Subverting Rousseau’s Idea of “Noble Savage”: A
Study of the Immanent Evil in Man in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies
Ananta
Khanra,
Assistant
Professor,
Department
of English,
Chandernagore
College,
West
Bengal, India.
Abstract: The so-called and popularly cherished notion that
man is essentially good and remains so as long as he lives in the close
proximity with Nature or the concept of ‘noble savage’ as enunciated by
Rousseau and civilisation with its customs, dogma and rules corrupts mankind
and robs him of his innate goodness is turned upside down by William Golding,
the 20th century literary stalwart in his epoch-making novel Lord of
the Flies with a pessimistic bent of mind on mankind. Society does not corrupt
man rather suppresses the evil instinct present in him since birth, which
surfaces itself as he keeps growing and erupts out completely in a state of
moral anarchy and collapse of rules. Man’s frequent tendency to revert to evil
and his consequent degeneration of mind irrespective of ages and places is the
mote point of tension here.
Keywords: Noble Savage, Evil, Innate goodness,
Nature, Civilization, Corruption and beast.
One of the
fascinating traits of literature is that it keeps changing from age to age in
terms of attitude, ideology, spirit
and representation of the zeitgeist and
,therefore, tenets or ideologies of one particular age may either be challenged
or rejected in the ages to follow. Every literary age has its own peculiarities
and is captured in the domain of a literary work. One thing, however, common in
all forms of literature of the modern period is that it throws a searchlight of
scepticism, questions the old standards, belief-system and morality and
sometimes renders them as false and discarded. If primitive literature sings of
the celestial beauty of human soul and its purity, the Renaissance literature
scales the immense potency and possibilities of human beings, the classical
literature holds the mirror up to human nature, the modern literature just does
the opposite; it belittles man, reveals his moral vacuum, ennui, death-in-life
existence and laughs at his achievement attained at the cost of bloodshed,
cruelty and merciless butchery. The path-breaking Freudian exploration into the
psyche of man, Darwinian revolutionary theory of man coming from apes through
evolution, not being created by the Biblical God, the incident like Holocaust
and the two great World Wars confirm the belief that man is not such a creature
as he was previously thought to be or as Shakespeare eulogises Hamlet --
“What a piece of
work is a man, how noble in reason?
How infinite in
faculties, in form and moving...
How like an
angel in appreciation,
How like a
god...” (Act –ii, Scene –ii)
The
noble nature of man undergoes a cataclysmic change following such findings and
massacres. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”, written after the devastating
effects of the First World War unsettles well the conceited pride of the
nobility in man as well as his superiority myth-
“Things fall
apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed
tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of
innocence is drowned” (52)
With the
publication of William Golding’s Lord of
the Flies, Rousseau’s idea of “Noble Savage”—an idealised concept that men
retain their inherent goodness if not exposed to the corrupting influence of
civilisation is called into question for its regardless acceptance from ages to
ages. It is Rousseau’s plea that since birth man is good, and civilisation with
its various negative traits like envy, greed, selfishness and craving for power
has made man bad. His autobiographical Confessions
(1765-70) affirm his belief in the innocence of childhood and present his main
concept that human beings are good by nature but become corrupt by society and Dreams of a Solitary Walker (1776-78)
contain description of nature and man’s natural response to it. Apart from
Rousseau, William Wordsworth is also of the opinion that customs rob a child of
his innocence and bliss of happy life. He writes in Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:
“And customs lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, deep almost as
life!’’(62)
Wordsworth
champions common and simple life on the lap of nature and their uncontaminated
virtues. But according to Golding, it
is not children or grown up men but mankind in general is prone to evil at any
stage or at any place. Rousseau was supported by such writers like Michael de
Montaigue and many voyagers and travel writers. Montaigue thinks that though
Cannibals eat the body of their own, yet they are better than Europeans who act
more barbarously when they kill each other for religion. Voyagers and travel
writers witnessed the natural goodness of the savages of America and the
islands of South Seas. Many travel writers praised the natural virtues of these
noble savages and raised doubts to the value of civilisation.
A
cursory look at the various travelogues and literature preceding modern age and
particularly the works of Rousseau suffices to say that glorification of
primitive man along with the belief of his innate goodness in nature was most
frequent theme to deal with. But coming to the 20th century this belief suffers
a setback and William Golding, a pessimist of the first water launches a
scathing attack in his novel Lord of Flies by proving that man is born evil at core, no
matter he is a child or a grown up, no matter he is in nature or in
civilisation. He calls a spade a spade without mincing the matter and shocks
the complacency of mankind about their noble nature and so long false
appraisal. Emphasising the natural tendency of man to evil and cruelty, Golding
says, “Man can produce evil as bees can produce honey”. The setting,
characters, motifs and symbols of the novel are designed in such a way as to
undermine Rousseau’s idea of “Noble Savage” most logically. To whet his point,
Golding deliberately chooses as characters not men but a group of school boys
of eight and nine years who are supposed to possess some sort of innocence
still. But this group of tiny boys startles by their savage and evil instinct,
not still acquired from society but inherited and inborn, the English captain
who fed on the idea of superiority and nobility of man and national pride
wonders –“I should have thought that a pack of British boys--- you’re all
British aren’t you? - Would have
been able to put up a better show than that --- I mean---” (220). Nevertheless, they are away from corrupting society
(according to Rousseau society corrupts); they are in the close proximity with
nature as they are stranded on a tropical south pacific island. So what is
expected quite naturally from them, according to the idea of Rousseau, is that
they must be innocent and good originally. But contrary to this expectation,
they degenerate progressively into a group of savages and gradually turn this
island into a veritable hell, ‘scorched up like dead wood’ (220).
