Dintre basme, reminiscenţe mai pregnante ale ştiinţelor oculte se găsesc în creaţiile lui Ion Creangă. De vreme ce toată lumea cunoaşte „Povestea lui Harap-Alb”, am ales acest basm pentru a scoate în evidenţă felul în care firul narativ al unui basm se împleteşte cu semnificaţiile unui simbol, în acest caz focul.

În ancadramentul basmului, ni se descrie situaţia generală în care se află lumea, haosul creat de separarea aparent definitivă a celor două principii: cel masculin şi cel feminin, din cauza distanţei ce îi desparte pe Craiul, cu feciorii săi, de fratele său, Împăratul Verde, cu fetele sale. Această distanţă devenită de nesurmontat este urmarea permanentelor războaie şi a pârjolirii pământului de către cei care se luptă. Focul apare pentru prima oară (menţionat indirect, prin substantivul “războaie”), ca element de distrugere a naturii şi a relaţiilor interumane. Pârjolirea poate fi o pedeapsă pentru faptele oamenilor, aici fiind evidenţiată una dintre cele cinci laturi ale focului ritual – Agni, din doctrina hindusă. Astfel, focul distrugător este un efect mai degrabă decât o cauză – este un efect al unui alt efect: faptele oamenilor au dus la izbucnirea războaielor, care a dus la apariţia focului nimicitor.

În expoziţiunea basmului, apare Sfânta Duminică în chip de cerşetoare, iar după ce-i încearcă bunătatea lui Harap-Alb şi îl sfătuieşte ce să-i ceară tatălui său pentru a pleca spre Împăratul Verde, fiul de crai „o vede învăluită într-un hobot [văl] alb, ridicându-se în văzduh, apoi înălţându-se tot mai sus”. Sfânta Duminică este mesagerul lui Dumnezeu, este un personaj solar, folosindu-se de simbolul focului purificator, fiindcă dispare învăluită de ceaţă, care alcătuieşte un mediu terţiar, un nivel median între Cer şi Pământ, adică între locul fiinţelor superioare prin înţelepciune şi lumea celor care aspiră la înţelepciune, aşa cum este fiul de crai.

Un alt personaj solar este calul năzdrăvan, o altă imagine a focului purificator – focul înţelepciunii. El îşi redobândeşte puterea şi înfăţişarea de odinioară datorită jăraticului pe care îl mănâncă.Jăraticul reprezintă tot focul războiului, care este menţionat în ancadrament, dar are de data aceasta proprietăţi regeneratoare. El reflectă, în plan simbolic, binele care există în orice rău şi care poate oferi ajutor cui îl vede şi ştie să profite de el. Calul aparţine şi lumii pământeşti, şi lumii superioare cereşti, iar prin capacitatea sa de a se înălţa până la soare imită “hobotul alb” al Sfintei Duminici, făcând parte din acelaşi plan de mijloc şi de legătură dintre cele două lumi. Calul şi Sfânta Duminică exemplifică latura pozitivă a simbolului focului – soarele, forţa purificatoare, generatoare de viaţă, lumina incandescentă a îngerilor.

Iar intr-o zi mi-a jignit inteligenta intrebandu-ma daca stiu de la ce vine CSI. Sigur, am zis. Iata de la ce vine:

In contextul social-politic de la noi, putem zice Cereri Si Indemnizatii

Daca se scade si din ajutorul financiar pentru mamele cu copii mici, putem asista la: candy store infringement

Apoi, daca ne uitam prin cartierele din minunata capitala, auzim Cats Singing Intrusively

Cei care au studiat sau mai studiaza lingvistica in mod sigur alcatuiesc  commonplace sentences inflected,

in timp ce isi valorifica timpul pe la scoala cu the complete study of idioms (courtesy of rainyautumnsunset)

si demonstrand ca multi, foarte multi, crowds surpassing imagination, dispun de un Lexicon.

Unii lingvisti, insa, devin atat de destepti aratand ce-i cu lexiconul, incat ajung sa sufere de common sense infatuation

Poluarea, o mare problema mondiala, poate dauna faunei:  creatures severely iodized

De asemenea si natura umana este afectata de lipsa culturii, care favorizeaza aparitia unei specii urbane de cute sociable idiots (courtesy of rainyautumnsunset).

In afara de asta, mai este si flagelul coruptiei, care a cuprins socitetatea, deci control stops immediately (courtesy of rainyautumnsunset).

In unele tari, de exemplu, infractiunile sunt la ordinea zilei : Crime smearing Ireland

In altele, nu mai e mult, de exemplu Casablanca soon invaded

In Antile se produce o Caribbean Smugglers’ Immersion. Pentru a pune mana pe infractorii de acolo, autoritatile striga : call sailors inland !

Dar credinciosii din toate colturile lumii nu trebuie sa se teama, confessions shouldn’t impact (rainy)

In tot acest timp, generalii de armata, concocting some in-listings, primesc in regimente children slightly industrious (rainy). Acesti copii sunt educati numai cu ajutorul internetului si unii dintre ei n-au aflat de comercializarea sexului interzisa. Totusi, mai abitir ca parintii, criza supravegheaza indivizii (rainy). In acest context, au aparut manuale despre cum sa innebunesti(rainy): conditii si ilustrari, cu secvente interminabile, care seduc iremediabil, create special ptr idioti (rainy) care spera inevitabilul (rainy) in camere spatioase, iluminate cu speranta infinita.

Acesta este un crude spoiler innuendo (rainy), menit sa trezeasca la realitate visatorii care se cred creeping savage Indians, dar pe care ii obosesc superiorii, creating stupid internships (rainy).

In fata necazurilor vietii, curaj, serenitate, indiferenta ! Nu te intreba Ce Se Intampla , ci crede, spera, iubeste (rainy)

Cu solutii Inovatoare, capre, sabii, inimioare, Comandoul de Salvare Intrinseca a si pus bazele unei operatiuni de salvare. A inceput prin a posta afise, anuntand :

colectionam suzete inscriptionate cu semnatura inamicilor, cate sase intr-o cutie imateriala, cumparata sambata de la iarmaroc.

Daca dusmanii nu se opresc din atac, iata, nici comandoul nu se lasa mai prejos :Can’t stop initiating !!!!

Asta ca sa va arat cat de omni si pluriprezent este CSI-ul in viata noastra, a tuturor, si sa dau peste nas celor care ar indrazni sa afirme ca nu e decat o costisitoare stupizenie idioata.

Abstract and short presentation

Lord of the Flies has been analyzed as a social, a political, a moral and a religious allegory, yet none of these interpretations seems to capture the larger significance of the novel. I believe that Jungian archetypal criticism does. Through the archetype of the Self, this theory provides answers to the following questions raised by Golding’s narrative: what does the novel symbolize? What is human nature like? Where does evil originate? Is man capable of becoming aware of his inner evil? If he does, how does he deal with this knowledge?

Chapter 1: The Framework explains the terms on which the analysis is based. Chapter 2: Leadership and personal development, is centred on the notion of leadership as ambiance for individuation and inflation. I am comparing the two leaders of the boys, Ralph and Jack, in terms of their legitimacy – 2.1. Conch and conflict, and of their attitude regarding the image of the leader, which they try to embody- 2.2. Archetype adjustment. Both aspects discussed in this chapter have as background a state of conflict: exterior conflict between the two leaders and also Ralph’s and Jack’s interior conflict due to their social role. Chapter 3: Salvation – a personal affair, speaks about the children’s attempt to find out the nature of the beast and to protect themselves from it –3.1. The beast and the circle. Of all the boys, it is only Simon who realizes the truth about the beast. He tries to save the others, and here Golding plays upon the Christian myth, which is parodied and reinterpreted as a new myth of mankind – under 3.2. The myth of the Self.

In Chapter 1, the terms are defined as follows: one of the most general term in Jung’s theory is the collective unconscious, this being man’s second psychic system, of a hereditary nature, as opposed to consciousness (Jung, Arhetipurile 54). Jung has named its contents archetypes. They are forms without content, showing the way the psyche lives the events (Jung, Arhetipurile 160). Archetypes mediate between the collective unconscious and consciousness (Jung, Arhetipurile 179), Among archetypes, the Self is central in Jung’s theory, as it represents the potential of an individual’s psychic development, a potential that needs to be fulfilled, because the Self is the centre and, at the same time, the purpose of psychic life (Jung, Amintiri 474). It has a degree of understanding that is superior to that of consciousness (Jung, Imaginea omului 47). Therefore it is only natural that the Self, of all the archetypes, have the largest amount of authority. However contradictory it may sound, the Self is made of pairs of opposites, which coexist but do not destroy each other, and the conflict that arises between these opposites fuels psychic life (Jung, Amintiri 441). The symbols of the Self are often numinous (Samuels 239). The numinous is the aprioric affectivity (Jung, Tipuri 498) that man feels in relation to an object or a phenomenon. Concretely, the symbols of the Self, which we may find in Lord of the Flies, are the king (or more generally the leader), the saviour or the enlightener (such as Jesus Christ) and the circle (Jung, Tipuri 497).

The lifelong interaction between consciousness and the Self has three possible outcomes, as Jung has empirically discovered: individuation, repressed individuation, and inflation. Individuation is a synthetic process aiming at fulfilling the potential residing in the Self (Jung, Arhetipurile 49). This process takes place in two stages: firstly, one must recognize one’s own shadow, which stands for the inferior and the dark parts of the psyche (Jung, Aion 21) Secondly, one integrates archetypes into consciousness, giving them applicability in his life (Jung, Aion 55). The process of individuation is repressed if one does not go through the two stages consciously (Jung, Aion 88). Inflation is the assimilation of the ego by the Self or, on the contrary, the assimilation of the Self by the ego (Jung, Aion 39).

To all this, I have added the notions of leadership and salvation, which are linked to the Self and which I deem as highly significant for interpreting the novel. I have divided the two parts of the analysis according to their focus on leadership and on salvation, respectively. As far as leadership is concerned, it may be said that it is one of the appropriate circumstances in which the Self can become manifest. The figure of authority, like the king or the prince, is a symbol of the Self (Jung, Arhetipurile 194). The two symbols share with the Slelf not only authority, but also the attribution to correct malfunctions: in the exercise of his power, the king must see that the rashness of passionate nature is controlled (Jung, Arhetipurile 43 –4). The symbols of the Self do not include only types of leaders, but also the figure of the saviour (Wehr 71). As for salvation, it is what the boys on the island need for their psychological survival, for they are prey to the misperception and bewilderment caused by the beast. Salvation is regarded here both as recovery from the consequences of ignorance of evil, and as deliverance of the soul from the terror of absolute evil. As Jung remarks, it is only the lack of deliverance that generates a longing for the Saviour (Arhetipurile 277).

Chapter 2 compares Ralph and Jack, as the first issue that arises in the boys’ life on the island is choosing a leader. The majority of the boys vote for Ralph, because of the numinous character the leader, which is a symbol of the Self: “None of the boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence has been shown was traceable to Piggy while the most obvious leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch. (…)” (Golding 19).

In Ralph’s case, election brings legitimacy, which favours a harmonious personality development. On the contrary, Jack has to snatch the role of leader. Rejection favours an amplification of the shadow. : “(…) the freckles on Jack’s face disappeared under a blush of mortification” (Golding 20) The shadow is by definition placed at the back of one’s mind, repressed, because it is unacceptable to consciousness (Jung, Amintiri 475).In giving Ralph the right to lead them, the boys indirectly say to him: “we want you, we need you, we trust you and we will obey you”. To Jack, they are saying exactly the opposite. Along with acceptance, Ralph discovers the responsibilities that he alone has, as leader. We can see this in his reaction when the boys first approach Castle Rock, in search of the beast: “Something deep in Ralph spoke for him. ‘I’m chief. I’ll go. Don’t argue.’ ‘ (Golding 115). He does things that are necessary, regardless of the fact that he dislikes them, means that his objective values are stronger than the other boys’ and this is a sign of a powerful consciousness, able to adjust the requirements of the Self to reality “[Ralph to Jack] ‘And I work all day with nothing but Simon and you come back and don’t even notice the huts!’ [Jack]‘I was working too –‘ ‘But you like it!’ shouted Ralph. ‘You want to hunt! While I –‘ “ (Golding 56).

The shadow gets denser and more powerful as one tries to repress it (Samuels 265). Beside the fact that he is a second leader, Jack has the tendency to hide his feelings from himself, but also from the others. When Ralph tells Jack that they need shelters because the little boys are more and more often afraid, Jack reluctantly confesses: “Jack (…) frowned in an effort to attain clarity. ‘All the same – in the forest. I mean when you’re hunting – (…) when you’re on your own –‘ He paused for a moment, not sure if Ralph would take him seriously. ‘Go on.’ ‘If you’re hunting sometimes you catch yourself feeling as if –‘ He flushed suddenly. ‘There’s nothing in it of course. Just a feeling’ “ (Golding 55). The verbal artifice, “you can feel as if you’re not hunting”, “of course”, “Just a feeling”, as well as the pauses and the fragmented phrases show his hesitation not only in talking about his fear but also, in acknowledging it to himself. Ultimately, he thinks he is safe from the beast, and unconsciously tries to get rid of the fear it generates in him, by fraternizing with it, by leaving it a falsely sacrificial gift.

Inflation makes one stumble upon the shadow, like Jack does. “The bolting look” (Golding 77) in his eyes is a sign of inflation, and its last stage is identity with the Self as supreme authority: “Before the party had started a great log had been dragged into the centre of the lawn and Jack, painted and garlanded, sat there like an idol” (Golding 167). Although Jung did not claim to have discovered the source of evil, he made a striking remark in relation to it: he said that evil arises from the fragmentation of the mind (Jung, Imaginea omului 318).

Ralph, on the other hand, is not trying to lie to himself or the others. When the twins come running from the mountaintop, where they think they have seen the beast, and tell the others about it, the boys become disorganized and Jack calls everyone “back to the centre” (Golding 110), summoning them to join him in “a real hunt” (Golding 110). Then “Ralph moved impatiently. ‘These spears are made of wood. Don’t be silly.’ Jack sneered at him. ‘Frightened?’ ‘Course I’m frightened. Who wouldn’t be?’ “ (Golding 110 – 1). Ralph is not embarrassed to show his fear or to show the other boys that he is thinking about the most appropriate course of action: “ ‘I don’t remember this cliff,’ said Jack, crest-fallen, ‘so this must be the bit of coast I missed.’ Ralph nodded. ‘Let me think’ “(Golding 130).

Ralph’s individuation becomes clearer at the end of the narrative, in portraying Ralph through the officer’s eyes. He has grovelled at the officer’s feet, running from the boys who are chasing him, yet he tells the officer he is their chief. He looks pitiful, miserable, but he has reached a higher understanding of human nature. He is singled out from the rest of the boys by his understanding and by his capability of choosing the useful traits of the shadow and by his power to fulfil the requirements of the Self in accordance with reality. He is at the same time closely linked to the boys, and to the officer, by his awareness of the evil, the distorted mental images of reality and the naivety that they posses. This scene is, in other words, a synthetic, a symbolic image of individuation: “And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph 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” (Golding 230). This image is similar to Tiger’s “confrontation scenes” which support the novel’s “ideographic structure” (Tiger 58).

Individuation leads to a separation from the world, setting the individual apart from the archetypal images of the collective unconscious, as a distinct personality, anchored in the specificity of his life. At the same time, individuation generates a spiritual union with the world, through the feeling of belonging to the human race and through a higher understanding of human nature, by knowing that whatever is to be found in the world, it is also present in the individual.

Chapter 3 speaks about salvation. The boys live under the influence of the beast. Taking into consideration the fact that the beast cannot be literally tracked down, escape from it acquires deeper connotations, and they come to feel escape as salvation, with its full religious meaning: “[Ralph:]‘For all we know, the beast may swing through the trees like what’s its name.’ “ (Golding 111). The only defence tactics against the beast is forming a circle. This is an archetypal reaction, because it ensures protection. It is one of the symbols of the Self (Jung, Aion 260), but here its negative side is illustrated. It is not only the fear of fear, but also the fear of the unconscious contents altogether that creates “the secret terror” (Jung, Imaginea omului 21) allegedly caused by the beast.

The circle is a symbol of attack and defence. We can see how the boys’ fear of the beast determines them to unite in a circle for both purposes: “[Samneric:] ‘The beast followed us– ‘ ‘I saw it slinking behind the trees –‘ ‘Nearly touched me –‘ (…) ‘I’m all rough. Am I bleeding?’ (…) The circle of boys shrank away in horror. (…) the circle began to change. It faced out, rather than in, and the spears of sharpened wood were like a fence.” (Golding 110). The centre of the circle is formed by the twins and their story. Then, the boys are facing outside the circle, on the lookout for the beast. Behind every boy there are the twins again, with their terror, which is now in the others’ souls as well. Therefore, fear is at the centre of their circle. And along with it, also causing destabilization, there is the boys’ lack of adhesion to any positive symbol.

Simon is the only one who makes the link between fear, the beast and human beings. He tries to explain:“ ‘Maybe’, he said hesitantly, ‘maybe there is a beast. (…) What I mean is… maybe it’s only us’ ”(Golding 97). Simon has direct and conscious access to the level of existence that implies the unmediated experience of evil and of spiritual salvation. These two elements are part of the archetype of the Self, being conditions to individuation. Simon’s individuation is, however, incomplete. It is a repressed individuation (Jung, Aion 88). There are two reasons for this. Firstly, Simon becomes conscious of his inner evil. Only that he cannot cope with the knowledge he acquires – that exterior evil is nothing but the projection of inner evil – is too powerful for him to handle. His consciousness loses ground and gives in to the shadow: “Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness.” (Golding 162). Secondly, Although he knows that Jack hates Ralph and that if he were to be chief, things would worsen for the boys, he does not dislike Jack. He hears Lord of the Flies say:” ‘You like Ralph a lot, don’t you? And Piggy, and Jack?’ “(Golding 161).

The Christian myth, as it is illustrated by Simon, completely fails, because it addresses the multitude, the terrified, confused, hostile multitude, and not separate individuals. Moreover, this kind of knowledge comes from outside the individual and cannot be shared. Lord of the Flies tells Simon that if he tries anything, he will be killed. God’s representation as the Supreme Being has become ineffective but man does not take His place in the centre of things. It is in the totality of man – in which psychology plays an important part – that God’s image has been redirected (Jung, Imaginea omului 85).

In conclusion, by what I have interpreted as individuation, repressed individuation and inflation, in Golding’s three characters, I may say that Lord of the Flies dramatizes the interaction between the archetype of the Self and consciousness. The way Ralph and Jack adjust the archetype of the Self to their own view on life tells of their interior conflict. This is caused by the clash between consciousness and the collective unconscious, which puts to the test the adherence of the consciousness to objective values. Golding makes us see both boys through their own eyes: Jack as a tribal hunter, and Ralph as a responsible chief with “baffled common sense” (Golding 76). Jack’s view narrows, while Ralph’s widens rapidly, because the former is an example of exclusion of the world and the latter of inclusion of the world in his mental representation of himself. Therefore, the authors’ idea of human nature is the following: man is mainly evil, and we see this in Jack, because of his lack of unity and individuality. However, man is capable of improvement.

A different aspect of the archetype of the Self is related to salvation from absolute evil. The myth of the Self reinterprets the Christian myth. Nevertheless, the scope of salvation makes the Christian myth fail and the myth of the Self succeed. The Self is, from a certain point onward, the same as God’s image in man (Jung, Arhetipurile 330). Thus, “mankind’s essential illness” (Golding 97) is not merely the objectification of evil (Tiger 58), which means ignorance of inner evil, but also includes the weakness of consciousness, which can hardly cope with the knowledge of inner evil. Lord of the Flies symbolizes the new era of the myth of the Self: deliverance, as well as understanding, must come from within, not from another person, as man is engaged in a constant becoming, moulded between the collective unconscious and consciousness.

Lord of the Flies - social, political, moral, religious allegory

- Jungian archetypal theory :

● What does the novel symbolize?

● What is human nature like?

● Where does evil originate?

● Is man capable of becoming aware of his inner evil?

● If he does, how does he deal with this knowledge?

Chapter 1  The Framework

-   the collective unconscious = man’s second psychic system, of a hereditary nature, as opposed to consciousness (Jung, Arhetipurile 54).

-   archetypes = the contents of the collective unconscious

• forms without content, showing the way the psyche lives the events (Jung, Arhetipurile 160).
• the Self = the centre and the purpose of psychic life (Jung, Amintiri 474).

The symbols of the Self in Lord of the Flies: the king (the leader), the saviour or the enlightener (such as Jesus Christ) and the circle (Jung, Tipuri 497).

The interaction between the ego and the Self: individuation, repressed individuation, and inflation.

Chapter 2 Leadership and personal development

Leadership = one of the appropriate circumstances in which the Self can become manifest. The figure of authority ( the king or the prince) is a symbol of the Self (Jung, Arhetipurile 194).

Ralph and Jack:

- way of election and legitimacy: “there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch.” (Golding 19).

- objective values: ‘But you like it!’ shouted Ralph. ‘You want to hunt! While I –‘ “ (Golding 56).

- individuation: “And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph 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” (Golding 230).

- inflation: “The bolting look” (Golding 77);  “Before the party had started a great log had been dragged into the centre of the lawn and Jack, painted and garlanded, sat there like an idol” (Golding 167).

Chapter 3  Salvation – a personal affair

Salvation = what the boys on the island need for their psychological survival; recovery from the consequences of ignorance of evil, and deliverance of the soul from the terror of absolute evil. It is only the lack of deliverance that generates a longing for the Saviour (Jung, Arhetipurile 277).

- The beast, the circle: “[Ralph:]‘For all we know, the beast may swing through the trees like what’s its name.’ “ (Golding 111). – “ ‘Nearly touched me –‘ (…) ‘I’m all rough. Am I bleeding?’ (…) The circle of boys shrank away in horror. (…) the circle began to change. It faced out, rather than in, and the spears of sharpened wood were like a fence.” (Golding 110).

- Simon and the Christian myth vs the myth of the Self: “Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness.” (Golding 162); He hears Lord of the Flies say:” ‘You like Ralph a lot, don’t you? And Piggy, and Jack?’ “(Golding 161).

Conclusion

Lord of the Flies dramatizes the interaction between the archetype of the Self and consciousness.

The way Ralph and Jack adjust the archetype of the Self to their own view on life tells of their interior conflict. Golding makes us see both boys through their own eyes: Jack as a tribal hunter, and Ralph as a responsible chief with “baffled common sense” (Golding 76). Jack’s view narrows, while Ralph’s widens rapidly, because the former is an example of exclusion of the world and the latter of inclusion of the world in his mental representation of himself.

A different aspect of the archetype of the Self is related to salvation from absolute evil. The myth of the Self reinterprets the Christian myth. The Self is, from a certain point onward, the same as God’s image in man (Jung, Arhetipurile 330). Thus, “mankind’s essential illness” (Golding 97) is not merely the objectification of evil (Tiger 58), which means ignorance of inner evil, but also includes the weakness of consciousness, which can hardly cope with the knowledge of inner evil.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Framework

1.1. Criticism on Lord of the Flies

1.2. Allegory and symbol

1.3. Definitions

1.4. The Self in sacred and literary texts

1.5. Conclusion to Chapter 1

Chapter 2: Leadership and personal development

2.1. Conch and conflict

2.2. Archetype adjustment

2.3. Conclusion to Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Salvation – a personal affair

3.1. The beast and the circle

3.2. The myth of the Self

3.3. Conclusion to Chapter 3

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

Lord of the Flies is an intriguing novel about the way a group of boys struggle to survive on a desert island. Survival is treated here both as a matter of staying alive and of maintaining a logical (or a sane) connection with reality. The new environment is unfamiliar to the boys as far as their personal history is concerned, but, as time goes by, they adapt to it in becoming comparable to savages. On the island, there is no material civilization; there are no social or cultural institutions and no adults to enforce rules upon the children and to punish them. Consequently, they must not only make the things they need, but they must also rely on their own judgement. There arise a number of questions: first of all, what does Lord of the Flies symbolize, from a psychological point of view? What does the novel symbolize? What is human nature like? Where does evil originate? Is man capable of becoming aware of his inner evil? If he does, how does he deal with this knowledge?

This paper means to demonstrate that, in focusing on the possibility of letting youngsters act by themselves, Lord of the Flies dramatizes the manner in which man’s conscious attitude changes when the archetype of the Self, in Jung’s archetypal meaning of the term, manifests into consciousness. The method I have chosen consists in applying Jungian archetypal theory to the novel, in order to shed light on Golding’s conception of human nature, from the point of view of man’s aspiration for completeness. I will closely follow the evolution of Ralph, Jack and Simon, against the larger context of the boys’ changing attitude toward life. I have chosen this perspective because the path to it has been hinted at by literary critics, but only the archetypes of the shadow and of the persona in the novel have been analyzed, while the archetype of the Self, which encompasses them, has not been discussed. I think that the most appropriate way to analyze psychic transformation is comparison. I have chosen it because it allows bringing together contrasting elements, such as the two reactions to the Self, observable in Ralph’s and Jack’s psychical transformation, and the two kinds of salvation, as seen in the Christian myth and in the myth of the Self.

