GOLDING S PANOPTIC VISION. Estelar

Transcription

1 GOLDING S PANOPTIC VISION

2 131 The Panopticon as defined in the free dictionary is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (opticon) all (pan) prisoners without the incarcerated being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience and Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind "(Encyclopedia). The idea was derived from the plan of a military school in Paris designed for easy supervision. It was initially conceived as a solution to the complexities involved in the handling of large numbers of people when put together. It was intended to be cost effective involving a fewer staff during his time. Design of the structure was such that the watchmen cannot be seen. Thus, all the time watching was not needed as the watched would be watching each other. Bentham devoted a large part of his time and almost his whole fortune to promote the construction of a prison based on his scheme but the design did not come to fruition during his life time, but the design was invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for modern disciplinary societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalize. Foucault proposes that not only prisons but all hierarchical structures like the army, schools, hospitals and factories have evolved through history to resemble Bentham's Panopticon. The notoriety of the design today (although not its lasting influence in architectural realities) stems from Foucault's famous analysis of it (Encyclopedia). The term is used as metaphor in contemporary social circles. It is said that technology has allowed for the deployment of panoptic structures

3 132 invisibly throughout society. Surveillance by closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in public spaces is an example of a technology that brings the gaze of a superior into the daily lives of the populace. Furthermore, a number of cities in the United Kingdom, including Middleborough, Bristol, Brighton and London have recently added loudspeakers to a number of their existing CCTV cameras. They can transmit the voice of a camera supervisor to issue audible messages to the public. Similarly the system of internet practice is suggestive of a panopticon form of observation across the globe. The cases of IP address hacking and stealing others material is now a common practice. Super surveillance systems are now being used in warfare to collect information from the opponent country. Thus, the panoptic vision is a kind of system in technology that describes how computer technology makes work more visible. Critics and scholars have used the term in the context of observing and observed. There are quite a few examples as, The 2009 film "Law Abiding Citizen" uses the panopticon, both architecturally and conceptually, in a Foucauldian interpretation of the power struggle inherent in a system of constant observation (Encyclo. Foucault). Michel Foucault used the term more generally as a metaphor in describing Western society. Angela also includes a critique of the Panopticon prison system during the Siberian segment of Nights at the Circus. In her 2008 young adult novel The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart has the protagonist talk about reading an excerpt from Michel Foucault's book Discipline and Punish in which he "uses the idea of the panopticon as a metaphor for Western society and its emphasis on normalization and observation" (Encyclopedia). She goes on to bring up the panopticon again throughout the course of the book.

4 133 Golding is variously known as fabulist, anti-realist or philosophical novelist, but his work is based on his own war-time experience and powerful observation of irrationality in the world. He draws upon the rich literary tradition only to undo the smug religious and scientific superiority of the age. He undertook a serious Aeschylean preoccupation with human tragedy to get at the root of the disease of humanity instead of describing the symptoms. He has avoided being reductive like Marx, Freud or Darwin in the west and attempted to scrape the labels off things, to take nothing for granted, to show the irrational where it exists (Green78). The task is to break down all illusions and his creed is that know yourself. Hence, self knowledge, the knowledge of god and evil with the natural chaos of existence without forcing an artificial pattern that form part of the whole, the idea of unity, is the only hope for humanity. To explain and expound the validity of the knowledge of good and evil and how are they related as a dichotomy through the select works of Golding is the burden of this thesis. Charles Monteith, the editor at Faber who helped Golding to get his first book published was very critical about certain parts of the Lord of the Flies. He persuaded Golding to scrap all references of god or anything related to the divine especially to scrap the Theophanic (the manifestation of a God) experience of the boy Simon. Golding Conceded to what he said only to get his book published. He was quite unhappy at this as the world would be deprived of his panoptic vision what is saintly figure Simon represented and what was the need of the hour for the world to have a close look at how it s functioning in post modern world of only surface, no depth. He would, much later, explain to an audience that he felt it as a betrayal of the Divine and that he regretted it deeply.

5 134 The Double Tongue, published posthumously, is Golding s answer to many vexed issues in general and his displeasure of scraping of the LF in particular. Arieka, the protagonist in the Double Tongue, as well as Golding, in their eighties remember life from vantage point of lived experiences. The book opens with a strange recollection of her own birth: Blazing light and warmth, undifferentiated and experiencing themselves (1). Golding too claimed he remembered his birth and jotted it down in his journal as a color experience: Red mostly, but everywhere, and a sense of wind blowing, buffering and there was much light. Thus, it is rightly noted that: Both Arieka and Golding, remembering something which cannot be remembered that not only tag them as one of a kind but set them apart in their exceptionality...the question if Golding is Arieka, who is Ionides? is answered as It is of course Charles Monteith, the man who saved Lord of the Flies out of the wastepaper basket. And in that sense The Double Tongue is also Golding s homage to his Muse ( Macumbeira DT). Thus, if Ionides is Monteith then Golding s assessment is right when he says, So Ionides, cynic, atheist, contriver, liar, believed in god! (DT136). A Study of Golding fiction confirms according to Mr. Stone that the author: Is caught in the ineluctable paradox between pessimism and morality; therefore, his view of man combines the duality of his vision. As a pessimist, Golding believes man is selfish, willful, egocentric and morally irresponsible. As a moralist, he perceives a faint hope that a change in behaviour and a re-awakening of moral responsibility is possible if man is forced to see into himself (stone). The series of his novels shows man's destructive actions out of his free will and a possible way out through self-knowledge that comes after huge