The
novel is written against the backdrop of World War-II and during this time of
turmoil, insecurity and frequent bombing, the children were being evacuated to
a safe place. A plane carrying a group of children fell down on the Pacific
Ocean near a desert Island and the boys somehow swam ashore. Now they are on
the lap of nature and no traces of civilisation could be found in them. As we
meet the boys for the first time, they are full of optimism, attempt to build a
makeshift civilisation and establish order and rules by holding a “conch”, the
symbol authority. But this is temporary, and evil which is inherent in the boys
and mankind in general is enduring and will surface as the plot proceeds.
Nature cannot shake off inborn evil instinct in the boys and in no time anarchy
and misrule would follow. Golding hints at this hidden savagery in the
following lines—“Within the diamond haze of the beach something dark was
fumbling along ...Then the creature stepped from the mirage on to clear sand,
and they saw that the darkness was not all shadow but mostly clothing...”
(19).Ralph, the only voice of order assigns each of the boy’s duties and
responsibilities and devises ways to get rescued. But this voice is so meagre
and so timid that it cannot assert and dominate. Jack gradually symbol of
anarchy and misrule grows more powerful and sinister. He opposes Ralph, forms a
group of hunters, usurps power and threatens the littluns to join him. Jack
becomes obsessed with hunting; paints his face like a barbarian in order to
hide his crime and act of violence. They re-enact the hunt in the manner of the
savages of primitive time, dancing wildly around the fire, singing and raising
slogan—“Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Bash her in!’’(84).
Of
all the boys Simon is the Christ-like and he attains the vision of beast which
led him to realise that the beast does not exist outside the jungle; the beast
(the tendency for evil and savagery) is rooted in the mind of the boys—“May be
there is a beast...maybe it is only us”(8).But Simon’s knowledge of the “beast”
does not reach the “beasts” in the form of children who kill him mistaking him
for another beast in the wild frenzy of hunting. In the later part of the
novel, Piggy dies a tragic death when Roger slides down a huge stone toward his
direction. With the brutal and animalistic murder of Simon and Piggy, Jack and
his followers destroy last vestige of order and civilisation and reign of sheer
anarchy, chaos and bloodshed begins. Golding describes the situation---“Ralph wept for the end of
innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of true,
wise friend called Piggy”.(184) Ralph’s life is at stake ; he is threatened to
death. As the ultimate attempt of Jack to get rid of Ralph, the entire jungle
is set on fire to smoke him out. Finding the flames of fire, the naval officer
reached the island and rescued the boys. Surprisingly, Ralph does not celebrate
the arrival of the naval officer rather cries at the sight of him. The reason
is not far to seek. The place he will be rescued to is no more different from
this island. He cries for human being’s innate tendency to revert to evil again
and again.
Rousseau’s
idea of ‘noble savage’ has not only been discarded here but also a true picture
of man’s psyche and nature evoked most artistically. Society, institution and
rules regulate man to act in accordance with it and check the free flow of evil
which is present in his sub-conscious mind irrespective of ages, places and
climes. Golding is a hard or anti-primitivist--- one who does not believe that civilisation corrupts man and
nature sustains his innocence. Jack is an antithesis to Ralph who makes every
attempt to turn back to order and civilisation but Jack foils his attempt.
Ralph is created to show the immense power and enormity of evil as personified
in Jack. In 1960s a film maker Stanley Kubrick professed his position quite
like in the vein of Golding, “Man is not noble savage, and he is ignoble
savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak and silly unable to be objective about
everything where his own interests are involved...I
am interested in brutal, violent nature of man because it is the true picture
of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the
nature of man is probably doomed to failure”. The unnamed island is a macrocosm
that mirrors the macrocosmic situation---
the life of adult world full of animalism, savagery and unbridled evil. Life on the island holds up mirror to the
adult world outside in which the same game of hunt and kill is played on a
larger tragic way.
Works Cited
Alexander,
Michael, A History of English Literature, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000
Bloom,
Harold, Ed. Lord of Flies: Modern Critical Interpretations, Chelsea House
Publishers, 1998
Fredricks,
Sarah, Critical Insights: Lord of the Flies, University of Arizona, 2017
Golding,
William, Lord of Flies, Rama Brothers India Pvt. Ltd. New Delhi, 2016, Print
Rousseau,
Jean-Jacques, The Confessions, Penguin Classics, 1973
Shakespeare,
William, Hamlet Ed. By Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Wordsworth,
William, 100 Selected Poems, Delhi Open Books, 2022. Print.
Yeats,
W .B, Collected Poems, Vintage Yeats, 1990 Print