The
easy obviousness, perhaps because more overt and more confrontational, of the
conflict between Jack and Ralph in Lord
of the Flies must clearly be
the reason why the novel is oftener determined as polarizing into two poles of
antagonism, with Ralph at one end and Jack Merridew at the other. Some readings
in fact have gone so far as suggesting that Jack is not just only Ralph’s direct
antagonist but his very antithesis too, ‘being an epitome of perverse humanity,
and appealing only to primal desires of the other boys by his leadership
temperament, his violence and irrationality,’ leading them ultimately into
evolving a tribe of blood-thirsty barbarians. But this present effort of reading
proposes to establish that the opposition poles of the story in reality
resolves into Jack (and all the other boys including even Ralph) at the one
end, and Piggy (and Simon, and then again Ralph—Ralph’s ambivalent career will
be very shortly demonstrated) at the other; and that it is in the tension
between these poles that the tragedy of the narrative is to be located, at
least insofar as Piggy immediately strikes as, by reason of constituting
basically a minority of one at his own extreme of these conflicting poles,
Northrop Frye’s character who ‘becomes isolated from his society’ (Anatomy of Criticism 35) and is
so marked with tragedy. And what happens in the event is that other characters,
Simon and Ralph, who respectively by ‘convenience’ and ‘sympathy’ (Foucault, The Order
of Things) finally have course to be drawn towards Piggy’s end of the
poles become expectedly sharers in what may well have strictly been Piggy’s
tragedy. For before what must be accounted these two’s ‘attempt to divert it’
is ‘implicate[d]…/ At the day of consummation,’ (Eliot, The Family Reunion) the tragedy is wholly and strictly Piggy’s; and
it is not because of anything he has or has not done. This tragedy, his
isolation, seems to attach to Piggy as a sort of personal appurtenance, as if
the very ‘mode of his existence comprises his tragedy’ with the result that
this ‘character’ or the reader for that matter, ‘cannot pinpoint the source of
his suffering, whether it results from the structure of the world around him or
from his inner being’ (Akwanya 1998: 119).
So does the novel begin with Piggy’s
suffering and isolation always already trailing him much like ‘his school
sweater’ which ‘he had taken off…and trailed it now from one hand’ (Lord of
the Flies 6), his sorry career always already sticking to him with much
the same ominous defiance with which ‘his grey shirt stuck to him’ (6). With
this full weight of his fate already upon his shoulders, he is seen so early in
the narrative
clambering
heavily among the creepers and broken trunks when a bird, a vision of red and
yellow, flashed upwards with a witch-like cry; and this cry was echoed by
another. ‘Wait a minute,’ the voice said. ‘I got caught up’ (6).
This
witch-cry is significant in especially its rather foreboding similitude to
Piggy’s own ‘“I can hardly move with all this creeper things”’ (6) just shortly
after—as though the witch-cry I got caught
up were some uncanny projection of a
selfsame anguished cry from some deepest recesses of Piggy’s unconscious. For
by and by the density of the creeper things is to intensify symbolically for
him so that he no more can make his way through and is effectively ‘caught up’
in the isolation that is to become his tragedy.
Between Ralph and Simon, two of whom
as already mentioned come finally to become ‘caught up’ with Piggy in his
tragedy by their identification with him, becoming partakers of his isolation,
Ralph is the one who knows the brunt of this tragedy in less absolute terms,
and is not completely crushed under its weight as Piggy and Simon are, but
manages to barely escape with his hunted life. This is not wholly unprecedented
total if it be considered that Ralph’s movement towards Piggy’s end of the poles
of opposition is severely ambivalent, with the result that he is now there, now
at Jack’s end. Perhaps this is because Ralph’s mode of identification with
Piggy is not as radical as Simon’s being as already suggested by the similitude
of ‘convenientia’ (Foucault 21) which
permits the transference of properties and influences between things only so long
as there is ‘convenience,’ that is, proximity, between the things in question.
It can, therefore, be argued that Ralph’s dalliance between the two poles of
antagonism is what ensures that his identification with Piggy is not finally consummate,
and thus is he saved, albeit only barely, from complete catastrophe such as
Piggy and Simon know.
On occasions, in fact, what is
manifested is Ralph’s positively treating Piggy as the other who must by all means be kept at bay, which posture inevitably
even if unconsciously locates him at Jack’s end of the pole. And Ralph is
already doing this even before the other boys appear on the scene; for example
when he and Piggy meet in chapter one, Piggy initiates a gesture of comradeship
by asking him his name which he supplies. But contrary to Piggy’s expectation
of a reciprocity of this gesture, what is narrated is that ‘The fat boy waited
to be asked his name in turn but this proffer of acquaintance was not made’(9).
