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Monday, February 11, 2008
My College Essay on Lord of the Flies
Click on the "comments" link to read an essay on Lord of the Flies I wrote for my USD graduate class, using the theories of Louis Althusser. Make sense?
Matt Christensen ENGL 786: Literary Criticism Dr. Willman 9 May, 2007
Reproducing the Modes of Destruction: Applying Althusser to Golding’s Lord of the Flies
What better way is there to reproduce the modes of destruction than to train boys in the arts of warfare and malice, then set them loose on a perfect playing field? The island burns up and all the reasonable, feminine figures are purged in the end—mission accomplished. Not so ironically after all, it is the smoke from the inferno that gets the boys spotted by the adult warriors, who think the boys are playing a silly game when the little savages, just doing as they have been interpellated to do, are really about to deliberately kill another one of their own. So just when the naval commander arrives to take the boys back to the atomic conflict—going on at the “civilized” world—on his cruiser, they are ideally equipped with malicious traits for the mayhem they will encounter once they reach home. (There is no better way to coach a team than to show them all they need to know, drill and practice those behaviors, then evaluate what they have learned by making them demonstrate what they can do.) William Golding’s boys perform admirably—perfectly in accordance with what they have been interpellated by. There is no stopping their reproducing the modes of destruction, because that is all they have known throughout their lives: men kill other men and the earth is absolutely expendable to that end. Golding’s Lord of the Flies has been read as survival narrative, Freudian representation, political allegory, religious fable, didactic myth, apocalyptic warning, and counterargument (to R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, which, in a parallel tale, has the boys thrive against insurmountable odds, using mainly their superior British intelligence and savvy against pirates and predators). What has yet to be noticed about Golding’s most famous book, however, is that it examines the potential outcome of a subtle, gradual apocalypse happening now in the West: the deterioration of the family ideological state apparatus. A successful “family” is greatly different from what it used to be, obviously. For a new critical angle, Lord of the Flies should be read as an examination of how important the family structure is to the success of a social system. A “family” does emerge in this novel—surely is depicted by Golding—but cannot prosper, or even function, because the father figure, Jack, is too bloodthirsty and the mother figure, Ralph, is too passive, too feminine to lead. Golding shows more than a lot of concern for the ways that Western society has been constructed. Lord of the Flies unfolds to say that as long as men—who behave much like Jack Merridew, the “father” of the “family” on the island—are in charge of governments and militaries, there will be war after war, with the fighters getting ever better at killing. Golding indicts the inherent nature of males, not of females, interestingly aligning the feminine with the rational. Undoubtedly, Golding, a schoolteacher much of his life, had seen in his classrooms little boys ripping at each other while little girls sat by, amicable and studious. The solution seems to be in applying a reading with a working knowledge of the ideological state apparatuses, which, when working “properly,” promote a culture that is harmonious within itself and with those cultures around it. In the chapter “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in his book Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Louis Althusser attempts to theorize the reproduction of the conditions of production within a social system. He conceives of ideology as more than just a system of ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and values. For Althusser, “1. ideology is nothing insofar as it is a pure dream (manufactured by who knows what power)… [and] 2. ideology has no history, which emphatically does not mean that there is no history in it (on the contrary, for it is merely the pale, empty and inverted reflection of real history) but that it has no history of its own” (160). Ideology is supported by what Althusser calls “ideological state apparatuses” (which function by ideology) and “repressive state apparatuses” (which function by violence), both of which influence the subjects within the social system to interpellate—to hail, by recognizing and going along with, the ideologically-established codes. Ideology must be reproduced through the modes of production; also, submission to the ideology must be reproduced so that the subjects follow properly the rituals, practices, and codes of the social system. When examining Lord of the Flies and its relevance and readings today, it must be noted that Althusser’s family ISA is very significant: “the School-Family couple has replaced the Church-Family couple” in influential hierarchy (154; my italics). Family has always remained paramount in the successful interpellation of a social system’s subjects. Upon close reading, the boys should be seen as indeed having/playing distinct family roles. To be clear about his theory, Althusser lists his ISAs and adds a note about the family: “The family obviously has other ‘functions’ than that of an ISA. It intervenes in the reproduction of labour power. In different modes of production it is the unit of production and/or the unit of consumption” (143). And consumption is precisely what Golding’s little Pac-men are best at. Moreover, an Althusserian reading of Lord of the Flies, published in 1954, adds a lot 1) to examine post World War II reconstruction of families, schools, and churches, the ISAs that create the societies of the West; 2) to consider the ways WWII changed families, schools, and churches forever; and 3) to consider the West (especially America) in 2007, with divorce rates skyrocketing and wartime unceasing. More specifically, an Althusserian reading illuminates so well how ideological state apparatuses, especially the family ISA, influence Western culture—and this reading also reveals on the next layer what Golding is condemning and indicting about the inherent nature of men, not women. The failure of the “family” on the island and the subsequent destruction of that island show how important the family ISA is to the West. If the family “succeeds” in the culturally-defined ways it is supposed to (if all the members are properly conditioned and interpellate as they should), then the West can keep reproducing its modes of production. Lord of the Flies should be read not only as a microcosm of what horrors can occur in patriarchal society, due to the faults within men, but also as a patriarchal family meeting its doom due to the faults of the father. Golding’s plotline of destruction twists Althusser’s statement, “the reproduction of the conditions of production” (127). According to Golding, the West is just going to keep recreating a destructive mindset. Destruction has become the code of the West, because of competitively malevolent natures of males who train younger males. It is remarkable that in Lord of the Flies, it is the feminized characters, Ralph, Piggy, and Simon, who are absolutely rational (and are connected with culture) while it is the masculine characters who are irrationally evil (and revert back to a deplorable, primitive human nature). Critics of gender representations should find this polarity intriguing. When Lord of the Flies was published in 1954, it was neither immediately famous nor very profitable, though it was well-received by critics. It was in the 1960s, however, when the countercultures were thriving, that Lord of the Flies was a “campus favorite,” a term Golding deplored. Much of the past scholarship about the book was written in the 1960s, too, when there was anxiety about the Vietnam War and a heavy hangover—more than that, a backlash—from the rigidity of the 1950s moral codes and McCarthy episodes. There have been many readings of Lord of the Flies, but Althusser has yet to be specifically applied. In other theorists’ and critics’ arguments, however, there are connections to be made to the reading that these boys should be seen as a family. E. L. Epstein calls Golding’s narrative, within his framework analysis of the symbolism, an “extremely complex and beautifully woven symbolic web” (204). Epstein also demonstrates that the central symbol of the novel, that which seems to rule over the boys’ psyches and behavior throughout, is the pig’s head, the “’lord of the flies,’ which is a translation of the Hebrew Ba’alzevuv (Beelzebub [Prince of Devils] in Greek)” (205). These boys are destroying/exploiting the natural and feminine world throughout, doing just what they are guided to do by their worshipped idol, “a devil whose name suggests that he is devoted to decay, destruction, demoralization, hysteria and panic and who therefore fits in very well with Golding’s theme [‘an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature’]” (205). Jack, the father and head diabolist, leads the boys in a paramount killing of a central mother figure. Epstein asserts that the “turning point in the struggle between Ralph and Jack is the killing of the sow…The sow is a mother: ‘sunk in deep maternal bliss lay the largest of the lot…the great bladder of her belly was fringed with a row of piglets that slept or burrowed and squeaked.’ The killing of the sow is accomplished in terms of sexual intercourse” (206). Jack steers the removal of the feminine order on the island and, thereby, the destruction of everything that is good in their society. Epstein employs Freudian psychoanalysis here, showing all of the language that is easily read as sexual. Seemingly, every phallic and vaginal phrase is there in this picture. This is not pleasant, cooperative “intercourse,” either, which shows the ways that the male power abuses its role in the family ISA (using then killing the female force), causing the social system to fail. If families fail, society unravels—or, society surely undergoes a stage of severe flux. Also noteworthy is Epstein’s final examination of the scene where Simon, on a Christ-like quest to seek answers in the wilderness, speaks to the Lord of the Flies directly. This can be read as Epstein sees it, with an all-consuming male figure: “Simon imagines he is looking into a vast mouth. ‘There was blackness within, a blackness that spread…. Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness’” (207). This mouth should be seen as overriding the feminine and perpetuating the modes of destruction. It is a “symbol of ravenous, unreasoning and eternally insatiable nature” (207) and is seen in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as well, coming from Kurtz, Epstein points out. This masculine force has gathered so much clout that it stands overwhelming to any resistance. The mouth is masculinity, come to consume all goodness and rationality. Squaring off with this black hole is Ralph, the feminine figure. George Clark presents a fascinating reading of Lord of the Flies, which urges a close look at the world that Ralph has to try to manage. Clark outlines Ralph’s mental and emotional progression through the book, then elucidates, “As far as external action is concerned, Ralph struggles in a losing cause, and his tragic vision is the product of defeat in the realm of external action” (76). In the end, Ralph knows he has been defeated due to this innate wickedness of mankind. From the beginning, it is tough for Ralph to prove, Clark shows, without the support of the father figure, to the boys that “domestic” work is necessary: “Ralph clashes with Jack over what things must be first—hunting (the new definition of fun) or the signal fire; meat or shelters” (80). During the plot, he keeps trying to maintain harmony, first offering them hope of a rescue by his father, a navy man, then structuring their day as much like their military school as possible, then trying to create parliamentary democracy, then attempting to rein in the savage faction that has gone with Jack. Ralph struggles in the face of the omnipotent mouth of masculinity, and in the end is made fully aware that he has lost. Roger, the sadistic lieutenant of Jack, sharpens a stick at both ends to display Ralph’s head like the pig’s. Without the other two feminized characters, Piggy and Simon, who have been killed by the savages, Ralph embodies the last matriarchal force. Clark studies Ralph’s struggle to near the end, when he tries to talk some sense into the twins, Samneric, at Jack’s stronghold, the manly—even kingly—den called “Castle Rock”. Here, the twins flat out tell Ralph what is going to happen to him, and they have no defense for what they have been conditioned by, Jack’s masculine rule. (Marx—“They are doing it, and they know that they are.”) Even the kind twins are now powerlessly interpellated by masculinity that they will destroy their leader and display his head as a trophy for manliness. But, they will not ensnare Ralph on the spot; they need their father to show them the slaughtering way the next day. Bernard F. Dick adds to the readings of Golding’s revered text, explaining that “Lord of the Flies introduces a structural principle that becomes Golding’s hallmark: a polarity expressed in terms of a moral tension. Thus, there is the rational (the fire-watchers) pitted against the irrational (the hunters)” (21) (which flips the title question posed by Sherry B. Ortner). Dick fails to note, however, the gender role implications in Lord of the Flies. Golding has set up a family that cannot succeed because of the male faults. Ralph, like many mothers then and now, “learns [this troubling truth] through suffering but cannot articulate his feelings. He can only weep [on the beach, in front of the male gaze, the naval commander]; but, what is even more pathetic, his tears are a reflex response to a situation he cannot fully comprehend” (92). Golding has made his feminine characters rational, but still painfully passive. They sit by while the savage group grows and festers. This family ISA cannot prosper, so the civilization cannot either. Lord of the Flies was widely-read, though not immediately, in the United States, gaining prominence when people were compelled to question the “idyllic” 1950s. America did all it could after WWII to reconstruct its hopes for a perfect family ISA—and had a lot of factors work in its favor, helping it become a “superpower.” The United States had not hosted a major battle in WWII and so did not have to rebuild its cities from the constant shelling like parts of Europe had to; Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor was the only American location of devastation. Most of the fighting took place in Europe, of course, thousands of miles away. However, the war threatened everything America stood for and wanted to remain and/or become. Much had to be rebuilt in America ideologically. With so many fathers and brothers dead or traumatized by the war, families had to be reconstructed. With so many young men unsure of what to do, the G. I. Bill was instated so that anyone who fought physically (and ideologically) for America could be re-interpellated by American universities. The intended, hoped-for results are blatantly obvious, when examining this time period: America was trying to recreate itself and knew it had to take measures to remain capitalistic and “wholesome.” Scholar Joanne Beckman has written on the resurgence of the church ISA, showing how America deliberately tried to reconstruct itself, in line with Althusser’s theory of ISAs: At midcentury, Americans streamed back to church in unprecedented numbers. The baby boom (those born between 1946 and 1965) had begun, and parents of the first baby boomers moved into the suburbs and filled the pews, establishing church and family as the twin pillars of security and respectability. Religious membership, church funding, institutional building, and traditional faith and practice all increased in the 1950s. At midcentury, things looked very good for Christian America. (National Humanities Center)
America was becoming a superpower and the culture constructers wanted this rise to prominence to be done just right. So, around and during the year when Golding’s novel was first published, 1954—which happens to be the same year Elvis Presley’s ideology-threatening career began—the family, the church, the school, and the other important ISAs were systematically being recreated. With ISA’s influence over the reconstruction of the West after WWII, Golding’s group of boys should be read as a family, with a distinct mother, father, big brother, grandmother, daughter (or homosexual son), and lesser siblings. In this reading, the family ISA fails due to dysfunctional members, which leads to the island society failing miserably and horrifyingly. Of course, these are largely culturally constructed roles within the framework of mid-Twentieth Century America. It must be said in advance that the roles align with the traditional, or original, American—and, largely, Western—roles for men, women, children, and extended family members. Because Lord of the Flies was written in 1954, it is productive to place Golding’s representations and these Althusserian interpretations in that era. These roles fit with supposed primitive instincts within the family unit, wherein the man actively seeks and hunts and the woman passively supports and holds together. As a schoolteacher for much of his life, Golding surely knew a variety of students from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds—and within that framework, it is of course likely that he knew students with differing levels of parental support. To consider this group of boys as a family ISA within the superstructure of the island society, each member must be examined carefully to mark his position in the ever important social system. Ralph is the mother figure. He is constantly trying to create order and safety, urging the boys to focus on maintaining the fire—for warmth, but mainly for rescue—and to build huts and gather fruit. Throughout the text, Ralph nurtures the littluns and provides all he can selflessly for the betterment of the group. Ralph is a giver, gatherer, builder, provider; he leads by understanding, availability, and cooperative direction. He is a motherly figure that is focused on the current welfare and future rescue of the whole group. More attentive than most boys his age, Ralph wants the littluns to remain as close to him and the huts on the beach as possible. Ralph is the superego, the kind angelic conscience on the shoulder. There are moments when he wants to submit to Jack’s rule and, thereby, to the codes of familial dominance, but is urged by those he protects, Piggy and Simon, to go on being chief. Nearer the end, when Jack, the father, has recruited all the boys except Piggy into the hunting tribe, Ralph, like actual mothers throughout Western society, submits to patriarchy. (It is just like the Sunday morning when the mom goes to church faithfully, but, unless the father habitually attends too, the sons will remain in bed or will watch the sports pundits instead.) In the end, the boys are wholly on the father’s side and join with him to kill the mother figure, Ralph, for trying to instill a limiting, reasonable structure and for not being able to propagate the species. Ralph behaves like a mother, but cannot possibly do the traditional duty of mothers, so he becomes unnecessary. He threatens the father’s rule, so he is hunted by the reprobates and their spears in the end. Jack Merridew is the father. Like the father in Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye—and many fathers of the early to mid-Twentieth Century—Jack is the rough, disciplinarian figure who provides “fiscally” (pork chops instead of bananas), but not emotionally or intellectually—or in any other way, for that matter. Jack is significantly given a last name while the rest of the boys are given just first names or no names at all. Like a father, his last name matters; Merridew might as well be the last name of all the boys. Of course, the last name is not missed as significant by Althusser: “it is certain in advance that [the baby] will bear its Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived” (176). It is no accident that Golding anoints Jack the father with a last name. The only other boy whose last name is revealed is the tiny Percival Wemys Madison, who has been so conditioned by his parents to remember all his personal contact information that he recites his full name and address constantly due to the persistent pressure he is under on this island. He is nervous beyond control, because the social system he has been interpellated by is gone. He sees that the reproduction of the means of production cannot take place, so he is aimless. Percival cannot take charge like the father. In contrast to Ralph, Jack is a taker, hunter, not a planner, but an actor. Jack leads by fear, and he is a selfish, wasteful glutton. Jack is also exceptionally desirous. He is absolutely Darwinian, making everyone do their parts, each of which, he is sure to communicate, is expendable or replaceable. There are just a few moments in the text where Ralph and Jack get along and are able to cooperate. When they do work together—while building shelters and a fire—as Western society/culture says a married couple should, there are meaningful results: The twins, Sam ‘n Eric, were the first to get a likely log but they could to nothing till Ralph, Jack, Simon, Roger and Maurice found room for a hand-hold. Then they inched the grotesque dead thing up the rock and toppled it over on top. Each party of boys added a quota, less or more, and the pile grew. At the return Ralph found himself alone on a limb with Jack and they grinned at each other, sharing this burden. Once more, amid the breeze, the shouting, the slanting sunlight on the high mountain, was shed that glamour, that strange invisible light of friendship, adventure, and content. “Almost too heavy.” Jack grinned back. “Not for the two of us.” (39)