In building his own way in the study of the soul, Carl Gustav Jung coined the terms of “collective unconscious” and “archetype”, which his life work is based on. He extended his research from the practice of psychotherapy to other domains where man’s psyche found a specific way of expression: religion, alchemy, literature. On the one hand, this confirmed his hypothesis of the universal nature of archetypes. On the other hand it gave him a more comprehensive set of examples to offer to the general public in explaining his findings, at the numerous public conferences that he took part in. Therefore, literary texts are of interest for him as long as they contain occurrences of archetypes, which provide information on the structure and dynamics of the human psyche. Although I am interpreting the novel from the point of view of the Jungian theory of archetypes, I consider important the themes of leadership and of salvation, which are but marginal in Jung’s work. The way they relate to the archetype of the Self is the following: as far as leadership is concerned, it may be said that it is one of the appropriate circumstances in which the Self can become manifest. The figure of authority, like the king or the prince, is a symbol of the Self, (Jung, Arhetipurile 194).Moreover, these two instantiations of the Self share with it not only the power of authority, but also the ability to adjust things and to see that the rashness of passionate nature is controlled (Jung, Arhetipurile 43 –4). The symbols of the Self do not include only types of leaders, but also the figure of the saviour (Wehr 71).

As for salvation, it is what the boys need for their psychological survival, for they are prey to the misperception and bewilderment caused by the beast. Salvation is regarded here both as recovery from the consequences of ignorance and as deliverance of the soul from the terror of absolute evil. As Jung says, it is only the lack of deliverance that generates a longing for the Saviour (Arhetipurile 277).The Saviour is the one who helps consciousness free itself from the prison of the unconscious, and this is why he is said to be an enlightener (Jung, Arhetipurile 277). The shadow, be it personal or collective, contains within itself the possibility for good (Jung, Arhetipurile 277). Jung believed that a comprehensive image of the psyche must include both good and evil, and that these two are dependant upon each other (Arhetipurile 346-7). One of the reasons why both good and evil are to be included in the image of the Saviour is that, in order to heal the wounds of the ones whom he means to save, he himself must be wounded (Jung, Arhetipurile 262).

This analysis is focused on the psychological symbolism of the work, which may go beyond what the author could have imagined. I am not focusing on the author’s psychology. The first chapter provides a brief introduction to the critical framework on which the analysis is based, mentioning the opinions of literary critics who have interpreted Lord of the Flies at various moments in time, as well as my comments on what these critics have found in the novel. The chapter goes on by presenting the Jungian judgement on literary works, and by setting the conditions under which such a critical perspective may apply to the chosen novel. Definitions of the most important Jungian terms for the present analysis are included at the end of the chapter, as well as a short list of the occurrences of the archetype of the Self in sacred and literary texts. These texts show that, irrespective of its form or symbols, the Self holds as essential features its being formed of multiple opposites, which generates a state of conflict, and the search for union.

The second chapter draws on the differences between the two leaders of the boys, Ralph and Jack, in their social interaction and from the point of view of their reactions to the Self. Leadership is an appropriate reference from the Jungian perspective. Robert J. White says that the fragmentations of the novel correspond to Plato’s division of the soul: “Golding is careful to point out that it is Ralph’s administrative duties – an image of the soul’s balance and power when governed by reason – that enable him to keep the anarchy that resides in his heart under control” (cited in Tiger 42). Leadership, as I have referred to it here, is an ambiance that Ralph’s “administrative duties” render possible. Due to it, Ralph’s Self can develop toward its inherent purpose, for Ralph’s leadership qualities, which the narrator mentions at the beginning, need to find motivation in reality, and thus come to a concrete realization. In my opinion, leadership is tightly connected to the archetype of the Self, for it implies determination serving a purpose that comes from within while adjusting it to the conditions that reality offers. Also, from this interdependence between mind and reality, or more precisely from the relation between one’s will (aspirations, desires) and reality, derives the ethical nature of the individual. This latter issue is, according to Golding, the basis of the shape of society (cited in Hollinger 4).

The third chapter focuses on the great differences between and the shared characteristics of two important myths of mankind, the Christian myth and the myth of the Self, represented by Simon and Ralph, respectively. Although they stand for different perspectives on the psyche, both boys personify a symbol of the Self: if Ralph is the image of the leader, being directly involved in the social life, Simon resembles Jesus Christ and is associated to the most profound meaning of salvation.

I have entitled the chapter that deals with Simon’s mission “Salvation- a personal affair” because the Christian myth is transformed here into something humanly psychological. Apart from the two boys, the Self is also represented by the circle, an archetype of transformation and a spontaneous symbol coming forth in the boys’ minds when they feel endangered. Another archetype, which parallels the Self, is the shadow, whose symbol, the beast, is the boys’ most alarming concern on the island.

Chapter 1

The Framework

Professing art is a psychological activity (Jung, Despre fenomenul spiritului 67)

1.1. Criticism on Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s first novel, has made an impression since its publication in 1954. While the critics’ opinions’ on the craft of the author have changed with the passage of time, their interpretations of the novel have always underlined the ambiguity of its symbols and, at the same time, the gravity of the problem they express.

One of the earlier critics of the novel is Frederick R. Karl, who strongly disagrees with the gimmick ending in Lord of the Flies, because he sees it as a false, artificial one. Karl says that “there are beliefs and values operating in Golding’s fiction that must dominate despite the main thrust of each novel toward disbelief” (Karl 257). In other words, Karl accuses Golding of didacticism (Karl 260). Indeed, apart from the general direction in which the narrator presents the story, Golding’s didactic intentions are transposed in the Head’s “voice of a schoolmaster” (Golding 162).

Karl is right in that in Lord of the flies, once he has shown us his point of view on the matter of human nature, Golding practically cuts the film and stops unnecessary violence from occurring, by bringing the naval officer on the island. In this respect, the ending seems abrupt and unrelated to the veridical tale that aims to change the general belief in the innocence of children. From the point of view adopted in this paper, Golding’s didacticism shows an extrovert author who consciously directs the narrative to fulfil his intention. Even if the arrival of the officer seems a tactless turn of events from the part of the author, it is the key to a thorough understanding of the novel.

At the beginning of the story, readers are introduced to the strange, colourful, dream-like setting, seeing the place as a “good island” (Golding 34), they take part in the excitement of the first meeting and of the first exploration of the island, and feel the warmth of the friendship that binds the boys. Then, little by little, readers come to wonder if they should indeed regard children as innocent beings. As the issues of violence and of the beast become more and more present in the boys’ life, this proverbial innocence is gradually replaced by amorality (as the boys do not clearly make the difference between right and wrong) and viciousness.

Throughout the succession of events, Golding’s ‘tricks’, mainly consisting in magnifying the children’s world, make readers take the boys seriously, and the latter are no longer mere children, but hunters, fire-keepers, and governors of their own society (or so they are trying to be, at least during the meetings). Readers have so far got rid of the prejudice of the children’s innocence, but in a gradual way, which Golding perhaps considered too smooth for a real change of perspective. The sudden appearance of the officer crowns the writer’s attempt to extract a false idea out of the public’s mentality. Readers, shocked, are brought back to their initial state of prejudiced thought, now being able to see themselves in the officer and through the writer’s eyes (which are Ralph’s eyes, in the novel). This is what provokes the shock, the sudden “inescapable recognition” (Golding 155), the most important recognition that the novel facilitates. Therefore, Karl, in dismissing the ending as “didactic intrusion” (Karl 259) and as destroyer of the novel’s “artistry” (Karl 257), fails to see that the ending is actually none of these things. Actually, the whole book is a “didactic intrusion” in the readers’ minds, and the ending is perfectly coherent with the rest of the story. The fact that readers are shocked when seeing the difference of perspective between Ralph and the other children, on the one hand, and the officer on the other hand proves the artistry of what is written between the first and the last page of the novel. It also proves that Golding was so convinced with the idea of inner evil, that he made sure he can persuade the others too.

In commenting on the general themes in Golding’s fiction, Karl points out that “Golding is (…) a metaphysical writer interested in states of being and aspects of survival (…) interested not in the superficial capabilities of man but in those long-buried responses the latter can suddenly evoke in order to satisfy or preserve himself” (Karl 254-5).This remark opens a path for archetypal criticism.  Man’s “long-buried responses” to events can be regarded as one of the numerous definitions of archetypes. The boys’ actions may be considered a relapse into savagery. But how does all this help create the coherent, sad, cynical and at the same time resigned view on man that we are left with at the end of the novel? What does Lord of the Flies really tell us about the world within?

I have not directed my analysis toward an explanation of the psychological causes of the characters’ actions, first of all because characters are nothing but the reflection of the author’s mind. They are not a number of distinct, real beings. Second of all, because, in the practice of the archetypal theory, Jung’s interest was attracted more by the purpose of the archetypes’ manifestation into consciousness, and less by its cause. Therefore, in the course of the analysis, I have tried to follow the development of the archetype of the Self, the way Golding made it obvious in his novel. This way, the boys’ inner transformation is seen as a route that had had its trajectory traced since the beginning of the story.

Actually, we cannot speak of a transformation proper, because what the readers see in the boys as they are depicted on the occasion of their first meeting is, in its fundamental lines, the same as what the readers witness toward the end of the novel. The boys’ characteristics, which the narrator points out at the beginning, are directed toward a purpose, they are latent forces whose manifestation is sped up by the boys’ life conditions. The purpose of inner development is growing toward whatever the Self indicates. The genuine psychic transformation comes with the understanding of the inner world, which Simon and Ralph reach, by different means.

Virginia Tiger draws our attention to the “ideographic structure” of Lord of the Flies, which “sustains the thematic structure” (Tiger 64), and which is given by the image of Simon, standing in his hiding place in the clearing, before the dripping head of the pig. The head had been put on a stick, which Jack had told the boys to jam in the mountain rock. Not only does Simon see the head in its form of totemic gift, but he has also witnessed the chopping and decapitation. Just as the thematic structure of the novel is built around the concept of evil-and-innocence, or rather develops on the consequences of their proximity, so does this visual image, or this “confrontation scene” (Tiger 59), as Tiger calls it, convey the collision between evil and innocence. This relates to Golding’s comment that “whenever Simon thought of the Beast, there arose before his inward sight  the picture of a human at once heroic and sick” (Tiger 128).  I believe that it is due to this scene that readers come to understand fully the immense difference between the two modes of being, let’s call them, and to see how easily the barrier between them can be broken, because of the intrusion of the unconscious into consciousness.

But the head, says Tiger, is not at all a symbol of rationality that has been cut off, because “rationality, for Golding, is a suspicious concept” (Tiger 58). “The severed Head (…) is a symbol of the malaise of the human consciousness which objectifies evil rather than recognizes its subjectivity (…). This intellectual complication is mankind’s essential illness, which Simon discovers in the severed Head” (58). As repulsion is mixed with fascination, the Head speaks to Simon and tries to convince him that what he has witnessed is acceptable, normal, and therefore not so outrageous as to determine in him an irreparable act of wonderment. At this point, we may believe that although Simon witnessed the horrible act performed by Jack and the hunters, he remains a stranger to the possibility of doing evil. Tiger remarks: “But this Lord of the Dung is Simon: the Head that counsels acceptance is his own strategic consciousness” (Tiger 4). Why? Because “such counselling of acceptance of evil is the infinite cynicism of adult life” (Tiger 59). Therefore “adulthood is inadequate to prevent destruction” (Tiger 52). Tiger continues: “To interpret correctly the Head as an objective symbol for evil independent of consciousness, would be to make the same mistake as Jack of externalizing and objectifying one’s own evil” (Tiger 59). What really keeps Simon apart from what the Head represents is “his capacity to act without evil” (Tiger 57).

Apart from the symbol of the head, Tiger also speaks about the symbol of the island: we come across it in many forms in the novel, and it is associated with another symbol, the ship, with which it shares the more general meaning of something emerging from a mass of a different, hostile matter, being isolated by it. First, it is the island as a concrete form of relief, seen as “a ship at sea, a civilization threatened with submergence, a tooth in a sucking mouth, a body dissociated from primal nature, consciousness divorced from the brute passivity of the subconscious”, as say critics Gregor and Kinkead-Weeks, cited by Tiger (66). Jung, too, metaphorically refers to the unconscious as water “where all life floats in suspension” (Surdulescu 81). Then there is Simon’s hiding place in the clearing, described “in terms of the ship/island symbol” (Tiger 72). Ralph is isolated “at the tail-end of the island (…) it is the isolation of the despairing hero as well as the rupture of the self-conscious mind” (Tiger 66). Having arrived at Castle Rock to claim back his spectacles, Piggy is described as “islanded in a sea of meaningless colour, while he embraces the rock with ludicrous care above the sucking sea” (Tiger 66). As we can see from the examples provided by Tiger, the island (or the island/ship) refers both to the environmental hostility (not necessarily a natural, but also a human hostility) and to the state of the mind that has become conscious of itself. This corresponds to Jung’s metaphor of the relation between consciousness and the unconscious: the latter is like an immense expanse of water reaching to the beaches of a small island (Jung, Arhetipurile 287; Tipuri 362).

Drawing closer to a possible archetypal approach, in relation to the island/ship symbol, Tiger identifies “an ancient, primal rhythm” (Tiger 61) at the core of the human being, showing “the rise and fall of man’s darkness” (Tiger 61). This is made obvious in the novel by the many references to the rhythm of the waves that draw the dead bodies of the parachutist, of Simon and of Piggy into the depth of the ocean. Reference to this dark rhythm is made in the present analysis, by taking further the hints that have opened the path to the archetypal approach.

Alexander Hollinger, whose study is focused on detaching a philosophical view on life from Golding’s novels, in the chapter dedicated to Lord of the Flies, gives great importance to the duality of human nature. “Average man” is at the same time “heroic” and “sick”‘, the latter of which means “morally diseased”, as Golding himself wrote in The Hot Gates (Hollinger 4). Again, Simon’s encounter with the Lord of the flies is the key to the problem. According to Hollinger, Simon is not average, but exceptional, meaning that he has the capacity to understand his own nature, to differentiate and choose between right and wrong- which means that he is able to make value judgements. The solution to this sickness is precisely gaining the capacity to make “value judgements” (Golding, cited in Hollinger 7).

Contrary to Hollinger’s opinion, I believe that Simon is not the only exceptional human being in the group of boys, because understanding human nature is not the only way to finding a solution. Neither is he in the main focus of the narrator. The one whom Golding always keeps within sight is Ralph. As a “common man” (Hollinger 34), he has a very strong sense of correctness but he has to become aware of human nature by experience, he is not already intuitively informed about it as Simon is.  Next, he takes action in order to control his evil. As opposed to Tiger, Hollinger makes more reference to Ralph, underlining the importance of his personal experience and suffering that led him to self-knowledge and to the knowledge of the duality of human nature. This duality, this nucleus of opposing concepts can be regarded from the perspective of Jungian theory as the main characteristic of the Self, which exists due to pairs of opposite features.

Hollinger also talks about innocence as lack of guilt because of ignorance of evil (Hollinger 16), but in Simon’s case it is something more complex than that. It is, as Tiger pointed out, choosing to act without evil. We may see here a hint to another dimension of thought, drawing on the religious parallel to Jesus Christ, however ironic it may be, as most of Simon’s “Christ-like” (Hollinger 30) qualities derive from his excessive introversion, which brings him closer to the dark, hidden side of his personality.

Going back to Ralph, Hollinger emphasizes the fact that Ralph opposes alienation (this being the main concept of Hollinger’s analysis) and dehumanization “by keeping his instincts under natural control” (Hollinger 34). Here lies another path for archetypal criticism, for Ralph’s natural control of his instincts cannot be understood as usual, normal, ordinary, effortless, but as biological, innate, instinctive, though learned through his life experience, and not spontaneous. Hollinger says that Ralph is both heroic and sick, which is true, up to a certain point, when he realizes that he has to “preserve his humanity” (Hollinger 34). But what does this mean? Alienation from what is human, as Hollinger puts it, is, in the Jungian perspective, a meaningless phrase. Certainly, Hollinger refers to the part that exercises a conscious control upon the mind, which is consciousness. But man’s life is also guided and more often than not violently pushed toward goals that are set as such by the unconscious, as we can see in the boys’ transformation into tribal hunters. Therefore, in Lord of the Flies alienation can be discussed as separation from conscious control, not from what is human, because that which is unconscious and apparently irrational is also characteristically human.

In talking about Simon, Hollinger remarks that “this vision of evil as part of human nature is only one side of Golding’s view” (Hollinger 27) and that it is Simon who actually expresses the entirety of the novelist’s view, which is formulated as the duality of human nature.

As far as Golding’s ethics is concerned, Hollinger brings forth the argument that he is influenced by Aristotelian ethics. The Nichomachean ethics of Aristotle presents vice as a wrong habit, “either an excess or a defect”, whereas virtue “is the mean state between the two extremes that characterize vice” (Hollinger 31). This mean state, or middle way, is psychologically reformulated in Jung’s theory as the purpose of the clash between consciousness and the unconscious, being called individuation.

To sum up, among literary critics who have written about Lord of the Flies, Frederick R. Karl appreciates the profoundness of the novel’s survival theme, but does not see fit for the author to have introduced such a sudden and illogical ending. Virginia Tiger draws our attention onto the ideographic structure of the novel, which supports the thematic structure and both contains and explains the issue of evil-and-innocence. Alexander Hollinger underlines the theme of alienation in its multiple aspects, and discusses the duality of human nature, man being both heroic and sick. Jung’s view on human nature, as literary critic, is of course influenced by his empirical conclusions. This is why I find his description of the psyche more inclusive and more capable to explain the strange paradoxes of the Self.

1.2. Allegory and symbol

Lord of the Flies has been variously interpreted, according both to its general meaning and to its detailed content. Related to its general meaning, it was called a fable, an allegory and a myth (Hollinger 6), while according to its symbols, it has been interpreted as a moral, as a social and as a religious fable (Tiger 42). Golding himself calls his novel a fable (Hollinger 5). If one calls this novel a fable, one considers as primary “the moral didactic intention” of the author. This is how Hollinger views Golding’s novels, as he stresses on their moral purposes. This is how Golding himself looks at it: “In ‘The Writer In His Age’ Golding described himself as ‘a citizen, a novelist and a schoolmaster’ (…) ‘The fabulist is a moralist. (…) Arranging his signs as he does, he reaches not profundity on many levels, but what you would expect from a sign, that is overt significance.’ ” (Hollinger 5).

If one chooses to regard it as a myth, one interprets the work “as revealing an archetypal ruth” (Hollinger 6). As critics Gregor and Kinkead-Weekes say, “The essence of literary myth is process, reversal and discovery” (Hollinger 6). If one labels Lord of the Flies as allegory, there emerges as the most important aspect the double significance of the work, which is coherent both in its literal and in its symbolical meaning (Hollinger 6). Despite the availability of the term “literary myth”, which is closer to the critical approach I have adopted, I am referring to Lord of the Flies as allegory. This is because of its partial adherence to the type of literary works that Jungian criticism is interested in, and because of the note of parody and the dystrophic vein which the author has so skilfully added to it.

Before the analysis proper, I will try to define the notions of allegory and symbol, for they are terms from literary criticism which analytical psychology endows with a different meaning. To a literary critic, allegory is a figure of speech representing a metaphor prolonged in a narrative or in a lyrical form, and conveying an abstract idea (Dragomirescu 64). In its narrative form, it develops two parallel plans, the literal and the symbolical one (“Literary Terms”). Lord of the Flies is an allegory, as behind the adventure story, about friendship and rivalry, attracting readers’ interest by the young age of its characters and the exoticism of its setting, lies an account of the scarcity and vulnerability of goodness, the savageness under the peel of civilization, and the power of evil to overwhelm good. Thus Ralph symbolizes the commonsensical, responsible, civilized man. Piggy is the embodiment of the potential and daring of intelligence in the human being (Cokyll 75): he is the only one who can think of moving the fire from the mountaintop to the beach when the boys find out that the beast lives on the mountain. Also, when he, Ralph and Sam and Eric are the only ones left outside Jack’s tribe, and they are trying to figure out how to keep the fire burning, Piggy says: “We could experiment. We could find out how to make a small hot fire and then put green branches on to make smoke. Some of them leaves must be better for that than others” (Golding 146-147). Simon is a symbol of the potential of kindness and psychological insight, Jack stands for the man driven by his thirst for power, self-affirmation and violence, and for the primitive nature of one who personifies and worships what is invincible and infinitely more wicked than him. Roger is the prototype for one who lurks behind the figure of authority, enjoying freedom as the chief’s right hand in evil doings. If we look on Ralph’s side, Piggy too can be seen as the follower and right hand of the chief, but as his good counsellor. The saplings of palm trees that run dry because of lack of soil are a symbol of the state in which the boys find themselves on the island, because, had the officer not found them, they too would have died, in the absence of something to sustain them. This could have been a mature way of thinking, like Ralph’s or Piggy’s, or a disposition to help the others, like Simon’s: “Simon, sitting between the twins and Piggy, wiped his mouth and shoved his piece of meat over the rocks to Piggy, who grabbed it” (Golding 80).

In the psychological interpretation, the short-lived saplings show the negative side of the archetype of the mother. The way the fate of all the children depends on a few “biguns” is an allegory of political rulers who undermine the welfare of the people and see to their own needs and wishes. Read as a social allegory, it is a story about the regression of a society which changes its structure (its main occupation and its range of social roles) according to the kind of people that form a majority. As a moral allegory, the novel is about choosing to do right or wrong and the subjective and objective reasons behind the choices. As a psychological allegory, it is a view on what people make of religion and of the divinity when they see them through the veil of their own half obscure personality. As a religious allegory, it is the story of the Fall of Man.

Still in terms of literary criticism, a symbol is a figure of speech expressing an abstract idea by using the name of a concrete object in the real world. The object is easily connected with that particular idea through a certain, obvious feature that they share (Dragomirescu 255). The examples above, on what each of the main characters represent, give the symbolic message the author most probably intended to transmit. They show characters as personified functions. The aesthetic element wraps up the author’s bitter finding about human nature and helps him persuade us of its truth. Because the symbol can be pinpointed to a steady image, I see it as the static counterpart of allegory.

Analytical psychology defines allegory as a paraphrase of a conscious content, and symbol as the most appropriate expression of an idea that is partly reached at by intuition, and that partly remains unconscious (Jung, Arhetipurile 16). Golding is an introvert writer, who does not wholly identify with the process of artistic creation. All the readings of the novel as an allegorical tale can be included here, to the extent to which the author has intended for us to understand all these things from his text and are not all that can be said of its symbolical meaning.

Adding to the somewhat mechanistic use of characters, which arises from the strictly literary definition of allegory, I propose to consider them functions or symbols of psychological processes, and not merely of ideas or comments about life. In this reading, Lord of the Flies is both an allegory and a symbol of the becoming of man as a result of the interaction between the collective unconscious – the impersonal part of his psyche, the “scaffolding” of the human being – and consciousness –the unique, innovative component of the human being (Jung, Arhetipurile 221).

A symbol, in analytical psychology, is the best possible expression of an unconscious content, of something that has not yet reached consciousness so as to be put into words, but which is experienced as an intuition (Jung, Arhetipurile 16). The novel itself may be considered a symbol of the manifestation and fulfilment of the Self. Golding does not say it explicitly, but he directs the reader to such an interpretation (or, more precisely, he is directed by his own unconscious to write in such a way) by stressing the importance of the children’s personality in the on-going events. Moreover, it is not the conscious part of their personality which plays the most prominent role in what ultimately becomes the boys’ destiny. Their behaviour and decisions are mostly influenced by the collective unconscious in relation to their consciousness, because the consciousness of children is not yet fully differentiated from the unconscious.

The psychological processes of inflation and of individuation show what happens with archetypes once consciousness comes to perceive them. Archetypes are present both as personifications and as archetypes of transformation (as an action, object, form or place). They appear everywhere throughout the novel, from images that are recurrent and explicitly shown, such as in the children’s nightmares, in Ralph’s active imagination and mind veil, in the way Ralph is chosen chief, and Roger’s mysterious power over the boys. The most important archetype in the novel is the Self, both regarding its function and its recurrence.

1.3. Definitions

What is unknown about the inner world of the individual, but perceived through his senses, represents the unconscious (Jung, Amintiri 468). The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche that can de differentiated from the personal unconscious by its origin. It does not come from any personal experience, its components have never been part of the conscious state, and only exist because they have been inherited from the long line of ancestors (they are hereditary). It expresses man’s belonging to the world, and in it, man is taken as the object of the archetypes. It is extremely easy to be lost when in the unconscious state, that is why clearly knowing who you are is of high importance (Jung, Arhetipurile 31). The contents of the personal unconscious have once been in the consciousness, but were sent to the unconscious (they were repressed). Jung’s thesis is that along with consciousness, which is personal and which represents the main psychic system, there also is a second psychic system, which is collective, non-personal, inherited (Jung, Arhetipurile 53).

The collective unconscious is a deeper layer of the unconscious, onto which stands the more superficial layer of the personal unconscious. Its physical existence is recognisable only on the basis of the contents that are liable to become conscious. The contents of the personal unconscious are the so-called affective complexes (related to the emotions), while the contents of the collective unconscious are the archetypes (Jung, Arhetipurile 13-14). The biological purpose of the archetype is to activate in case that the current state of affairs is contradictory to the original, typical one (Jung, Arhetipurile 165).

Archetypes are elements that mediate between the unconscious foundation of the psyche and consciousness (Jung, Arhetipurile 179). They are forms without content (Jung, Amintiri 464); their content is given by the consciousness in which they appear. They are typical life situations, and appear in dreams (especially in early infancy), in the delirium of psychotics, in the fantasies of active imagination, on the one hand, and in myths, fairy tales and in tribal and/or esoteric teachings on the other hand (Jung, Arhetipurile 60; 159). They do not result from concrete events, rather they show the way the soul experiences (the way it lives) the events (Jung Arhetipurile 160). Also, the reason why they are activated in crisis situations is that they represent all that man should be, both in the negative and in the positive sense, but cannot (Jung, Arhetipurile 174). As a consequence, man lives the archetype as a mythological form (as a religious projection) or as anticipation alongside his consciousness (Jung, Arhetipurile 48). Sometimes the archetype is more powerful than the consciousness, which cannot control it. In this case, it takes over and forces the individual to act according to it, regardless of its positive or negative application in the objective reality.

