Golding on the fall.(William Golding)

WHAT IS THE FALL?

LAST YEAR I met a man who admitted that, if he were to apostatise, or his theology and ecclesiology were swept away, he would still believe in the fall as its reality stands at the centre of his understanding. What is the fall? If the enlightened West no longer accepts the literary account of Genesis, because it now listens to story and science differently, how do we explain the fall within our contemporary intellectual frame? What does it look like? Did it happen once? Is it still happening? Does it happen to nature or only humans? These questions were important to twentieth-century novelists who--appropriating the religion-versus-science zeitgeist in their different and perceptive ways--interrogated the fall as they reflected on a century of man-made horror.

The fall stands at the centre of William Golding's literary vision. His novels of the 1950s are informed by his experience of the Second World War, with its fresh memory of the marriage between modernity and evil, which revealed to him the truth of the fall. This article gives an overview of Golding's interrogations of the fall in three brilliant and economical novels that succeeded his more popular first novel Lord of the Flies (1954): The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956) and Free Fall (1959). In each, Golding presents a fall, physical and metaphysical, located within language, consciousness, free will, or a combination of these. The power of Golding's presentations comes from his gift for mimesis rather than diegesis: that is, for his ability to show rather than tell; for the way he embodies rather than narrates. I apologise in advance. Golding's mimetic genius can't be conveyed in a precis of each novel's ideas. I hope readers will be inspired to reread the novels for themselves, as each is a virtuoso performance.

THE INHERITORS

DOES THE FALL Occur through language? Humans are distinguished from other genera by our capacity for language; and, among other things, language gives us the capacity for good and evil. In The Inheritors Golding presents the fall in relation to language, and the absence of language, by reworking the story of Genesis through an anthropological prism. The novel is about a fatal encounter between two isolated remnants of different species within the Homo genus; H. neanderthalensis, associated with nature, and H. sapiens, fleeing from nature as well as other members of their tribe. The former are destroyed by the latter not because there's mutual conflict between them but because the former doesn't have the abstract knowledge, conveyed by conceptual language, which allows the latter to adapt and therefore to survive.

The story doesn't pretend to be a complete history of these two species, or the full encounter between them, and it hasn't dated, any more than the story of Genesis has dated, even if science has added to our understanding. Perhaps both species coexisted for tens of thousands of years, and perhaps H. neanderthalensis were more advanced than Golding describes. But that doesn't diminish his anthropological snapshot of the innocence of a species living in harmony with nature--the novel uses the concept of blamelessness to describe that relationship--and the guilt of a species that's more aware and able to flee from nature and tribe because it knows how to respond to nature's challenges and tribal threats. Most of the novel embodies the perspective of H. neanderthalensis by presenting its communicative and conceptual limitations. The last chapter embodies the perspective of H. sapiens. Each page advances Golding's mimetic genius, as he takes the reader into the minds of two species of humans that, according to most recent data available, didn't interbreed but did share direct lineages.

There are eight persons among the Neanderthals, referred to as "the people": Mal, an aged patriarch; old woman, an aged matriarch; two men, Ha and Lok; two women, Nil and Fa; Liku, a female child; and new one, a male infant. Ha and Nil are partners, as are Lok and Fa, but their relationships are neither monogamous nor jealous. The people's language and religion and gender identity are precursors of what evolved in modern humans. Their language is made up of mental pictures and a few words to communicate their limited understanding of what those pictures mean. Their religion, a theistic precursor of animism, with high-god ethics, is centred on a female creator, Oa, two letters that frame both the Greek alphabet and monotheism's sense of God alpha and omega (beginning and end). Their gender identity is constructed by their language and religion--the old woman describes that identity in non-negotiable terms: a man is for pictures (language); a woman is for Oa (religion)--and the constraints of language and religion and gender identity frame their fallenness at one period of human evolution.