For now, the boys are getting along like one big, happy family, complete with all the codes a family should follow in Western society. But, ultimately, Jack becomes too impatient and power-hungry to cooperate for long, not when there is a castle to inhabit, subjects to command, and a “Beast” to vanquish. Like many fathers in the West today are so focused on career advancement and salary increases that they neglect providing time to their children, Jack is interested in only personal status and gain. He wants as much distance between him and the littluns as he can create. Undoubtedly, little boys want to be like their fathers due to obvious gender associative reasons. Jack leads and gets results, because he fathers just like the men all the boys have known, their own fathers and the schoolmasters at their boarding school. Jack demands the choir boys wear their robes, even on the unbearably hot beach. Why? Because he says so. The boys wear their robes, buttoned to the top, because Jack says so and because they are used to listening to Jack, who had been appointed to a position of power by the adults. Moreover, like adults he has seen, Jack never acknowledges the worth of the littluns, seeing them only as burdens. Interestingly, Golding depicts the littluns as one faceless, neglected entity. Throughout, Golding makes it clear that Ralph and Jack have much different interests. They have gone against their vows. Their opposite goals are made explicit in chapter entitled “Huts on the Beach,” (just prior to the chapter “Painted Faces and Long Hair,” which is when manly impulses begin to make things unravel). The man wants to hunt for pigs (which is unnecessary—rather, a desirous pursuit—because the boys have easily enough fruit to survive), while the woman wants to provide secure sanctuary (which is absolutely necessary, considering these boys are sleeping on a beach where South Pacific tropical storms are imminent): [Jack and Ralph] walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate. [Jack said,] ‘If I could only get a pig!’ [Then Ralph replied,] ‘I’ll come back and go on with the shelter.’ They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate. All the warm salt water of the bathing pool and the shouting and splashing and laughing were only just sufficient to bring them together again. (55)
It is as if this family unit has taken a vacation and has found a hotel with a pool. Poolside, this husband and wife are quarreling about their diverging goals; their “children” are keeping them together though, just as can happen in reality. Ralph and Jack interpellate—hail the parental codes they have witnessed—in this scene, but, of course, it is the manly, bellicose conventions that Jack has seen so often that win out in the end. The feminized, reasonable characters would survive just fine together on the island, if patriarchy would not have won out. Jack, the patriarchal figure, is made beastly, just like a warmongering platoon leader or ruthless sniper: “Jack was bent double. He was down like a sprinter, his nose only a few inches from the humid earthy...There was only the faintest indication of a trail here…He lowered his chin and stared at the traces as though he would force them to speak to him. Then dog-like, uncomfortably on all fours yet unheeding his discomfort, he stole forward five yards and stopped” (48). Then, Jack asks for water, a precious commodity in this scenario. Yet, Jack wastefully and animalistically, like the combat generals he has seen—and studied and learned from—treating the earth and human life like a dog treats a fence base: “Jack took up a coconut shell that brimmed with fresh water from among a group that was arranged [by someone else] in the shade, and drank. The water splashed over his chin and neck and chest. He breathed noisily when he had finished” (50). The patriarch gluts himself and reigns. Roger is the big brother—and an Orwellian one in a lot of ways. He is a sadistic lieutenant for Jack, the enforcer of every code Jack creates for the boys to rigidly follow. In this Althusserian reading, Roger is entirely a repressive state apparatus. Roger is an RSA that benefits greatly from hailing the ISAs newly instituted by the dictator Jack. Also, there is no “law” (both an ISA and RSA), so a tribal law is made; no “culture” ISA (opera, music, comedy, literature, sports), so the theatre of the “Beast” is created; no religious ISA, no educational ISA, no communications ISA (except fire, which is only heeded by the rational), and only a dysfunction political/family ISA (where Ralph and Jack clash). Without Roger, Jack cannot reign like he does. With the Gestapo, Hitler could not have, either. Without all of the West telling its children that “daddy knows best,” the patriarch could not persist as Golding shows it has, with consequences and victims. Piggy is a grandmother and the collective conscience of all the youths. He is physically pathetic: nearly blind, utterly asthmatic, rather portly, and unwilling and incapable of doing much about his lack of physical skills. His very name is feminized—we never do get his actual name—and is foreshadowing in itself to what happens to him. He is neglected throughout the whole book, then killed when he finally forcefully tries to get the savages to repent and think reasonably about their situation. Noticeably, Piggy is introduced butt first in the opening scene, as he makes his way out of the heavy foliage. Continually advising from the side or back, Piggy is much like a portrait on the wall of a past matriarch of a family; she might metaphysically offer her wisdom and counsel during times of need and not during times when she feels like pontificating. As Jack leads other truant boys away from the conch and the assembly to build a fire that nearly burns the whole island at the start, Piggy judges from his sedentary spot: “’Like kids!’ he said scornfully. ‘Acting like a crowd of kids!’” (38). Next, he shows further evidence of interpellation when he considers tea-time as a missed opportunity for contemplation, while Ralph ditches him for fire-building. Then, grandmother-like, “with the martyred expression of a parent who has to keep up with the senseless ebullience of the children, he picked up the conch, turned toward the forest, and began to pick his way over the tumbled scar” (38). Piggy transfers every element of the adult world, the place he is used to, to the island, spotting the conch and prompting Ralph—Piggy himself does not have the wind to blow into it himself—to use it like a dinner bell, or an attendance horn, to make an alluring sound. It is significant here that Golding sets up the exchange with Piggy knowing about the conch’s potential to make a sound that would attract the rest of the boys, who have been interpellated. Piggy is constructed by Golding as not looking like a leader should look. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to hide his weakness from polio throughout his career, because he and those close to him knew that there is something that has been constructed about a leader that expects him to be tiptop shape. This is one reason, of course, that fathers have been socially constructed as leaders, due to their physicality. If Piggy as a grandmother is a stretch, then he can be easily read as a son who has not—cannot possibly—lived up to his father’s expectations and is therefore demeaned, silenced, and rejected by his father. Either way, Piggy is a feminine figure, entirely productive and rational, within what would “work” in Golding’s eyes for the boys and for Western society. But physical weakness does not fit into traditional ISAs, so Piggy is killed by Roger, whose boulder from the ledge above destroys Piggy and the conch he brought to restore order. The three boys who are feminized in the book, Ralph, Piggy, and Simon, show how thoroughly they have been interpellated in this scene—by the hierarchy notions associated with age, by British tea customs, These three boys are the ones who are not included in the manly activities (hunting, rallying) and dwellings (castle rock, fire site). They are absolutely subjects who have submitted to the ruling ideology and all its codes. They miss the rituals that are representations of the ways which they belong to these ISAs. “Piggy’s right, Ralph. There’s you and Jack. Go on being chief.” “We’re all drifting and things are going rotten. At home there was always a grownup. Please, sir; please, miss; and then you got an answer. How I wish!” “I wish my auntie was here.” “I wish my father…Oh, what’s the use?” “Keep the fire going.” The dance was over and the hunters were going back to the shelters. “Grownups know things,” said Piggy. “They ain’t afraid of the dark. They’d meet and have tea and discuss. Then things ‘ud be all right—” “They wouldn’t set fir to the island. Or lose [a member of the group to the fire]—” “They’d build a ship—” The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life. “They wouldn’t quarrel—” “Or break my specs—” “Or talk about a beast [that was constructed to keep boys afraid and dependent on Jack]—” “If only they could get a message to us,” cried Ralph desperately. “If only they could send something grownup…a sign or something.” A thin wail out of the darkness chilled them and set them grabbing for each other. Then the wail rose, remote and unearthly, and turned to an inarticulate gibbering. Percival Wemys Madison, of the Vicarage, Harcourt St. Anthony, lying in the long grass, was living through circumstances in which the incantation of his address was powerless to help him. (94)