Archetypes fall in two categories: some are so-called personifications; they can be directly experienced in personified form; others are archetypes of transformation: they are not personalities, but typical situations, places, ways and means that symbolize a certain kind of transformation; a good example for them would be the images on the Tarot cards (Jung, Arhetipurile 47).

The numinous is a concept belonging to Rudolf Otto and stands for whatever is impossible to express, hidden and frightening. It is a characteristic of the divinity and can be directly experienced (Jung, Amintiri 471). When an archetype is numinous, it means that it is unconditioned, dangerous, taboo, magic (Jung, Arhetipurile 37). Any contents that are numinous are relatively autonomous (Jung, Arhetipurile 49). The numinous nature of an archetype consists in the fact that it is a meaningful content, but unknown to the consciousness and in that it has a secret and fascinating influence over the consciousness. (Jung Arhetipurile 173).

Individuation is the process by which the individual becomes a complete person, an indivisible whole. Also, individuation makes man aware of the paradoxical fact that he is both a unique and an ordinary being (Samuels 127). This contradictory fact stands on its own because individuation does not separate man from the world, but brings the world to man (Samuels 128). By bringing the world (to man), Jung most probably means the enabling of an understanding of the world, whence comes tolerance, compassion and identification with some of its elements. The purpose of individuation is the development of personality. It implies relations with the unconscious and with the events in reality (Samuels 127). Being a way of reconciliation of the unconscious with consciousness, individuation is crucial to the understanding of the Self and to the enactment of its messages.

Inflation is the assimilation of the ego by the Self or, on the contrary, the assimilation of the Self by the ego (Jung, Aion 39). In both cases, the conscious part identifies with the archetype in the unconscious. Jung also refers to the assimilation of the ego by the Self (like in Jack’s case) as to a kind of pride. To inflate, in English, means to fill with air or gas and also to make something seem more important than it already is (Macmillan 734). Inflatio, in Latin, means inflation, swelling, blowing/puffing (up); flatulence; inflammation; insolence (Babylon Online Dictionary). Inflation widens the blind spot in one’s eyes (Jung, Aion 37). A concrete example is the opaque look in Jack’s eyes, which is more frequently brought into discussion by the narrator as the Self takes over and Jack loses his capacity to judge it. A more obscure connection between Jack and the archetype, this time the shadow, is established through inflation, but regarding its meaning of filling with air: Jack is the first one who takes a glimpse of the beast and he describes it to Ralph and Roger as “a creature that bulged” (Golding 137).

The psyche includes the Self and all the relations between the Self and the ego (Samuels 194). The Self is the archetypal image of the entire human potential and of the unity formed by the personality of the individual. It is the centre of the unconscious and consciousness taken together and at the same time, it is the purpose of life (Jung, Amintiri 474).

During man’s life, the Self asks to be integrated into consciousness, to be fulfilled. To this end, it manifests in dreams, but it contains both good and evil parts and the ego (which is the centre of consciousness) must discern between them and decide if it will accept the “suggestions” of the Self or not. (Samuels 237 – 9). The Self thus includes evil, contrary to the Christian conception of the soul, and a realization of the Self, a fulfilment of human totality, cannot be done without integrating the dark spirit (Jung, Arhetipurile 255). The integration of the shadow in the conscious personality implies a change of the latter (Jung, Arhetipurile 276), because the shadow, which is right under the threshold of consciousness, provides indispensable self-knowledge (Jung, Aion 20). By knowing oneself, and by keeping the balance between action and suffering, one can preserve together the opposites that cannot be united. This is the equilibrium of life, this is individuation, the realization of the Self (Jung, Arhetipurile 350).Holding opposites together means seeing the relativity of the concepts of good and evil, which is dangerous to Europeans, but not uncommon in the Orient, for example in Indian philosophy (Jung, Arhetipurile 45).

According to Jung’s formula of the Self (Aion 299), psychic transformation is characterised by a circular movement, either to the right, which means that unconscious contents are brought and integrated into consciousness, or to the left, which means a regression of the consciousness toward the unconscious. Also, none of the four components of the Self[1] becomes something totally different once the transformation has taken place. It is the same core element. The Self must be divided into four elements in order for consciousness to come to know it. Knowing means splitting into the component parts: like Jung says, “solve et coagula” (Aion 300).

1.4. The Self in sacred and literary texts

The Self as an archetype is present in literary texts, from ancient to modern. I will give a few examples. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is believed to have been written by the Sumerians in about 2500 BC (Kovacs cited by Vaughan), presents a story that can be symbolically seen as the return to the Self. Although Jung makes little reference to Gilgamesh, Paula Vaughan starts from Jung’s definition of religion to show that Gilgamesh’s journey is “a religious quest” (Vaughan). Religion, from Jung’s point of view, is a conscious and careful observation of an existence or of a dynamic effect that does not originate in man’s will (Vaughan; Jung, Imaginea omului 13). This cause, which is exterior to the individual, and which Jung also calls “the numinous”, determines a significant change in consciousness (Jung, Imaginea omului 13).  What Gilgamesh goes through, starting from the meeting with Enkidu, witnessing his friend’s death, and ending with the loss of the plant of eternal youth and the return to Uruk, is, according to Vaughan, reconciliation of his unconscious with consciousness and gaining a relish “of the present and [of] his new awareness”. Given the identity between the Self and the image of God in man (Jung, Imaginea omului 94), a quest for inner unity is a search for God. The myth of the Self consists in interiorizing God’s image, under the form of the totality of the psyche (Jung, Imaginea omului 94).

Anima mundi, the soul of the world, is called Mercury in Tractatus Aureus (a series of 16^th c. alchemical treatises), and Atman in the Upanishad (Jung, Arhetipurile 319). Mercury, or quick silver, is at the centre of the alchemic mandala, it is the philosopher’s stone (Jung, Arhetipurile 315), both of which represent the Self. The Self urges man to become aware of himself, of his actions. On the one hand, awareness is a fusion of scattered parts, a deliberate realization of the ego. On the other hand, awareness of oneself is based on a spontaneous manifestation of the Self, because the Self endows the ego with the gift of introspection, as a father teaches his son how to behave in the world. Therefore, individuation is both a synthesis of the parts of the psyche that have been gathered together, and the ego’s creation of its own essence. We create the Self by becoming aware of its unconscious contents.This is why it can be said that it is our son. Similarly, alchemists have called the Self filium philosophorum – the son of philosophers (Jung, Imaginea omului 166; 329). But in order to integrate the Self into consciousness, one needs to go through psychic transformation.

Transformation and the forms of rebirth are important parts of the continuous dialogue between the ego and the Self. Transformation implies symbolic death and symbolic rebirth (Samuels 258). Subjective transformation may appear, among other things, as a result of a natural process of individuation, in which man feels reborn as an “ampler” personality (Samuels 222). Although the Bible is primarily a religious and not a literary text, it has had an immense influence on the way people envisaged psychic transformation. Jung notes that on his way to Damask, Saint Paul suddenly had a vision of Christ, but it was not Christ, the historical man who spoke to Saint Paul. It was Christ in Saint Paul’s unconscious that manifested in his consciousness (Jung, Arhetipurile 129). The Self is symbolized in the New Testament by Jesus Christ, the complete man, the bit of immortality hidden in mortal man (Jung, Arhetipurile 129). Duality, which is at the core of the Self, is also expressed in the relation between Nietzsche and his character, Zarathustra, who transformed its author from critical aphorist into tragic prophet (Jung, Arhetipurile 128-9). A similar image can be found in the Upanishad, where a pair of friends is described, much like the Roman Dioscuri: two winged friends, tied to each other, take in their arms the same tree. One of them tastes the tree’s sweet fruits and the other looks up at the sky (Jung, Arhetipurile 129-130). The former is mortal, while the latter is immortal. In the Koran, the pair formed by the mortal and the immortal element in man’s psyche is expressed by man’s capacity to free himself from earthly laws and to be reborn as a new, religious man, or his tendency to obey the law made by people and to obey  Allah’s will blindly (Jung, Arhetipurile 143). Both possibilities are at hand for man, in their potential state.

We can find such blind obedience to the course of life in James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, published in 1922 (Jung, Despre fenomenul spiritului 113). Ulysses describes a day from the life of a man whose labyrinthine wanderings around Dublin are suggestive of his need for psychic unity. Leopold Bloom, the sensorial man, is in need of something spiritual: he craves for a son whom to love and to protect. The son he finds, at least for a short period of time, is Stephen Daedalus, the speculative man, almost as translucent as vapour (Jung, Despre fenomenul spiritului 118). The two characters may be regarded as the two opposite elements in search of each other, but Jung is extremely reluctant in ascribing the characters in Ulysses any kind of symbolism (128). Although nothing but mere perception is added to the narration of events (Jung 119), with an atrophy of feeling (126), although Joyce proves a mastery of desecration that surpasses Nietzsche’s (125), and never says anything explicit to the reader (114), his novel shows reality exactly the way it is (123). The fact that people read it means that Joyce is a prophet of the compensatory absence of sentimentality that his age needed (127). Joyce’s characters seem so real because the narrator, the artist, that ego who includes everything, and who created the characters, is nowhere to be found. It is this detail that signals the presence of the Self in the novel, more precisely the author’s identity with the impersonal, impartial, superior entity that watches mankind from above, while including it in itself. The book itself is Ulysses, he is all the characters, while Ulysses does not appear in the book. Thus, human consciousness is detached from this crazy world, approaching the divine nature of God. This is the greatest artistic achievement of Joyce’s novel (129-134).

1.5. Conclusion to Chapter 1

The introductive chapter of the analysis has set the limits of my Jungian approach to Golding’s novel. Firstly, I have presented the opinion of literary critics, who have shown me that an interpretation based on the interaction between the collective unconscious and consciousness would not be far-fetched at all, as they have pointed out Golding’s concern with “man’s long-buried responses” to life (Karl 255), the novel’s “ideographic [thus visual and synthetic] structure” (Tiger 64), and the way Golding depicts alienation and shows man’s double nature (Hollinger 4; 27). Secondly, I have tried to reconcile Lord of the Flies with Jung’s judgement of literary works. The novel is of interest to a Jungian critic inasmuch its visionary side is present in the background, in the symbols of the Self and of the shadow. Thirdly, because I consider this novel an allegory, I have given the Jungian definition of the term: a paraphrase of a conscious content, which stands for the author’s intention in writing the novel. But Lord of the Flies also contains expressions of unconscious contents, which come from the author’s intuition of human nature. This kind of expressions is the Jungian definition of symbol. Next, I have listed some occurrences of the archetypes of the Self and of the shadow in the novel, and I have discussed the snake as an ambivalent symbol of the dual nature of the Self. There followed the definitions of the main Jungian terms used in the paper, and, last but not least, a brief account of the sacred and literary texts where we can find the archetype of the Self. Among these, I can mention the Bible (The New Testament) and James Joyce’s Ulysses as the most notable ones.

What I have intended to obtain out of this rather diverse listing of definitions and opinions is a clear idea of what the readers might expect from this interpretation of Lord of the Flies.

Chapter 2

Leadership and personal development

“ ‘You hunters! You can laugh! But I tell you smoke is more important than the pig (…) We’ve got to make smoke up there – or die.’ “ (Golding 88).

2.1. Conch and conflict

The Self becomes manifest at the level of consciousness through symbols, such as geometrical figures of the mandala type (the circle), important religious figures, such as Jesus Christ, figures of authority, such as the king (Jung, Tipuri 497). It can be recognized by its paradoxical structure: a union of opposites which should destroy those features that oppose elements to one another, however, it does not (Jung, Aion 8). Such symbols are present in Lord of the Flies, and at a closer look, they show a possible outcome of the manifestation of the Self in the early stages of man’s life, explaining the way human nature is built to fulfil that which resides in it as potential.

The pair of opposites that the narrator directly presents and insists on in the diegesis is that of Ralph and Jack, whose way of dealing with the Self is made apparent by their being leaders. The overt and constant opposition between them generates a state of conflict which enables the traits that set them apart to stand out and finally to develop into opposing conceptions of life. The narrator remarks: “They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate. (…) They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.” (Golding 57). Later on, these conceptions of life find their expression in concrete situations that are part of the way each of them lives on the island: “The two boys faced each other. There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled common sense” (Golding 76).

The narrator directs readers to seeing the interaction between Ralph and Jack against a war background (the 2^nd World War is in progress) and dismisses the hypothesis, or rather the prejudice, that children are innocent and that they could start out a better life if isolated from the negative influence of the surrounding civilization. When it comes to children, people understand innocence mostly as absence of evil. But it can equally be seen as ignorance of evil, as Hollinger comments (16). I believe that what Golding intends to show by the novel is that what people usually understand by absence of evil is ignorance of the existence of evil. Human nature is the same in children and in adults, the difference being that children are not aware of what human nature is. From knowledge of evil to self-knowledge is but a step, and to a certain extent the two notions merge. The realization of the Self highly depends upon self-knowledge and upon the way in which the individual makes use of the latter, because it presupposes a confrontation, and thus knowledge of the opposites in oneself, and a harmonization of these opposites (Jung, Aion 8). Acquiring self-knowledge means ridding oneself of innocence, therefore, still at a psychological level, it is this issue of innocence, or loss of it, that engenders the interior and the exterior conflicts, even if it then develops into an ampler collision between consciousness and the unconscious (Jung, Arhetipurile 294), which is more palpable as the conflict between the individual and the environment.

The exterior conflict between Ralph and Jack arises because both of them are chiefs over the same “subjects”, more or less, and because both are extroverts, this meaning that the power one of them has is almost as big as the other’s. Still, this conflict between peers has deeper roots than social interaction, leading to an inner conflict in each of the two boys, which is related to the archetype of the Self.

The two boys compete for the same role in the newly formed society, but Ralph is the one whom the boys choose, for two reasons. The obvious one is that the “wearily obedient” church choir (Golding 17) has had enough of Jack’s “uniformed superiority and (…) offhand authority” (Golding 17). When Jack states, “with simple arrogance”: “ ‘I ought to be chief’ ” (Golding 19), one of the members of the choir, “the dark boy, Roger, stirred at last and spoke up. ‘Let’s have a vote.’ “ (Golding 19). The less obvious reason is that Jack, with his “tall, thin and bony” body, his red hair “beneath the black cap”, his “crumpled and freckled” face, “ugly without silliness”, and his “light blue eyes (…) ready to turn to anger” (Golding 16), does not appeal to the little boys as the ideal leader. On the contrary, Ralph, “the fair boy” (Golding 2) whose “width and heaviness of shoulders” (Golding 5) show physical strength, and whose mouth and eyes have “a mildness (…) that proclaimed no devil” (Golding 5), is seen as a more reliable and merciful chief. As the narrator makes us believe, the little ones are not aware of this judgement, which they unconsciously make.

Children’s consciousness comes into being out of the fragmentary awareness of moments scattered in time, like isles in the ocean, and these isles come to the surface of the complete darkness of the world of instincts (Jung, Arhetipurile 287). In relation to instinct is intuition, which Jung defines as “perception via the unconscious” (Arhetipurile 288). One of the figures of the unconscious is that of the hero (Jung, Arhetipurile 291), which Ralph is an example of, and which resembles the leader. The similarity between the hero and the leader lies, I believe, in the great responsibility that both the hero and the leader (or the king) have toward their community and toward humanity. We can see this in Ralph’s reaction when the boys first approach Castle Rock, in search of the beast: “Something deep in Ralph spoke for him. ‘I’m chief. I’ll go. Don’t argue.’ ‘ (Golding 115). The hero and the leader are instantiations of the archetype of the Self; they are figures of authority, superior personalities (Jung, Tipuri 497). Ralph and Jack, in representing the Self, also correspond to the pair formed by the hero and his opponent (Jung, Tipuri 498).

There is symmetry in the way Jack and Ralph are perceived by the children who vote for their leader. Just as Jack is rejected because of his appearance and because of what it tells the children (the message that they receive intuitively), so is Ralph accepted (being chosen here can be seen as being accepted) because of his physique and because of the attraction that the Self exercises upon the little ones. The appealing nature of archetypes in general is due to their belonging to entire peoples or to historical ages, an extension in space and time that makes them be powerfully enrooted in the collective unconscious (Jung, Tipuri 464). Another explanation would be that an archetype is the synthetic result of numerous similar psychic realities. Being the most appropriate expression of interior experiences, the archetype is a condensation that has occurred with the passage of time and a response to the contact of the soul with the exterior world (Jung, Tipuri 464-465). Thus, choosing Ralph as chief is not a (fully) conscious act, because it is not directly based on logical reasons. It is the outcome of a subtler line of reasoning, which crosses the realm of the unconscious. The absence of critical thought in children smoothens the way, and the boys see their democratic activity as a “toy of voting”: “None of the boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence has been shown was traceable to Piggy while the most obvious leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch. (…)” (Golding 19).

The fascination of the conch seems to precede Ralph’s image as leader: “This toy of voting was almost as pleasing as the conch” (Golding 19). This spiral shell has the same function as the wheel as symbol of the Self[2]: if the circle represents the inclusion of the Ego into the Self (they can be pictured as two concentric circles), the wheel implies rotation around a centre[3] (Jung, Aion 261). Representing the Ego and the Self as two concentric circles, the Ego being the smaller circle, means saying that they share the same centre, which is the Self, however contradictory it may seem. In the cultures of the world, the spiral evokes a labyrinth’s trajectory, heading for the centre (Benoist 77), a view which supports this psychological hypothesis. The sound of the conch, which brings the boys together, is both of a solemn harmony, which makes it attractive in itself, and promising. It is a calling to something that is in the making and can only be done collectively. Because it sounds like a summoning, it imposes itself as an attribute of authority, which determines the children to see in Ralph the equivalent of an adult: “The small boy squatted in front of Ralph, looking brightly and vertically. As he received the assurance of something purposeful being done he began to look satisfied, and his only clean digit, a pink thumb, slid into his mouth” (Golding 14).

Children associate the older boy blowing the conch with the “men with megaphones” (Golding 14) they heard back home. Nevertheless, the strangeness of the sound, and the new, natural environment in which they hear it, draws them closer to the typical conditions of man’s life, to the life of primitive people, to whom such a summoning was always a sign of important change, announcing either immediate danger or a decision-making gathering. This may explain why the narrator describes the shell as “a gleaming tusk” (Golding 13).

Throughout the novel, the conch has the psychological function of a symbol, which is the most accurate expression of an ultimately unexplainable psychic experience[4]. Ralph soon decides what the conch should stand for: “ ‘We can’t have everybody talking at once. We’ll have “Hands up” like at school.’ He held the conch to his face and glanced round the mouth. ‘Then I’ll give him the conch.’ “(Golding 32). However, the conch does not owe its influence to its conventional use of giving people the right to speak uninterrupted, nor to the touch of order and impartiality associated with the established convention. Things are rather the other way around, meaning that the convention holds because of the things it evokes to the children. Jack senses the symbol’s power and he aims at it when he tries to diminish Ralph’s authority: “ ‘The conch doesn’t count on top of the mountain’ said Jack, ‘so you shut up’ “ (Golding 43). Although he addresses Piggy, and exteriorizes his adversity against “the fat boy” (Golding 3), to whom he very frequently tells to “shut up”, Jack unconsciously attacks Ralph, for it is Ralph’s rules that he tries to cancel with his invective. Later on he expresses this bluntly: “ ‘Bollocks to the rules! We’re strong – we hunt! If there’s a beast we’ll close in and beat and beat and beat –!’ “ (Golding 100).

Jack’s main purpose is going against the chosen leader, as Ralph is the indirect reason of his rejection by the boys. Election brings legitimacy, and in its turn, legitimacy favours a harmonious personality development. Thus, the life conditions leadership offers form the best psychic ambiance for Jack’s, as well as for Ralph’s, realization of the Self. In giving Ralph the right to lead them, the boys indirectly say to him: “we want you, we need you, we trust you and we will obey you”.

Similarly, they are saying the opposite to Jack: “we do not want you, we don’t need you, we don’t trust you, and we will not obey you”. This rejection favours an amplification of the shadow. Jack chooses the dark side of the Self, his ego identifies with it, and the shadow is by definition placed at the back of one’s mind, repressed, because it is unacceptable to consciousness (Jung, Amintiri 475). The shadow gets denser and more powerful as one tries to repress it (Samuels 265). Jack has the tendency to hide his feelings from himself, but also from the others, because, being so accustomed to be treated with respect (which he later on finds that is not really respect, but only fear), he resents even the faintest possibility of becoming an object of ridicule. It is a compensatory reaction of his unconscious. When Ralph tells Jack that they need shelters because the little boys are more and more often afraid, Jack reluctantly confesses: “Jack (…) frowned in an effort to attain clarity. ‘All the same – in the forest. I mean when you’re hunting – (…) when you’re on your own –‘ He paused for a moment, not sure if Ralph would take him seriously. ‘Go on.’ ‘If you’re hunting sometimes you catch yourself feeling as if –‘ He flushed suddenly. ‘There’s nothing in it of course. Just a feeling. But you can feel as if you’re not hunting, but – being hunted. (…) That’s how I feel in the forest. Of course there’s nothing in it. (…) Only I know how they feel. See? That’s all.’ “ (Golding 55). All the verbal artifice, “you can feel as if you’re not hunting”, “of course”, “Just a feeling”, “That’s all”, as well as the pauses and the fragmented phrases show his hesitation not only in talking about his fear but also, in acknowledging it for himself. Ultimately, he thinks he is safe from the beast (and unconsciously tries to get rid of the fear it generates in him), by fraternizing with it, by leaving it a votive gift (Chapter 8: “Gift for the Darkness”).

Ralph, on the other hand, is not trying to hide anything from himself because he does not have this excessive pride that must not be hurt. When the twins come running from the mountaintop, where they think they have seen the beast, and tell the other boys about it, they become disorganized and Jack calls everyone “back to the centre” (Golding 110), summoning them to join him in “a real hunt” (Golding 110). Then “Ralph moved impatiently. ‘These spears are made of wood. Don’t be silly.’ Jack sneered at him. ‘Frightened?’ ‘Course I’m frightened. Who wouldn’t be?’ “ (Golding 110 – 1). Ralph is not embarrassed to show his fear or to show the other boys that he is thinking about the most appropriate course of action: “ ‘I don’t remember this cliff,’ said Jack, crest-fallen, ‘so this must be the bit of coast I missed.’ Ralph nodded. ‘Let me think’ “(Golding 130).

Ralph can more easily achieve a state of balance, because he has a certain level of modesty, meaning that he is not so much convinced of his merits and not so eager to let everybody know what these are. Jack, on the other hand, says: “ “I ought to be chief’, said Jack with simple arrogance, ‘because I’m chapter chorister and head boy. I can sing C sharp’ “(Golding 19). The directness of his statement draws Ralph’s sympathy. He too is straightforward and determined. We can see this in the answer he gives to Piggy: “ ‘I said I didn’t care as long as they didn’t call me Piggy; an’ I said not to tell and then you went an’ said straight out – ‘ (…) He [Ralph] hovered between the two courses of apology or further insult. ‘Better Piggy than Fatty’, he said at last, with the directness of genuine leadership (…)” (Golding 22).

Then, Jack casts himself into illegitimacy by letting the fire out. Ralph reprimands him, more bitterly than ever, because a ship had passed near their island and there was no rescuing smoke signal, but Jack wins the hunters to his side again by apologizing to Ralph. However diminished his authority is, Ralph shows them he is still their chief by sitting where the fire had died out, and making them move the logs, branches and leaves. The boys dare not ask him to stand aside so they can light the fire: “ ‘All right. Light the fire.’ (…) Ralph said no more, did nothing, stood looking down at the ashes round his feet. Jack was loud and active. (…) No one, not even Jack, would ask him to move and in the end they had to build the fire three yards away (…) So Ralph asserted his chieftainship and could not have chosen a better way if he had thought for days. Against this weapon, so indefinable and so effective, Jack was powerless and raged without knowing why” (Golding 78).

Jack is “conscious of a fault” (Golding 75), and Ralph points it out to everyone, virtually turning him into an outcast. This is probably the conscious reason of the antagonism, while the other, unconscious reason is related to the fulfilment of the Self as leader. The awareness of the fault clashes with the exhilarating feeling of a successful hunt, which has offered Jack not only pleasure but also the opportunity to prove his intelligence: “He [Jack] sought, charitable in his happiness, to include them in the thing that had happened. His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink” (Golding 75). This feeling of contentment comes from the agreement between inner drives and reality.

Moreover, when Ralph blames Jack for letting the fire out, Piggy reprimands him too: “[Ralph:] ‘We might have gone home – This was too bitter for Piggy, who forgot his timidity in the agony of his loss. He began to cry out, shrilly: ‘You and your blood, Jack Merridew! You and your hunting! We might have gone home – ‘ “ (Golding 76). This is the worst humiliation yet, and the very one that the boys, starting with Jack, had always considered outside the group, thus illegitimate in a way, as not being fit for any kind of authority, Piggy, blames Jack publicly. “This from Piggy, and the wails of agreement from some of the hunters drove Jack to violence. The bolting look came into his blue eyes. He (…) stuck his fist into Piggy’s stomach. (…) His voice was vicious with humiliation. ‘You would, would you? Fatty!’ “ (Golding 76-77). Then Piggy, his glasses broken, warns Jack: “ ‘Now I only got one eye. Jus’ you wait – ‘ Jack mimicked the whine and scramble. ‘Jus’ you wait – yah!’ Piggy and the parody were so funny that the hunters began to laugh. Jack felt encouraged. (…) laughter rose to a gale of hysteria. Unwillingly Ralph felt his lips twitch (…) He [Ralph] muttered. ‘That was a dirty trick’ ” (Golding 77).