6 135 suffering. Golding hopes the reader will be persuaded to alter his own behavior. Matty, as Golding himself said, was the character who binds together so many of his concerns: sanctity, the uncanny, and the numinous. They are found elsewhere in the LF, PM, Rites of Passage and the DT (qtd. in. Golding crisis). The entire episode and characters of the first novel, the Lord of the Flies, were placed in a nameless island and its first in-house reader, Miss Perkins, dismissed it as an "absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless"(William Golding crisis).little did she know that apparently this rubbish and dull story and the unnamed island is a literary panopticon that does not require any name as distinct identity but that creates permanent visibility of the human race as the novel deals with several diverse issues, some explicitly and some in a implicit manner. We are taken as far back as the beginnings of human civilization, a world where there are no laws, no rules and no god. A group of children are dropped in an island. Then the story speaks of an evolution of them in their individual capacity shedding light upon the civilization and the relevance of laws and those who protect these laws. Individual liberty is shown in conflict with individual morality and the laws and its validity stands as a constant questioning overtone. The island, in a way, represents the world at large we inhabit and we get to see ourselves through it. Rare and uncommon people always remain enigmatic and away from the heat and dust of public life. Golding was difficult to understand in his true perspective as all have explained him as a fabulist, myth maker, a religious novelist, writer of dark fields etc. but seldom could any one delve into his central point and real potential that he is a mystic and is content in

7 136 his deepest self, beyond any differentiation; hence a shrouded figure ever, But the Pythia must remain in public a shrouded figure (DT86).It is also in conformity with the central purpose of panoptic vision in which the author creates visibility without being observed. The editors of Faber, especially Charles Monteith and Golding were in disagreement on the edition of the Lord of the Flies as the author, with his spiritual power made the novel a reading for multiple levels and certainly, for the highest level for the highest people with subtle sense of the world. But, more often than not, people of Monteith s sensibility which is certainly erudite in rational world, but coarse for the spiritual realm would be fond of a drama that caters to the need of the mundane people, not the subtle ones. Ionides represents the mundane world of so called erudite people like Monteith, the custodians of the society. The world of Ionides is best explained by the author himself through the voice of Arieka: I began to understand that he was passionately fond of dramatic representation, an art which has its own language, not just that spoken on the stage before an audience but spoken by actors when they are by themselves or accompanied by the technicians of presentation. I began to be concerned that in our dealing with the god or gods we were using a form of speech more appropriate to the modern kind of drama which, I am told, lacked dignity and religious feeling and had interest only in the mundane affairs of men. I began to understand by way of the language which Ionides used how the surroundings of the oracle had altered (DT 96). Thus, it is clear that it is not so easy to speak the language of god or gods and neither it s everybody s take. Language is too subtle to be understood by common people.this does not mean, however, that none should speak it, at least the inspired ones, or else, how the world strides or think of striding

8 137 beyond the binary? He is inspired to speak the god s truth the proof of which lies in his series of fiction beginning from the LF and culminating at the DT which explores the one truth against the back drop of all binary to its dissolution to oneness, from apparent level of differentiation to integration of whole cosmos, not just the universe. When in the second novel, the INH, he spoke of annihilation of all innocence, and rise of crafty Homo sapiens; he certainly lamented the so called myth of progress and that the mundane world fails to understand the Gia theory of common origin of all species let alone the oneness of the universe. Certain situations as technical feature are created for the characters to persuade them to look beyond the binary world.pincher Martin s Lone condition as technical feature of the novel becomes essential for self realization and self-actualization. Boys world was deserted on an island. Lone condition enlarges our vision to see the limits of possibility and man is forced to look beyond. Golding coined the term for James Lovelock's concept of Gaia, and who believed the sea is the mother of all mankind, in the sense that it's from the ocean that life first crawled ashore. Another technical feature that contributes to his fiction's emphasis on enlarging the vision is the subversion of literary models and the use of what is called the confrontation scene. Each fiction originates against another writer's point of view on matters of society, history, morality or religion. For example, Lord of the Flies ironically subverts Ballantyne's Coral Island while Free Fall gives a sensual inversion of the spiritual values of Dante's Vita Nouva. In a situation of such subversion and a sudden twist in the point of view at the end of each fiction, the reader is forced through some ambivalent deliberations while encountering his/her own psychic landscape and thus, the scene, as in the case of Free Fall, brings about conflict of two

