How many times have I read/taught the novel?

I first read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in 1960 when I was 16 — and doing English I at Sydney University. Having just a year before become a born-again — no, not at a Billy Graham Crusade though I went to that several times, but at a Presbyterian Fellowship Camp at Otford in January 1959 — the cover was just a little risque… Mind you, Sydney Uni also had me reading Moll Flanders that year…

Spot the nudity! However I soon found as many do the Christian references therein…. I think that was the first time I encountered the term “Christ figure” in literary studies…

On NITV (National Indigenous Television) yesterday morning I saw the Peter Brook movie

And I was in fact struck, not having seen it for ages, with how good a movie it is, and also how much it is of the early 1960s, with all the fears we had then….

Interesting that NITV was showing it. I am sure we could now have an interesting debate about the way the “savage” is portrayed…. But we need to remember that the novel is also a parody of the awful Englishness of the 19th century classic The Coral Island.

The major themes of the novel revolve around the influence of Christianity, the importance of social hierarchies, and the inherent superiority of civilised Europeans over the South Sea islanders; Martine Dutheil, professor of English, considers the novel “a key text mapping out colonial relations in the Victorian period”. The basic subject of the novel is popular and widespread: “castaway children assuming adult responsibilities without adult supervision”, and The Coral Island is considered the classic example of such a book.

It does not work out quite so well in Lord of the Flies. But I was interested to see this by William Golding’s daughter.

The boys in Lord of the Flies make quite a good fist of creating a democratic society, at least to begin with. Ralph, the democratically elected leader, admonishes Jack to stick to “the rules”, because “the rules are the only thing we’ve got”. In an interview the author said that the novel was about the importance of the rule of law. It was also about the complexity of human beings.

My father greatly distrusted simple judgments. He was careful to give Jack some good qualities, and to make him attractive. It’s possible to imagine that under different circumstances Jack and Ralph would have been friends, would have helped each other’s weaknesses, and admired each other’s strengths. But the author shows that this cannot happen on the island because the boys in their isolation are suffering unchecked “from the terrible disease of being human”.

Yesterday I saw other things in the movie…

Or rather these thoughts came to me, though I am sure neither William Golding nor Peter Brook would have had them in mind. One was the way the scenario we see in Lord of the Flies is so repeated again and again by social media! And I am not the first to think this, I see.

See Lord Of The Flies meets social media (2017).

Welcome to the golden age of social media. This is not okay — this is not okay at all!

It’s like some giant experiment of Lord Of The Flies. Without some form of moderation, some enforceable authority, a group tests it’s boundaries. If they find none, they’ll push and push, and only settle for what they can get away with. The thrill becomes seeing what they can do.

So you get obscenity, sexual content, bullying, intimidation, death threats, rape threats.

In something aping Lord Of The Flies, a journalist who received rape threats on Facebook followed them to the source, and contacted those persons parents, who were horrified. Read her story here. It mimics the end of Lord Of The Flies, where a group of abandoned schoolboys have become feral and violent (even killing one of their number), however when an authority figure in the form of a Naval office appears, they chillingly revert back to sobbing children.

All this is unacceptable — no matter what social media you use, apply pressure to it in order to handle this better. If you see someone being abused on it, then report their posts, and maybe even send a message of support to the person being bullied. But don’t turn a blind eye to this behaviour, unless you really do enjoy the world of Lord Of The Flies.