In creating a favourable atmosphere, Jack is able to re-build his public image (his persona), by another “dirty trick” (Golding 78): “ ‘All right, all right!’ He looked at Piggy, at the hunters, at Ralph. ‘I’m sorry. About the fire, I mean [not about hitting Piggy...]. There. I – ‘ He drew himself up. ‘– I apologize’ (Golding 78). By saying “there”, Jack shows he is making Ralph, Piggy, Simon and Maurice a favour. He considers himself superior to them.

Even if Jack is the illegitimate leader, he is eventually followed by almost all the big boys, because, beyond the conventions that they superficially hold on to, it is he who offers them what they want and need in the present and not as a promise for the future. What they want comes from the adventure books they read, fun, adventure, and thrilling experiences. What they need is to eat and to feel safe. The boys never actually think about rescue, because they forget their fears in the daytime, “when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten” (Golding 61). The conch too is left aside, because despite its initial fascination, it stands for principles that are too hard to preserve: “ [Ralph] ‘We must make a fire.’ ‘A fire! Make a fire!’ At once half the boys were on their feet. Jack clamoured among them, the conch forgotten. ‘Come on! Follow me!’ ” (Golding 38). The boys follow Jack, not minding that he is not the chief, and not actually caring what the fire is for.

The boys start a new life, breaking the bond with the old one, by becoming careless about their return. On the contrary, Ralph, looking at the ocean, sees it as “the divider, the barrier” (Golding 123). For the boys, fun replaces the “longing” that Ralph feels (Golding 76) and that renders him continuously obsessed with the smoke signal. When Ralph says, at their second meeting: “ ‘We want to be rescued; and of course we shall be rescued.’ “ (Golding 37), the boys agree with him, but they do not do anything about it, because the new life offers them as many pleasant thrills as dangers. The boys’ reaction is only a response to the feeling of safety that he gives them: “Voices babbled. The simple statement, unbacked by any proof but the weight of Ralph’s new authority, brought light and happiness.” (Golding 37). Jack and the other boys let the shadow control them. The shadow stands for whatever is sombre and inferior in the individual (Jung, Aion 55). The clear cut line between reality and imagination, between the real world and the inner world of personified psychic experiences, is increasingly blurred: “He [Ralph] thought for a moment, formulating the question. ‘Who thinks there may be ghosts?’ (…) Ralph peered into the gloom and made out the hands. He spoke flatly. ‘I see.’ The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away. Once there was this and that; and now – and the ship was gone” (Golding 99).

2.2. Archetype adjustment

Archetype adjustment is the transformation that the archetype undergoes when it reaches consciousness and the latter tries to apply it in the objective reality. This is the cause of Ralph’s and Jack’s inner conflict: they both want to turn themselves into what they think a leader should be and to do what they believe a leader should and can do. The transformation of the archetype in man’s consciousness is thus characteristic of the inevitable alteration of unconscious contents that become conscious, because of the individual stamp of the consciousness in which they appear (Jung cited in Surdulescu 80).”. The exterior conflict between the two leaders is an effect of their interior conflict, which arises from the inadequacy of the conscious attitude with the archetype of the Self, manifesting as the figure of the leader. The inner conflict is short-lived in Jack’s case, because he rapidly gives it to the Self, but Ralph manages not to slip to either side, he does not forget the values of the old world. He, Piggy and Simon are singled out among the boys because each of them keeps to the meaning behind the image of the benefits of civilization, even if the old world is no longer their environment. But each of the three boys is alone in his cling to these values, because each has retained a different part of them. They are isolated from the rest of the group also because the majority of the boys quickly forget the meaning of rescue, as they do not see in the old life anything better than the current “fun and games”. Therefore, when they obey Ralph and make a fire, they light it because they enjoy it; and destruction comes as a result of their lack of responsibility: “Smoke was rising here and there among the creepers that festooned the dead or dying trees. As they watched, a flash of fire appeared at the root of one wisp, and then the smoke thickened. Small flames stirred at the bole of a tree and crawled away through leaves and brushwood, dividing and increasing. (…) Beneath the dark canopy of leaves and smoke the fire laid hold on the forest and began to gnaw. (…) At the sight of the flames and the irresistible course of the fire, the boys broke into shrill, excited cheering. The flames, as though they were a kind of wild life, crept as a jaguar creeps on its belly towards a line of birch-like saplings that fledged an outcrop of the pink rock” (Golding 45). The simile in the last phrase anticipates the representation of the beast, while the palm tree saplings can be associated to the boys themselves, because these saplings dry out quickly for want of soil, just as the boys regress for want of certitudes to cling to:”The top of this was covered with a thin layer of soil and coarse grass and shaded with young palm trees. There was not enough soil for them to grow to any height and when they reached perhaps twenty feet they fell and dried (…)” (Golding 7).

The boys live under the influence of the beast, a terrifying projection of their own shadow. From this point of view, Jack is closer to them than Ralph, and this is why the big boys end up on Jack’s side. Their actions are determined neither by the public opinion (by the views expressed at the meetings or reminiscent from home), nor by the moral code (whose defenders are few and lack power of persuasion), but by their own personality, of which they are still unconscious (Samuels 154). Therefore, the exterior conflict is not only due to the opposition between Ralph and Jack, regarding what each of them makes of the image of the leader, but is also due the attitude of the community towards them. As the general tendency oscillates between acceptance and rejection, the two leaders make their way to spiritual isolation: Ralph achieves individuation, whereas Jack undergoes inflation. For both these directions of the consciousness, the individual needs to be, or to consider himself the centre of the story, the unique impersonator of the archetype. From this point of view, Ralph and Jack isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Just as leadership creates the proper circumstances for the development of opposites, regarding both the exterior and the interior conflict in relation to Ralph and Jack, so does their isolation, or the uniqueness of the leader favour the state of the psyche that leads to individuation, in Ralph’s case, and to inflation, in Jack’s case.

Inflation separates the individual from the world, because he comes to consider himself superior to the others, but unites him with the archetype, so that he is no longer free to adapt it wisely to his life conditions- on the contrary, it is he who adapts to the archetype (Jung, Amintiri 470). Inflation makes one stumble upon the shadow, like Jack does. “The bolting look” (Golding 77) in his eyes is a sign of the inflation that takes over: “Before the party had started a great log had been dragged into the centre of the lawn and Jack, painted and garlanded, sat there like an idol” (Golding 167).

From the point of view of his conscious attitude, Jack is an extrovert. This means that he focuses his psychic energy onto the exterior and he acts according to objective circumstances. It is from the exterior that he draws his determination (Jung, Tipuri 355 -356). Upon arriving to the boys’ first meeting, he is highly concerned with the situation in which they are, and he is striving to find solutions to it: “He turned quickly, his black cloak circling. ‘Isn’t there a ship, then? (…) ‘Is there a man here?’ (…) Merridew turned to Ralph. ‘Aren’t there any grown-ups?’ ‘No.’ Merridew sat down on a trunk and looked round the circle. ‘Then we’ll have to look after ourselves.’ (…) Jack spoke. ‘We’ve got to decide about being rescued.’ “ (Golding 17-8). This is before they decide who should be their chief, when Jack assumes that he will naturally lead all of them, just as he has the lead of the choir. Once they make the first fire on the mountaintop, Jack gives orders: “ ‘We’re English; and the English are best at everything. So we’ve got to do the right things. (…) Ralph – I’ll split up the choir – my hunters, that is – into groups, and we’ll be responsible for keeping the fire going – (…) [but then he says, in a way that diminishes the positive effect of his action-oriented plans:] We’ll let the fire burn out now. Who would see smoke at night-time anyway? And we can start the fire again whenever we like (…)’ “ (Golding 44). The phrase that I have put in italics is important for an understanding of Jack’s rapid switch to the attitude of a native savage, some time after this speech. This phrase shows Jack’s actual lack of concern for all the values he is emphasizing: his origin, the specific principles attached to it, and human dignity, ultimately. It is an anticipation of his carelessness about the fire, which costs the boys their rescue. Jack takes with him the boys on watch so he could go hunting, because “ ‘We had to have them in the hunt,’ he said, ‘or there wouldn’t have been enough for a ring. (…) ‘The job was too much. We needed everyone’ ” (Golding 75 -6). His attitude, that could be described as tolerant, or his flexible principles, show again in his answer to Ralph’s remark that he left the fire out: “ ‘The fire’s only been out an hour or two. We can light it up again – ‘ “ (Golding 75).

Jack’s indolence does not originate in his consciousness. The attitude of the unconscious is always complementary to the attitude of consciousness. If, from the point of view of consciousness, he belongs to the extrovert type, his unconscious adopts an introvert attitude (Jung, Tipuri 358). What characterizes such a structure of the unconscious is giving high importance to everything that consciousness deems as secondary. In the case of an extrovert, the object comes before the subject, meaning that exterior reality is more reliable and more important than the way the individual sees it. When manifested, what is repressed comes as a negative compensation (Jung, Tipuri 361).

As “chapter chorister”, Jack too is keen on keeping to the rules, but he exaggerates, being too harsh on the boys. Jack does not care about being rescued because he finds life on the island much better than civilized life, because here it is possible to live outside the rules. What attracts him is the pig hunt, a circumstance that allows him to outwit another being and to kill it: “Jack had to think for a moment before he could remember what rescue was. ‘Rescue? Yes, of course! All the same, I’d like to catch a pig first –‘ He snatched up his spear and dashed it into the ground. The opaque, mad look came into his eyes again.” (Golding 55). Tracking down and killing is more appropriate for a primitive man, for “the inferior man” in him. It is he who turns “the song of angels” (Golding 149) of the choir into violent chants: “ ‘Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!’ “(Golding 127). It is he who turns the circle, a healing symbol of the totality specific to the Self, into an unfailing hunting tactic: “Robert snarled at him [Ralph]. Ralph entered into the play and everybody laughed. Presently they were all jabbing at Robert who made mock rushes. Jack shouted. ‘Make a ring!’ The circle moved in and round. Robert squealed in mock terror, then in real pain” (Golding 127). It is still the inferior man who makes Maurice say: “ ‘ We ought to have a drum (…) then we could do it properly. (…) You want a fire, I think, and a drum, and you keep time to the drum’ “ (Golding 128).

The inferior man has existed in his unconscious, is now revived by the new life conditions and takes over because the ego has never integrated the rules of civilization. The rules and principles stopped at Jack’s persona, and in the realization of the Self, Jack stops at the shadow.

Psychical contents are formed by the intellectual judgement and the judgement of value, or the emotional value, which assigns a certain role to the psychical content in the economy of the psyche (Jung, Aion 45). The judgement of value can be represented as a scale of subjective values: the first element, from the point of view of the degree of awareness, is the ego, then there are the shadow, the animus or anima, and the highest, as well as the farthest from consciousness, there is the Self (Jung, Aion 42-43). Subjective values coexist with moral, aesthetic and religious values, which Jung calls objective values, because they represent generally acknowledged ideals – they are the cultural counterpart of psychological archetypes (Jung, Aion 43). In order to reach the Self, to become aware of its intentions, one must overcome the shadow and the animus or anima. Jack is not able to receive the messages of the Self critically, because he is influenced by the shadow. If the Self requires its fulfilment through leadership, the shadow turns this into an opportunity to take advantage of absolute power in order to accomplish and release all the fury in Jack’s eyes and his pride, which at the beginning presents itself as “simple arrogance” (Golding 19). Pride and projections cause Jack’s inflation.

Because he takes as model the negative side of archetypes, Jack also helps portray the archetype of the mother in its dark and evil side, by killing the sow surrounded by her piglets, and transforming it into a votive gift for the beast: “(…) practice had made Jack silent as the shadows. He stole away again and instructed his hidden hunters. (…) A little apart from the rest, sunk in deep maternal bliss, lay the largest sow of the lot. She was black and pink; and the great bladder of her belly was fringed with a row of piglets that slept or burrowed and squeaked. (…) The afternoon wore on, hazy and dreadful with damp heat; the sow staggered her way ahead of them, bleeding and mad, and the hunters followed, wedded to her in lust, excited by the long chase and the dropped blood. (…) the sow fell and the hunters hurdled themselves at her (…) Jack held up the head and jammed the soft throat down on the pointed end of the stick which pierced through into the mouth. (…) Jack spoke loudly. ‘This head is for the beast. It’s a gift.’ “ (Golding 150 – 4). Moreover, the killing of the sow made the boys change their chant, from:” ‘Kill the pig! Cut his throat! (…)’ “ to “ ‘Kill the pig. Cut her throat.’ “ (Golding 81).

The pig’s head is a sacrificial gift to the extent to which it represents the culture of the community and the endeavour and skill employed to obtain it (Jung, Imaginea omului 158). However, it is a representational gift in essence, because it does not presuppose self-sacrifice (Jung, Imaginea omului 158), it is rather a substitute for it, a shrewd way to appease the divinity and to escape from its claws. This is Jack’s conscious intention: “ ‘We’d better keep on the right side of him [of the beast], anyhow. You can’t tell what he might do’ ‘ (Golding 182).

However, he goes even further, unconsciously, by giving the beast an image, and by giving an image to the evil in himself: the shadow, the dark leader – as the sow chosen for the hunt is the largest of all the pigs, and its head is named Lord; all this point to something which is the best, the greatest in a lot. In the gift, he also projects a part of himself – marking his psychic identity with the object he is offering (Jung, Imaginea omului 155 – 8). By considering himself entitled to make a gift to such a powerful being, Jack expresses his selfish desire of power (Jung, Imaginea omului 152). His inflation comes down to the things he remains unconscious of. Jack projects his negative feelings onto the image of the beast and tries to “forget about the beast [forget about fear]” (Golding 149), by fraternizing with it, by offering food to it, ultimately by failing to see that the beast is his own shadow and not a different being. Even if he knows about the fear, and he admits he is experiencing it too, Jack remains unaware of its source.

Before seeing the beast on the mountain, Jack tells the boys: “ ‘Be frightened because you’re like that – but there is no beast in the forest’ “ (Golding 90). When he becomes convinced of the existence of the beast, though he sees nothing but a shadowy profile, which could correspond to practically anything, Jack becomes convinced that it is hunting them – an activity that implies cunning, skill, cruelty, which he himself has. By associating himself with hunting, and by seeing nothing more natural for the beast than the same kind of activity, Jack projects his shadow onto the mysterious creature: “ ‘Quiet!’ shouted Jack. ‘You listen. The beast is sitting up there, whatever it is –‘ ‘Perhaps it’s waiting–‘ ‘Hunting–‘ ‘Yes, hunting.’ ‘Hunting,’ said Jack. He remembered his age-old tremors in the forest. ‘Yes. The beast is a hunter. (…)’ “ (Golding 141).

The medieval conception of evil was that of privatio boni – the absence of good (Jung, Aion 64). Jung, as a psychologist, does not agree with this view, but with the view of Gerardus Dorneus, a seventeenth century physician and philosopher of nature, who says that the devil, as well as God, tried to represent the world as a circular system, but he only managed to draw a double-headed, four-horned snake. This symbolizes fighting against oneself, dividing oneself into opposing parts. (Jung, Imaginea omului 318). Jack’s inflation is caused, apart from pride and projections, by his inner scission, because he does not integrate the shadow into an indivisible entity– individuation means becoming an individual, an in-divided entity. His interior conflict arises from this lack of union. He wants to be understood, but he is only feared by the boys, and he does not understand why: “ ‘I got you meat!’ Numberless and inexpressible frustrations combined to make his rage elemental and awe-inspiring. ‘I painted my face – I stole up. Now you eat – all of you – and I – ‘ (…) Jack looked round for understanding but he found only respect” (Golding 80). Respect is a combination of admiration and fear.

Jack projects his negative side onto the environment, out of the fear that he might recognize in himself the traits he hates in others: being frightened, being a coward, and thinking too much about something. He sees the bad part in these traits, which he attributes (and distributes) to the beast, to Piggy and to Ralph. We have seen how he forges the beast’s image according to that of his soul. Jack sees he traits that are rather qualities than flaws in Piggy and in Ralph, critical thinking and cautiousness, only in a negative light: “ ‘He [Ralph] is like Piggy. He says things like Piggy. He isn’t a proper chief.’ Jack clutched the conch to him. ‘He’s a coward himself.’ “ (Golding 141).

Ralph is no more of a coward than Jack, or in other words, he is as courageous as Jack. He is an extrovert as well, and consequently takes decisions according to the objective facts in reality. But it is the way he interprets these objective facts that differentiates him from Jack. It is his awareness of the objective facts that keeps him out of the grip of the unconscious and out of inflation. As opposed to Jack, Ralph becomes aware of his shadow and tries to control it, while accepting that it is part of him.

Individuation presupposes acknowledging one’s shadow (the sombre and the inferior part of the soul), integrating the double aspect of the psychic content (Jung, Aion 45) and fulfilling that which has been left unredeemed (Jung, Amintiri 230). Individuation leads to a separation from the world, setting the individual apart from the archetypal images of the collective unconscious, as a distinct personality, anchored in the specificity of his life. At the same time, individuation generates a spiritual union with the world, through the feeling of belonging to the human race and through a higher understanding of human nature, by knowing that whatever is to be found in the world, it is also present in the individual.

When Jack mimics Piggy, Ralph too feels like laughing: “Unwillingly Ralph felt his lips twitch; he was angry with himself for giving way” (Golding 77). He is ashamed of what he feels, but he has the strength to face the fact that he is laughing at Piggy, just like everybody else. Still, his interior conflict, which arises from the interaction with the Self, is not primarily caused by the tendency to mock whosoever seems inferior, but it is generated by the difficult task of keeping to his responsibilities (which he sets for himself, urged by his mental image of a leader). Ralph understands that, as chief, he has more duties than the others, that he must ensure security and rescue for all of them: “[Ralph to Jack] ‘And I work all day with nothing but Simon and you come back and don’t even notice the huts!’ ‘I was working too –‘ ‘But you like it!’ shouted Ralph. ‘You want to hunt! While I –‘ “ (Golding 56). The fact that he does things that are necessary, regardless of the fact that he dislikes them, means that his objective values are stronger than the other boys’ and this is a sign of a powerful consciousness, able to adjust the requirements of the Self to objective reality[5]. The fact that he keeps to the rules on the island, where rules show their conventional nature more than in the civilized world, where one can only observe the unconscious by making use of cunning and artifice (Jung, Aion 17), is another proof of Ralph’s strong objective values.

However, Ralph sees the inferior man coming to life, and this may trigger the mind veil, “the curtain that might waver his brain, blacking out the sense of danger, making a simpleton of him” (Golding 224). If the mind veil has this effect of calming down, then it may indeed be associated with Jack’s strange tolerance in stepping outside the rules, and ultimately, it can be traced back to the shadow, showing the struggle between the old and the new attitude toward the frame within which man can live. Yet his active imagination consists in memories that are not only of the most pleasant kind, but that also a compensation for the present lack of harmony between the boys, to put it mildly. They express such perfection and joy of life that it is natural to associate them with the compensatory reaction of the Self. Ralph’s parents, the house and the books, the snow and the wild ponies are symbols for the world that Ralph has left behind, symbols of a state closest to perfection, in his view. These symbols feed Ralph’s longing for the old world and disperse the mind veil, which is a product of his hopelessness and his urge to adapt to the new life (it can also be interpreted as the stratagem of the shadow to make Ralph forget his life in civilization). The new conditions determine the inferior man, with his specific adaptive behaviour, which is a positive feature, and his inferiority of consciousness, come out and take action. In the end, it is only adaptability that Ralph preserves from the inferior man: he defends himself from the wild boar: “Ralph found he was able to measure the distance coldly and take aim. With the boar only five yards away, he flung the foolish wooden stick that he carried, saw it hit the great snout and hang there for a moment. The boar (…) swerved aside into the covert” (Golding 125); he dodges the spears of the hunters: “Ralph turned and ran. (…) He obeyed an instinct that he did not know he possessed and swerved over the open space so that the spears went wide” (Golding 206-7); he makes an escape plan, while running away from the hunters, when “there was no Piggy to talk sense. There was no assembly for debate and no dignity of the conch” (Golding 223): “Break the line. A tree. Hide, and let them pass. (…) Hide was better than a tree because you had a chance of breaking the line if you were discovered. Hide, then” (Golding 224).

Ralph’s mind veil appears when he is numbed by the ocean. The ocean, as opposed to the lagoon and its colours, its mirages and illusion of safety, is the barrier to civilization, while the lagoon is a barrier to consciousness, illustrating the terrible dangers of the unconscious. Water, in its double representation, of calmness and fury, of enveloping and of threatening powers, is the symbol of the unconscious – the collective unconscious, where everything lays undifferentiated and the individual may undergo the danger of being lost in it, of becoming the object of the archetypes, while in the world of consciousness he is the subject. The narrator chooses water symbolism to illustrate Ralph’s mingling thoughts: “(…) So they would continue enduring the ill-balanced twister, because, because… Again he lost himself in deep waters.” (Golding 83).

The accurate perception of reality, which, despite his mind veil, never actually leaves him, allows Ralph to see the others and himself as they really are: Jack and the other big boys are not actually hunters with spears, but “boys armed with sticks” (Golding 140). When the officer looks at him, Ralph is “conscious of his filthy appearance” (Golding 228) and humbly answers his greeting. At the end, when everything is described through the officer’s eyes, we see that this was Ralph’s perspective all along (and Piggy’s, who always called the boys “a crowd of kids” (Golding 39)). Jack, the great “Chief” (Golding 153), is merely “a little boy who wore the remains of an extraordinary black cap and who carried the remains of a pair of spectacles at his waist (…) (Golding 229 – 230). The narrator takes us back from the enlarged vision, diminishing everything at its normal size. In this respect, the narrative technique, from the boys’ first meeting to the officer’s arrival resembles inflation in that it endows the characters and their deeds with exaggerated dignity. Ralph’s and the officer’s perceptions are not identical, though, as Ralph, unlike the officer, knows about inner evil: “ ‘I should have thought that a pack of British boys – you’re all British, aren’t you? – would have been able to put up a better show than that – I mean –‘ ‘It was like that at first,’ said Ralph (…) ‘We were together then –‘ The officer nodded helpfully. ‘I know. Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island.’ Ralph looked at him dumbly” (Golding 230).

When his stay on the island is finally over, Ralph cries for the first time: “The tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body” (Golding 230). He can now express all his pain, because he can be just a little boy again. He will no longer have to live in the typical conditions, which call for the realization of archetypes.

In portraying Ralph through the officer’s eyes, but not forgetting to mention the inner image as well, that of his consciousness, by the knowledge he has acquired, and that of his unconscious, by what has come to consciousness and has been transformed by it, the narrator gives us a concise and clear description of Ralph’s complex, and ultimately paradoxical state. He has grovelled at the officer’s feet, running from the boys who are chasing him, yet he tells the officer he is their chief. He looks pitiful, miserable, but he has reached a higher understanding of human nature. He is singled out from the rest of the boys by his understanding and by his capability of choosing the useful traits of the shadow and by his power to fulfil the requirements of the Self in accordance with reality. He is at the same time closely linked to the boys, and to the officer, by his awareness of the evil, the distorted mind images of reality and the naivety that they posses. It is, in other words, a synthetic, a symbolic image of individuation: “And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph 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” (Golding 230). This image is similar to Tiger’s “confrontation scenes” which support the novel’s “ideographic structure” (58).

The phrase “the end of innocence” draws our attention to the fact that up until now a story has unfolded, a story about the way innocence (as ignorance of evil) came to an end, for Ralph and for the boys (or comes to an end, if we are to rise it to a general, archetypal level). The existence of a story is highly significant both for Ralph’s individuation and for the persuasion of the readers. For Ralph, this story is direct life experience. Since one possesses nothing, psychologically speaking, unless one has actually lived it (Jung, Aion 48), the becoming of his Self depends on the relation of his consciousness with reality, and this is generated by his involvement in the events. Similarly, the story (the novel) is important for the readers in order to understand what Ralph knows and feels and not look at him the way the officer does, just as the patient’s story is important for the analyst, as Jung observes: in many cases, the patient has a story that he has never told to anyone. The real therapy begins only by analyzing this absolutely personal story. It is the patient’s secret, it is the rock against which he has been crushed (Stevens 142). Of course, characters cannot be regarded as real persons, nor is the reader asked to find how to cure characters, had they been real persons. The similitude is only relevant to show that the best expression for archetypes is a narrative (a myth in ancient times, a novel in modern times), which points to the fact that the Self can only be fulfilled in the dynamic context of the interaction of consciousness with the collective unconscious, and of the psyche, as a whole, with the exterior world.

As the conflict between the two leaders comes to a peak, the narrator makes it obvious that this does not concern only the boys’ community, but it represents something beyond the limited, fictional world of the novel: it is the opposition between good and evil, as psychological principles, when coming in contact with reality. By one word, “Chief” (Golding 153; 197), with capital letter, and by the circumstances in which it is related either to Jack or to Ralph, the narrator indirectly illustrates both Jack’s inflation and Ralph’s individuation, at an archetypal level. After the killing of the sow whose head becomes a gift to the beast and then the beast itself, in Simon’s eyes, Roger calls Jack “Chief” (Golding 153). Before starting for Castle Rock, Piggy encourages Ralph, just as he was trying to remember why they needed smoke: “ ‘You’re Chief, Ralph. You remember everything’ “(Golding 197). Indeed he does, and this is again a sign of his individuation.