9 138 opposing ideologies, between two worlds which occurs in structural terms in the fiction. The panoptic vision can be gauzed as a bird s eye view in his noble lecture: Under some critical interrogation I named myself a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist. I should have thought that anyone with an ear for language would understand that I was allowing more connotation than denotation to the word 'cosmic' though in derivation universal and cosmic mean the same thing. I meant, of course, that when I consider a universe which the scientist constructs by a set of rules which stipulate that this construct must be repeatable and identical, then I am a pessimist and bow down before the great god Entropy. I am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension which the scientist's discipline forces him to ignore (Noble Lecture). Prospero in the Tempest created a panopticon which can be compared and contrasted with Golding s vision. Gonzalez argues: Prospero s attitude equals the role of the colonial ruler and the necromancer. Moreover, his omnipotent, godlike control resembles that described by the French philosopher Michel Foucault as one of the most nightmarish fantasies of power ever designed by the human mind -the metaphor of the panopticon ; a prison where the jailer can see and hear every thing, but, conversely, he can not be seen or perceived by the prisoners (Gonzalez). But the irony is that Prospero himself was a prisoner as if a prisoner of his owns self as he was compelled to be in the island. Prospero s invisibility transformed to his chief sentinel, Ariel, who represents panopticon symbolizing absolute control of power. Prospero s panopticon was created for a desire of seeing without being seen where as Golding s

10 139 panopticon exposed every human being in this unnamed island, we call the world.all the monstrous figure in island literature like Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, and the Lord of the Flies have been subjected to a process of educational metamorphosis by imperial or colonial power which provided them with the values of political correctness but ultimately the same value betrays their masters. The Naval Officer who comes to rescue the boys from the island is a pun used by Golding showing the irony of rescue as he is about to go for his mission of human slaughter in the ongoing world war II and he represents the politically correct civilized society of Europe. Caliban s divided self reminds the double speak of Ionides in the Double Tongue. He is colonized and feels otherness ; otherwise he is a natural man representing the renaissance origin. But he is fed with the dream of civilisation and education by so called scientist s thirst for forbidden knowledge (Gonzalez).The world began to worship the science as the post Darwinian God and the result is loss of innocence for the Homo sapiens (INH), and for Ionides, cynic, atheist, contriver, liar, believed in god! (DT136). William Golding creates a mighty religious dimension in his perception of the world which he expresses through certain prominent protagonists beginning from Simon (LF) and ending with Arieka (DT). He works with the myth of a Fall. The Inheritors shows an original state of innocence in the history of mankind. The Fall came with the more rational homo sapiens. The aggressive intelligence, the power-hungry self-assertion and the overweening individualism are the source of evil and violence. But both the forces of good and evil spring from human heart and a visibility, what he understood, was the need of the hour so that a constant watch could keep us corrected.

11 140 Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of English schoolboys marooned on a tropical island after their plane is shot down during a war. Though the novel is fictional, its exploration of the idea of human evil is at least partly based on Golding s experience with the real-life violence and brutality of World War II. Free from the rules and structures of civilization and society, the boys on the island in Lord of the Flies descend into savagery. As the boys split into factions, some behave peacefully and work together to maintain order and achieve common goals, while others rebel and seek only anarchy and violence. In his portrayal of the small world of the island, Golding paints, A broader visibility of the fundamental human struggle between the civilizing instinct-the impulse to obey rules, behave morally, and act lawfully-and the savage instinct-the impulse to seek brute power over others, act selfishly, scorn moral rules, and indulge in violence. (Cox 116). The Lord of the Flies in the post-war years dramatizes the nature of world and its functioning through a pack of British boys from a Cathedral Choir-school on a desert island who, gradually falls away from the genteel civilization that has so far shaped it and regress into dirt, barbarism, and murder. Golding s concern is to present us with a vision of human nature and also the nature of the world which we inhabit through the experiences of this school children, letting them work out archetypal patterns of human society ( Cox 116). The island itself is boat-shaped, and the children typify all mankind on their journey through life. By isolating the boys on the island, Golding probes the deep inner recesses of human representatives to show the instincts and impulses of the adult world outside the island. At an extreme situation man reverts to his natural behavior; all the basic instincts like hunger, passion, greed and fear assist themselves at the cost of his rationality and morality. Faced by primeval conditions, the boys soon

