Ash Wednesday

i

Only Joshua’s

incorporeal cauldron-bowels

can

consume

this yearly unsoulful suffusion

of

rouge-faced oblation

and

then

regurgitate them, again,

ash-smeared foreheads

of

cosmetic contrition:

only Joshua’s.

 ii

Joshua propagates back my left ear
down at Gethsemane
doubling his battered body’s fatal fruition
that conduces equally
to sudden otherwise disconcerting pulls

now of triumphal dance and now of choral doom
now of labial kiss and now of silver kiss
and showers on both equally
his rain and his shine and o
his blood too
on that tree of boundless dualities
that now props him high the heavens

now just as low down the deepest bowels of the earth
that swallows up so slippery a Joshua
who propagates my ear down at Gethsemane
so our dismembered lobe

doubles his fatal fruition
when the baffled bowels
regurgitate him again:

shroud-shaming summer of winter immortality.

iii

How many times will Joshua shun my sword

and blow the smear from oh my earthed auditory lobe,

plug it back like scion-bud
before my sheath-spurning sword ceases to tear it again

out

so I never ever gain the boon double audit
that alone hears the soberer other half of his case
that relentless beckons me

like conquest-drunk Ojadili's flute
from the meretricious rotundity of the apple
the fraudulent charm of swine-fellowship

the Janus-lustre of the scarlet silver pieces
the arboreal lure that draws a disillusioned Judas
the carnal cry on his left arm to merely lumber back my lobe—

gross rehash of the crimson chorus to bail me Barabbas
towards the sudden soulful Longinus-cry
that solely secures me his Joshuadom?

A Linguistic Reading of Kwesi Brew’s ‘The Dry Season’

The kind of study we are here concerned with is commonly pursued at three often interweaving levels namely, graphology, phonology, and the level of semantics. The level of graphology takes into account any lingual ‘aberrations’ relating to syntax, punctuation, and the general structure of the object of study, in the present context a poem by the title of ‘The Dry Season;’ at the level of phonology the study looks at sound patterns generally and such other devices as alliteration, parallelism, rhyme and rhythm, that all together may go to render a poem either ‘speedy’ or ‘jerky,’ ‘soft’ or ‘loud;’ at the level of semantics, the question of sense-making in the poem is raised, especially as regards unconventional liberties taken with language whereby the known patterns of  sense-making are breached, and new patterns emerge, sometimes, even in spite of the very language that makes to constitute this sense. Of course, the underlying understanding in this study is that language is a code, a set of rules for generating ‘well-formed’ sentences, in the axiom of the generative transformational grammarians, so that a breach of this definite code results in ‘ill-formed’ sentences. A follow-up to this is, perhaps inevitably, that language being rather so indefinite in literature, the literary artist shows himself forth as notorious in the regard of defying the definite codes in pursuit of what has been called ‘stylistic effect’ by his particular ‘style.’ It is these ‘stylistic effects’ and ‘styles’ which often amount to ‘aberrations,’ at least from the point of view of the definite language code, that stylistics sets out to trace and possibly account for, with an arm of it called literary and the other linguistic stylistics.

    The latter is really what we are here concerned with, and will be applying at the three levels already mentioned, though not necessarily in the order of enumeration. ‘The year is withering’ is how the poem of our specific attention begins, and it is apparently a conventional sentence at the level of syntax, but the predicative ‘is withering’ problematizes it at the level of semantics. This has happened because of the violation of what is called selectional restriction rule which consists in the choosiness of words as to what words to go with, or say nouns, what particular verbal forms to co-occur with. For the verbal form ‘is withering’ implicates the subject ‘The year’ as being, in the least, tangible, non-abstract, which is, of course, the only condition of possibility of it being withered, of it ‘withering.’  But much more than that, ‘is withering’ also implicates ‘The year’ as possessing life, succulent, fluid-filled life, so that in ‘withering’ this fluid-life is sapped from the ‘year’ and it becomes shrivelled up. This sense is not lacking through the remainder of the first stanza: ‘the wind/ Blows down the leaves;/ Men stand under eaves/ And overhear the secrets/ Of the cold dry wind,/ Of the half-bare trees.’ For there is a sense in which the features /+animate/, /+tangible/, /+fluidy/ which have been communicated to the intangible, immaterial year in the first line of the poem reappears in these follow-up lines, whereby the year is seen to share these vouchsafed properties with the ‘leaves,’ whose very nature make them possessors of the selfsame properties.