The only sign the adults send, although it does come immediately after Ralph asks for one, is a dead parachutist whose haunting presence and appearance on the mountain perpetuates the myth of the Beast on the island. If a feminine uprising threatens, it is immediately thwarted. Even the natural order and Fate seem to be working against Ralph, Piggy, and Simon. Simon, like Piggy, is naturalized. Throughout the book, Simon is a mystical character, in touch with the natural world around him. He is introduced through commentary of the other boys, who are talking about him. Through the male gaze and voice, Simon is depicted: “’He’s buzzed off.’ ‘Got fed up,’ said Jack, ‘and gone for a bathe.’ Ralph frowned. ‘He’s queer. He’s funny’” (55). Further on, Simon behaves like a meditative hermit who knows he is different and who “knows” there is something better than the quibbling on the beach. He is difficult to label, “a small, skinny boy, his chin pointed, and his eyes so bright they had deceived Ralph into thinking him delightfully gay and wicked. The coarse mop of black hair was long and swung down, almost concealing a low, broad forehead” (55-6). Like the stereotypical gay boy might, he recognizes beauty and colors and the precious parts of the island and its flora and fauna, only found deeper in the forest, where only the perceptive Simon can venture and access the underlying aesthetic. Simon is killed when he “comes out of the closet”; he emerges from the forest with newfound comprehension of the evil with everyone. Simon has found a clearing where he finds refuge from the madness he senses that is growing within the rest of the boys. Also, deep in forest is where he meets the Lord of the Flies, the supernatural talking pig’s head placed on a spear. After he learns from this encounter and recognizes the dead parachutist as a man and not an enormous gorilla, he bursts forth from his hiding spot, only to be stabbed repeatedly by the frenzying savages who have been darting around the fire. Golding undoubtedly had students like Simon, boys who were more “perceptive” and “soft.” And, assuredly, he noticed these more feminine boys being harassed or subordinated. Simon is a feminine figure who embodies what Golding believes would help Western society thrive. But traditional ISAs say Simon does not fit into the natural order, so he is killed on the beach by the boys with spears. There are many problems this family faces, especially with Althusser’s theories in mind. This family cannot reproduce itself. There are no women to have babies. Without ISAs to follow, the boys see no point in even attempting to remain loyal to the ISAs they have left behind. The father fails because there is no work to attend, no money to make. In his previous life, Jack was somebody, he was the bold leader of the choir (a stereotypically feminized lot, making Golding’s theme that much more cogent and potent: even soft choirboys can become reprobates). Roger, the biggest savage of them all, is the big brother of this family. Roger sees no point in following the rules established by the feminized conch holders, Ralph and Piggy, so he sees no possible dividends in behaving like he did in England. The ISAs of a culture must show the subjects some ultimate goal, illusory or real, that “pays off” for them in some way. The mother, Ralph, simply cannot provide that. His main lure is rescue, but even that falls short of the others’ expectations, because rescue is not seen as all that good. Moreover, the mother of this family does not have the support of the father, so she fails. In fact, Jack the father becomes corrupt and defects from what he sees as meaninglessness. Ralph’s hopes are meaningless, because even if they are saved, the world they are returning to is largely dysfunctional: where they would return to would be worse: nuclear/atomic war has erupted. Lord of the Flies seems to be set in the near future from 1954, not exactly when it was published. The text shows a peaceful, rational society’s ISAs simply cannot be established and reinforced effectively until peace time. Yet, it is during war time that destructive ISAs can really be engrained, just as Jack is able to influence his minions. They are lusty for something more than the domestic huts and bananas. Instead, living in a castle—in a real man’s den—hunting (not out of necessity, but out of desire), and eating pork chops is a much better option. Jack establishes certain ISAs of his own, a masculine set, and imposes those quickly on the easily interpellated boys. The younger boys are easily interpellated because they are dropped from their element. Adults actually shot them down, hoping for their demise. Now, the boys wonder what the use is of considering the adult world. One of their realizations is that consciously or unconsciously, that they cannot “reproduce: 1. the productive forces, [and] 2. the existing relations of production” (128). For Althusser, they do not have a chance to propagate their social system. Ralph’s pleas for following the adult ISAs of their past fail because he is unable to establish a reward system. Althusser states that incentives are necessary to perpetuate any social system: “How is the reproduction of labour power ensured? It is ensured by giving labour power the material means with which to reproduce itself: by wages. Wages feature in the accounting of each enterprise, but as ‘wage capital’, not at all as a condition of the material production of labour power” (130). Even stickers on good papers in elementary school influence and interpellate. Ralph has no gimmick, no commodity to offer the boys, nothing except shelter and camaraderie. This is what a mother who is alone can provide. The boys reject the rational aspects of the adult world. While it seems they are perceptive, when they are first on the island, of how the world should work. Yet, they are incompetent, overly masculine, another problem that causes them to fail, according to Althusser’s notions of social systems: “the labour power must be ‘competent’, i.e. suitable to be set to work in the complex system of the process of production. The development of the productive forces and the type of unity historically constitutive of the productive forces at a given moment produce the result that the labour power has to be (diversely) skilled and therefore reproduced as such” (131). The boys on the island are “diversely skilled,” but the masculine disallows the feminine rationality and skill set to contribute. Their demise comes when they are lead into, and by, masculinity’s competitive faults. They follow their “father,” because they revere Jack. They compete with their father, who is less affectionate and attentive (Jack does not care one bit about the littluns), so the “sons” are urged to be selfish and exploitive. Also, back in their home country, revering and imitating their father is interpellation in itself, which is rewarded by all members of their immediate social system: mother, sister, extended family. These boys have been worked over by their school—they all attend the same institution for boys—and by their families. Reinforcing this position, Althusser comments on the significance of the family ISA: [School] is coupled with the Family just as the Church was once coupled with the Family. We can now claim that the unprecedentedly deep crisis which is now shaking the education system of so many States across the globe, often in conjunction with a crisis…shaking the family system, takes on a political meaning, given that the School (and School-Family couple) constitutes the dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the Apparatus playing a determinant part in the reproduction of the relations of production of a mode of production in its existence by the world class struggle. (157)
Golding’s boys have been cast away from their families at home for a boarding school, where they will get the same ideologies, just spun more militaristically. Golding warns the reader that Althusser’s concept of reproducing the modes of production has become reproducing the modes of destruction, for that is what the adults in his novel are doing. The naval commander who arrives in the end simply reproduces the hierarchy when arrives. He is not really rescuing them from the island, for they will be taken to a more dangerous place in his cruiser. This naval commander, whose condescending tone shows he has submitted to the rules that state what adults should do to children who misbehave, is undoubtedly a husband/father and has a family that misses him while he fulfills his own selfish, barbaric needs of destruction. All he does, when Ralph admits that the boys are having a war and that two are dead, is whistle softly. Percival Wemys Madison, interpellated anew, cannot recite who he is, for he has forgotten in the mayhem. (Likely, his mother made him remember his address for prompt return.) Ralph, along with the other boys, who finally realize what they have done, “wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy” (202). But the naval officer turns away, embarrassed and ashamed of these pathetic, emotional boys, who are not behaving like sons of his. If they are to succeed in life, they will have to harden. Letting the boys regain their self-control, the officer focuses on his cruiser and getting back to his business in the war. The modes of destruction are efficiently reproduced.
It was a triumphant experience, writing this essay for my class at USD and being able to connect my ideas to class at BVHS. Dr. Skip Willman is a brilliant, generous professor who does a great job teaching.
It's ironic: the only way the boys are "rescued" is by starting a fire large enough to be seen by the warring men in the sky and at sea. The only way the warring men see the island is due to the entire island burning to ashes. Are they really "rescued," though? Is their home still there? If there is nowhere for the boys to be taken, then they are not definitively "rescued."