12 141 discard their civic habits learnt from home and adults society. They turn fierce and aggressive and more sinister elements take control over their nature. In the absence of any check system by the adult world, they themselves grow into a microcosm of the adult world displaying their instinctual evil and guilt. In the opening scenes, the boys are on an Edenic island with the green shadows, palm and coconut saplings, lagoon, little breezes and plenty of food and water. Ralph and Piggy are in rapture with the glamour of this new found paradise. The paradise, for Ralph, was the imagined but never fully realized place leaping into real life (LF: 21). As the events unfold, we see that fruit-eating commune on the Eden island subverts into totalitarian butchery. Both order and disorder are in constant conflict throughout the novel. The conch symbolizes the notion of order which heralds formal meetings. We can use this to call the others. Have a meeting (LF: 22). Thus the conch becomes identified with its procedure, with democracy and the right to free speech (weeks: 18). The symbol of conch not only helps in social purpose but also traces the trajectory of plot and establishes character. Piggy is a kind of father figure (Oldsey: 178) as against simply a fat boy for, he counsels common sense and has regards for order and authority. His point of view stands like rational humanism. It is he who is first excited by the conch, gives the idea of the meeting and makes suggestions for establishing a civilized society. The littluns are terrified by the night time vision of a snake-thing or beastie. Now children s own irresponsibility and ignorance turn the Eden into a place of terror, liberate a power that is more and more savage and that power appeals to something savage in the boys themselves (Weeks:165)

13 142 Ralph, who at the first instance has brought the scattered groups together, is now makes a desperate attempt to build the shelter with an urgency of home ; his instincts are to ward off terror by the social security. On the other hand, Jack finds a renewed spirit of hunting, a kind of instincts that lie hidden in everyman. For him the forest is not only a place to hunt but also a place where one feels hunted. He reverts to a state of savagery and hence his passion for hunting overrides the idea of rescue as he utters, rescue? Yes, of course! All the same, I d like to catch a pig first. (LF: 67). They look at each other, baffled, in love and hate and share two continents of experience, and feeling, unable to communicate (LF: 70). Ralph s treasure island begins to break up into blood shed. S.J. Boyd views that, the boys regress to what might be called a state of nature, but the experience of this is not of any earthly paradise but a hell on earth (Monod: 138). Why the things break up is what Golding has made us see in the actions of three main characters, their motives and all these are held in the programme of the book for readers to unfold and explain. The world of Ralph and Jack are mutually opposed in their attitude and vision of life. Ralph lives in a world of Longing and baffled common sense whereas, Jack s is the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill (LF: 89). The physical condition of the boys also degenerated in absence of balanced diet and lack of toilet facilities. The littluns suffer from stomach- aches and a sort of diarrhoea (LF: 74) and look filthily dirty (LF: 75). The littluns are now overwhelmed by horror and brutality. In their howl, they were reminded of their personal sorrow; sorrow that was universal. (LF: 108). What is traced here is the degeneration not only in the boys but also, on a deeper level, in the constitution of man s psyche, in mankind s

14 143 essential illnesses (Johnston: 51). Vergenia Tiger observes that: There is no essential difference between the island world and the adult one and it is the burden of the fable s structure to make it clear that the children s experiment on the island has its constant counterpart in the world outside (51). Therefore, the novel is suggestive of large scale human values which are universal. Golding himself, having survived the world war II as a naval officer, is quite understandably concerned with the nature of man in the world outside and the root of the disease man suffers from. It is the Great War that has led the crash-landing at the desert island. The dead parachutist, the symbol of decay and disorder of the atomic holocaust from the adult world intensifies their evil when the world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away (LF: 113). Finally, the naval officer arrived at the island at the close of the novel as an adult representative to put a check on the present Savagery and to take them back to the adult world. Thus, the dramatic episodes of the boys world can be viewed as microcosm of the adult world, which is destroying itself. The boys will be back again to a world ravaged by war, the terrible symbol of evil. So the boys are not in fact rescued but are on a journey towards the fulfillment of Simon s prophecy: You ll get back to where you came from (LF: 137). This is perennial theme of Golding s novel which he presents in juvenile terms in a deliberate setting of RM Ballantyne s Coral Island. His intertextuality is both to present the reality as well as to challenge the smug religious and racial superiority. In a long pedigree of island literature from Cruso to Coral Island we find a tendency to present human nature at an extreme: In More s utopian fantasy and in Aldous Huxley s Island, we see human nature and society at their best (Boyd: 5). Golding re-

