his evil impulses.
PESSIMISTIC LOGIC AND OPTIMISTIC NATURE
Criticism has been levelled about Golding’s obscurity. Whatever obscurity exists in his works serves a thematic purpose. He creates a fictional world seen with new eyes from unusual perspectives. The degree to which readers experience a link between the fictional world and the world they function is the degree to which the writer succeeds as a mythmaker.
As such, William Golding writes stories that illuminate a truth about human nature. He sometimes creates these stories by presenting literary precedents in new ways and sometimes applies the concrete details by drawing from his own interests and experiences. The truth he often brings to light is that there is a depravity which the majority of us refuse to counter. The pessimism of such a focus is at times balanced by the possibility that self-awareness empowers goodness in the people. Golding’s pessimistic logic and optimistic nature merge in those novels which present both darkness and potential light.
He died in the summer of 1993 leaving the draft of a novel, The Double Tongue, which was published posthumously.
Bibliography
- Babb, Howards: The novels of William Golding, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, (1970)
- Moody Philippa: Golding: LORD OF THE FLIES, London: Macmillian and Company Limited (1966).
- Biles, Jack I and Robert Evans, eds: William Golding: Some critical considerations, Lexington: University press of Kentucky, (1978).