2.3. Conclusion to Chapter 2

In this chapter we have seen how leadership influences Ralph by making him realize that he has additional responsibilities and the way it influences Jack, who sees his being a leader as the best condition for doing whatever it used to be formally forbidden in the civilised world. The exterior conflict between the two leaders starts because Ralph is chosen by the boys and Jack practically imposes himself as leader of the hunters. From the very beginning, Ralph is the legitimate leader whereas Jack is the illegitimate one and this state of affairs corresponds to the path that each of them chooses in their struggle with the archetype of the Self: Ralph is always trying to help the boys to live securely on the island and to get rescued. Jack, who is an outcast because of his being a leader, comes to identify with the shadow and with the Self, does not have Ralph’s understanding of himself and of the others. He exercises his authority only in his own interest. Along with the symbol of the Self as the leader, comes the idea of uniqueness, which is one of the characteristics of the Self. The others, which all have to be considered in order to achieve psychic balance, are “general”, which is opposed to “unique”, and another pair of opposites, “unrepeatable” and “eternal” (Jung, Aion 80). These two pairs of opposites make up the paradox of the Self: man has to understand that he is both unique and similar to all the other human beings (“general”), which is a spatial paradox, and he is also unrepeatable and general, this being a temporal paradox. The psychological explanation is that consciousness is responsible for the uniqueness of the human being, while the collective unconscious connects the individual with the race, in space and time.

The way each of the two boys adjusts the archetype of the Self to his own view on life tells of their interior conflict caused by the clash between consciousness and a content of the collective unconscious, which puts to the test the adherence of the consciousness to objective or to subjective values. Of the two leaders, Ralph keeps to the objective values as well as to the subjective ones, and he sees his own pettiness but that does not impede his developing his potential as a leader and as a human being. These, and the remembrance of home, which the adventurous and thrilling life on the island cannot erase from his memory, show that Ralph has begun and completed the process of individuation. Individuation is the integration of the Self into the conscious personality. Jack, on the other hand, by seeing nothing in himself but a tribal idol and by failing to acknowledge his shadow, falls prey to inflation. In his case, this means the assimilation of the ego by the Self.

The two reactions to the archetype of the Self mark the possible outcomes of the encounter with the Self, depending on the strength of consciousness. Golding has pointed this out in his attempt to prove wrong the idea that children are innocent, because his thesis is, in Lord of the Flies, that innocence is not absence of evil, but ignorance of evil – which, in Jungian terms, means absence of self-knowledge. Evil is present in human nature (or rather a tendency to do evil), whether we are aware of it or not. It is awareness of oneself that can keep one from doing evil.

Chapter 3

Salvation – a personal affair

”Simon felt a perilous necessity to speak” (Golding 97).

3.1. The beast and the circle

The main problem the boys have on the island concerns the existence and location of the beast. Consequently, their main endeavour is in the direction of a real or an illusionary means of escape, according to what the boys want to escape from: fear or the beast itself. Taking into consideration the horror that the beast inspires them, and the fact that the beast cannot be literally tracked down, escape acquires deeper connotations, and they come to feel it as salvation, with its full religious meaning: “[Ralph:]‘For all we know, the beast may swing through the trees like what’s its name.’ “ (Golding 111).

Tracking down the beast is the beginning of the boys’ defence plan, but in their search they come up with ideas reflecting “the depths of their tormented private lives” (Golding 150). The wild beasts they think they can find on the island, or the mysterious, half-fantastic creature that “doesn’t leave tracks” (Golding 111), “comes out of the sea – (…) Out of the dark –‘ “ (Golding 141), “the thing that bowed” (Golding 138) on the mountain, which Sam and Eric describe as having “ ‘Teeth – ’, ‘Claws –‘ “ (Golding 110), are nothing but the equivalent of the straw man fallacy in logics. They are the projections of man’s dark and yet unconscious side. Therefore the boys attack a false problem; they are fighting against a projection. This state of affairs is dangerous, because misleading: if one thinks a projection is real, one cannot fight it because its source and essence are unknown. The boys know neither where the beast comes from, nor what kind of creature it is, which makes Ralph say: “ ‘I don’t think we’d ever fight a thing that size (…) We’d hide.’ “ (Golding 140), and which makes Jack say: “ ‘The beast is sitting up there, whatever it is –‘ “ (Golding 141).

However false the idea of a beast is, it is the belief in its existence that makes the boys take part in something very similar to an unmediated religious experience. This means that they directly sense the numinous[6] and little by little they form what may be called a ritual in response to what the beast makes them feel and think. This ritual consists in forming a circle and chanting, and it helps the boys rid themselves of the terror that overwhelms them. This way they form a “demented, but partly secure society” (Golding 171).

The circle is a spontaneous symbol of both attack and of defence. The transcendental function of the symbol makes it unite the opposites it stands for, thus offering a possibility of existence beyond the limited condition of either of the two opposites (Stevens 127). The circle, as a form that unites different parts together so that these parts have a complete range of vision (360 degrees), and that encloses something evenly on all sides (a centre), is thus a symbol of attack and defence. We can see how the boys’ fear of the beast determines them to unite in a circle for both purposes: “[Samneric:] ‘The beast followed us– ‘ ‘I saw it slinking behind the trees –‘ ‘Nearly touched me –‘ (…) ‘I’m all rough. Am I bleeding?’ (…) The circle of boys shrank away in horror. (…) the circle began to change. It faced out, rather than in, and the spears of sharpened wood were like a fence.” (Golding 110).

The movement from facing in to facing out of the circle is also meaningful. When Sam and Eric tell them about the (imagined) chase, the boys are facing inside the circle. The centre of the circle is formed by the twins and their ghastly story. Then, the boys are facing outside the circle, on the lookout for the beast. Behind every boy there are the twins again, with their terror, which is now in the others’ souls as well. Fear is the centre of their circle. And along with it, also causing destabilization (Ralph says, when the other boys start chanting and form a circle:” ‘We’re all drifting (…)’ “ (Golding 103)), there is the boys’ lack of adhesion to any positive symbol.

Forming a circle is an archetypal reaction, because it ensures protection. It is one of the symbols of the Self (Jung, Aion 260), but here its negative side is illustrated, because it is formed by the boys out of their primitive fear of the perils of the soul[7]. It is not only the fear of fear, but also the fear of the unconscious contents altogether that creates “the secret terror” (Jung, Imaginea omului 21) allegedly caused by the beast. The contents of the collective unconscious are the ones that unleash the collective man when people gather together in a crowd. Man becomes a molecule of a mass, and unconsciously descends to an inferior level from the point of view of morality and intellect. This level is always right under the threshold of consciousness (Jung, Imaginea omului 21), where the shadow lies (Jung, Aion 20; Surdulescu 81).

Children are very close to primitives as far as the state of consciousness is concerned. As consciousness is not clearly differentiated from the collective unconscious, there is no individual ego differentiated from the ego of the others or from the existence of objects[8]. This is why, for children, as for primitives, emotional reactions extend indiscriminately from one individual to another (Jung, Dezvoltarea personalitǎţii 49). This is also why children and primitives prefer mythological explanations to concrete and rational explanations (Jung, Dezvoltarea personalitǎţii 43).

Considering these facts about the child’s psyche, readers may understand better why the chanting group of boys is compared to one living organism, while as individuals standing on their own, they feel disoriented: “ ‘Going to be a storm.’ said Ralph (…) ‘Where are your shelters?’ (…) The hunters were looking uneasily at the sky, flinching from the stroke of drops. A wave of restlessness set the boys swaying and moving aimlessly. (…) The littluns began to run about, screaming. Jack leapt on to the sand. ‘Do our dance! Come on! Dance!’ (…) the boys followed him, clamorously. Roger became the pig, grunting and charging at Jack, who side-stepped. (…) ‘Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!’ The movement became regular while the chant lost its first superficial excitement and began to beat like a steady pulse” (Golding 171).

Locating the beast is done in such a way that it ironically shows the path to individuation, in a spiral heading for the centre (which is the Self)[9]. The boys first see the beast in their dreams (nightmares), then they say it comes out of the forest, then out of the water; the narrator moves its area of origin into the air (by the name of chapter 6: “Beast from Air”), implicitly blaming the adults for it – because the dead parachutist is the first one who gives the beast a body. By finally concluding that the beast is real, the boys are trapped in the projection. Identifying Simon with the beast and killing him as the beast are the end of the false circumambulation and the acme of the shadow. The spiral rotation is backwards, as the children regress further and further from their initial state (of civilization and of intellectual and moral development). In Jungian terms, the spiral rotates towards the left, which is the equivalent of a journey toward the unconscious (Samuels 66).

Whenever the boys form a circle, they (want to) enclose something in order to destroy it. This is, in Jack’s and the hunters’ case, an attack strategy, when they are hunting. When it comes to all the boys on the island, it is a defence strategy, but the purpose is to destroy whatever is at the centre of the circle. Also, the one who tells them to form a circle, when they are told and they do not do it by themselves, is Jack. At the meetings, where the one who leads is Ralph, the boys form a triangle: “The place of assembly in which he [Ralph] stood was roughly a triangle (…). First there was the log on which he himself sat (…). The two sides of the triangle of which the log was base were less evenly defined” (Golding 83).

From a psychological point of view, meaning in the context of a message of the Self, the triangle should be interpreted as a deficient quaternity, or as a transitory state toward quaternity. The number 4 means perfection –it indicates the quadrature of the circle (Jung, Imaginea omului 59). Alchemists believed that God manifested himself first and foremost in the 4 elements (Jung, Imaginea omului 60). The number 4 is a natural symbol (because emerging from the unconscious), and represents the inner God, including the evil part and the feminine part, both of which the Church excludes from the Trinity (Jung, Imaginea omului 63; 65; 67). If the meetings, where they are arranged in a triangle, appeal to the conscious part of the boys’ psyche, as during these meetings they try to order things out and think logically, the circle they form spontaneously or because Jack tells them so (and he too is influenced by a spontaneous symbol), shows the tendency of their unconscious to deal in some way with the shadow and the anima (which become one in the image of the beast). This is an (unconscious) endeavour of integrating the Self – of becoming aware of its double, contradictory aspect, of good and evil (Jung, Aion 45). The fact that the boys do not succeed in fulfilling this integration is expressed by the image of the shabby arrangement of logs that make up their place of assembly: “The two sides of the triangle of which the log was base were less evenly defined. On the right was a log polished by restless seats along the top, but not so large as the chief’s and not so comfortable. On the left were four small logs, one of them – the furthest – lamentably springy. Assembly after assembly had broken up in laughter when someone had leaned too far back and the log had whipped and thrown half a dozen boys backwards into the grass” (Golding 83).

3. 2. The myth of the Self

What Simon directly experiences in the encounter with Lord of the flies is the fourth element of the dogmatic, and, according to Jung, incomplete Trinity: the feminine element (the sow, the anima appearing as the mother), which turns into evil (the terrifying, destroying mother), and then evil itself (the devil). Evil is the element that the Christian dogma has always excluded from the attributes of God. However, it must be included in a discussion on the Self. The incompatibility of opposites in Christian psychology is based on their moral focus (Jung, Aion 89). Because evil is excluded as immoral, its existence is generally denied, but not annihilated. This state of affairs hinders evil from reaching the level of consciousness and from becoming integrated in a harmonious entity, the Self. Even if a certain psychical fact is not made conscious, that is, if man remains unconscious of his inner contrasts, it still influences man’s life, but as destiny, from the exterior (Jung, Aion 89). It is from the exterior that the beast influences the boys, as they think it is some sort of creature living in the forest.

On the contrary, Simon is the only one who makes the link between fear, the beast and human beings. While Piggy dismisses fear as unfounded, “ ‘Unless we get frightened of people’ “(Golding 91), thus not taking into consideration the abstract notion of absolute evil, Simon tries to explain:“ ‘Maybe’, he said hesitantly, ‘maybe there is a beast. (…) What I mean is… maybe it’s only us.’ Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness“(Golding 97). The fact that Piggy does not see the connection between evil as such and human beings is evident in his reaction to Simon’s statement:” ‘Nuts!’ That was from Piggy, shocked out of decorum” (Golding 97). Piggy is the adept of scientific explanations:“ ‘Life’, said Piggy expansively, ‘is scientific, that’s what it is. (…) I know there isn’t no beast – not with claws and all that, I mean – but I know there isn’t no fear, either’ “(Golding 91). The transcendental view belongs only to Simon, because he does not want to do away with fear, but sees what lies beyond it. Consequently, he has direct and conscious access to the level of existence that implies the unmediated religious experience of evil and of spiritual salvation. These two elements are part of the archetype of the Self, being conditions to individuation. Simon’s individuation is, however, incomplete. It is a repressed individuation (Jung, Aion 88).

Psychologically speaking (and not from the point of view of dogma, or of faith), the Passions of Jesus Christ signify the separation of opposites within him, a process which renders them conscious (Jung, Aion 85). In the Christian faith, Christ brought the new law of love. In psychology, Christ represents the separation of opposites and a higher level of self-consciousness. His Crucifixion is a symbol of the union of opposites in the Self, because both are paradoxes: Christ, the incarnation of God in a human being, is crucified between two thieves. The union of opposites logically presupposes their destruction, in order to become united, melted into each other. Yet opposites stand separated in their union. Another way to interpret Crucifixion psychologically is as a tormenting division of the ego between irreconcilable opposites (Jung, Aion 60-61). This is why Christ is a symbol of the Self. Wherever the archetype of the Self is predominant, the inevitable psychological consequence is a state of conflict (between opposites), which is expressed by the Christian symbol of the Crucifixion. It is an acute want of deliverance, which ends with “consumatum est” (Jung, Aion 88). As Virginia Tiger remarked, the severed Head is Simon’s own “strategic consciousness” (59), and this recognition brought bout Simon’s fit.

Apart from his kindness and altruism, Simon is a “Christ-like figure” (Cokyll 44) because he becomes thoroughly conscious of the evil in human nature. When Jack says loudly:” ‘This head is for the beast. It’s a gift.’ “(Golding 154), Simon, near the clearing, “concealed by the leaves” (Golding 154) hears him. “The sow’s head (…) remained [in his mind] like an after-image” (Golding 154). “The obscene thing [that] grinned and dripped” (Golding 155) is so terrifying and shows such wickedness, not only Jack’s, but man’s, that haunts Simon and stands as a symbol, in the Jungian meaning, of “the infinite cynicism of adult life”, of the fact that “everything was a bad business”  (Golding 154). What is “everything” referring to? We may guess it includes man’s nature and life in a community, the things that are “breaking up” (Golding 89) on the island.

Simon becomes conscious of man’s inner evil, but as Lord of the Flies addresses him, he suffers different influences that let the unconscious come to the surface and take over his consciousness. This stops his individuation and makes Simon helpless and incapable of saving the boys even before he is mistaken for the beast. Simon acquires knowledge of evil, but he cannot defend himself or anyone else from it, because his consciousness is numbed and cannot stop inflation from occurring. “Simon’s head was tilted slightly up. His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung is space before him” (Golding 161- 2). Had he had the chance to transmit his message, would he have saved the boys from the confusion of thought? Or from that of the unconscious?

The coming of Antichrist is, according to Jung, an inexorable psychological law, in that it illustrates enantiodromia (Jung, Aion 58), the transformation of every psychic content into its corresponding opposite (Samuels 86). Thus any higher differentiation of the image of Christ fortifies its unconscious complementary, increasing the tension between Up and Down (Jung, Aion 58). If Christ corresponds to the Self, Antichrist corresponds to the shadow of the Self (Jung, Aion 58). The allegorical parallel, Simon – Christ, Lord of the flies – the devil, seems psychologically natural, because the interaction between good and evil takes place in Simon’s psyche. It is a clash between the two great opposites residing in the Self, and the clash is so powerful that it makes him drift out of consciousness.

The unconscious pours out into Simon’s consciousness, and on a concrete level, flies are invading him: “The pile of guts was a black blob that buzzed like a saw. After a while these flies found Simon. Gorged, they alighted by his runnels of sweat and drank. They tickled under his nostrils and played leap-frog on his thighs. They were black and iridescent green and without number (…)” (Golding 155). It is interesting to notice that the colours black and green are associated with the devil (who has a black and a green eye) and that mockery always accompanies occurrences of evil (“flies played leap-frog”). The identity between Simon and the beast, which is for now obvious to the readers, comes to be completely and ironically fulfilled in the minds of the boys, as they kill Simon in their enraging terror.

In the noises of the storm, the chant of the boys and their confused minds, Simon’s message of salvation remains unheard. Nobody gets to take part in the beginning of individuation this message could have triggered. Simon is alone not only in his revelation of man’s inner evil, but also remains alone in his attempt to save the others at least from the terrifying certainty of the existence of the wicked animal. The Christian myth, as it is illustrated by Simon, completely fails, because it addresses the multitude, the terrified, confused, hostile multitude, and not single individuals. No character comes to know about Simon’s revelation. From the atemporal state in which he is when he allegedly speaks with Lord of the flies, Simon passes onto the transitory, mortal world. The failure resides in the way his consciousness is formed: too openly good and able to realize, but unable to control, psychic facts. Simon’s weakness in acquiring knowledge of inner evil seems to be the flaw in the way he represents Christ. The way this symbol is perceived by the boys, not necessarily on the night Simon is killed, but before that, when he is laughed at, mocked at by the boys, shows that the Christian myth is no longer efficient in this form. Christ as symbol of the Self reflected man’s soul in the past, but not in our post-Christian epoch (Jung, Aion 51). Jung’s argument is that Christ, the way He is perceived by the dogma, corresponds only to a half of the archetype, the good half, whereas, for our modern age, such an image of the Self is incomplete (Jung, Aion 60). This means that, as Christ is the Christian symbol of the Self and Antichrist is his shadow, the empirical Self contains both light and darkness, in one paradoxical entity (Jung, Aion 57-58). Nevertheless, here I believe the issue implies more than admitting the paradox: it is the scope of salvation that makes the Christian myth fail and the myth of the Self succeed.

The way the myth of the Self comes into being is related to the death of God, to the death of spirituality, more precisely. In the modern age, the development of consciousness implies the destruction of all accessible projections, such as the anthropomorphic representation of divinities (their non-psychological existence). If the historical process of the de-spiritualization of the universe continues as from up until now, then all that has existed in the exterior world, be it divine or demonic, must return to the soul of the unknown man, whence it apparently came from (Jung, Imaginea omului 88). While the other boys cannot destroy the projection, Ralph and Simon do not believe in it (Ralph, up to one point, but Simon never believes in the beast). The beast, to the extent to which can be seen as a divinity (from the moment of Jack’s gift onward), is not an anthropomorphic representation, yet it perfectly reflects both the force and the shapelessness of the boys’ shadow. By continuing to exist as a strange animal, it reflects their lack of self-consciousness.

The myth of the Self reinterprets the Christian myth. The link between the two is the circle, which is a form of mandala. What is important is what is at the centre of the mandala, or of the circle. We have seen that there is nothing at the centre of the circle formed by the boys. They are waiting for something to become the centre of their circle, and this is always a victim. If the circle is a spontaneous symbol, representing the state of their psyche, then it is themselves who are victims, for the centre of their self is initially void. And which is the thing that becomes their victim? Their sacrificial victim is the projection, Simon embodying the beast. In the terms of Christian mass, the one who performs the sacrifice is also the one being sacrificed, thus suffering a loss with no possibility of claiming anything in return (Jung, Imaginea omului 158, 160). But giving oneself first presupposes having oneself, as no one can give things that are not in their possession. Therefore, genuine, redeeming self-sacrifice implies self-knowledge, because to have oneself means to know, to be aware of oneself (Jung, Imaginea omului 160-1).

Since we are talking about the shadow (or Antichrist, who imitates Christ, but in reverse –Jung Aion 58), the boys, at the time of Simon’s killing, are performing a reversed mass, due to their lack of self-consciousness. The way Simon dies is not at all according to the death of Jesus Christ, because the boy’s death saves no one (and the death of Christ saves no one either, unless we authentically live the mystery and let it heal us – Jung, Aion 50), and because he is not the symbol of the boys’ self-sacrifice, but its replacement, his death draws closer to a pagan ritual killing. A similar image would be that of the scapegoat, or that of the killing of Pentheus[10], who wanted to come to know Dionysus, and ends up being killed as Dionysus. But the ones who kill him and eat him want to become one with the god (to be in communion with the god), while in Lord of the Flies the killing of the alleged divinity is an attempt of getting rid of it. It is ultimately the boys’ desperate attempt to save themselves from the beast (only that they do it in killing the saviour), not to be in communion with it. Christian mass can be regarded as a rite of the process of individuation (Jung, Imaginea omului 176). Analogically, the reversed mass indicates inflation (inner scission and inability to integrate the parts of the psyche). Also as an image of Antichrist, the dead parachutist who is moved by the gusts of wind, ironically represents the spirit hidden in matter –which the alchemists were seeking to reveal (Jung, Imaginea omului 100) – and the life giving power of the Holy Ghost (Jung, Imaginea omului 95). Flies also invade the parachutist, and form a sort of dark halo around his head: “Simon saw a humped thing suddenly sit up on the top and look down at him. (…) The flies had found the figure too. The life-like movement would scare them off for a moment so that they made a dark cloud round the head. Then as the blue material of the parachute collapsed the corpulent figure would bow forward, sighing, and the flies settle once more” (Golding 164 – 165). The way the dead airman is described in this passage is utterly different from the way he is presented when Jack, Roger and Ralph see him. Now it is day and the one who sees him is Simon, who has just experienced evil in its most abstract form, identifiable with man himself. The thing that impersonated the beast is now “sighing”, itself held under the power of a superior force, in “the mechanics of parody”, subject to “the wind’s indignity” (Golding 165). This image symbolically represents man, the boys on the island, held by the powers of their unconscious as the parachutist by the strings of his parachute.

Since God is not at the centre of the circle, His place is taken by man’s completeness (Jung, Imaginea omului 85), in the case of the boys with a more powerful self-consciousness – Ralph and, partly, Simon. For Ralph, the beast becomes real when he thinks he sees it, but this is not troublesome for his individuation, as he thinks he must fight an exterior evil, yet he does not ignore his own flaws. He is engaged in the conflict with Jack as well, and his becoming is permanently conditioned both by the requirements of the Self and by those of the exterior world. Unlike him, Simon is an introvert and he is consequently not so much involved in the exterior reality as he is in his troubled, inner world.

The modern age is an age where God has died; we are on this side of the archetype (Jung, Imaginea omului 93). Christ has descended to hell and the Christian myth is reborn, under a new form: as the descent to the realm of death signifies the connection with the collective unconscious[11], the redemption of what has been left unredeemed (Jung, Aion 55), its rebirth as transformed value is in the shape of the myth of the Self. This means bringing the unconscious to the supreme clarity of consciousness (Jung, Imaginea omului 93-94), and “relocating” God from the exterior world to the interior one. In tracing God to the Self, man does not replace, but symbolizes the divinity (Jung, Imaginea omului 98). The inner God is a natural symbol, not a dogmatic one, as it includes evil (Jung, Imaginea omului 63)[12].

The rebirth of the archetype (of the Self) does not avoid the Christian mystery, but it recreates the necessary preliminary psychological condition without which salvation would be meaningless. Salvation means having the burden taken away from us, but a burden that we are aware of. Thus, the great extent to which man is unbearable to himself is an experience only for the complete man (Jung, Aion 88). The fact that Simon dislikes himself and the fact that he knows about inner evil are connected. When Simon looks at Lord of the Flies, he recognizes himself: “At last Simon gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes, the blood – and his gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition. In Simon’s right temple, a pulse began to beat on the brain” (Golding 155).

Up to this point, he is on the way to individuation. Only that when Lord of the flies speaks to him, he tells him: “ ‘I’m warning you. I’m going to get waxy. D’you see? You’re not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island! So don’t try it on, my poor misguided boy, or else – (…) we shall do you. See? Jack and Roger and Maurice and Robert and Bill and Piggy and Ralph. Do you see?’ “(Golding 162). From this moment on, Simon cannot deal with the prophecy; his consciousness loses ground and gives in to the shadow: “Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness.” (Golding 162). His individuation is repressed.

Simon’s talk with Lord of the flies has a double aspect of positive and negative experience. Dreams give to the dreamer the necessary information for him to get to the root of an obsessive idea, and can be considered as coming from an intelligent source, oriented toward a purpose, and a personal source as well (Jung, Imaginea omului 30). Since what Lord of the flies told Simon is actually what Simon already knew (it is a confirmation of his intuition), we may be in doubt as to the beneficial purpose of the message, as it does not help Simon in any way. It is just a morbid repetition of the same idea, in the absence of a solution to it.