8 comments:
Matt Christensen
ENGL 786: Literary Criticism
Dr. Willman
9 May, 2007
Reproducing the Modes of Destruction: Applying Althusser to Golding’s Lord of the Flies
What better way is there to reproduce the modes of destruction than to train boys in the arts of warfare and malice, then set them loose on a perfect playing field? The island burns up and all the reasonable, feminine figures are purged in the end—mission accomplished. Not so ironically after all, it is the smoke from the inferno that gets the boys spotted by the adult warriors, who think the boys are playing a silly game when the little savages, just doing as they have been interpellated to do, are really about to deliberately kill another one of their own. So just when the naval commander arrives to take the boys back to the atomic conflict—going on at the “civilized” world—on his cruiser, they are ideally equipped with malicious traits for the mayhem they will encounter once they reach home. (There is no better way to coach a team than to show them all they need to know, drill and practice those behaviors, then evaluate what they have learned by making them demonstrate what they can do.) William Golding’s boys perform admirably—perfectly in accordance with what they have been interpellated by. There is no stopping their reproducing the modes of destruction, because that is all they have known throughout their lives: men kill other men and the earth is absolutely expendable to that end.
Golding’s Lord of the Flies has been read as survival narrative, Freudian representation, political allegory, religious fable, didactic myth, apocalyptic warning, and counterargument (to R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, which, in a parallel tale, has the boys thrive against insurmountable odds, using mainly their superior British intelligence and savvy against pirates and predators). What has yet to be noticed about Golding’s most famous book, however, is that it examines the potential outcome of a subtle, gradual apocalypse happening now in the West: the deterioration of the family ideological state apparatus. A successful “family” is greatly different from what it used to be, obviously. For a new critical angle, Lord of the Flies should be read as an examination of how important the family structure is to the success of a social system. A “family” does emerge in this novel—surely is depicted by Golding—but cannot prosper, or even function, because the father figure, Jack, is too bloodthirsty and the mother figure, Ralph, is too passive, too feminine to lead. Golding shows more than a lot of concern for the ways that Western society has been constructed. Lord of the Flies unfolds to say that as long as men—who behave much like Jack Merridew, the “father” of the “family” on the island—are in charge of governments and militaries, there will be war after war, with the fighters getting ever better at killing. Golding indicts the inherent nature of males, not of females, interestingly aligning the feminine with the rational. Undoubtedly, Golding, a schoolteacher much of his life, had seen in his classrooms little boys ripping at each other while little girls sat by, amicable and studious. The solution seems to be in applying a reading with a working knowledge of the ideological state apparatuses, which, when working “properly,” promote a culture that is harmonious within itself and with those cultures around it.
In the chapter “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in his book Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Louis Althusser attempts to theorize the reproduction of the conditions of production within a social system. He conceives of ideology as more than just a system of ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and values. For Althusser, “1. ideology is nothing insofar as it is a pure dream (manufactured by who knows what power)… [and] 2. ideology has no history, which emphatically does not mean that there is no history in it (on the contrary, for it is merely the pale, empty and inverted reflection of real history) but that it has no history of its own” (160). Ideology is supported by what Althusser calls “ideological state apparatuses” (which function by ideology) and “repressive state apparatuses” (which function by violence), both of which influence the subjects within the social system to interpellate—to hail, by recognizing and going along with, the ideologically-established codes. Ideology must be reproduced through the modes of production; also, submission to the ideology must be reproduced so that the subjects follow properly the rituals, practices, and codes of the social system. When examining Lord of the Flies and its relevance and readings today, it must be noted that Althusser’s family ISA is very significant: “the School-Family couple has replaced the Church-Family couple” in influential hierarchy (154; my italics). Family has always remained paramount in the successful interpellation of a social system’s subjects. Upon close reading, the boys should be seen as indeed having/playing distinct family roles. To be clear about his theory, Althusser lists his ISAs and adds a note about the family: “The family obviously has other ‘functions’ than that of an ISA. It intervenes in the reproduction of labour power. In different modes of production it is the unit of production and/or the unit of consumption” (143). And consumption is precisely what Golding’s little Pac-men are best at.
Moreover, an Althusserian reading of Lord of the Flies, published in 1954, adds a lot 1) to examine post World War II reconstruction of families, schools, and churches, the ISAs that create the societies of the West; 2) to consider the ways WWII changed families, schools, and churches forever; and 3) to consider the West (especially America) in 2007, with divorce rates skyrocketing and wartime unceasing. More specifically, an Althusserian reading illuminates so well how ideological state apparatuses, especially the family ISA, influence Western culture—and this reading also reveals on the next layer what Golding is condemning and indicting about the inherent nature of men, not women. The failure of the “family” on the island and the subsequent destruction of that island show how important the family ISA is to the West. If the family “succeeds” in the culturally-defined ways it is supposed to (if all the members are properly conditioned and interpellate as they should), then the West can keep reproducing its modes of production. Lord of the Flies should be read not only as a microcosm of what horrors can occur in patriarchal society, due to the faults within men, but also as a patriarchal family meeting its doom due to the faults of the father. Golding’s plotline of destruction twists Althusser’s statement, “the reproduction of the conditions of production” (127). According to Golding, the West is just going to keep recreating a destructive mindset. Destruction has become the code of the West, because of competitively malevolent natures of males who train younger males. It is remarkable that in Lord of the Flies, it is the feminized characters, Ralph, Piggy, and Simon, who are absolutely rational (and are connected with culture) while it is the masculine characters who are irrationally evil (and revert back to a deplorable, primitive human nature). Critics of gender representations should find this polarity intriguing.
When Lord of the Flies was published in 1954, it was neither immediately famous nor very profitable, though it was well-received by critics. It was in the 1960s, however, when the countercultures were thriving, that Lord of the Flies was a “campus favorite,” a term Golding deplored. Much of the past scholarship about the book was written in the 1960s, too, when there was anxiety about the Vietnam War and a heavy hangover—more than that, a backlash—from the rigidity of the 1950s moral codes and McCarthy episodes. There have been many readings of Lord of the Flies, but Althusser has yet to be specifically applied. In other theorists’ and critics’ arguments, however, there are connections to be made to the reading that these boys should be seen as a family. E. L. Epstein calls Golding’s narrative, within his framework analysis of the symbolism, an “extremely complex and beautifully woven symbolic web” (204). Epstein also demonstrates that the central symbol of the novel, that which seems to rule over the boys’ psyches and behavior throughout, is the pig’s head, the “’lord of the flies,’ which is a translation of the Hebrew Ba’alzevuv (Beelzebub [Prince of Devils] in Greek)” (205). These boys are destroying/exploiting the natural and feminine world throughout, doing just what they are guided to do by their worshipped idol, “a devil whose name suggests that he is devoted to decay, destruction, demoralization, hysteria and panic and who therefore fits in very well with Golding’s theme [‘an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature’]” (205). Jack, the father and head diabolist, leads the boys in a paramount killing of a central mother figure. Epstein asserts that the “turning point in the struggle between Ralph and Jack is the killing of the sow…The sow is a mother: ‘sunk in deep maternal bliss lay the largest of the lot…the great bladder of her belly was fringed with a row of piglets that slept or burrowed and squeaked.’ The killing of the sow is accomplished in terms of sexual intercourse” (206). Jack steers the removal of the feminine order on the island and, thereby, the destruction of everything that is good in their society. Epstein employs Freudian psychoanalysis here, showing all of the language that is easily read as sexual. Seemingly, every phallic and vaginal phrase is there in this picture. This is not pleasant, cooperative “intercourse,” either, which shows the ways that the male power abuses its role in the family ISA (using then killing the female force), causing the social system to fail. If families fail, society unravels—or, society surely undergoes a stage of severe flux. Also noteworthy is Epstein’s final examination of the scene where Simon, on a Christ-like quest to seek answers in the wilderness, speaks to the Lord of the Flies directly. This can be read as Epstein sees it, with an all-consuming male figure: “Simon imagines he is looking into a vast mouth. ‘There was blackness within, a blackness that spread…. Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness’” (207). This mouth should be seen as overriding the feminine and perpetuating the modes of destruction. It is a “symbol of ravenous, unreasoning and eternally insatiable nature” (207) and is seen in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as well, coming from Kurtz, Epstein points out. This masculine force has gathered so much clout that it stands overwhelming to any resistance. The mouth is masculinity, come to consume all goodness and rationality.