    But ‘the leaves’ are being blown down and the ‘trees’ are rendered ‘half-bare,’ and these arguably ensuing from the ‘withering’ in line 1. In fact, it is arguable that what is happening is transference of properties from the leaves, the trees, to the year, or is it from the ‘withering’ year to the leaves, the trees, so that they are losing, now, their vitality. And we recall too that ‘the wind’ blowing down the leaves and trees is ‘the cold dry wind’ (line 5), still sustaining the sense of the shriveling up of the year, of the leaves and the trees. The paradigmatic association found existing between ‘cold’ and ‘dry’ by virtue of their sharing the same grammatical slot in ‘cold dry wind’ somewhat intensifies this ‘withering’ process, so that the objects seen to be losing their fluid-life are seen in the manner of, first, shedding their sap by the freezing activity of the coldness of the wind, which then sets the stage for the shriveling activity of the dryness.

    But if this ‘wind’ is capable of the said freezing shriveling activity, is it not because we are looking at a movement not unlike the one witnessed in ‘The year is withering,’ where animate properties have been transferred to an otherwise lifeless object? Is it not precisely because this ‘wind’ is possessive of an unsuspected secret vitality, dark and sinister—for is it not its ‘cold dry’ nature that has initiated all the deadness, all this dryness that pervade ‘The Dry Season’? Are we not looking precisely at a similar transference of properties from an animate object, ‘Men,’ to the inanimate ‘wind,’ so that henceforth it is the ‘Men’ who are rendered inert, passive, and non-vital, while the ‘wind’ now speaks ‘secrets’ having been animated by the new acquired vitality, including the particularly speech-capacities of ‘Men,’ ‘secrets’ to which they now do the listening, they ‘overhear’? What we find, therefore, is that the wind has been communicated such features as /+animate/, /+human/, for the second feature is the only condition of the possibility of its verbalizing ‘secrets’ to which the ‘Men stand under eaves/ And overhear.’ Yet these properties are also shared by the ‘half-bare trees,’ for in the economy of the poem, these ‘secrets’ are too ‘Of the half-bare trees’ (line 6).

    By the second stanza of the poem ‘dryness’ itself has gained the tangible materiality we have been seeing in some of the non-tangible objects of stanza 1. For ‘The grasses are tall and tinted’ (line 7) with ‘Straw-gold hues of dryness’ (line 8), and the alliterative /t/ sound in ‘tall and tinted’ punctuates the sense of the colouring process of the grasses, as by the tick-tick movement of a brush on an artist’s canvass. But the paint for this ‘tint[ing]’ of the grasses in ‘Straw-gold hues’ is ‘dryness,’ whereby the features /+liquid/, /+miscible/, ordinarily associated with colour-paint, is passed on to it. The stylistic relevance of this transference is, of course, obvious, for it is only under this condition that ‘dryness’ can be, that is, is applied, as ‘Straw-gold hues’ and the ‘grasses… tinted’ thereby. The sense of ‘dryness’ having gained liquid materiality appears to have lingered further down the second stanza: ‘And the contracting awryness,/ Of the dusty roads a-scatter/ With pools of colourful leaves’(lines 9-11). After the ‘tinting’ of the grasses in line 7 in the variegated ‘hues’ of dryness, the variegatedness  of the colour-mixing and tinting has, apparently, resulted in ‘the contradicting awryness’ of the dust-ridden roads which become the ultimate repository of the ‘colourful leaves.’ And these leaves are deposited as ‘pools,’ revamping the sense of the feature /+liquid/ it already has acquired.