Jung cites Caspar Peucer, who says that dreams of divine origin (and here we may consider Simon’s “vision” a parallel to such dreams) are those that the Holy Scripture says that were sent by God, not those that occur to people to confirm their own [conscious] opinions (Jung, Imaginea omului 27-28). Therefore, this “vision” is closer to a cunning trap, which Benedictus Pererius, cited by Jung, says that the devil makes of dreams when he reveals things about the future (Jung Imaginea omului 27). On the other hand, the talk with Lord of the Flies is similar with the phenomenon of the voice in one’s dream, a voice that may or may not be personified, and that illustrates the amazing intelligence and purpose oriented intentions of the unconscious, which surpass the limited possibilities of the introspective consciousness (Jung, Imaginea omului 44). Even if Lord of the Flies does not say anything new to Simon, his voice is not Simon’s, but belongs to the collective unconscious. If we accept this hypothesis, then we may draw the following conclusion: the voice comes from a psychic, unconscious content, which is not part of the ego, but part of something that includes the ego, this being the Self (Jung, Imaginea omului 46). This is contrary to Virginia Tiger’s conclusion that Lord of the flies (the pig’s head) is Simon’s own “strategic consciousness” (59). It is the voice of the Self that he hears, which sometimes has the power of prophecy, and a degree of understanding that is superior to that of consciousness (Jung, Imaginea omului 47), and most surely includes evil. This is where Simon’s prophecy comes from, that he will be killed by all the boys if he tries anything – if he reveals to them the secret of the beast. He was allowed to see inside things, but he cannot tell the others. Simon resembles Christ by the fact that he too is wounded, but he is different from Christ by his impossibility to heal (Jung sees Christ as a wounded healer, and, by analogy, the analyst must also be a wounded healer). Salvation is addressed only to himself.

The myth of the Self is a new way of perceiving God, and also a warning. When Ralph, Piggy and Samneric go to Castle Rock to claim Piggy’s glasses, Ralph tries again to remind the boys that their purpose should be the keeping of a smoke signal in order to get rescued, but Jack starts shouting during Ralph’s attempt to bring some sense into the hunters, and eventually, nobody can understand what Ralph is saying: “ ‘Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?’ “(Golding 205). This scene is parallel to Simon’s attempt to break the news about the dead parachutist. When the boys are gathered in a large group, they become immune to objective values, be they to their own good, and their “incantation of hatred” (Golding 205) or their “loud, derisive jeer” (Golding 200) gives no room for rational messages. Ralph finally understands this, when he is almost crushed by the rolling rock and flees from the fury of the hunters. Simon, however, is spiritually weakened by the wish to be regarded as pleasant by the others. Although he knows that Jack hates Ralph and that if he were to be chief, things would worsen for the boys, he does not dislike Jack. He hears Lord of the Flies say:” ‘You like Ralph a lot, don’t you? And Piggy, and Jack?’ “(Golding 161).

When he goes to the boys, Simon becomes victim. The Christian myth, faulty because of Simon’s weak consciousness and the boys’ strong connection to the shadow, regresses to a form which is close to the ancient human sacrifice of the king for the welfare of the people (Jung, Imaginea omului 129). It is not quite a regression to paganism, but to primitivism, because being afraid of the perils of the soul, because the boys’ dancing and chanting are not meant to unite them with any divinity, but to save them from its terrible numinous influence. Instead, they are trying to escape from their own shadow, which never leaves not even the most rational and responsible of them, as the narrator employs the same image of their shadows on the sand, as creatures living underneath their footsteps: “The boys made a compact little group that moved over the beach, four plate-like shadows dancing and mingling beneath them” (Golding 197). Ralph is not exempt from this kind of representation either: “Ralph turned involuntarily, a black, humped figure against the lagoon” (Golding 96).

3.3. Conclusion to Chapter 3

The final chapter compared the Christian myth, which has been a valid solution to spiritual problems until the modern age (Jung referred to the modern age mainly from the First World War onward) with the myth of the Self. The latter does not exclude the former, but it transforms it, by replacing the exterior image of God with the inner image of God, which merges with the totality of the personality of the individual. The myth of the Self depicts the psyche more faithfully, as it includes the fourth element (apart from the Christian Trinity), which is either evil or femininity (as Jung exemplified, this means either the devil or Virgin Mary, which are excluded by the Christian dogma. Simon, who has a dark halo of flies, and then, after his death, a bright halo of glittering fish, illustrates the myth of the Self because he encompasses the idea of evil. Although he reaches an awareness of his inner evil (which brings him closer to Christ, who, from Jung’s perspective, stands for the separation of opposites and for self-knowledge), he cannot cope with it, he does not have a solution to it. It is true that Simon is able to choose to act without evil, but he cannot teach the other children to do the same, nor is he immune to this piece of information on himself. His individuation is thus repressed, and the only one who accomplishes it is Ralph, as he finds the middle state between self-knowledge, self-love and self-hatred.

Conclusion

This paper is meant to show that, in a Jungian reading, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is a coherent account of the occurrence of the archetype of the Self in one’s consciousness, in the context of the natural and compensatory interference of the collective unconscious into consciousness. I have chosen this perspective because literary critics have made reference to the role that consciousness and the unconscious might play in Golding’s image of the human soul, but they have not considered the archetype of the Self, which represents man’s personality in its entirety. In Lord of the Flies, Golding’s view that “the boys are suffering from the terrible disease of being human” (cited in Hollinger 11) gains a fuller significance if the moral aspect and the disease are carefully looked at as making up one unit, the centre, source and at the same time purpose of man’s psychic existence: the Self (Jung, Amintiri 474). Ultimately, there is nothing abnormal about this so-called disease, and it is not with resigned cynicism that we should regard it, as Golding’s narrator seems to do in telling the tale, but with informed caution. This is the attitude that Ralph gains after his experience on the island.

The first chapter provided a brief introduction to the critical framework on which the analysis was based. What critics have pointed out in Lord of the Flies are the novel’s survival theme, the sudden and illogical ending (Karl), the ideographic structure of the novel, which contains and explains the issue of evil-and-innocence (Tiger) and the theme of alienation in its multiple aspects, deriving from the duality of human nature, man being both heroic and sick (Hollinger). However, I consider Jung’s description of the psyche more inclusive and more capable to explain the paradoxes of the Self, because his experience is primarily that of a psychiatrist.

The second chapter compared the two leaders of the boys, Ralph and Jack, two extroverts whose personality development is facilitated by leadership. I see leadership as a valuable concept to the archetypal perspective, because it encompasses the social and psychological conditions for the authoritative figure of the Self to become useful in reality. Psychic contents cannot be said to be fulfilled if one does not apply them concretely in the objective reality. From the very beginning, either Ralph or Jack is always rejected by the boys, while the other is accepted as leader. The oscillation from legitimacy to illegitimacy is due to what the other boys see in the archetypal image that Ralph and Jack represent in the new, typical life situation in which the plane crush on a desert island has cast them. Being given the social role of an authority figure, both Ralph and Jack come to symbolize an aspect of the Self, which, as personification, is illustrated in figures of authority, such as the king, to whom the leader is related by attributions.

Being leader helps Ralph strengthen his selfless attachment to objective values, which are the moral and social values that he has acquired in his education in the civilized world. This, and the greater awareness of his real physical and psychical condition, along with the awareness of the psychology of the others that his experience on the island facilitates, are the hard pillars of his consciousness, which sustain it in the interaction with the shadow and the Self (which are archetypes of the collective unconscious). Because he achieves a balance between the forces of the unconscious and of consciousness, Ralph can accomplish his individuation, which presupposes the acknowledgement of the shadow (the inferior and sombre part of the psyche) and the integration of the double aspects of the Self into one indivisible entity.

On the contrary, Jack, whose excessive pride and whose projections of the shadow weaken his consciousness, is subject to inflation and becomes the equivalent of a dictator. Although Jung did not claim to have discovered the source of evil, he made a striking remark in relation to it: he said that evil arises from the fragmentation of the mind (Jung, Imaginea omului 318). What Golding shows us in Jack’s character can be explained through Jung’s statement. In his attempt to find a correspondent in reality to his potential, Jack tries to make himself a legitimate chief, but in the end he is blinded by his power and by the freedom to do what in the civilized world is forbidden, and he identifies with the shadow. He comes to call himself “Chief”, with a capital letter, which can be translated as the desire of the shadow for uniqueness. Uniqueness is one of the attributes of the Self – being unique and unrepeatable in space and time – only that Jack takes it to the extreme and ignores its counterpart, formed by the pair of attributes general and eternal. By stopping at the shadow, in his way to the realization of the Self, Jack not only cancels any possibility of salvation for himself, but also for the others: he compels the twins to go hunting with him, when they are supposed to watch the signal fire, and as a result, the ship that passes them by does not see their smoke; when the storm is coming, he tells the frightened boys to make a ring, dance and chant, and in the confusion and awkward feeling of safety and power that this gives the boys, they kill Simon, mistaking him for the beast. Individuation and inflation are the two outcomes of the interaction with the unconscious, and they greatly depend on the power of consciousness to acquire self-knowledge and make choices according to the objective reality. They mark the attempt to fulfil one’s destiny, whose psychological synonym is the individuation of the Self.

The third chapter added a religious dimension to the analysis of the symbols of the Self and of its counterpart, the shadow, by looking into the deeper meaning of escape: salvation from evil. The symbols referred to here were the beast as the devil, the circle as a double symbol of protection and destruction, and Simon, who resembles Jesus Christ. His antagonist, the devil, is the boys’ “beastie”. The beast is described by the boys as a monstrous fantastic animal, being a personified projection of the shadow. Not being able to recognize one’s own projections loosens the power of consciousness to impose order on psychic contents. This is why the circle, a spontaneous symbol of the Self, turns from protective element to destructive force. Because it is an archetype of transformation, and not a personification, the circle needs all the members of the community in order to become apparent.

The beast transcends the material level of existence. As Ralph observes, it does not leave tracks, and as Simon sees it, it is part of the human being. In its talk with the half unconscious Simon, it receives the name of Lord of the Flies, which is another name of the devil. Escape from the beast thus acquires a deeper significance. It comes closer to psychological salvation, through the perspective of religious deliverance. Since the beast is an integral part of the psyche, it is in the psyche that the boys can find relief, but the majority of them do not, because of the unequal forces of consciousness and the collective unconscious.

The Self is, from a certain point onward, the same as God’s image in man. God’s will, which determines people to act right in the decisive moments of their life, identifies with the cluster of beneficial, compensatory impulses and symbols that are sent to consciousness by the collective unconscious, in order to mend the lack of psychic equilibrium. It is this deficiency that the boys actually need to be saved from. Thus, “mankind’s essential illness” (Golding 97) is not merely the objectification of evil (Tiger 58), which means ignorance of inner evil, but also includes the weakness of consciousness, which can hardly cope with the knowledge of inner evil.

The Self in personified form is also represented by Jesus Christ, or it used to be, for in the modern age Christ is seen as an imperfect image of the interior man. He has no trace of evil, although He is not ignorant of its nature, and He lacks the feminine element (Jung, Imaginea omului 195). The head, which is a sow’s head, is both the shadow (evil) and the unconscious feminine element, the mother, in its darker side. Jung believes that a faithful image of the psyche should contain the shadow and the animus or the anima in order to account for all its characteristics. From the traditional point of view of Christ as the interior, complete man, Simon resembles Him, psychologically speaking. Simon becomes conscious of the opposites in the psyche, and he knows that this awareness of the different parts of the psyche (among which inner evil is crucial for the boys) is the key to salvation. He is, to a certain extent, a wounded healer, like Christ, because he is looking at the issue of evil from inside, he too is negatively influenced by it. Only that he cannot cope with this negative influence, the knowledge he acquires – that exterior evil is nothing but the projection of inner evil – is too powerful for him to handle. What we see in his talk with the head is that  he cannot but be overwhelmed by evil, that knowledge of his own evil is more that he can bear, which shows his repressed individuation. Just as the dead airman is a parody of the crucifixion (Tiger 45), so is Simon a twisted image of Christ, because of his extreme self-criticism and because his death does not help the boys improve in any way. His death contributes only to the maturing of Ralph’s consciousness. This is what Golding wants to show by making Ralph go through all the torment: “ Our humanity rests in the capacity to make value judgements, unscientific assessments, the power to decide that this is right, that wrong, this ugly, that beautiful, this just, that unjust (…)” (Golding cited in Hollinger 7). Coming back to Simon, his arrival from the mountain top increases the children’s fear. What actually happens is a reversal of Simon’s intention and of the Christian myth, just as the island is a mock earthly paradise (Tiger 45).

Moreover, this kind of knowledge cannot be shared. Lord of the Flies tells Simon that if he tries anything, he will be killed. It is an anticipatory reference to the actual facts, but it is also a metaphorical way of saying that the experience of the Self is only addressed to the respective individual, not to all people at once. In the context of self-knowledge and of salvation from inner evil, the myth of the Self is a reinterpretation of the Christian myth. In the latter, the central figure is Christ, whose death redeemed all people. In our modern, individualist age, everything is reduced to the individual, to the personal perspective. God’s representation as the Supreme Being has become ineffective, but man does not take His place in the centre of things. It is in the totality of man – in which psychology plays an important part – that God’s image has been redirected (Jung, Imaginea omului 85).

Thus, from an archetypal point of view, Lord of the Flies symbolizes the development of the Self into consciousness, and the dynamics of all psychic experiences that the Self imposes on the individual. The basic question that the novel imposes is the following: even if man becomes aware of inner evil, can he control it? Golding gives us three types of answers: if man cannot acknowledge his wickedness, he becomes one with it, as Jack does. If one intuitively knows that evil exists in every human being, but is overwhelmed by this truth, and cannot be at peace with himself, which is the way Simon reacts, one has but half achieved individuation. Finally, if, knowing that evil is a part of everyone, but finds the strength to control it, one succeeds in reconciling the inner and the exterior world, the psychic and the objective reality. As Lord of the Flies shows, Heaven and Hell are not excluded from this apparently egocentric importance of man, but are natural symbols of an authentic transformation: the path to inflation or to individuation. These two are psychic processes deriving from the manifestation of the Self into consciousness. Inflation and individuation reformulate the Christian notions of Hell and Heaven, and the realization of the Self is based upon the pair of opposites formed by good and evil. The way Jung puts it, no tree can grow Heaven-high, unless its roots reach down to Hell (Aion 60).

Bibliography

Benoist, Luc. Semne, simboluri  şi mituri. trad. Smaranda Bǎdiliţǎ. Editura Humanitas: Bucureşti,
1995

Cokyll, Susan (ed.). Looking at Literature. Study Guide 1. Lord of the Flies. William Golding.
Oxford University Press: Delhi, 1994

Dragomirescu, Gh. N. Dicţionarul figurilor de stil. Editura Ştiinţificǎ: Bucureşti, 1995

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Faber and Faber: London, 1999

Hollinger, Alexander. William Golding’s Fables and the Human Condition. Cavallioti: Bucureşti,
2000

Jung, Carl Gustav. Aion: contribuţii la simbolistica sinelui. trad. Daniela Ştefǎnescu, cuvânt înainte
de Vasile Dem. Zamfirescu. Editura Trei : Bucureşti, 2005

– Amintiri, vise, reflecţii. Consemnate şi editate de Aniela Jaffé. trad. şi notǎ de Daniela Ştefǎnescu.
Editura Humanitas : Bucureşti, 2004

– Arhetipurile şi inconştientul colectiv. trad. Dana Verescu, Vasile  Dem.Zamfirescu. Editura Trei: Bucureşti, 2003

– Despre fenomenul spiritului în artǎ şi ştiinţǎ. trad. Gabriela Danţiş. Editura Trei: Bucureşti, 2003

– Dezvoltarea personalitǎţii. trad. Dana Verescu, Vasile Dem. Zamfirescu, Viorica   Nişcov. Editura Trei: Bucureşti, 2006

– Imaginea omului şi imaginea lui Dumnezeu. trad. Maria Magdalena Anghelescu. col. Archetypos 4, editura Teora : Bucureşti, 1997

– Tipuri psihologice. trad. Viorica Nişcov. Editura Trei: Bucureşti, 2004

Karl, Frederick R. Chapter XIV: “The Novel as Moral Allegory: The Fiction of William Golding, Iris Murdoch, Rex Warner, and P.H. Newby”. A Reader’s Guide to the Contemporary English Novel. Thames and  Hudson: London, 1970  pp 254-260

Samuels, Andrew, Bani Shorter, Fred Plaut. Dicţionar critic al psihologiei analitice  jungiene. trad. şi studiu introductiv de Corin Braga. Editura Humanitas: Bucureşti,  2005

Stevens, Anthony. Jung. trad. Oana Vlad. Editura Humanitas: Bucureşti, 1996

The students in Cyber English. “Literary terms”. 6 June 2008. http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/allegory.htm>

Surdulescu, Radu, Bogdan Ştefǎnescu. Contemporary Critical Theories. A Reader. Universitatea Bucureşti: Bucureşti, 1998

Tiger, Virginia. William Golding: the Dark Fields of Discovery. Marion Boyars: London, 1976

Vaughan, Paula. “The Psychical Healing of the Epic Hero Gilgamesh”. One Woman’s Mind. 4 Dec 2008. <http://onewomansmind.net/east/gilgamesh.html>

Wehr, Gerhard. Doi giganţi: Jung şi Steiner. trad. Daniela Ştefǎnescu, Editura Trei: Bucureşti, 2002

[1] A= Anthropos, spiritual man, B= the shadow of Anthropos,C= the snake (instincts and wisdom), matter, physis,

D= lapis, the philosopher’s stone (Jung, Aion 300).

[2] The wheel represents a form of inner experience (the wheel of the sun). A remarkable piece of evidence comes from primitive drawings, which precede the invention of the wheel as a concrete object (Jung, Despre fenomenul spiritului 101).

[3] Jung calls this rotation “circumambulation”, and gives it the meaning of psychic integration (Samuels 67; Jung, Aion 261). By amplification, Jung associates circumambulation to the motif of the wheel, which illustrates the inclusion of the ego into the Self (Samuels 66).

[4] Primordial images, or archetypes, appear to the individual under the form of symbols when one cannot link the psychic experience –the feeling – to the idea that envelops it – the judgement of that respective feeling (Jung, Tipuri 466). A symbol is an intuitive idea (Samuels 233).

[5] What I call objective reality is that part of the psyche which man takes to some sort of fulfillment. This is not to be mistaken for Jung’s objective psyche, which means either the objective existence of the psyche, or the collective [and impersonal, un-individual] unconscious (Samuels 194).

[6] The numinous is either the quality of a visible object, or the influence of an invisible presence, which provokes an extraordinary twist in one’s consciousness (Jung, Imaginea omului 13). The numinous is the influence of God’s presence or of the presence of a divinity (Jung, Amintiri 175).

[7] The primitive peoples are very much afraid of the perils of the soul. These are the states in which consciousness is less active and the collective unconscious can make its way to the surface easier. In such situations one of the following things may happen: a part of the soul becomes unconscious, the state of trance is set up, or simply a powerful feeling [such as anger] makes the individual act irrationally (Jung, Imaginea omului 24).

[8] The relation between the individual and certain objects is similar to Lévi-Bruhl’s notion of “participation mystique”: there is an archaic identity between the subject and the object (Jung, Tipuri 482). The individual – subject cannot clearly differentiate himself from the object, be it a thing or another person (Jung, Tipuri 480). Hence the projections.

[9] The spiraled way to the centre [of one’s personality] is called circumambulation (Jung, Arhetipurile 371).

[10] The main character in Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae

[11] One of Jung’s first definitions of the collective unconscious is “mythical realm of the dead, of one’s ancestors” (Jung, Amintiri 230).

[12] God’s existence outside man’s psyche cannot de proved. All we can say is that man has an archetypal image of God, which is revealed, among others, through the symbol of the quaternity in dreams. The quaternity, which includes Satan, or, according to other philosophers, Virgin Mary, is a symbol that the Church strongly disagrees with (Jung, Imaginea omului 63-67). As it is said that in falling from Heaven, Satan reached earth, the realm divided in four – directions, elements (Jung, Imaginea omului 65), and as in the Crucifixion, Christ was divided in four when laid on the cross (Jung, Aion 80; 85) this corresponding to a scission of the ego when going to face the shadow, the number four seems to connect good and evil quite accurately from the point of view of the structure of the psyche.

In The Time Machine, H. G. Wells’ work of science-fiction, and in Stephen Hawking’s works of physics, time is considered the fourth dimension of existence. Hawking says, in his public lecture entitled “Space and Time Warps”, that “one can describe the location of an event by four numbers. Three numbers describe the position of the event. (…) The fourth number is the time of the event. Thus one can think of space and time together, as a four dimensional entity, called space-time.”

Hawking estimates that time travel is possible, even if only theoretically for the moment, because if we managed to warp time and space enough in the right direction, “things like hyper space drives, wormholes, or time travel” could be possible. Einstein demonstrated that “all we need for time travel is a space ship that will go faster than light” (Hawking, “Space and Time Warps”). One needs to travel faster than the speed of light in order to “go backwards relative to the time of another observer [of time]”. This is how one would get to travel into the past. Hawking also cites a limerick in this respect:

“There was a young lady of Wight,

Who travelled much faster than light,

She departed one day,

In a relative way,

And arrived on the previous night”.

But he also showed that it would take an infinite amount of power to get the space ship to reach and surpass the speed of light, so it is impossible to time travel. Hawking says, however, that the way to “get from one side of the galaxy to the other, in a reasonable time [“while your friends are still alive”], would seem to be if we could warp space-time so much, that we created a little tube or wormhole (…) to create a wormhole, one needs to warp space-time in the opposite way to that in which normal matter warps it.” This method is not used in Wells’ science-fiction work, but it shares with it the idea that “closely related to time travel, is the ability to travel rapidly from one position in space, to another”, whereas “the idea that space and time can be curved is fairly recent” (Hawking, “Time and Space Warps”). Wells wrote The Time Machine (1898) even before Einstein’s theory of relativity (1905).

While agreeing with time being the fourth dimension, although long before Hawking was born, Wells shows that time is an irreversible chain of causation. However, this is not his central theme, he just briefly mentions it in the course of his story-telling in The Time Machine.

At the beginning of the story, the Narrator describes the pleasant atmosphere in the Time Traveller’s house, were his friends gathered to have dinner and discuss different matters. It is precisely this atmosphere that introduces the idea of the relativity of time, because what is peculiar about the atmosphere in the room is that these men let their thoughts flow at ease, or, as the Narrator says, thought is freed from within the boundaries of precision. This idea leads to, or prepares readers for the Time Traveller’s demonstration that our consciousness moves along Time. But he only gets to this idea by first convincing his friends that time is the fourth dimension. The argument is the following: no object or being can really exist only in space. It must also exist in time. Therefore, the dimensions of existence are: length, width, height and duration. The difference between the dimensions of space and that of time is that our consciousness moves along time, in one direction, from the beginning to the end of our life. One aspect of this theory is unclear, for Wells makes the Time Traveller say that our consciousness moves along time discontinuously, and later on, he says that it moves at a constant speed. Still, we may say that both statements are true, for, as we can see in The Time Machine, consciousness moves indeed with the same speed across time, but also discontinuously, due to the processes of remembering past events. And it is because our consciousness and time follow the same path (the same direction) that we have not noticed the fourth dimension until recently in the history of humanity (it is a principle of psychology, which a Romanian proverb depicts indirectly, “vezi paiul din ochiul altuia, nu bârna din ochiul tău”).

Time, says the Time Traveller, is a kind of space (in a very abstract way). The example he gives is the line that is traced from one day to the other by the barometer. Then the Medical Man and the Psychologist bring forth the counterargument that any of us would have thought of: one can move in space physically, but not in time. The Time Traveller has thought of this and he provides these two ideas: one, that our mental existence has no other dimensions but that of duration, and we move along time as if we travelled downward, from 50 miles above the ground (a metaphor for the opposition up-down, ignorance-knowledge, enthusiasm-calming of spirits, opposition which marks the beginning and the end of life of the consciousness). And the second idea is that we travel across time when we remember past events accurately. At that point we are absent from our present, we are briefly transported in time.

Next, the men discuss the advantages and disadvantages of building a time machine. Firstly, the Psychologist thinks it would be of great help to historians, but the Medical Man immediately replies that one such historian, looking so unusually for the fashion of the age, would draw attention to himself. The consequence would be that he would involuntarily change the past, for he might prevent events from taking place by being a curiosity for the others. Another advantage that the Very Young Man spoke about is that one could learn Greek directly from Homer or Plato. This is another instance of the irreversible time, because of the irreversibility of consciousness (consciousness is what helps us feel the passing of time, and measure it). Then one of the men replied that it would not be of any use to do so, because in modern times, ancient Greek has been much perfectioned by the German scholars. This shows the discrepancy between the moderns’ view of the past and the past itself, because of the evolution of the consciousness (or mentality) of the human being. A last advantage that the Very Young Man put forth is that one could put all one’s money in the bank and then rush to the future, to collect them. However, the Narrator drew his attention on the possibly communist society that one might encounter in the future (thus losing all the money…). This is an example of the unpredictability of the future and also an illustration of the butterfly effect. The entire discussion takes place in the introductory chapter, which is meant to convince readers to accept the validity of Wells’ theory about time and to make them reflect upon the changes that a time machine could bring about.

Then the Time Traveller shows his friends a small model of his time machine. Before beginning his demonstration, all the men gather round him in a circle, thus they occupy a strategic position in space, that, they think, facilitates knowledge (they think that this way they can tell if their friend plays a foul trick on them or not). This circle of friends wants to be in control, just like the Time Traveller, who acquires some knowledge and control too, with the help of time exploration. When the model of the time machine is sent to its unknown destination, it whirls so intensely that it puts out a candle. This little detail is held as very important by the Medical Man, and we shall see why. But before that, we deal with a false paradox: Where did the machine go? The Psychologist says that it could not have gone to the future, because then it would still be there on the table. The Medical Man says it could not have gone in the past, because it would have already been there on the table before they witnessed the experiment. And now we are told the way in which such a device works… and why the candle was put out… At the Time Traveller’s urge, the Psychologist remembers that there is a theory called diluted representation, which says that, if the machine travels through time with 50 or 100 times the speed that we humans have when passing through time, then it is normal that they did not perceive the machine neither in the past, nor in the future (past and future taken in relation to the moment when the time traveller sent it to its destination).

