The Historical Imagination in William Golding’s Later Fiction

Abstract

Golding’s novels of the 1950s are aimed at particular targets, at fictions that reveal a complacent self-regard about the human condition.¹ Lord of the Flies (1954) demolishes the confidence in the virtue and superiority of English schoolboy society in R. M. Ballantyne’s 1857 novel, The Coral Island; The Inheritors (1955) uses as an epigraph a passage from H. G. Wells’s Outline of History underlining the brutish physical and emotional inferiority of man’s evolutionary antecedents. Written in a dense, impacted, metaphorical prose, both these early novels convey an idea of original sin, of intrinsic human depravity, that is not dependent on time or space. The settings of the novels, although physically specific as the tropical beach and jungle in Lord of the Flies or the rocky European wilderness of prehistory in The Inheritors, are historically imprecise and could easily be transposed to other times and places. Only the targets, the moments of unjustifiable confidence, are securely embedded in history. Golding’s third novel, Pincher Martin (1956), has a more specific setting, a rock in the Atlantic during the Second World War. But Golding’s focus remains on the metaphorical implications of the rock, the constant human delusion of a self-generated stability and control, rather than on any historical process that may have contributed causally to human delusion.