15 144 evaluates these earlier texts to dehypnotize our sense of reality in the face of the horrors of Belsen and Dresden. Ballantyne s book is optimistic in an imperialist, Victorian manner for evil in his book lies firmly outside the English school boys and made manifest by savage, black cannibals. When Jack says: After all we re not savages. We re English, and the English are best at everything, or the British officer at the end remarks, I should have thought that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show (LF. P. 248), Golding scraps the label off and parodies Ballantyne s. The false optimistic portraits, which equate English with good and foreign with evil, are overturned to suggest that evil lies everywhere and it resides within humanity. External evil is a projection of an inner evil. Thus Golding offers a critique of Victorian Imperialism (Weeks: 4) which Chinua Achebe echoes in his criticism of the heart of Darkness, beneath their veneer of civilization, the Europeans are, the novel tells us, as barbaric as the Africans the novel portrays Africans as a prehistoric mass of frenzied, howling, incomprehensible barbarians..." (Tyson ). The theme of the Free Fall is made more significant by the two worlds of the title. They possess, both theological and scientific connotations (Monod: 135). The theological aspects predominate over the scientific, which serves only as a metaphor. The central problems of the narrator, Sammy, are those of free will, free choice and of the free fall - the fall of man, the fall of everyman. Sammy repeatedly asks himself the same questions: when did he lose or alienate his freedom, when did he fall from childhood innocence? The protagonist s name is also constituted of dualities. Samuel is the name of an Old Testament prophet, while Mountjoy clearly possesses sexual connotations. This tension between the religious and the carnal, the spirit and the flesh, provides the central

16 145 dynamic of Free Fall. The dual perspective is also clear in the phrase free fall suggesting that an object obeys the law of gravity and falls freely, but it also suggests theological fall of humanity. The novel moves on two interrelated quests: the quests for the point where this monstrous world of my present consciousness began (FF. P. 78) and another significant quest of the decision made freely that cost me my freedom (FF: 7). In other words, it is an exploration of his past in search of a pattern of Becoming governed by choice. In the words of Weekes, revelation and recognition of Being, then, give way to exploration, explanation, discovery of Becoming (165). Golding as a myth maker explores the tension between Being and Becoming and designs a form to explore the nature of looking for truth. Sammy goes for a discovery what is already known. But the known facts infect put on a new look as Sammy moves from adolescence to youth, from innocence to guilt and finally stands confused finding no bridge. The Free Fall is contrasted with Dante s work deliberately for creating a vision as Dante s attitude seems to proclaim no devil, devoid of any baseness and any sordid episode. The adolescent Sammy, who can remember a time in childhood when the eye of innocence transformed a squalid slum into a world of beauty and his Eden (FF: 20) now, fails to realize the tragic cost of relinquishing innocence and its world after his experience of sex. His world secularized: his love for Beatrice, or for anyone else, is not ennobled or given meaning by the love of God but has become a poor replacement for the religious sense he has lost. He needs therefore the tickling pleasure, the little death shared or self inflicted was neither irrelevant nor sinful but the alter of whatever shoddy temple was left to us. (FF: 108). Virginia tiger comments: whereas to Dante Beatrice becomes an instrument of contemplation, exaltation, and finally salvation to Sammy she is merely an instrument of lust (Boyd: 67). Beatrice is a coy

17 146 and religious girl who doesn t respond to Sammy s sexual frenzies. He abuses her sexually as she fails to fulfill his lust. He desecrates the object of his worships the way he has done by spitting on the alter and earns severe self-desecration. His love is earthbound. In Hot Gates, Golding argues that the basic nature of man is his propensity to evil (87).He believes that the average man is sick and morally diseased. He is disillusioned about the idea of perfectibility of social man after the Great War. He further stresses that the real nature of man is ignored and hidden by those who drapes man s history as steady climb up the evolutionary ladder towards sweetness and light. In theological terms, his view of man s imperfectability is familiar as the fall of man. Certainly this view seems to be pessimistic as the novel enacts the theme but it is far from being depressing novel. The narrative momentum on one hand takes the readers to the inevitable catastrophe in the boys society and on the other hand it awakens us all to the knowledge and deeper understanding of mankind s essential illness. The author by depicting the original sin does not say, Something startlingly original but something which has to be restated by each generation in its own terms (Fleck: 190). In Golding s world, the Christian version of man s depravity and limitations still convey a great deal that is relevant and permanent. They do not convey everything as a solution, rather, it is an awareness that can sustain the civilization; it is to: acknowledge the presence of this darkness in one s own heart- a necessary but devastating condition of growing up, of becoming fully and yet flawedly human (Boyd:1). It is for this reason that he is an allegorical writer. The novel is a deliberate translation of a proposition into the dramatic art and this thesis leaves no doubt that the novel is a fable (Peter: 37).The fiction sound at times as fables but the author worked out carefully