This explains why the Time Traveller disappears with his machine when he starts his journey, even if he does not leave his laboratory. And also why, before disappearing, he sees Mrs Watchett crossing his laboratory, and she does not see him. A hint at the irreversibility of time is this Mrs Watchett, whom the Time Traveller sees again upon his returning home. But this time he sees her doing all the moves backwards, he does not see her crossing his laboratory in the normal direction (“As I returned, I passed again across that minute when she traversed the laboratory. But now her every motion appeared to be the exact inversion of her previous ones. The door at the lower end opened, and she glided quietly up the laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared behind the door by which she had previously entered”). And the time machine “had started from the south-east corner of the laboratory. It had come to rest again in the north-east (…)”. Therefore, even if he came back at the same place, and, probably, at the same time as when he left (with slight differences, because the Morlocks had moved it inside the white Sphinx) – “that gives you the exact distance from my little lawn to the pedestal of the White Sphinx”) he cannot witness the events in the order, or in the “direction” in which they initially happened.

The third chapter is the final one on the frame of the story and it illustrates the travel through memory made by the Time Traveller. It also constitutes a paradox, for the Time Traveller talks about the future from his memories, that is, from a perspective that we normally associate with the past. And indeed what happens in the future is now part of his past, we cannot say that it will happen in his future. Time is irreversible… because consciousness, irrespective of the recording of past or future events (as in the situation of the Time Traveller) records things in one single direction. When the Time Traveller stops his machine in the epoch of the Eloi and of the Morlocks, the year on the screen is eight hundred two thousand (this is an inexistent year, for we cannot place hundreds before thousands), thus letting us readers know that the part of fiction begins.

Going back to time travel with the help of memory, we also noticed that the story told by the Time Traveller revolves at one point around Weena, and leaves the other events behind. The increasing speed of the story-telling is due to the emotional implication of the Time Traveller, to his subjectivity.

The whole story in The Time Machine is similar to the journey of the Time Traveller: it takes us from the past – in the introduction, where the Narrator speaks – to the future, where the adventures of time travelling take place, then back to the past that belongs to the Narrator, and then to the present of the Narrator. Thus, in the epilogue, the Narrator comes to a quite complicated situation in his story-telling. He says: “He [the Time Traveller] may be even now- if I may use the phrase- be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic reef”.

If we correlate the Time Traveller’s journey with the structure of time as presented by Stephen Hawking, in A Brief History of Time (chapter 2), we may conclude that this journey is shaped like an hour-glass. In the middle of this shape, which is a dot, lies the present moment, and downward is the “past light cone” and upward is the “future light cone”. The hour-glass shape is the image of past and future events that have a connection to the present event (the dot represents one event in the present), in that the cones are created by the echoes of that event which is in the middle of the hour-glass. If the Time Traveller changes something in the past or in the future (and, as we have seen in The Time Machine, he does change something in the Golden Era), then the whole chain of events changes, for everything is related to its neighbouring event.

Bibliography

Wells, H. G., The Time Machine, translated by Petre Solomon

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, is a tale about adultery. All that the characters do, say or feel is centered on this, which in the novel is discussed, both directly and indirectly, as a moral problem. The novel shows this moral issue from six different angles: that of the author(who, to a certain extent, peeps out from behind the mask of the narrator and whose approach to the problem controls the other approaches, naturally), of the Puritan community of 17^th century New England and of the four main characters, Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth and Pearl. An intricate map takes form in the mind of the reader, as Hawthorne pleads for three of his central characters, assuming a more humane role in viewing one’s public and private conduct than, for example, that played by his ancestor, Judge John Hathorne, prosecutor in the Salem witch trials of 1692. “I, the present writer”, he says, “(…) ask pardon of Heaven for their [his ancestors’’] cruelties” (Hawthorne 8 “The Custom-House”).

The idea at the basis of Hawthorne’s “plea” (the novel may be regarded as such) is that true understanding of one’s deeds and feelings may come at a distance, in time and space, and indeed it often does. His Puritan nature, though, is against revealing everything that lies in a human heart, even if the purpose sought is to be understood: “It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even when we speak impersonally.” (Hawthorne 3, “The Custom-House”)- that is, when the one who speaks is an author of fiction. Nevertheless, such an author may and will reveal what is necessary in order for the characters (and himself, through them) to be understood: “The truth seems to be, however, that when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him better than most of his schoolmates or life-mates.” (Hawthorne 3 “The Custom-House”). The Scarlet Letter thus functions as a message that resists time and reaches those whose minds are ripe enough to grasp its meaning, just as it happens with the letter “A” itself in the novel (because it evolves from a negative symbol, of shame and guilt, to a positive one, coming to be looked at as the symbol of a woman who suffered enough to have become a good advisor for the other women in the community). Hawthorne’s wish to obtain from the readers the same response as he himself manifests regarding the ideas that trouble him is what gives the novel its vividly coloured, allegorical characters and the scaffold scenes, where Hester, Pearl and Dimmesdale meet, that resemble more with biblical ones than with representations of a group of ignominious pariahs.

But what are the ideas that troubled Hawthorne? One of his diary entries speak about “what life would be like for a ‘woman, who, by the old colony law, was condemned to wear the letter A, sewed on her garment, in token of her having committed adultery.’ “ (Hawthorne cited by Claridge VIII). Another diary entry is concerned with “moral or spiritual disease which causes a disease of the body” (Claridge VIII) and a third entry resolves that the sin that would trigger the apparition of a sign on the body would be “the Unpardonable Sin [that] may consist in a want of love or reverence for the human soul” (Hawthorne cited by Claridge IX).

And we may see even better what Hawthorne sought to achieve in the novel by taking a look at his way of approaching Hester’s guilt: the story starts after the sin of adultery has been committed (Claridge XI), therefore readers are urged to look upon it from a more general perspective, to see the whole picture, the whole web of circumstances (Hester’s husband was presumed dead, she was thought of as a beautiful young “widow”, Dimmesdale was not committed to any woman, and thus their sin is not quite adultery), this being possible only with the passing of time. Time gives us just the right perspective, as it gave Hawthorne when he looked at his family’s past. By this strategy, we are given the illusion of being like the omniscient narrator, who sees the effects and knows the causes of the characters’ acts. But this is merely an illusion, for, as we have pointed out before, the narrator only lets the readers see enough to judge upon. However, it is this illusion that places us, the readers, in the position of someone wiser than the characters themselves at the time when they committed the sin and ensures that we react compassionately towards them. It is the passing of time also, -be it in a fictional piece of writing- that reminds of our own past mistakes. As Hawthorne puts it, (describing the attachment he feels for the past of his native land, and for his ancestors), he feels “the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust”(Hawthorne 7 “The custom-House”).

It is not adultery that Hawthorne regards as the sin that should be so severely punished, or rather that should be punished, but not unforgivable. It is the Puritan community that considers it so. The psychological pressure exercised by the Puritans on Hester and her daughter has more influence on Hester seeing herself as a horrible sinner than the actual deed itself. This is because the community tries to control the private life of its common members. Hester says to Dimmesdale: “What we did, had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other!” (cited by Claridge XI). She also dresses Pearl in fine garments, scarlet as the letter A on her dress. “’I am mother’s child’, answered the scarlet vision ,’and my name is Pear!’”(Hawthorne 82 “The Elf-Child and the Minister”). The respectable Puritans, the ones who wonder at the elf-like image of the child, and who speak of her mother in these derogatory words: “ Nay, we might have judged such a child’s mother be a scarlet woman, and a worthy type of her of Babylon!”, that is, according to the note at the end of the book, “the Whore of Babylon”, inflict the guilt onto Hester more due to their vivid imagination, which is highly inclined to accept fantastical interpretations of reality.

When Roger Chillingworth mysteriously arrives in Boston, the people think that “Heaven had wrought an absolute miracle by transporting an eminent Doctor of Physic from a German university bodily through the air and setting him down at the door of Mr. Dimmesdale’s study!”(Hawthorne 90 “The Leech”). Going back to Pearl, she is depicted throughout the novel as having a wild and “perverse” (84) nature, but if we read carefully, we may discover, through Chillingworth’s objective observation of Dimmesdale that “This man (…), pure as they deem him, -all spiritual as he seems- hath inherited a strong animal nature from his father or his mother.” (96 “The Leech and His Patient”).

Knowing that, we can now consider Pearl more human and normally related to this world than to see her as an elf, a creature of heathen belief. Hawthorne fuels the reader’s imagination with unreal descriptions of the little girl for three reasons. Fristly, to make us see that it is the Puritans of impure thoughts who, besides God, also believe in witchcraft and fabulous creatures, and thus their judgement on the righteousness of conduct of other people is questionable. Secondly, to indirectly reveal a little of that (animal nature) which is inside a human soul but which Hawthorne does not want to speak about plainly (and which he very safely puts into a child, who is forgiven for being irresponsible and mean, because the public values have not yet been incorporated in her psychological being). It is the “non-decorous” mentioned above. Thirdly, to show, by contrast to Hester and Dimmesdale, the power of suffering to tame, hold down and at the same time save the soul, in a religious (non-heathen) way : “She wanted-what some people want throughout life- a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus harmonise and make her capable of sympathy” (138).

And this is the actual sin of Pearl’s mother and father: the trespassing of moral public values, and this is what they expiate. Hester, whose guilt has been publicly revealed and is constantly in people’s face, due to the scarlet letter, is not in fact so severely punished, because now that people have seen her worst, she can only improve her image with time. Which she does. Still, she is so much affected by this, that she wants her name on her tombstone to be replaced by the scarlet letter . But Dimmesdale, whose “offense” to the community is not made public, secretly suffers and his fall is more abrupt because his is highly esteemed and considered a saint: “Some declared that if Mr. Dimmesdale were really going to die it was cause enough that the world was not worthy to be any longer trodden by his feet.” (90 “The Leech”).He also torments himself (“His nerve seemed absolutely destroyed” (119)) over the adultery, maybe more that Hester does, and his increasing physical weakness is a direct cause of his moral destruction. Hawthorne’s answer to the situation where a man becomes physically ill as a consequence of his spiritual illness is that he consumes himself; he practically kills himself, slowly.

If Pearl and the scarlet A (which is given, throughout the novel, many meanings, such as “angel”, “Arthur”, “Adam”, but never “Adulteress”, never explicitly, as though Hawthorne waits for the reader to assign or do away with this particular significance, according to his own understanding) are Hester’s constant reminders of her sin (“Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me, too!”(84) cries Hester), what works for Dimmesdale to fulfill the same purpose are public consideration and his own moral torture. Each of these two work as a cause for each other, although there might be another element, his feeling guilty for letting Hester take all the blame on herself. But his moment of redeem is really like the sacrifice of a martyr, for he admits to being Pearl’s father and reveals his own scarlet letter, painfully engraved on his skin (as we are lead to believe, for it is not explicitly said) : ”Lo, the scarlet letter which Hester wears! Ye all have shuddered at it! (…) But there stood one in the midst of you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered! (…) He bids you look again at Hester’s scarlet letter! He tells you that, with all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears on his own breast, and that even this-his own red stigma- is no more than the type that has seared his inmost heart!” (191).

Just before Dimmesdale gets to approach the scaffold, to confess his part of the guilt, Chillingworth tries to stop him, because he wants to fulfill his revenge; “’Madman, hold! what is your purpose?’ whispered he. ’Wave back that woman! Cast off this child! (…) I can save you!’”(189). Imagine the old man, with his devilish look (his name, too, hints at the devil, for “old Roger” means the devil and “Chill” in “Chillingworth” makes one think of death chills) after having silently directed his hatred toward the minister, now saying “I can save you!”. There has been achieved no contrast in the novel greater than this. Chillingworth, blinded by his desire of revenge, does not see the inutility of his act. The “Unpardonable Sin” against “a human heart” is Chillingworth’s, for, after having tried to cure the minister of his illness that had no apparent physical cause (“He deemed it essential, it would seem, to know the man before attempting to do him good”(92)), he comes to know his secret and resolves to torture him as if he mastered his soul. Chillingworth is a character parallel to pearl, regarding his savageness. Although he is an Englishman, he is reported by a New Englander to have been seen in the company of a dangerous man back in England, and his knowledge of alchemy and his skill in handling various herbs, skill which he gained during his Indian captivity, all this makes a dark figure out of him, a savage one, pitiless, remorsefess.

In contrast to him, however, Pearl has her moments of love and tenderness- for example, with the minister, after he speaks in favour of her mother: “Therefore it is good for this poor, sinful woman that she hath an infant immortality (…) Herein is the sinful mother happier than the sinful father. For Hester Prynne’s sake, then, and no less for the poor child’s sake, let us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place them! (…) Pearl, that wild and flighty little elf, stole softly towards him, and taking his hand in the grasp of both her own, laid her cheek against it : a caress so tender, so unobtrusive(…)” (86).

In seeing the complexity of such a moral and social issue as sin, and the examples of adultery and the more abstract and more dangerous plotting against someone’s soul, the readers are constantly asked to ponder on the consequences of both and to discriminate between them. The Scarlet Letter remains as an urge for people to judge such matters at a certain time distance, when the power of feelings has ceased but their memory persists, just as scarlet is the colour of a half-healed wound.

Bibliography

Claridge, Henry, Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Wordsworth                                        Classics, Hertfordshire: 1999

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter, Wordsworth Classics, Hertfordshire: 1999

With wonderful extracts of Lear speaking Romanian

“King Lear” is a play about family relations, devotion and love. The tragic part comes from the way these are envisaged by the characters: the members of Lear’s and Gloucester’s families, as well as the subjects of both Lear and Gloucester, who are examples of the most loving devotion (the Count of Kent, the Fool; Gloucester’s servants). The means by which tragedy occurs is usurpation (in its three registers), which equals with the loss of order both in the family and in the state. This double view was discussed by the critic Denton J. Snider, a 19^th century critic whose approach this essay is based upon.

Lear criticism in the 19^th century came to “an abrupt turning point”, for the Romantics considered that the end of the play is both “proper and effective” (Harris, 89) as says August Wilhelm Schlegel.  William Hazlitt comments on the role of the Fool, stating that he is important because he transports the pathos to its “highest pitch” by constantly demonstrating the foolishness of Lear’s conduct”. The German scholar Hermann Ulrici considers that the sins of Lear and Gloucester lead them to the extremity of their suffering and that this is “the appropriate response of divine will in its attempt to punish (…) fundamental transgressions”. Victor Hugo pointed the appearance of the “double action” or double plot in “King Lear” (and in other plays by Shakespeare), explaining that this is a sign that the dramatist adhered to the spirit of his age, when every idea and gesture were reflected in a parallel symbol or gesture. Hugo also underlines that there is a historical reason for the double plot, not an artistic one (Harris, 89). One of the seminal essays on “King Lear” belongs to Algernon Charles Swinburne, who says that Shakespeare’s play is “oceanic and titanic in conception” and the darkest, most fatalistic of his tragedies. In his opinion, the keynote of the entire play is reflected in Gloucester’s famous “flies to wanton boys” speech (Gloucester, blinded by Cornwall, tells an old servant that mortals are to gods like flies to wanton boys). Denton J. Snider an American teacher, philosopher and poet, wrote in 1887 an essay on “King Lear”. There, he reunites more of the aspects dealt with by the critics cited above, namely the social and symbolic dimensions of the play, together with the political understatement.

In his essay, Snider interprets the play from a social perspective (being one of the first critics to see the symbolism behind the social themes (Harris, 133)). He divides the play in two parts, or “movements”. The first one shows the development of the “Perverted World” (and the “breaking up of the Institutional World”), and the second one, being a reverse of the first (a reverse of the reverse), shows the reestablishment of the “Institutional World”. This view does justice to the play, for it matches the recurrent image of the Wheel of Fortune, which brings down what is up and up what is down. Thus, when Kent is punished for having beaten Oswald (Goneril’s messenger), he says: “Surâde-mi, soartă, şi-ţi întoarce roata!” (Act II, sc. 2). The wheel is both a positive symbol, as in Kent’s line, and a negative symbol, as in Edmund’s monologue: “E un serviciu mare, / Pe care ducele-l va răsplăti. / Astfel voi dobândi ce pierde tata: / Cei tineri vin la rând, aşa e roata.” (Act III, sc. 3). The idea that fortune is shifting from good to bad for all humans, is expressed by Cordelia, as she and Lear are caught by the victorious Edmund, the war having ended: “Pe tine, oropsit monarh, te plâng, / Căci eu cu roata sorţii schimbătoare / M-am fost deprins.” (Act V, sc. 3). From Cordelia’s line we are also given a hint on the purpose of Lear’s destitution or usurpation, purpose which belongs to the author of the play (and thus is related to poetic justice, one of the key issues in the history of “Lear” criticism (Harris, 88)). In the other two instances where the wheel of destiny appears, it is related to death. The wheel is seen as the representation of man’s life course therefore one’s life is a series of (more or less) randomly distributed, but imminent rises and falls. When life comes to an end, the wheel stops from turning: Edmund, deadly hurt by his brother Edgar (who is disguised as a beggar), concludes: “roata /Norocului oprită-i pentru mine.” (Act V, sc. 3). And Kent, referring to Lear, who had just died, says: “Lasă-l / Să părăsească în tihnă lumea asta, / Destul l-a tras pe roata ei cea crudă.” (Act V, sc. 3). The comparison of destiny with the wheel that was used for torture in the Middle Ages is extremely powerful and beside emphasizing the idea of cruelty, it also alludes to that of injustice and excess (excessive injustice and cruelty).

If we take the wheel as a symbol of ever-changing fate, we may notice that usurpation is the most prominent consequence of its movement. But does usurpation take place so unjustly? Not for all the characters. Lear, the father and king that we find in his rightful place at the beginning of the play, undergoes a series of socially degrading and morally useful changes. First, he asks of his daughters to tell him how much they love him. The two elder sisters, Goneril and Regan, sweet talk him, but the younger daughter, Cordelia, reacts in protest to this artful strategy (Cordelia says to herself “Biată Cordelia, te măsori cu ele ? … / Pe câte ştiu, mă tem că-s mai bogată / În dragoste decât în măgulele …” (Act I, sc. 1) and at the same time she wants to let her father know that she is honest in her expression of love for him. But Lear fails to see Cordelia’s statements as expressing love, and he urges her to lie to him: “CORDELIA: Dar dacă, doamne, nu pot, rău îmi pare, / Să-mi scot cu vorba inima pe gură? /Eu ştiu că vă iubesc precum se cade, / Nici mai puţin şi nici mai mult, atât.” To this, Lear replies: “Ei, ei Cordelia! Hai, struneşte-ţi glasul, / Să nu-ţi răstoarne carul cu noroc.” (Act I, sc. 1) It is obvious that Lear does not want to hear the truth from his daughters, nor that he cares much for it, but that he wants them to pay lip service to him. Here is the cause of what Snider calls the breaking up of the Family unit. The social role of the family, and also its role as a universal binder, is held by Snider as the origin of the exterior conflict of the play. According to Snider, it is within the family that “the most heroic fidelity” and “the most wanton infidelity” (Harris, 134) appear. He says that “the parents are both faithful and faithless to their relation; so are the children, taken collectively”. The phrase “taken collectively” (referring to the two sisters and to Edmund) is crucial to the understanding of the play, because it tells us very plainly that Snider sees “King Lear” as a tragedy of parents, and not of both parents and children, as it may seem at a first reading. And indeed it is so, because Shakespeare made the parents (Lear and Gloucester) imperfect, partially blind, and the children (Cordelia and Edgar) wise (wiser than their parents who are experienced old men). The tragedy is therefore based on the fall of characters placed higher both in the social class and in the family structure, as it should be, given the rules for the constitution of a tragedy (from Antiquity).

Going back to the major issues that critics have discussed about “King Lear”, the meaning of Cordelia’s and Lear’s death can be deciphered in the following way: the play as a tragedy refers to Lear (and to Gloucester, his subplot counterpart). At the beginning, Lear commits that which may be compared to the hybris in Greek tragedies (which originally means arrogance toward the gods; here, it is the note of disrespect that Shakespeare keeps from hybris): he blatantly disregards his daughter’s sincere love; he even punishes her and disinherits her in exchange for her honesty.

In doing this, and in the way he is asking for sweet words from his elder daughters, we might be inclined to think that he knows that they are lying to him, yet he does not realize it. So he is the cause of his own usurpation.

As a result of his diminishing image in the minds of Goneril and Regan (and of his giving them all his possessions, this foolish act being another of his guilts), Lear is suddenly cast away from his kingly state. He goes from the highest social rank (and from the highest position as a noble person) to the lowest social rank, that of a beggar, of a homeless person. The change of social class reflects the change of vision: Lear is now closer to nature and to the people who are loyal to him. As far as his relation to nature is concerned, Snider believes that the play has a Titanic strength, comparable to “the mightiest forces of Nature” (Harris, 134). This strength derives from Lear’s relation to natural elements: now that he has fallen from his pedestal, he is no longer great by his wealth, but by the intensity of his feelings, because he is becoming humane through suffering. However, nature is also a double-faced symbol: outdoor nature reflects his moody (inner) nature (for he too can be abruptly stormy). In this respect, Lear resembles Cordelia, because both of them express their feelings just as they are, they do not try to mask them (they both are true to their nature).

Gloucester, like Lear, is guilty for his own usurpation, but his fall is not caused by an event in the play. Edmund, his illegitimate son, is the one who brings about Gloucester’s tragic destiny. Gloucester’s fault is that he had loved Edmund’s mother in his youth: “Eh, dar ce mândreţe era maică-sa! L-am făcut cu plăcere pe acest fecior-de-fată; trebuie să-l recunosc… “(Act I, sc. 1). In the last act, Edgar tells Edmund after they have fought: “Ciudat de drepţi sunt zeii, când păcatul / Ce ne-a plăcut să-l facem ni-i pedeapsa” (Act V, sc. 3). Edgar’s comment is actually Shakespeare’s explanation to the situation in which Gloucester was put.

A different register of usurpation is that of the concept of monarch. Snider draws our attention on the trick that Shakespeare plays upon us: he sets the action of the play in “pre-historic Britain” (Harris, 134), before the time of Merlin, as the Fool says in his monologue: “Prorocirea asta are s-o facă, odată şi-odată, Merlin; numai că eu n-am să apuc timpul să-l aud şi pe el” (Act III, sc. 2). Shakespeare himself “laughs at his violations of chronology” (Harris, 134), because what the Fool says is too illogical even for such a character as he: how can he know of the existence and attributions of one who will live after him? Therefore, says Snider, we must look at “King Lear” as at a thoroughly Elizabethan play, which “reaches to the very heart of the age of the Tudors and Stuarts, and reveals to us the disease of absolute authority” (Harris, 134). In this respect, we find in “King Lear” a good example of authoritative ruling. On the one hand, Lear is an absolute monarch, doing everything as he pleases and being ready to ban his daughter and his faithful servants (Kent). On the other hand, Regan, her husband the Duke of Cornwall, and Goneril, represent the nobles who exercise, in their turn, absolute power (inherited from the monarch). Thus, Cornwall illustrates, by his attitude, two ways of abusing power: first, he wants to punish Gloucester before judging him in the presence of a court: “De viaţa lui, noi, fără judecată, / Nu vom putea dispune; dar puterea / Ce-avem va face-acest hatâr mâniei;”; then , in referring to what the people might say with respect to his punishing Gloucester without a trial: “Chair dacă, mai târziu, ne va urî, / Poporul, azi, nu poate să ne-oprească.” (Act III, sc. 7).

A third register of usurpation is connected to reason. In his wanderings as a poor man, Lear talks to his Fool (who comes with him, like Kent and Edgar, both disguised). In the course of these talks, Lear is once more usurped, this time by the discourse of the Fool, who mocks at him in the most disrespectful way, but who also tells him where he was wrong and what he should have done. Therefore, Lear is not usurped only as a father and as a ruler, but also as a reasonable being. It is in the dialogues between Lear and the Fool that we fully realize the foolishness of Lear (this is also due to the contrast between the two characters’ conditions: Lear may be destitute, but he is an ordinary man, whereas the Fool is by definition an intellectually inferior person; however, here the Fool proves to be a wise man, because in reading his lines, we are inclined to say, like Polonius in “Hamlet”: “If there be madness [here, stupidity], there is method in it”). At one point, Shakespeare even invites us to take Lear for the Fool: “LEAR: Mă faci nebun, adică? BUFONUL: Dat fiind că la celelalte titluri ai renunţat, e tot ce ţi-a mai rămas, fiind că pe ăsta îl ţii din născare.” (Act I, sc.4).

To sum up, in “King Lear” usurpation represents the realisation of the tragic, because it is the lowering of highly positioned characters. Three registers of usurpation are identifiable in the play: social usurpation, the usurpation of the rightful attributions of a monarch, and the usurpation of reason (as the logical, commonsensical way of thinking). The other two registers originate in the social one, for this is the most obvious and the most painful for the character in question (Lear). Thus the tragic fulfils its function of generating suffering and offering wisdom. This is not necessarily for the character himself, for both Lear and Gloucester die soon after they are consciously reunited with their loving children, but for the audience and the readers. They experience, like Snider put it, “the world-destroying element [in the play] (…), which oppresses the individual and makes him feel like fleeing from the crash of the Universe.” (Harris, 134).