Rather after Piggy gets over this initial disappointment, and tells Ralph
‘confidentially’ that ‘I don’t care what they call me…so long as they don’t
call me what they used to call me at school’ (12), and still in confidence
supplies him the said unwanted name ‘Piggy,’ Ralph goes right precisely on to
call him that, causing the return of ‘The expression of pain and
concentration…to Piggy’s face’ (13). Thus does it happen that Piggy’s real name
is never learned, and regardless his striving to prevail on Ralph to at least
keep this ‘Piggy’ appellation to himself, the latter lets the thing out without
so much of a provocation when the conch has finally brought the other boys
along. The point being made is that though now and again Ralph may be seen to
be sympathetic towards Piggy, for which reason as is being argued Piggy’s
tragedy also touches off willy-nilly on him, portions of his sympathy yet
remain with Jack’s end of the poles, for which other reason he is not as wholly
consumed in the tragedy as Simon, and of course Piggy himself.
In a sense what is played out in the
full unfolding of the narrative is this initial tragic isolation of Piggy
manifest in this early meeting with Ralph, which only as it were intensifies in
pathos as Piggy strives vainly to enter the discriminating fellowship of the boys. For as Akwanya has indicated
[i]n
a narrative, what comes before does not simply precede, it brings about in some
way what comes after….[]because a narrative is grasped at the integrational
level, which means that no element may be left. All together make up the
narrative…(Verbal Structures 136-7).
Thus
is the movement of Piggy’s isolation already inscribed from the earliest moment
of Ralph not reciprocating his gesture of acquaintanceship picked up again
after he lets out Piggy’s name despite the latter’s hearty warning, as
A
storm of laughter arose and even the tiniest child joined in. For the moment
the boys were a closed circuit of sympathy with Piggy outside: he went very
pink, bowed his head and cleaned his glasses again (Lord of the Flies
27).
The
thing is picked up yet again where the boys have settled to look up the land on
which they are marooned to ascertain that it indeed is an island. Piggy tries
to enter the number of those for this recce, and is again staunchly kept out
despite his justifiable enough remonstration that ‘I was with [Ralph] when he
found the conch. I was with him before anyone else was’ (31). And it is significant
that Ralph again in this another instance is who initiates the movement of
keeping Piggy out:
Piggy stirred.
‘I’ll come.’
Ralph turned to him.
‘You’re no good on a job like this.’
‘All the same—’
‘We don’t want you,’ said Jack, flatly.
‘Three’s enough’ (31).
And on and on does this go that
presently it begins to be more manifest that this story’s conflict is not so
much between Jack and Ralph as between the former and Piggy. For the next thing
known this antagonism has gained even the initial more overt, confrontational
proportions easily decipherable in that between Ralph and Jack, as for instance
at the scene where Piggy seems hesitant to lend his glasses for the making of
the fire, whereupon Jack pounces on him ‘snatch[ing] the glasses off his face’
(55-6). In the event Piggy is described as ‘wilted’ (58). Elsewhere he ‘opened
his mouth to speak, caught Jack’s eyes and shut it again’ (58). Yet in another
Piggy’s voice is ‘lifted into the whine of virtuous recrimination. They stirred
and began to shout him down’ (60). All the time Piggy’s agonized solitariness,
his anguished apartness from these boys, with all the pain and suffering that must
follow it cannot be missed. And when later the boys so fuse into an indivisible
body at the lynching of Simon, this ‘shout[ing]…down’ of Piggy by them as this
whole organic body is veritably replayed.
Other factors of course have entered
into the inscription of Piggy’s isolation inexpungeably, such as his corporeal
shortcomings—his asthma, his corpulence, his poor-sight—and even his rather
exceptional deep thought habits, by which he is easily the most intellectual of
the boys. For though Ralph is ready initially to dismiss this latter trait and
the ‘matter-of-fact ideas’ that proceed from it as ‘dull’ (91), he is finally
forced in some instance of extreme agony of thought ‘to adjust his values’ and
concede it to him that ‘Piggy could think’ and that he himself ‘can’t’
regardless his being ‘chief’:
Piggy
could…go step by step inside that fat head of his, only Piggy was no chief. But
Piggy, for all his ludicrous body, had brains. Ralph was a specialist in
thought now, and could recognize thought in another (110).
