In 1954, William Golding (1911-1993) released his first novel, Lord of the Flies. Golding had served in the British Navy in World War II, even commanding a landing craft at Normandy Beach on D-Day (for more on his life, visit his Wikipedia page). In his lifetime, he would publish twelve more works of fiction. In 1965, he published a collection of essays entitled The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces, which includes the essay Fable. By way of introduction, he offered these words in the preface to the collection:
I ought to say a little about the piece called Fable. In 1962 I was asked to give some lectures at UCLA in California. The second of these dealt with aspects of my novel Lord of the Flies, since it had become a campus requirement. I elaborated this lecture and took it round a variety of American universities where it answered some of the standard questions which students were asking me. I print it here, in the hope that it may continue to do so.
Setting aside how remarkable it must have been to speak about his own writing, which had become required reading – and how remarkable for the students who attended the lecture, given by the author of a classic book, it is quite helpful to see the quotation offered in its context. Below is an extract from the paragraph containing the quote, from page 87 (immediate context is in bold, the quote itself is also italicized):
…With all its drawbacks and difficulties, it was this method of presenting the truth as I saw it in fable form which I adopted for the first of my novels which ever got published. The overall intention may be stated simply enough. Before the second world war I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganization of society. It is possible that today I believe something of the same again; but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another. I am not talking of one man killing another with a gun, or dropping a bomb on him or blowing him up or torpedoing him. I am thinking of the vileness beyond all words that went on, year after year, in the totalitarian states. It is bad enough to say that so many Jews were exterminated in this way and that, so many people liquidated — lovely, elegant word — but there were things done during that period from which I still have to avert my mind less I should be physically sick. They were not done by the headhunters of New Guinea, or by some primitive tribe in the Amazon. They were done, skilfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition ef civilization behind them, to beings of their own kind. I do not want to elaborate this. I would like to pass on; but I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head…
Golding here offers a powerful articulation of a kind of existential disillusionment, moving from a state of (relative) idealism to a place of recognizing humanity’s innate capacity for evil. Visible in the text is, of course, some truly privileged words regarding developing-world societies; still, he makes the point that these atrocities were committed by those educated in what would have been considered “civilized societies” – echoing, perhaps, Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil,” where monstrous acts are committed not by obvious villains but by ordinary individuals operating within a rationalized system (see her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil).
Golding’s decision to present profound truths as fables is itself quite interesting. Sometimes – perhaps in our time – rational argument alone might be insufficient to convey deep moral truths. Within the framework of a fable, reality can be distilled into struggles where archetypes clash, saying much about the human condition.
The entire essay is worth reading. The collection is available for Kindle.