Bibliography

Harris, Laurie Lanzen, Mark W. Scott (eds). Shakespearean Criticism (vol. 2). Gale Research Company, Book Tower, Detroit, Michigan 48226, 1985

Shakespeare, William. “Regele Lear”. trans. by Mihnea Gheorghiu. Shakespeare, William. Teatru. trans. by Mihnea Gheorghiu, Leon Leviţchi, Dan Duţescu. Mondero: Bucureşti, 1999

Cum invatam cuvinte noi? Intr-un mod organizat, pe domenii? Invatam azi un grup de cuvinte din aceeasi familie lexicala sau acelasi camp semantic, maine un grup de verbe de aceeasi conjugare? E drept, le-am tine minte mai usor, dar la ce ne-ar folosi, fiindca noi, cand vorbim, avem nevoie de cuvinte din toate categoriile lexicale, semantice, gramaticale, fonetice etc etc etc…? Deci ar fi mai bine sa invatam cuvinte la intamplare? Deschidem dictionarul si pe ce punem ochii, aia invatam? Dar atunci cum tinem minte ce-am invatat ieri si ce invatam azi, daca ne alcatuim in minte un vocabular haotic, fara nicio structura?

Lexiconul (propriul nostru dictionar din capsor) trebuie totusi organizat intr-un fel. Ne uitam dupa ajutor prin vastul domeniu al lingvisticii; semantica, de exemplu, este nu numai o perspectiva de studiu al limbii, ci poate fi si un ajutor nepretuit pentru imbogatirea si fixarea vocabularului.

Ce este semantica? Vezi DEX online : 2. parte a semioticii (=studiul semnelor) care studiază raportul semnelor cu obiectele desemnate. Adica legatura dintre cuvinte si referenti. Exact ceea ce ne trebuie, fiindca vocabularul este o lista de cuvinte care ne ajuta sa ne referim la diferite obiecte din realitatea inconjuratoare.

Cum ne ajuta ea? Voi da un exemplu. Avem patru substantive ( plonge, plongée, plongement si plongeon) cu aceeasi radacina (verbul plonger), cu acelasi sens de baza, dar care, evident, nu inseamna acelasi lucru (principiul economiei spune ca intr-o limba nu exista doua elemente identice – vezi si cazul sinonimiei).

Sa citim cu atentie definitiile:

plonge n.f.

FAM. travail des plongeurs, lavage de la vaisselle (dans un restaurant, un café). Faire la plonge : faire la vaisselle (Le Petit Robert 2008 p. 1935)

plongée n.f.

I. 1. action de plonger et de séjourner sous l’eau ; manœvre par laquelle un submersible s’enfonce sous l’eau ; navigation sous-marine ;

2. vue plongeante ; SPÉCIALT. prise de vue effectuée de haut en bas : plongée et contre-plongée ;

II. 1. FORTIF. talus supérieur d’un parapet

2. HYDROGR. dans le relief sous-marin, brusque abaissement du fond de la mer (Le Petit Robert 2008 p. 1935)

plongement n.m.

action de plonger une chose dans un liquide (Le Petit Robert 2008 p. 1935 )

plongeon n.m.

1. action de plonger ; action de se jeter ou de tomber dans l’eau ; FIG. faire un plongeon dans la misère ; FAM. faire le plongeon : perdre beaucopu d’argent et être en difficulté ;

2. FAM.  salut plongeant, révérence;

3. FOOTBALL détente, saut (horizontal ou plongeant) du gardien de but pour saisir ou détourner le ballon (Le Petit Robert 2008 p. 1936)

plonger ◊ latin populaire ◦plumbicare, de plumbum « plomb »

I. v. tr.

1. faire entrer (qqch., qqn) dans un liquide, entièrement (► immerger, noyer) ou en partie (► baigner, tremper). Plonger les mains dans l’eau . « Il versa de l’eau et plongea sa tête dans la cuvette » ARAGON. Plonger la louche dans le potage. Plonger des beignets dans la friture. ♦ PRONOM. Se plonger dans l’eau, dans la mer, y entrer tout entier. (…)

II. v. intr.

1. 1. s’enfoncer tout entier dans l’eau, descendre au fond de l’eau (► plongeur). Pêcheur de perles, scaphandrier qui plonge (…) PAR ANAL. Oiseaux, poissons qui plongent. (…) ♦ s’immerger pour naviguer en plongée (en parlant d’un sous-marin). (…)

   2. SPÉCIALT. se jeter dans l’eau la tête et les bras en avant ; faire un plongeon  (…) ;

   3. s’enfoncer ou se jeter (dans, sur) ;

   4. FIG.ARG. être condamné à une peine de prison ♦ échouer, faire faillite (faire le plongeon) ; chuter brutalement (…) ;

   5. (ABSTRAIT) s’enfoncer profondément. Plonger dans ses pensées, dans ses réflexions, dans un sommeil profond, dans la dépression. (…) ;

   6. s’enfoncer au loin, vers le bas (en parlant du regard) « Dans l’abîme sans fond mon regard a plongé »LAMARTINE. Point de vue où le regard plonge. – FAM. voir aisément d’un lieu plus élevé. De cette fenêtre, on plonge chez les voisins.

   7. (CHOSES) s’enfoncer ; pendre. « On ne voyait pas son menton qui plongeait dans sa cravate » HUGO. Jupe qui plonge par derrière. (Le Petit Robert 2008 p. 1936)

Ce observam din aceste definitii? Am pus totul intr-un tabel:

*(Dictionar francez-român. Ed. Gramar 100+1, Bucuresti, 2000)

Iata ca substantivele atat de asemanatoare, dintre care nu stiam pe care sa-l  alegem si de ce, sunt de fapt foarte diferite si diferentele sunt foarte clare.

Concluzia este ca putem foarte usor sa invatam cuvinte- mai ales dintr-o limba care seamana foarte mult cu limba noastra materna – daca le disecam. Sensul unui cuvant nu e un element indivizibil, ci din contra. Faptul ca dictionarele definesc cuvintele cu ajutorul altor cuvinte ne arata ca nu numai forma, dar si sensul unui cuvant se poate”sparge”, decoda. Astfel putem si sa invatam cuvantul, si sa-l folosim in contextul potrivit, fiindca de fapt, diviziunile sale de sens ne dau contextul.

Nota:

1. Nici asta nu e metoda perfecta de a invata cuvinte noi, fiindca metoda perfecta este “plonjarea” intr-un grup de oameni care vorbesc limba respectiva, situatie care imita invatarea limbii materne in copilarie. Totusi, este o metoda mai buna decat altele – unele dintre ele le-am enumerat mai sus-, fiindca presupune si insusirea logicii proprii limbii straine pe care o inveti, si nu asocieri personale de genul: tin minte ce inseamna plongeon, pentru ca plon ma duce cu gandul la o interjectie cum ar fi pleosc, sunetul j imi sugereaza ca ceva trece cu viteza pe langa mine (ceva care face jjjjjjjjjj ca in vâjjjjjj) si eon imi arata ca acel ceva se duce in jos, cade. Sunt bune si asocierile de felul acesta, dar nu poti sa ai atata imaginatie incat sa inventezi cate o istorioara pentru fiecare cuvant pe care il inveti.Mai ales ca fiecare cuvant isi are deja propria istorioara.

2. Observatie de tipul “drepturi de autor” : ideea acestui articolas mi-a venit de la un exercitiu din cartea doamnei Tuţescu – Du mot au texte (Ed. Cavaliotti, Bucuresti: 2007), unde am gasit cuvantul plongée, iar ideea disecarii cuvintelor am preluat-o din cursul de semnatica al doamnei Cosăceanu.

Au début du roman La Sexualité, San-Antonio écrit son introduction en se moquant des conventions de l’organisation d’une œuvre littéraire (qui comprennent les essais de l’auteur ou de quelque critique de faire connaitre des faits extérieurs à l’œuvre, mais utiles pour la comprendre) et de la règle qui dit qu’on doit rédiger l’introduction après avoir achevé l’œuvre. San-Antonio parodie aussi le métalangage, lorsque la voix de l’auteur, qui s’identifie à la voix du narrateur du roman, s’adresse directement aux lecteurs en parlant de la façon dont est construite la préface et en anticipant leur intention de passer outre pour feuilleter le roman et se faire une idée du sujet :

« En matière d’espèce d’avant-propos/ Comme qui dirait…

Faites très attention, beaucoup achtung ! Gaffe, mes drôles. J’avertis : ceci est un préambule. Une introduction, V’là le sale mot lâché ! Je vous introduis d’autor, sans même le temps d’un n’ouf. Habituellement, un avant-propos, ca s’écrit après le bouquin. L’auteur qu’a des retours au carburo. Qui s’aperçoit, l’affreux connard, qu’il a pas exprimé le total de sa pensée. Qui plaide non coupable pour son œuvre ! Veut donner l’explication du comment, du pourquoi, du bidule ! Se drape dans de fières implorations. Bref, s’escuse en somme de ne pas s’être fait comprendre. (…) » (p. 13)

« Je sais des livres, que le pauvre tourmenté a affublés d’une préface, d’un avant-propos, de notes liminaires, d’un avertissement, d’une post-face et d’un ‘en matière de conclusion’ qui ferait bâiller un dentier dans son verre de flotte.

Moi, toujours novateur assoiffé, je te vous ponds mon introduction avant tout chose. J’attends que le reste suive. Je chauffe, comprenez-vous ? On bavarde un chouille avant de se mettre à l’établi. On déconne à vide, à blanc. Vous pouvez sauter. Foncer au « Chapitre premier » là que commence la puissante histoire fignolée « Fleuve-Noir » que je vous ci-jointe avec l’assurance de mes sentiments les meilleurs et les plus juteux. Je m’en fâcherais pas. (…) » (p. 13-14)

La Sexualité rassemble Gargantua, car ils sont écrits dans le même esprit : on s’imagine les narrateurs des deux romans racontant les histoires en riant aux éclats. San-Antonio semble suivre le conseil de Rabelais : « Mieux est de ris que de larmes écrire/ Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme » (extrait de la préface de Gargantua). Mais si le livre de Rabelais nous amuse surtout par son contenu, celui de San-Antonio nous amuse surtout par sa forme. Dans ce qui suit on essaiera de faire une analyse de la forme, c’est-à-dire du français de San-Antonio.

Le titre de la préface essaie de nommer le texte « avant-propos », tout en nous avertissant qu’il n’est pas un avant-propos comme il faut (comme nous nous sommes figurés). Les expressions que nous disent cela sont :

- « en matière de » (qui appartient au langage courant et qui signifie « dans le domaine, sous le rapport de, en ce qui concerne [tel objet] ») ;

- « espèce de » (qui appartient au français courant, mais qui a une connotation péjorative, étant utilisée pour les injures adressées aux personnes, non pas aux choses ; l’expression vient d’ « une espèce de », qui désigne une personne ou une chose qu’on ne peut définir précisément) ;

- « comme qui dirait » (expression qui signifie « une sorte de », tout comme « une espèce de »).

En accumulant ces trois expressions, l’auteur nous crée l’impression qu’il ne sait comment expliquer et s’excuser pour ce qu’il a écrit, car son introduction est fautive. L’effet comique part de cette impression que nous donne le titre, car, si on prête attention à « espèce de », on constate que l’auteur tourne en dérision sa propre démarche.

Ensuite, dans le premier paragraphe (qui marque le début de l’introduction), les phrases courtes et parfois coupées forment le monologue d’un finaud. Il commence par « faites très attention », une expression qui appartient au français familier, puis il répète l’ordre en employant ce qui pourrait être un néologisme de forme (un mot étranger qui est utilisé avec le sens de la langue d’origine), le mot allemand « achtung », comme par se faire mieux comprendre. Néanmoins, « achtung » ne se trouve pas dans le dictionnaire (Le Petit Robert) comme néologisme.

L’auteur répète pour la troisième fois le même ordre, par le mot « gaffe », qui vient de l’expression du français familier « faire gaffe », ayant le sens de « faire attention ». Le nom « gaffe » avec ce sens-là vient probablement de « gaf » de l’ancien provençal, qui signifiait « crochet, perche munie d’un croc ou de deux crocs, et servant à la manœuvre d’une embarcation, à accrocher le poisson etc. » D’ici, il a acquiert le sens figuré d’ « accrocher du regard » et il est passé dans le langage familier avec les sens de « regarder attentivement » (en tant que verbe transitif) et de « viser » (en tant que verbe intransitif), selon Le Petit Robert. Le vocatif « mes drôles » contient un nom noté dans Le Petit Robert comme moderne et régional (utilisé dans le Midi de la France). « Mes drôles » est l’équivalent de « mes enfants » (car « drôle » remplace ici « enfant, jeune garçon, gamin » ; l’auteur s’adresse donc aux hommes – d’une façon affectueuse -, non pas aux femmes). « Beaucoup achtung » et « gaffe, mes drôles » sont toutes les deux des phrases elliptiques, dont on devine légèrement le verbe « faites ».

La quatrième phrase est coupée en deux par la virgule et aussi par la préposition « V’là », qui est écrite avec majuscule après la virgule. Elle présente« l’introduction », dont il vient d’être question dans le discours. La forme contractée de « voilà » (utilisée dans le français familier) a été obtenue par la chute de la semi-voyelle [w] et de la voyelle [a] de l’intérieur du mot ([v w a l a]). Le fragment qui suit, « le sale mot lâché », comprend deux adjectifs appartenant au deux registres différents. « Sale » a, en français familier, une connotation extrêmement négative, il signifie « maudit ». « Lâché » est, au contraire, un terme du français courant, non-marqué stylistiquement. Cependant, dans ce texte-là, il acquiert une certaine connotation, si on pense au problème qui fait le sujet du roman, l’impotence sexuelle.

« Autor », un nom qui n’existe pas dans Le Petit Robert ou dans les dictionnaires en ligne, peut être le nom latin qui signifie « auteur ». L’onomatopée « ouf », qui exprime le soulagement, est précédée par un « n’ » qui peut être un « ne » explétif ajouté abusivement.

Dans la phrase suivante, le pronom démonstratif « cela », dans sa forme contractée, « ça », est utilisé pour reprendre le sujet exprimé par le groupe nominal « l’avant-propos ». Dans la même phrase, au niveau phonétique, on aperçoit le terme familier « bouquin » (qui vient du néerlandais « boek », signifiant « livre »).

La phrase « L’auteur qu’a des retours au carburo » et les autres qui suivent sont coupées de telle sorte qu’elles seraient considérées incorrectes dans le français standard (courant). Le fragment « L’auteur qu’a des retours au carburo » est formé du sujet d’une phrase principale qui n’a pas de suite et d’une relative qui détermine le sujet. Le nom « carburo » ressemble à un nom tronqué (par apocope) et suffixé de « -o », d’après le modèle de « prolo ». Ainsi, « carburo » pourrait signifier « carbure » ou « carburation », et l’expression « retours au carburo » peut designer les retours, de la part de l’auteur, à ce qu’il a écrit, pour mieux expliquer son intention dans la préface.

Les deux phrases suivantes, qui commencent avec le pronom relatif « qui », montrent que la longue phrase initiale du français littéraire est coupée et que le pronom relatif « qui » est séparé de son antécédent, « l’auteur ». La phrase, englobant aussi les quatre phrases suivantes du fragment, aurait dû être : « L’auteur, qu’a des retours au carburo, qui s’aperçoit, l’affreux connard, qu’il a pas exprimé le total de sa pensée, qui plaide non coupable pour son œuvre, veut donner l’explication du comment, du pourquoi, du bidule, se drape dans de fières implorations. » Mais, pour mettre l’accent sur les détails qu’il donne de cet auteur imaginaire et typique, San-Antonio fait ces longues pauses que lui permettent les multiples points d’orthographe. « Qu’a », de « L’auteur qu’a des retours au carburo. », montre le décumul du pronom relatif en français familier (l’emploi du pronom relatif invariable, sous la forme de « que »), ce qui reste des valeurs du pronom relatif étant seulement sa valeur syntactique.

De la syntaxe on passe de nouveau au lexique. L’adjectif « affreux » appartient au français courant, tandis que le nom « connard », auquel il est appliqué, et qui est formé à l’aide du suffixe péjoratif « -ard », appartient au langage familier (il est un juron). La négation « qu’il a pas exprimé [le total de sa pensée] » témoigne du style familier, auquel il est caractéristique d’omettre la négation ante verbale, atone.

La phrase qui commence avec « Veut… », tout comme celles qui commencent avec « Se drape… » et « Bref, s’escuse… »,  n’a pas de sujet exprimé, ce qui n’est pas accepté dans le français standard (courant). Qui plus est, les phrases « Qui plaide non coupable pour son œuvre ! » et « Veut donner l’explication du comment, du pourquoi, du bidule ! » sont des assertives transformées en exclamatives uniquement par l’intonation (donc au niveau phonétique).

Dans l’énumération « [l’explication] du comment, du pourquoi, du bidule », il y a de nouveau un mélange des termes du registre courant, comprenant « le comment », c’est-à-dire « la manière » et « le pourquoi », c’est-à-dire « la cause, le motif, la raison », et du registre familier, représenté par « le bidule », qui signifie « le truc, le/un objet complexe ».

« Se draper », verbe du français courant, signifie « arranger ses vêtements de manière à former d’amples plis ». Tout comme l’adjectif « lâché », ce verbe accidentellement pronominal produit un certain effet comique, à cause de l’oxymoron qui le suit. Il a un sens souvent ironique dans : « se draper dans sa dignité » (« en faire étalage »). Ici il est employé avec ce sens-là, mais la contradiction de « fières implorations » jette l’ironie dans le comique et dans le ridicule.

Pour ce qui est de la dernière phrase du premier fragment, elle contient un adverbe de phrase, dans sa forme familière, extraite d’une expression courante (« bref » de « en bref »), adverbe qui forme un pléonasme avec l’expression « en somme ». On note aussi la variante phonétique (incorrecte) du verbe « s’excuser », qui montre le mépris de San-Antonio pour le type d’auteur dont il parle (on peut trouver un autre exemple de la prononciation incorrecte du son [ks] dans Zazie dans le métro de Raymond Queneau : « espliquer », [e s], au lieu de [e ks], dans « expliquer »).

Dans le second fragment proposé pour l’analyse, l’adjectif « tourmenté » est employé comme nom dans le français familier. Le verbe « affubler » appartient au français courant, mais il a un sens péjoratif, il signifie : « habiller ridiculement, bizarrement » (du latin populaire « affibulare », de « fibula », « agrafe »). San-Antonio continue à ridiculiser l’auteur préfacier en parlant de « notes liminaires ». L’adjectif « liminaires » est formé par troncation initiale (aphérèse), comme si on aurait écarté le soi-disant préfixe « -pré ». La citation « en matière de conclusion » ridiculise la modestie auto-imposée des auteurs en général. L’expression « qui ferait bâiller un dentier dans son verre de flotte » s’inscrit dans la même attitude, mais avec du sarcasme cette fois-ci. « Flotte » est le terme familier pour « eau ».

Le datif éthique du pronom personnel de la deuxième personne du singulier, en emploi explétif et emphatique, « te » de « je te vous ponds [mon introduction] », et du pluriel, « vous », montre l’implication affective de l’auteur. « Pondre », au sens figuré et familier, aussi péjoratif, signifie « écrire, produire (une œuvre, un texte) ». Souligner un certain mot, comme dans le cas d’ « avant », par l’intonation, sans s’appuyer sur l’ordre des mots, est aussi une pratique du français parlé (familier). L’adjectif « assoiffé » (qui vient du verbe « assoiffer », formé du préfixe « a- » et du nom « soif » appartient au français courant et il a ici son sens figuré (« avide »).

La structure de la phrase interrogative « Je chauffe, comprenez-vous ? » n’est pas celle de la norme, car il n’y a aucune marque lexicale de l’interrogation (le périphrase interrogative courante « est-ce que »), il y a seulement l’intonation qui nous montre l’interrogation (ce procédé est caractéristique de la langue familière). Même si l’inversion du sujet dans « comprenez-vous » est une marque de l’interrogation appartenant au français soigné l’ordre des deux phrases qui forment l’interrogation est inversée, ce qui est marqué par la virgule (qui signale une pause emphatique). Au lieu d’une phrase principale et une phrase subordonnée complétive directe (Comprenez-vous que je chauffe ?), on a deux phrases principales coordonnées par juxtaposition (mais on sait qu’une d’elles est logiquement subordonnée à l’autre). Le verbe intransitif « chauffer » dans la première phrase est un terme courant, et San-Antonio l’emploi au sens figuré qui n’existe pas dans Le Petit Robert ; « Je chauffe » signifie « Ceci [l’introduction] n’est qu’un prélude ».

En décrivant ce prélude, l’auteur utilise les expressions : « [on] bavarde un chouille », « [on] déconne à vide, à blanc ». « Bavarder », verbe intransitif du français courant (qui a le sens de « parler beaucoup, de toute sorte de choses »), appliqué à son discours, nous donne l’impression que l’introduction est un simple jeu de virtuosité linguistique, sana autre but sauf la plaisanterie. Le nom « chouille » n’existe pas dans Le Petit Robert, mais un dictionnaire en ligne donne cette explication, tout en mentionnant que le nom est féminin : « une soirée particulièrement festive ».

« Se mettre à », comme verbe pronominal du français courant, signifie « commencer à », mais le sens du nom « l’établi » n’est pas clair ; il peut être le nom d’une « table massive sur laquelle on dispose, on fixe un ouvrage à travailler ». Alors « se mettre à l’établi » serait « commencer à faire le travail sérieux » (commencer à parle en narrateur, non pas en auteur d’une préface).

« Déconner », formé du préfixe « dé- » et de l’adjectif « con » (du français familier), signifie « dire ou faire des bêtises, plaisanter ». L’auteur en ajoute deux locutions adverbiales au sens figuré (utilisés en français courant), « à vide » et « à blanc ». Ces locutions renforcent le sens par la répétition sémantique suivante : « sans effet réel, sans effet utile ».

Ensuite, San-Antonio donne aux lecteurs la permission de « sauter », à ce qu’il paraît, c’est-à-dire qu’il consent que nous passions outre sans plus lire sa préface. Le sens figuré de « sauter » n’est pas marqué dans Le Petit Robert (qui signale l’emploi intransitif du verbe au sens propre) et on peut deviner qu’il appartient au français familier. Un autre verbe dont le sens figuré n’apparaît pas dans Le Petit Robert, mais qui est utilisé par l’auteur (en français familier), est « foncer [à] ». Cependant, le sens figuré peut être extrait du sens propre du verbe : « faire une charge à fond, se jeter impétueusement ».

On découvre une autre structure syntaxique dans «  [ (...) au « Chapitre premier »] là que commence la puissante histoire fignolée « Fleuve noir » (…) ». L’inversion du sujet (procédé syntaxique du français courant) est possible dans ce cas par la présence d’un adverbe de lieu en tête de phrase grâce à la longueur phonétique du sujet et au fait que le sujet est suivi d’une subordonnée relative. Le pronom relatif « que » de la structure «suivante : « là que commence (…) » remplace, en français familier, l’adverbe relatif « où », par décumul (décomposition de l’ensemble des valeurs du pronom relatif).

« Fignolée », adjectif du français familier, vient du verbe transitif « fignoler » (formé de « fin » et d’un suffixe obscur), qui signifie « parfaire, raffiner ».

Dans le syntagme « que je vous ci-jointe », le pronom relatif « que » est utilisé abusivement, car l’adverbe à valeur adjectivale « ci-jointe » (qui est accordé avec le nom, parce qu’il est placé après celui-ci) s ‘attache normalement au nom qu’il détermine (ici, « histoire ») sans autre élément de relation. Mais « jointe » a la forme d’un verbe (« joindre ») et « que » occupe la place d’un complément d’objet direct. Les formules « ci-jointe » et « l’assurance de mes sentiments les meilleurs » sont spécifiques au langage des lettres officielles (au français soigné). San-Antonio parodie ce langage tout comme il se moque des auteurs soi-disant « sérieux ». À « mes sentiments les meilleurs », il ajoute « et les plus juteux », pour renforcer (ou plutôt exagérer) le sens positif de « meilleurs » (l’adjectif « juteux » vient du nom « jus » et il est employé au sens figuré du français familier).

La dernière phrase du deuxième fragment, « Je m’en fâcherais pas », a la structure familière de la négation (dans laquelle manque l’élément atone, « ne ») et le verbe pronominal du français courant, « se fâcher », employé au conditionnel présent. Si on comprime les phrases suivantes : « Vous pouvez sauter. », « Foncer au ‘Chapitre premier’ (…) » et « Je m’en fâcherais pas », on obtient une phrase conditionnelle emphatique « même si vous sautez et si vous foncez au ‘Chapitre premier’, je m’en fâcherais pas. » Le caractère emphatique de ce fragment est déchiffrable dans les pauses entre les phrases. Elles fonctionnent comme des conditions, écrites en français familier, non-soutenu, sans « si » conditionnel (selon le modèle : « Tu serais gentil, tu viendrais me voir »).

En conclusion, le langage de San-Antonio a deux caractéristiques : il est une source du comique par la ressemblance parodique aux formules propres à d’autres types de textes et par le mélange du français familier, du français courant et du français soigné ; il est aussi une roche source du lexique et des procédés spécifiques au français familier.

Bibliographie

Rabelais, François. Gargantua Ed. Tineretului : Bucureşti, 1969.

Rey-Debove, Josette, Alain Rey (eds.). Le Nouveau Petit Robert de la langue française. Le                                                                 Robert : Paris, 2007

San-Antonio. La Sexualité. Éditions du Fleuve noir : Paris, 1971

Vişan, Viorel. Cours de français familier argotique. Université de Bucarest, 2008