Squaring off with this black hole is Ralph, the feminine figure. George Clark presents a fascinating reading of Lord of the Flies, which urges a close look at the world that Ralph has to try to manage. Clark outlines Ralph’s mental and emotional progression through the book, then elucidates, “As far as external action is concerned, Ralph struggles in a losing cause, and his tragic vision is the product of defeat in the realm of external action” (76). In the end, Ralph knows he has been defeated due to this innate wickedness of mankind. From the beginning, it is tough for Ralph to prove, Clark shows, without the support of the father figure, to the boys that “domestic” work is necessary: “Ralph clashes with Jack over what things must be first—hunting (the new definition of fun) or the signal fire; meat or shelters” (80). During the plot, he keeps trying to maintain harmony, first offering them hope of a rescue by his father, a navy man, then structuring their day as much like their military school as possible, then trying to create parliamentary democracy, then attempting to rein in the savage faction that has gone with Jack. Ralph struggles in the face of the omnipotent mouth of masculinity, and in the end is made fully aware that he has lost. Roger, the sadistic lieutenant of Jack, sharpens a stick at both ends to display Ralph’s head like the pig’s. Without the other two feminized characters, Piggy and Simon, who have been killed by the savages, Ralph embodies the last matriarchal force. Clark studies Ralph’s struggle to near the end, when he tries to talk some sense into the twins, Samneric, at Jack’s stronghold, the manly—even kingly—den called “Castle Rock”. Here, the twins flat out tell Ralph what is going to happen to him, and they have no defense for what they have been conditioned by, Jack’s masculine rule. (Marx—“They are doing it, and they know that they are.”) Even the kind twins are now powerlessly interpellated by masculinity that they will destroy their leader and display his head as a trophy for manliness. But, they will not ensnare Ralph on the spot; they need their father to show them the slaughtering way the next day.
Bernard F. Dick adds to the readings of Golding’s revered text, explaining that “Lord of the Flies introduces a structural principle that becomes Golding’s hallmark: a polarity expressed in terms of a moral tension. Thus, there is the rational (the fire-watchers) pitted against the irrational (the hunters)” (21) (which flips the title question posed by Sherry B. Ortner). Dick fails to note, however, the gender role implications in Lord of the Flies. Golding has set up a family that cannot succeed because of the male faults. Ralph, like many mothers then and now, “learns [this troubling truth] through suffering but cannot articulate his feelings. He can only weep [on the beach, in front of the male gaze, the naval commander]; but, what is even more pathetic, his tears are a reflex response to a situation he cannot fully comprehend” (92). Golding has made his feminine characters rational, but still painfully passive. They sit by while the savage group grows and festers. This family ISA cannot prosper, so the civilization cannot either.
Lord of the Flies was widely-read, though not immediately, in the United States, gaining prominence when people were compelled to question the “idyllic” 1950s. America did all it could after WWII to reconstruct its hopes for a perfect family ISA—and had a lot of factors work in its favor, helping it become a “superpower.” The United States had not hosted a major battle in WWII and so did not have to rebuild its cities from the constant shelling like parts of Europe had to; Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor was the only American location of devastation. Most of the fighting took place in Europe, of course, thousands of miles away. However, the war threatened everything America stood for and wanted to remain and/or become. Much had to be rebuilt in America ideologically. With so many fathers and brothers dead or traumatized by the war, families had to be reconstructed. With so many young men unsure of what to do, the G. I. Bill was instated so that anyone who fought physically (and ideologically) for America could be re-interpellated by American universities. The intended, hoped-for results are blatantly obvious, when examining this time period: America was trying to recreate itself and knew it had to take measures to remain capitalistic and “wholesome.” Scholar Joanne Beckman has written on the resurgence of the church ISA, showing how America deliberately tried to reconstruct itself, in line with Althusser’s theory of ISAs:
At midcentury, Americans streamed back to church in unprecedented numbers. The baby boom (those born between 1946 and 1965) had begun, and parents of the first baby boomers moved into the suburbs and filled the pews, establishing church and family as the twin pillars of security and respectability. Religious membership, church funding, institutional building, and traditional faith and practice all increased in the 1950s. At midcentury, things looked very good for Christian America. (National Humanities Center)
America was becoming a superpower and the culture constructers wanted this rise to prominence to be done just right. So, around and during the year when Golding’s novel was first published, 1954—which happens to be the same year Elvis Presley’s ideology-threatening career began—the family, the church, the school, and the other important ISAs were systematically being recreated.
With ISA’s influence over the reconstruction of the West after WWII, Golding’s group of boys should be read as a family, with a distinct mother, father, big brother, grandmother, daughter (or homosexual son), and lesser siblings. In this reading, the family ISA fails due to dysfunctional members, which leads to the island society failing miserably and horrifyingly. Of course, these are largely culturally constructed roles within the framework of mid-Twentieth Century America. It must be said in advance that the roles align with the traditional, or original, American—and, largely, Western—roles for men, women, children, and extended family members. Because Lord of the Flies was written in 1954, it is productive to place Golding’s representations and these Althusserian interpretations in that era. These roles fit with supposed primitive instincts within the family unit, wherein the man actively seeks and hunts and the woman passively supports and holds together. As a schoolteacher for much of his life, Golding surely knew a variety of students from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds—and within that framework, it is of course likely that he knew students with differing levels of parental support. To consider this group of boys as a family ISA within the superstructure of the island society, each member must be examined carefully to mark his position in the ever important social system.
Ralph is the mother figure. He is constantly trying to create order and safety, urging the boys to focus on maintaining the fire—for warmth, but mainly for rescue—and to build huts and gather fruit. Throughout the text, Ralph nurtures the littluns and provides all he can selflessly for the betterment of the group. Ralph is a giver, gatherer, builder, provider; he leads by understanding, availability, and cooperative direction. He is a motherly figure that is focused on the current welfare and future rescue of the whole group. More attentive than most boys his age, Ralph wants the littluns to remain as close to him and the huts on the beach as possible. Ralph is the superego, the kind angelic conscience on the shoulder. There are moments when he wants to submit to Jack’s rule and, thereby, to the codes of familial dominance, but is urged by those he protects, Piggy and Simon, to go on being chief. Nearer the end, when Jack, the father, has recruited all the boys except Piggy into the hunting tribe, Ralph, like actual mothers throughout Western society, submits to patriarchy. (It is just like the Sunday morning when the mom goes to church faithfully, but, unless the father habitually attends too, the sons will remain in bed or will watch the sports pundits instead.) In the end, the boys are wholly on the father’s side and join with him to kill the mother figure, Ralph, for trying to instill a limiting, reasonable structure and for not being able to propagate the species. Ralph behaves like a mother, but cannot possibly do the traditional duty of mothers, so he becomes unnecessary. He threatens the father’s rule, so he is hunted by the reprobates and their spears in the end.
Jack Merridew is the father. Like the father in Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye—and many fathers of the early to mid-Twentieth Century—Jack is the rough, disciplinarian figure who provides “fiscally” (pork chops instead of bananas), but not emotionally or intellectually—or in any other way, for that matter. Jack is significantly given a last name while the rest of the boys are given just first names or no names at all. Like a father, his last name matters; Merridew might as well be the last name of all the boys. Of course, the last name is not missed as significant by Althusser: “it is certain in advance that [the baby] will bear its Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived” (176). It is no accident that Golding anoints Jack the father with a last name. The only other boy whose last name is revealed is the tiny Percival Wemys Madison, who has been so conditioned by his parents to remember all his personal contact information that he recites his full name and address constantly due to the persistent pressure he is under on this island. He is nervous beyond control, because the social system he has been interpellated by is gone. He sees that the reproduction of the means of production cannot take place, so he is aimless. Percival cannot take charge like the father. In contrast to Ralph, Jack is a taker, hunter, not a planner, but an actor. Jack leads by fear, and he is a selfish, wasteful glutton. Jack is also exceptionally desirous. He is absolutely Darwinian, making everyone do their parts, each of which, he is sure to communicate, is expendable or replaceable. There are just a few moments in the text where Ralph and Jack get along and are able to cooperate. When they do work together—while building shelters and a fire—as Western society/culture says a married couple should, there are meaningful results:
The twins, Sam ‘n Eric, were the first to get a likely log but they could to nothing till Ralph, Jack, Simon, Roger and Maurice found room for a hand-hold. Then they inched the grotesque dead thing up the rock and toppled it over on top. Each party of boys added a quota, less or more, and the pile grew. At the return Ralph found himself alone on a limb with Jack and they grinned at each other, sharing this burden. Once more, amid the breeze, the shouting, the slanting sunlight on the high mountain, was shed that glamour, that strange invisible light of friendship, adventure, and content.