18 147 and has expressed disquiet at the term fable, for a fable speaks of some kind of moral appendage and it is not an inherent structure of the book. He wants to substitute the word myth for fable and says: I do feel fable as being an invented thing on the surface whereas myth comes out from the roots of things in the ancient existence, the whole meaning of life, and is something which sense of being the key to experience as a whole (Kirszner:882).A close examination of the novel supports this view as it moves the reader into recognition of nature of existence and individual location in terms of the micro and macrocosmic world. The genesis of myth is generally obscure. Myth generally contains truths that link people together. It also attempts to explain phenomena that human beings care about regardless of when and where they live. The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983 was awarded to William Golding "for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today (Noble Prize). Golding s island world, the archetypal images cut across cultural and racial boundaries and touch us on a deeper level for our understanding of the world. Golding is out of step with that of his contemporary writers to move beyond the parochial world and to present the works of universal applicability or myths of total explanation (Fleck: 53). He realizes that the present world is altered by new knowledge. The pattern of human behavior is markedly cynical. The myth of progress has failed; but the rival myth of necessary evil and universal guilt has come back without bringing God with it. Hence, in Golding s book one cannot expect any highbrow modern writing canvassing false superiority. The dilemma of modern man and modern crisis has rotted in his mind and thus new myth has put down roots.

19 148 What Golding has called the terrible disease of being human in The Hot Gates is the terrible ignorance. Vivekananda in his discourse of Vedanta has clearly stated that, we have no theory of evil. We call it ignorance (Vedanta: 61).If we go by the law of nature, we see man is a tiny boat in a tempest, rises one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and the next moment dashes down into a yawning chasm, thus rolling to and fro as a helpless wreck at the mercy of good and bad actions. Hence, self knowledge is paramount importance to guard against evil. Golding is a man in search of cosmological truth. For him it is the ultimate reality that counts irrespective of any labels or artificial pattern. The whole moral frame work of his novels is conceived in terms of traditional Christian symbolism. As mankind is subject to both good and bad, good is equally a part of the whole process of our action, an inclusive human concept. Golding has shown the human evil more prominently what sometimes looks pessimistic for he believes: Good can look after itself. Evil is the problem (Green: 79). The dead parachutist in the Lord of the Flies is the result of man s guilt in his developing consciousness. Golding has shown in the inheritors that the gift of progressivism of evolutionary science is guilt. The scientific and intellectual superiority of the Home sapiens over his simian victims is precisely measured by the guilt which dominates life and are relatively absent from his predecessor s. The parachutist is one among the innocent tribes of the pre historic man who is exterminated and stands as a sad symbol of scientific progress. But the reality is a regression from Christian values to the law of jungle, to the ruthless and greedy thrusts for domination and exploitation. Golding s real power has been his mythopoeic obsession to lay bare the Original Sin the evil of pride, greed, cruelty etc. in the best of human

20 149 actions. We do not require a doctrine to remind us of man s cruelty and barbarism; what we require is a doctrine that questions such evil and redeems our prime innocence and goodness. Golding shakes us through our bones through his mythological enactments to look at the ways how human commits evil. His doctrine of original sin may be disputable, but what can not be denied is the depth and seriousness of his purpose of reawakening us to our self - knowledge of good and evil, of right purpose for a new beginning. When one of piggy s glasses is broken; it bears a metaphorical meaning that his appeal to man s rationality, and his acceptance of science as providing an ultimate answer have one vision blinded. Fleck compares his attitude that everything is susceptible to reason with the mindset that was popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before it was shattered by two world wars (196).James Frazer also herds its optimistic view on the triumphs of science that, the future is bound up with the fortunes of sciences, and that every obstacle placed in the way of scientific discovery is a wrong to humanity ( 132).But we see the science has brought an atomic war as it is controlled by a corrupt mankind and the boys are isolated in the island. Golding is never against the science as he admires Copernicus for his inclination towards mysticism. He attempts to uncover the darkness of man s reason and faith as he makes it clear in Darkness Visible that darkness is man shaped and reconciliation is possible which is an idea of unity hence, piggy with his one lens broken, which is dried reason, fails to bring back order and keep himself alive. His tragic death shows the inadequacy of the rational mind as a total human response to life. Despite the warning of the Lord of the Flies about what will happen to him, he bears his pathetic death. Simon s life and death are an imitation of Christ on whom the boys re enact the crucifixion of Jesus

21 150 Christ. He is considered by critics as scapegoat against what Golding replied, a saint is not just a scapegoat a saint is someone who voluntarily embraces his fate Simon is somebody who exists not for himself, but only as a part of a pattern. (Bergonzi: ). Simon allowed himself to be killed only to save mankind from its guilt. His life and death do not convert the boys world to instant goodness but he is at least one good character who rises above ignorance to illuminating knowledge, brings back hope among the boys in the pervasive gloom of the island and shows in Christian terms that there is possibility of redemption for mankind. His novel is absolutely optimistic and moves always through the tension between optimism and pessimism, between hope and despair and fills our heart with essentially goodness and redemption as well. Ralph, the fair boy, whose eye proclaim no devil is essentially a good boy. His efforts to organize the scattered group, civic values and to keep a flame of fire going for rescue are his constant endeavor to be sincere and honest. We loathe the blood lust and evil of Jack and his hunters but they too are not out and out villains. We are aware that at the outset Jack finds a piglet caught in a curtain of creepers, draws his knife with a flourish but eschews: because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood. (LF: 41). What drives him to primitive behavior is his, irresponsibility and ignorance liberate or power that is more and more savage and that power appeals to something savage in the boys themselves (Weeks:40). Further, when the hunters go wild, paint their faces and laugh in a blood thirsty snarling ; Jack is Liberated from shame and self consciousness. (LF: 80). His attempt to hide his shame and self consciousness shows his innate goodness veiled under temporary eclipse and can readily shine under the tree of knowledge. He, in fact, shines