And
Piggy does bring to bear on a number of decisive issues on the island these
brains of his—he it is who puts it into Ralph’s head after they find the conch
to try and summon all the others trapped on the island with it; he it is who
comes up with the idea of improvising a time-piece in the guise of a sundial so
they can keep track of time; and he only ‘could have the intellectual daring to
suggest moving the fire from the mountain’ (185-6) following Samneric’s fervid
account of their vision of the Beast up there (142). And it is easily arguable
that Piggy (which includes Simon) remains the lone defiant factor of
civilization and culture (that is society as such) in this jungle, so that with
his exclusion, the boys too know a suchlike tragedy by degeneration into
bare-faced savagery with the law of tooth and claw henceforth holding sway.
This in fact is how Piggy’s tragedy finally too becomes theirs, for as Otto
Reinert is said to have observed, ‘The saint’s tragedy is less the saint’s own
than the world’s, which in ignorance deprives itself of its saviour’ (qtd. in
Akwanya 1998:24). For where the facility of Piggy’s brains may have been
expected to gain him the boy’s ‘friendliness[] [t]here had grown up tacitly
among the biguns the opinion that piggy was an outsider’ (91) instead. Thus is
Piggy’s tragedy sealed, and by the same token theirs.
By contrast Simon’s own identification
with Piggy is more radical and consummate than Ralph’s; and this is quite
simply by reason of Simon’s mode of identification, as already suggested, with
Piggy being by the similitude of ‘Sympathy’ which Foucault accounts for as
an
instance of the Same so strong and so
insistent that it will not rest content to be merely one of the forms of
likeness; it has the dangerous power of assimilating,
of rendering things identical to one another, of mingling them, of causing
their individuality to disappear—and thus of rendering them foreign to what
they were before (26).
By
this function therefore it can be postulated that Simon is not just like Piggy but that he is Piggy; the first statement will
really pertain more to Ralph. For it is not seen that Simon’s gravitation
towards Piggy’s end of the poles of opposition is purely on the basis of
whether the former finds this of some utilitarian convenience to him as is the
case with Ralph—it is either Ralph has been cast by sheer chance upon Piggy’s
society, or he finds that he needs some ‘brains’ to do his thinking for him, or
else he finds that Piggy’s glasses are needful for making the fire. Such in
fact is the subliminality of Ralph’s espousal of personal convenience in
relating to Piggy that he does not even ‘know’ that ‘a link between him and
Jack had been snapped and fastened elsewhere’ (Lord of the Flies
103) over Piggy’s glasses; with the result that he can actually stand, with
somewhat imputable inertia, and look on while Jack ‘st[i]ck[s] his fist into
Piggy’s stomach’ (100). Piggy falls from this impact, his glass falling off. It
is here that Simon’s sympathy towards
Piggy perhaps first becomes apparent; for in search of his fallen glass Piggy
went
crouching and feeling over the rocks but Simon, who got there first, found them
for him. Passions beat about Simon on the mountain-top with awful wings (100).
Shortly
after this, as the boys begin to feast on the meat Jack’s hunters have just
supplied, Simon proves even more un-Ralph-likely sympathetic towards Piggy. Jack has deliberately by-passed Piggy
while portioning out the meat to the boys, and Piggy begins to verbalize his
dissatisfaction with this when ‘Simon, sitting between the twins and Piggy,
wiped his mouth and shoved his piece of meat over the rocks to Piggy, who
grabbed it’ (104).
Of course Simon’s sympathy with Piggy goes beyond merely
these tangible gestures to much subtler yet effectual ones by which the assimilating function of the similitude
of sympathy clearly renders them radically ‘identical to one another’ (Foucault
26). For example he is the only other boy on the island who is anywhere near
Piggy in profundity of intellect, and is often seen to think things over, to try
and see how they hold together among themselves, or if they defy logic. Immediately
is recalled Piggy’s ‘life is scientific;’ and Simon is seen positively engaged
in such an empirical process after Samneric’s fevered account of their
experience of the Beast:
Simon,
walking in front of Ralph, felt a flicker of incredulity—a beast with claws
that scratched, that sat on a mountain-top, that left no tracks and yet was not
fast enough to catch Samneric. However Simon thought of the beast, there arose
before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick (Lord of
the Flies 147).
