Freedom, Responsibility, and Fable in Golding’s Darkness Visible

THE SHORT, SCRIBBLED NOTE attached by William Golding to the manuscript he submitted to Faber in 1953 read as follows: ‘I send you the typescript of my novel Strangers from Within, which might be defined as an allegorical interpretation of a stock situation. I hope you will feel able to publish it’.1 Today, this note forms part of the well-known story of the recovery of the manuscript from a pile of rejects by editor Charles Monteith and its subsequent publication as Lord of the Flies in 1954. But in referring to an ‘allegorical interpretation of a stock situation’ the note also highlights a feature of Golding’s writing that characterises not only the text he had submitted here, but his entire subsequent body of work. For there is indeed an allegorical, or perhaps better a fabular, quality to his novels. The fable is a genre designation to which Golding himself made claim, particularly in a long lecture of 1962 which he delivered at several American universities.2 And with good reason. The spatially and temporally remote setting of many of the novels, their tendency to make use of typological characterisation, and the seam of moralistic or even didactic closure that can be discerned in their endings would all seem to point to a fable-like design. Of course, no one would seek to deny the subtle ways in which Golding plays with or complicates this generic characterisation, but, as many critics have pointed out, the fundamental resemblance remains.3 And for some, this suggests a limitation to Golding’s art. For insofar as it directs itself to the conveyance of a singular moral lesson, the fable threatens to give the impression that it is overdetermined by a conclusion to which its narrative inexorably leads – a criticism to which Golding was sensitive: ‘The fabulist is a moralist’, he says in his lecture: ‘the fabulist is didactic, desires to inculcate a moral lesson. People do not much like moral lessons’ (Hot Gates, p. 85). In this sense, Golding’s novels might seem to sit awkwardly with mainstream realist and modernist fiction, especially where this is understood as seeking to depict in some way the multiplicity and undecidability of our contemporary condition. If it is indeed beholden to this genre, to what extent can Golding’s writing hope to describe the depth of social and psychological reality? For, as one early reader commented, fables ‘can only be submerged in actuality with difficulty, and they are liable to bob up again like corks, in all their plain explicitness’.4