22 151 through when in the presence of the British officer at the end, he cries and sobs and, he gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. (LF: 248). Ralph and piggy established the democratic system in the island yet that gradually turns into an absolute monarchy. Interestingly the boys prefer Jack s tyranny more to Ralph s tribe. Jack is fair enough in his effort to provide meat for the boys; quells the quarreling boys and keep them active and in order. Hobbe s political theory of human fractiousness and a need for a monarch to control exactly corresponds to the boys situation. Golding here makes us see that man s attraction and prosperity to evil make greater leap than it is towards good. On the contrary we try to desist from goodness and even with all our might we try to annihilate the good. Secular world of Sammy, where the only certain good is mask or salt- sex, there is a world with moral certainties, that there is sin and that one must face its terrible consequences. One consequence of his sin is reduction of Beatrice to animal level. Sammy is guilty of treating Beatrice as something less than human being. He not only abuses her physically but also tortures her by catechism to elicit some intellectual response. It is painful to see how the innocent is tortured even though she is sincere and devoted. After she is abandoned, she writes a painful letter asking Sammy s forgiveness with a touch of her concern for him. She writes, We are out of danger (FF: 130) with a cross at the left hand of the letter. It might be a symbolic language that she has not conceived or it might be she is crucified. Like the Christ she does not blame anybody, only bears the brunt. Boyed observes that, Beatrice the rather dim, religious girl is the novel s holy fool, the innocent who is crucified for Sammy s sin (72). She offers her fool s wisdom, her key word may be. Sammy recognizes this little wisdom: for may be was sign of all our times. We are certain of

23 152 nothing. (FF: 121). But Sammy fails to internalize that grand word of a growing uncertainty. Again, Sammy suffers in P.O.W. Camp being horribly interrogated by the Gestapo. He realizes that his role with Beatrice is reversed in the prison cell. The boy who was tortured by Miss Pringle and learned to loathe himself, who tortured and threaten to kill Beatrice, is now tortured by professional psychologist. It is a grim vision of a world in which self loathing, guilt and evil forces become the order of the day. Arnold Johnston comments that, Sammy must wait until his imprisonment by Halde to realize that his true labyrinth, like Pagan Daedalus s is self created and like Dante s inferno, exists within himself (Johnston:61). Finally, the panoptic vision the author left behind is a constant watchdog that is reminding the humanity at large of its nature being and directing toward ever perfecting height: Evidently age need not wither us nor custom stale our infinite variety. Let us be, for a while, not serious but considerate. I myself face another danger. I do not speak in a small tribal language as it might be one of the six hundred languages of Nigeria. Of course the value of any language is incalculable. Your Laureate of 1979, the Greek poet Elytis, made quite clear that the relative value of works of literature is not to be decided by counting heads. It is, I think, the greatest tribute one can pay to your committees that they have consistently sought for value in a work without heeding how many people can or cannot read it. The young John Keats spoke of Greek poets who "died content on pleasant sward, leaving great verse unto a little clan". Indeed and indeed, small can be beautiful. To quote yet another poet - prose writer Ben Jonson said:

24 153 "It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be, Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald and sere(noble lecture). Golding s setting in Pincher Martin is not remote or exotic and it has a social dimension. Golding in an interview states that, this time I want to show the patternlessness of life before we impose our pattern on it (Green: 92). Naturally, the author is confronted with the creative impasse of either to come to terms with humanity, or to ignore it. However, the novel explores the two counter posed worlds of human awareness the physical universe and the metaphysical, the world of science and God. The novel has much in common with its predecessor, particularly with Pincher Martin, but it is also different from earlier three novels Golding s panoptic vision is to show the universality of the human condition through the series of his fiction. Golding s concern is to present us with a vision of human nature and also the nature of the world which we inhabit through the experiences of this school children, letting them work out archetypal patterns of human society (Cox: 116). In case of the Inheritors the author has used a historical setting to draw parallels to the present time. The theme is shown as the, line of darkness which is modern man s inheritance; our ability to perpetuate horrors upon our fellow man and mistreat the world we live in seen as the price of evolutionary progress (Thehwa). Apparently his fiction are dystopian as there is no idyll for respite and day dreaming in a utopia. The dream of a perfectly harmonious world may be a beautiful but will quickly turn into, what the author understood a nightmare. Scientific progress and its concomitant Enlightment have brought rationality and reasonability on western mind. The emphasis on