“Almost too heavy.”
Jack grinned back.
“Not for the two of us.” (39)
For now, the boys are getting along like one big, happy family, complete with all the codes a family should follow in Western society. But, ultimately, Jack becomes too impatient and power-hungry to cooperate for long, not when there is a castle to inhabit, subjects to command, and a “Beast” to vanquish. Like many fathers in the West today are so focused on career advancement and salary increases that they neglect providing time to their children, Jack is interested in only personal status and gain. He wants as much distance between him and the littluns as he can create. Undoubtedly, little boys want to be like their fathers due to obvious gender associative reasons. Jack leads and gets results, because he fathers just like the men all the boys have known, their own fathers and the schoolmasters at their boarding school. Jack demands the choir boys wear their robes, even on the unbearably hot beach. Why? Because he says so. The boys wear their robes, buttoned to the top, because Jack says so and because they are used to listening to Jack, who had been appointed to a position of power by the adults. Moreover, like adults he has seen, Jack never acknowledges the worth of the littluns, seeing them only as burdens. Interestingly, Golding depicts the littluns as one faceless, neglected entity.
Throughout, Golding makes it clear that Ralph and Jack have much different interests. They have gone against their vows. Their opposite goals are made explicit in chapter entitled “Huts on the Beach,” (just prior to the chapter “Painted Faces and Long Hair,” which is when manly impulses begin to make things unravel). The man wants to hunt for pigs (which is unnecessary—rather, a desirous pursuit—because the boys have easily enough fruit to survive), while the woman wants to provide secure sanctuary (which is absolutely necessary, considering these boys are sleeping on a beach where South Pacific tropical storms are imminent):
[Jack and Ralph] walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate. [Jack said,] ‘If I could only get a pig!’ [Then Ralph replied,] ‘I’ll come back and go on with the shelter.’ They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate. All the warm salt water of the bathing pool and the shouting and splashing and laughing were only just sufficient to bring them together again. (55)
It is as if this family unit has taken a vacation and has found a hotel with a pool. Poolside, this husband and wife are quarreling about their diverging goals; their “children” are keeping them together though, just as can happen in reality. Ralph and Jack interpellate—hail the parental codes they have witnessed—in this scene, but, of course, it is the manly, bellicose conventions that Jack has seen so often that win out in the end. The feminized, reasonable characters would survive just fine together on the island, if patriarchy would not have won out. Jack, the patriarchal figure, is made beastly, just like a warmongering platoon leader or ruthless sniper: “Jack was bent double. He was down like a sprinter, his nose only a few inches from the humid earthy...There was only the faintest indication of a trail here…He lowered his chin and stared at the traces as though he would force them to speak to him. Then dog-like, uncomfortably on all fours yet unheeding his discomfort, he stole forward five yards and stopped” (48). Then, Jack asks for water, a precious commodity in this scenario. Yet, Jack wastefully and animalistically, like the combat generals he has seen—and studied and learned from—treating the earth and human life like a dog treats a fence base: “Jack took up a coconut shell that brimmed with fresh water from among a group that was arranged [by someone else] in the shade, and drank. The water splashed over his chin and neck and chest. He breathed noisily when he had finished” (50). The patriarch gluts himself and reigns.
Roger is the big brother—and an Orwellian one in a lot of ways. He is a sadistic lieutenant for Jack, the enforcer of every code Jack creates for the boys to rigidly follow. In this Althusserian reading, Roger is entirely a repressive state apparatus. Roger is an RSA that benefits greatly from hailing the ISAs newly instituted by the dictator Jack. Also, there is no “law” (both an ISA and RSA), so a tribal law is made; no “culture” ISA (opera, music, comedy, literature, sports), so the theatre of the “Beast” is created; no religious ISA, no educational ISA, no communications ISA (except fire, which is only heeded by the rational), and only a dysfunction political/family ISA (where Ralph and Jack clash). Without Roger, Jack cannot reign like he does. With the Gestapo, Hitler could not have, either. Without all of the West telling its children that “daddy knows best,” the patriarch could not persist as Golding shows it has, with consequences and victims.
Piggy is a grandmother and the collective conscience of all the youths. He is physically pathetic: nearly blind, utterly asthmatic, rather portly, and unwilling and incapable of doing much about his lack of physical skills. His very name is feminized—we never do get his actual name—and is foreshadowing in itself to what happens to him. He is neglected throughout the whole book, then killed when he finally forcefully tries to get the savages to repent and think reasonably about their situation. Noticeably, Piggy is introduced butt first in the opening scene, as he makes his way out of the heavy foliage. Continually advising from the side or back, Piggy is much like a portrait on the wall of a past matriarch of a family; she might metaphysically offer her wisdom and counsel during times of need and not during times when she feels like pontificating. As Jack leads other truant boys away from the conch and the assembly to build a fire that nearly burns the whole island at the start, Piggy judges from his sedentary spot: “’Like kids!’ he said scornfully. ‘Acting like a crowd of kids!’” (38). Next, he shows further evidence of interpellation when he considers tea-time as a missed opportunity for contemplation, while Ralph ditches him for fire-building. Then, grandmother-like, “with the martyred expression of a parent who has to keep up with the senseless ebullience of the children, he picked up the conch, turned toward the forest, and began to pick his way over the tumbled scar” (38). Piggy transfers every element of the adult world, the place he is used to, to the island, spotting the conch and prompting Ralph—Piggy himself does not have the wind to blow into it himself—to use it like a dinner bell, or an attendance horn, to make an alluring sound. It is significant here that Golding sets up the exchange with Piggy knowing about the conch’s potential to make a sound that would attract the rest of the boys, who have been interpellated. Piggy is constructed by Golding as not looking like a leader should look. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to hide his weakness from polio throughout his career, because he and those close to him knew that there is something that has been constructed about a leader that expects him to be tiptop shape. This is one reason, of course, that fathers have been socially constructed as leaders, due to their physicality. If Piggy as a grandmother is a stretch, then he can be easily read as a son who has not—cannot possibly—lived up to his father’s expectations and is therefore demeaned, silenced, and rejected by his father. Either way, Piggy is a feminine figure, entirely productive and rational, within what would “work” in Golding’s eyes for the boys and for Western society. But physical weakness does not fit into traditional ISAs, so Piggy is killed by Roger, whose boulder from the ledge above destroys Piggy and the conch he brought to restore order.
The three boys who are feminized in the book, Ralph, Piggy, and Simon, show how thoroughly they have been interpellated in this scene—by the hierarchy notions associated with age, by British tea customs, These three boys are the ones who are not included in the manly activities (hunting, rallying) and dwellings (castle rock, fire site). They are absolutely subjects who have submitted to the ruling ideology and all its codes. They miss the rituals that are representations of the ways which they belong to these ISAs.
“Piggy’s right, Ralph. There’s you and Jack. Go on being chief.”
“We’re all drifting and things are going rotten. At home there was always a grownup. Please, sir; please, miss; and then you got an answer. How I wish!”
“I wish my auntie was here.”
“I wish my father…Oh, what’s the use?”
“Keep the fire going.”
The dance was over and the hunters were going back to the shelters.
“Grownups know things,” said Piggy. “They ain’t afraid of the dark. They’d meet and have tea and discuss. Then things ‘ud be all right—”
“They wouldn’t set fir to the island. Or lose [a member of the group to the fire]—”
“They’d build a ship—”
The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life.
“They wouldn’t quarrel—”
“Or break my specs—”
“Or talk about a beast [that was constructed to keep boys afraid and dependent on Jack]—”
“If only they could get a message to us,” cried Ralph desperately. “If only they could send something grownup…a sign or something.”