    But ‘the contradicting awryness,/ Of the dusty roads a-scatter’ not only ‘With pools of colourful leaves;’ they ‘a-scatter’ also ‘With ghosts of the dreaming year’(line 12). This line, almost forcibly, takes us back to the first stanza, for there is where we encounter year for the first time, and in an uncommon relation to ‘withering;’ and if here now we encounter it as ‘dreaming,’ it can only be an extension of the already initiated pattern by which ‘year’ is perceived as possessing the feature /+animate/, and additionally now /+human/, a feature of course already perceptible in stanza 1, if we make enough room for the transference of properties among the leaves, trees, the year, and Men alike. And in the first stanza too is where we glimpse the activity that accounts, can account, for the scattering of, and the consequent littering with ‘leaves’ of the ‘dusty roads,’ that accounts too for the roads being a-scatter ‘with ghosts of the dreaming year,’ since it is in the first stanza that we find ‘the wind/ Blow[ing] down leaves’ (lines 1-2). What remains to be accounted for is the logic of the ‘ghosts of the dreaming year’ being scattered in the manner of the ‘colourful leaves.’ Which again takes us to our argument that there is a lingering communication of features and properties between the items ‘leaves,’ ‘trees’ and so on in the first stanza. For if here we are looking at ‘The year… withering,’ is it not precisely because it has come to partake of the nature of the leaves, because ‘The year is withering’ like the leaves, or more radically, that ‘The year is withering’ a leaf?

    The ‘ghosts of the dreaming year’ may also have been implicated in the ‘secrets’ which the ‘Men stand under eaves’ to overhear in stanza 1. For if these secrets are ‘Of the cold dry wind’ and the same ‘wind’ we have demonstrated is the force behind the roads being ‘a-scatter/ With pools of colourful leaves/ With ghosts of the dreaming year,’ does it not appear then how the otherness of these ‘ghosts’ is implicated and related to the ‘secrets’?

    The irruptive impulsiveness of the hyperactivity that dominates the third and final stanza of the poem is not totally unconnected to this otherness raised regarding the ‘ghosts of the dreaming year,’ ‘the secrets/ Of the cold dry wind,’ for once this hyperactivity is initiated, there is no stopping it, no interfering with it resultants: ‘And soon, soon the fires,/ The fires will begin to burn,/ The hawk will flutter and turn/ On its wings and swoop for the mouse,/ The dogs will run for the hare,/ The hare for its little life.’ We are looking at something not unlike the setting of a lone dying capsule of ember amid a bunch of highly combustible matter. The ember is vitalized and the blazing result can only be stopped by the flames wholly exhausting every single tiny piece of the combustible matter. And in the figures of the ‘leaves’ which have known the ‘withering’ activity of the shriveling dying year, known the dark, sinister operation of ‘the cold dry wind,’ known the ‘tinting’ shading of the ‘Straw-gold hues of dryness,’ and ultimately are scattered pool-like upon the ‘awryness/ Of the dusty roads,’ there is not lacking such volatile combustible matter that may readily be chanced upon by the subtle ghost-like ‘secrets’ of ‘the wind,’ so that this wind, that all along is seen to be only in the activity of destruction, of drying up and sapping of fluid-life, is not unlikely to initiate, not altogether incapable of initiating, in this final movement, ‘the fires,/… to burn’ up and consummate the annihilation process, even as the lone dying ember of our analogy.

     The sense of the irreversibility of this process, once set in motion, is heightened by the patterns of repetition found in this last stanza, as in: ‘the fire,/ The fires will begin to burn,/… The dogs will run for the hare,/ The hare for its little life.’ This is at the level of graphology, a level already seen to be operational even from the poem’s very first stanza. In fact, the whole structure of the poem is such that the ‘withering’ process inaugurated in the foremost line is really only consummated in the last, evidenced by the consistent patterns of repetition throughout the poem. In stanza 1 ‘Men stand under eaves’ overhearing the secrets ‘Of the cold dry wind,/ Of the half-bare trees;’ in stanza 2 the awryness of the dusty roads ‘a-scatter/ With pools of the colourful leaves,/ With ghosts of the dreaming year;’ and in stanza 3 the repetitions have gained in amplitude by the introduction of more frequent parallelism, and at the level of phonology, alliterations as /s/ in ‘And soon, soon,’ /f/ in ‘ the fires,/ The fires,’ /b/ in ‘begin to burn,’ /t/ in ‘flutter and turn,’ /w/ in ‘wings and swoop,’ and so on. Of course at the level of phonology still, the rhymes in ‘leaves’ and ‘eaves’(stanza 1), ‘dryness’ and ‘awryness’(2), ‘burn’ and ‘turn’(3) are taken in . These, together with all the other elements considered, work, as in a synergy, to endow the poem with its steady sustained rhythm from the inaugural ‘withering’ process in the poem to the mad restive consummation of ‘The Dry Season.’

Piggy’s Isolation and the Tragedy in Golding's Lord Of the Flies

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.

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