25 154 logic and reason is one of the golden threads running through Western world from the time of Plato to the modern period. Reason is the main cause of western scientific progress and the Greeks, especially Plato, Aristotle etc, handed down a systematic philosophy for maintaining balance of the science and humanities. The Enlightenment heightened the belief and dependence in reason as a universal human quality so much that we have witnessed two great wars. Ibn Warraq argues that the golden threads of Western culture can have negative side effects: It could be argued that the three defining characteristics of the West rationalism, universalism (with its underlying or implied liberalism), and self-criticism can lead to their opposites, or to other undesirable consequences (qtd.in Cult of reason).hence, Golding creates a parable about the cost of evolutionary progress through The Inheritors which has shown the encounter that took place 2700 years ago between the Neanderthals and a group of Homo sapiens and the result is that innocence is gone for good. When the Neanderthal family reaches their peaceful place at summer grounds after an arduous journey, they discover the new people. Their language is ethereal like signals so strong that only the innocents could grasp it. But the crafty Homo sapiens were lying in wait to kill the adults and snatch the babies. The nonviolent clan looks upon the new people with great love and affection the way they themselves are connected with each other. Ultimately, the damage is done by the sticks against them taking away the small baby, Liku. The fiction is multilayered and echoes the Lord of the Flies letting us see a universal mythic sensibility. Annis in his review commented, The new humans have eaten the apple of knowledge; they have become selfaware, separate. Cast outside the circle of oneness that connects other living things; they fear the very world they live in and destroy all around them as

26 155 they attempt to control it. We are the inheritors. Our inheritance, stained by the dark sin of Cain and bought by our brothers' blood, is the Earth. Lok is a point of view protagonist through whose eye the story unfolds. When the Homo sapiens celebrate their kill and bewildered Lok struggles to comprehend these predators; they are like a famished wolf in the hollow of a tree (INH: 83). Golding s panopticon reflects skillfully the play of the binaries of good and evil, and the nature of man starting from the Lord of the Flies to successive ventures. Ralph, who represents innocence, is manipulated by the other boys like jack who represent society and the descendants of the Homo sapiens. Here, we pay the price of our progress of evolution and not the meek, but the rational, scientific man inherits the earth. The rescue of the boys (LF) is ultimately a gimmick, a trick, and a means of cutting down or softening the implications built up within the structure of the boys society on the island. Golding very skillfully brings this rescue operation as a pun on the ignorant world as Golding said, The officer having interrupted a manhunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruise which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser (Baker: 63)? The rescuer here is a man of war, the same breed of the Homo sapiens of The Inheritors and Jack s tribe (LF) who is enmeshed in the same evil. Golding implies that the long course of evolution has brought no fundamental change in human nature. We are today essentially what we were in the past. The innocent Neanderthals perished and the Homo sapiens, a dubious and evil people survived. Darkness is the root of our being. Golding humorously, yet poignantly uttered the same symbol during his noble lecture: your first view of me, white bearded and ancient, may have turned that gloom into profound dark; dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of

27 156 noon, irrecoverably dark, total eclipse. But the case is not as hard as that (Noble lecture). The matter of rescue further points as to what extent human being could be rescued. The island is a microcosm of the paradise for the boys world. The same is put on fire for killing Ralph and eventually the perpetrators also would be destroyed in the all encompassing fire what they never realised. Then, who rescues who is a pertinent question. The Naval officer s remarks on first seeing the condition of the pack of British boys on the island is worth noting as he said that the British boys should have behaved properly. But the boys regressed to barbarism as the hold of the coir school lost meaning against the burgeoning evil force and its concomitant power in most of them. Unlike the rules of God in the Garden of Eden, the island paradise was ruled by Beelzebub, the Satan. Internal evil is in sharp contrast with the external fear on the island. They keep haunting for the unknown beast. Jack and his followers paint their faces to liberate themselves from shame and self-consciousness.finally, Jack the autocratic leader of the new tribe of hunters organise a violent ritual slaughter of a sow and places it on a sharpened stake as an offering to the unknown beast which becomes the icon of their totem or the Beast-God: This head is for the beast. It s a gift (LF: 169). Naturally, the Theurgy of propitiating such demoniac god would bring blood-lust ruining the paradise for ever. Jack tries to appease the beast with the pig s flesh as he says, the symbol of this propitiation is the stick sharpened at both ends, the support of the totem, Lord of the Flies. It is a weapon that suggests that the user can kill and be killed. It is also a symbol which reminds us of the self defeating nature of atomic war in the opening chapter. While the children impatiently yearn for rescue, a sign from the adult world appears on the mountain top. It is a symbol which persists