On
occasions, in fact, their habits of thought are so near absolutely exact that
one wonders if there are still really two individuals or one, if ‘the dangerous
power’ of Sympathy has not so mingled
them, and caused ‘their individuality to disappear’ that their minds are now
functioning in much the same unity as the twins’ Samneric. For instance
pondering over the matter of the reality of the Beast Piggy says: ‘…I know
there isn’t no fear…Unless we get frightened of people’ (118-9). Now notice the
similitude to Simon’s own meditation: ‘...maybe there is a beast…What I mean is…maybe
it’s only us’ (125-6).
On the matter of being easily
intimidated by the others boys, both are equally similar; though while Simon’s
own timidity often springs from a general horror of speaking in public, ‘to
speak in assembly was a terrible thing to him’ (125), Piggy’s springs from his
horror of violence in general, and Jack in particular: ‘He was intimidated by
[Jack’s] uniformed superiority and the offhand authority in [his] voice’ (26).
In both instances however what it results in for both is isolation from the
society of the boys, so that where Piggy is once seen to stand ‘outside the
triangle’ (118) of the other boys, Simon in his turn is seen to ‘retire[] and
s[i]t as far away from the others as possible’ (185). In his extremity once,
Simon will seek succour from this isolation in—and this is deeply
significant—Piggy’s company: ‘Again the pressure of the assembly took his voice
away. He sought for help and sympathy and chose Piggy. He turned half toward
him, clutching the conch to his brown chest’ (184).
No more wonder then that it is these
two who finally come to know the tragedy consequent upon this isolation in its
unmitigated fullness, as they are crushed one after another by the savage force
of Jack’s end of the poles of antagonism. Of course Simon is deceased before
Piggy. But the manner and circumstance of his death, of his being butchered by
the blood-drunk band of boys is profoundly significant in its relation,
especially, to the figure of the Beast. For it is as the beast that Simon is killed. And this significance relates to
what Casirrer calls the ‘law of the leveling and extinction of specific
differences’ by which ‘[e]very part of a whole is the whole itself, [and]every
specimen [] equivalent to the entire species’ (Verbal Structures). The
facility that makes this possible is ‘mythico-linguistic thought’ which Akwanya
has, following Casirrer, shown to also ‘extend[] to things with which [the
species] makes contact, or things that bear its name’ (124). Hence having once
been appropriated under the aspect of the Beast, Simon quite effectively becomes
the ‘thing…crawling out of the forest... [and] stumbled into the horseshoe’ of
the ‘centre of the [hunters’] ring yawn[ing]’ (Lord of the Flies
218-9) with a similar ritually convulsive predation for his life as preceded
the massacring of the sow whose head they make at once a visible fleshly figure
of and an offering to the hitherto invisible Beast.
Such too is the functioning of
Piggy’s own ‘name’ and its relation to the only other animal butchered again
and again on the island, namely the pig. Really it can be said that Piggy’s own
death has been realized repeatedly, albeit in more symbolic terms, in all the
pig-killings that precede his own death, and in Simon’s too; insofar as the
latter is killed as the beast and the
hunters having once ritually subsumed a sow’s head into the figure of the
Beast. And in all these horribly meshed relations among Piggy’s ‘name,’ and the
Beast, and Simon’s trampling, and the pig-killings, is glimpsed again that
sense of the highly perilous functionality of the similitude of ‘sympathy.’
Thus is re-opened again the question
of Piggy’s tragedy as a matter of his very mode of being, by reason of which
there is always already no escape for him. But this is also the tragedy of all
the marooned boys together insofar as their doing away with Piggy quite amounts
to Otto Reinert’s depriving themselves of their ‘saviour’ if only ignorantly.
For Piggy indeed is a saviour of sorts on this island and for the boys (think
for instance of the facility of his glasses). Little wonder that with
his/Simon’s death, the conch, the lone symbol of order on the island is
smashed; which equally means that there is no more oppositional force at
Piggy’s end of the poles of antagonism to counter that at Jack’s end. In the
event this uncountered end topples effectively over into the catastrophic
disequilibrium of Jack’s tribe’s naked, unrestrained and rampaging animalism.
Works Cited
Akwanya, A. N. Discourse Analysis
and Dramatic Literature. Enugu: New Generation Books, 1998.
—. Verbal
Structures: Studies in the Nature and Organisational Pattern of Literary
language. Enugu: Acena Publishers, 1997.
Cassirer,
Ernst. Language and Myth. New York: Dover Books, 1946.
Eliot, T.
S. The Family Reunion. New York, 1939.
Foucault,
Michel. The Order of Things. London: Tavistock, 1970.
Frye,
Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
Golding,
Wiliam. Lord of the Flies. Global Village Contemporary Classics pdf,
n.d.
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