A thin wail out of the darkness chilled them and set them grabbing for each other. Then the wail rose, remote and unearthly, and turned to an inarticulate gibbering. Percival Wemys Madison, of the Vicarage, Harcourt St. Anthony, lying in the long grass, was living through circumstances in which the incantation of his address was powerless to help him. (94)
The only sign the adults send, although it does come immediately after Ralph asks for one, is a dead parachutist whose haunting presence and appearance on the mountain perpetuates the myth of the Beast on the island. If a feminine uprising threatens, it is immediately thwarted. Even the natural order and Fate seem to be working against Ralph, Piggy, and Simon.
Simon, like Piggy, is naturalized. Throughout the book, Simon is a mystical character, in touch with the natural world around him. He is introduced through commentary of the other boys, who are talking about him. Through the male gaze and voice, Simon is depicted: “’He’s buzzed off.’ ‘Got fed up,’ said Jack, ‘and gone for a bathe.’ Ralph frowned. ‘He’s queer. He’s funny’” (55). Further on, Simon behaves like a meditative hermit who knows he is different and who “knows” there is something better than the quibbling on the beach. He is difficult to label, “a small, skinny boy, his chin pointed, and his eyes so bright they had deceived Ralph into thinking him delightfully gay and wicked. The coarse mop of black hair was long and swung down, almost concealing a low, broad forehead” (55-6). Like the stereotypical gay boy might, he recognizes beauty and colors and the precious parts of the island and its flora and fauna, only found deeper in the forest, where only the perceptive Simon can venture and access the underlying aesthetic. Simon is killed when he “comes out of the closet”; he emerges from the forest with newfound comprehension of the evil with everyone. Simon has found a clearing where he finds refuge from the madness he senses that is growing within the rest of the boys. Also, deep in forest is where he meets the Lord of the Flies, the supernatural talking pig’s head placed on a spear. After he learns from this encounter and recognizes the dead parachutist as a man and not an enormous gorilla, he bursts forth from his hiding spot, only to be stabbed repeatedly by the frenzying savages who have been darting around the fire. Golding undoubtedly had students like Simon, boys who were more “perceptive” and “soft.” And, assuredly, he noticed these more feminine boys being harassed or subordinated. Simon is a feminine figure who embodies what Golding believes would help Western society thrive. But traditional ISAs say Simon does not fit into the natural order, so he is killed on the beach by the boys with spears.
There are many problems this family faces, especially with Althusser’s theories in mind. This family cannot reproduce itself. There are no women to have babies. Without ISAs to follow, the boys see no point in even attempting to remain loyal to the ISAs they have left behind. The father fails because there is no work to attend, no money to make. In his previous life, Jack was somebody, he was the bold leader of the choir (a stereotypically feminized lot, making Golding’s theme that much more cogent and potent: even soft choirboys can become reprobates). Roger, the biggest savage of them all, is the big brother of this family. Roger sees no point in following the rules established by the feminized conch holders, Ralph and Piggy, so he sees no possible dividends in behaving like he did in England. The ISAs of a culture must show the subjects some ultimate goal, illusory or real, that “pays off” for them in some way. The mother, Ralph, simply cannot provide that. His main lure is rescue, but even that falls short of the others’ expectations, because rescue is not seen as all that good. Moreover, the mother of this family does not have the support of the father, so she fails. In fact, Jack the father becomes corrupt and defects from what he sees as meaninglessness. Ralph’s hopes are meaningless, because even if they are saved, the world they are returning to is largely dysfunctional: where they would return to would be worse: nuclear/atomic war has erupted.
Lord of the Flies seems to be set in the near future from 1954, not exactly when it was published. The text shows a peaceful, rational society’s ISAs simply cannot be established and reinforced effectively until peace time. Yet, it is during war time that destructive ISAs can really be engrained, just as Jack is able to influence his minions. They are lusty for something more than the domestic huts and bananas. Instead, living in a castle—in a real man’s den—hunting (not out of necessity, but out of desire), and eating pork chops is a much better option. Jack establishes certain ISAs of his own, a masculine set, and imposes those quickly on the easily interpellated boys. The younger boys are easily interpellated because they are dropped from their element. Adults actually shot them down, hoping for their demise. Now, the boys wonder what the use is of considering the adult world. One of their realizations is that consciously or unconsciously, that they cannot “reproduce: 1. the productive forces, [and] 2. the existing relations of production” (128). For Althusser, they do not have a chance to propagate their social system. Ralph’s pleas for following the adult ISAs of their past fail because he is unable to establish a reward system. Althusser states that incentives are necessary to perpetuate any social system: “How is the reproduction of labour power ensured? It is ensured by giving labour power the material means with which to reproduce itself: by wages. Wages feature in the accounting of each enterprise, but as ‘wage capital’, not at all as a condition of the material production of labour power” (130). Even stickers on good papers in elementary school influence and interpellate. Ralph has no gimmick, no commodity to offer the boys, nothing except shelter and camaraderie. This is what a mother who is alone can provide. The boys reject the rational aspects of the adult world. While it seems they are perceptive, when they are first on the island, of how the world should work. Yet, they are incompetent, overly masculine, another problem that causes them to fail, according to Althusser’s notions of social systems: “the labour power must be ‘competent’, i.e. suitable to be set to work in the complex system of the process of production. The development of the productive forces and the type of unity historically constitutive of the productive forces at a given moment produce the result that the labour power has to be (diversely) skilled and therefore reproduced as such” (131). The boys on the island are “diversely skilled,” but the masculine disallows the feminine rationality and skill set to contribute. Their demise comes when they are lead into, and by, masculinity’s competitive faults. They follow their “father,” because they revere Jack. They compete with their father, who is less affectionate and attentive (Jack does not care one bit about the littluns), so the “sons” are urged to be selfish and exploitive. Also, back in their home country, revering and imitating their father is interpellation in itself, which is rewarded by all members of their immediate social system: mother, sister, extended family. These boys have been worked over by their school—they all attend the same institution for boys—and by their families. Reinforcing this position, Althusser comments on the significance of the family ISA:
[School] is coupled with the Family just as the Church was once coupled with the Family. We can now claim that the unprecedentedly deep crisis which is now shaking the education system of so many States across the globe, often in conjunction with a crisis…shaking the family system, takes on a political meaning, given that the School (and School-Family couple) constitutes the dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the Apparatus playing a determinant part in the reproduction of the relations of production of a mode of production in its existence by the world class struggle. (157)
Golding’s boys have been cast away from their families at home for a boarding school, where they will get the same ideologies, just spun more militaristically. Golding warns the reader that Althusser’s concept of reproducing the modes of production has become reproducing the modes of destruction, for that is what the adults in his novel are doing. The naval commander who arrives in the end simply reproduces the hierarchy when arrives. He is not really rescuing them from the island, for they will be taken to a more dangerous place in his cruiser. This naval commander, whose condescending tone shows he has submitted to the rules that state what adults should do to children who misbehave, is undoubtedly a husband/father and has a family that misses him while he fulfills his own selfish, barbaric needs of destruction. All he does, when Ralph admits that the boys are having a war and that two are dead, is whistle softly. Percival Wemys Madison, interpellated anew, cannot recite who he is, for he has forgotten in the mayhem. (Likely, his mother made him remember his address for prompt return.) Ralph, along with the other boys, who finally realize what they have done, “wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy” (202). But the naval officer turns away, embarrassed and ashamed of these pathetic, emotional boys, who are not behaving like sons of his. If they are to succeed in life, they will have to harden. Letting the boys regain their self-control, the officer focuses on his cruiser and getting back to his business in the war. The modes of destruction are efficiently reproduced.
It was a triumphant experience, writing this essay for my class at USD and being able to connect my ideas to class at BVHS. Dr. Skip Willman is a brilliant, generous professor who does a great job teaching.
Your essay is very good!!
Are any of you going to graduate school ultimately (which means you will be seeking a Master's degree)?
It's ironic: the only way the boys are "rescued" is by starting a fire large enough to be seen by the warring men in the sky and at sea. The only way the warring men see the island is due to the entire island burning to ashes. Are they really "rescued," though? Is their home still there? If there is nowhere for the boys to be taken, then they are not definitively "rescued."
Is this an apocalyptic novel?
Is this an apocalyptic novel?
At a Holocaust memorial: "Forgive, but never forget." Golding wants us to remember--and to change.
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