Modern literature and education Literary modernism Postmodernism Feminist literature

The Inheritors
The Inheritors is a work of prehistoric fiction and the second novel, published in 1955, by the British author William Golding, best known for Lord of the Flies. It concerns the extinction of one of the last remaining tribes of Neanderthals at the hands of the more sophisticated Homo sapiens.
Plot introduction
This novel is an imaginative reconstruction of the life of a band of Neanderthals. It is written in such a way that the reader might assume the group to be modern Homo sapiens as they gesture and speak simply among themselves, and bury their dead with heartfelt, solemn rituals. They also have powerful sense impressions and feelings, and appear sometimes to share thoughts in a near-telepathic way. As the novel progresses it becomes more and more apparent that they live very simply, using their considerable mental abilities to connect to one another without extensive vocabulary or the kinds of memories that create culture. They have wide knowledge of food sources, mostly roots and vegetables. They chase hyenas from a larger beast's kill and eat meat, but they don't kill mammals themselves. They have a spiritual system centring on a female principle of bringing forth, but their lives are lived so much in the present that the reader realizes they are very different from us, living in something like an eternal present, or at most a present broken and shaped by seasons.
One of the band, Lok, is a point of view character. He is the one we follow as one by one the adults of the band die or are killed, then the young are stolen by the "new people," a group of early modern humans. Lok and Fa, the remaining adults, are fascinated and repelled by the new people. They observe their actions and rituals with amazement, only slowly understanding that harm is meant by the sticks of the new people.
The humans are portrayed as strange, godlike beings as the neanderthals witness their mastery of fire, Upper Palaeolithic weaponry and sailing.
All save the last chapters of the novel are written from the Neanderthals' stark, simple stylistic perspective. Their observations of early human behaviour serve as a filter for Golding's exercise in paleoanthropology, in which modern readers will recognize precursors of later human societal constructs, e.g., religion, culture, sacrifice and war.
The penultimate chapter employs an omniscient viewpoint, observing Lok. For the first time, the novel describes the people the reader has been inhabiting through the first-person perspective. Lok, totally alone, gives up in despair.
In the final chapter, we move to the point of view of the new race, more or less modern humans fleeing in their boats, revealing that they are terribly afraid of the Neanderthals (whom they believe to be devils of the forest) and of pretty much everything around. This last chapter, the only one written from the humans' point of view, reinforces the inheritance of the world by the new species.
The fleeing humans carry with them an infant Neanderthal, of whom they are simultaneously afraid and enamoured, hinting at the later hypothesis of inter-breeding between Neanderthals and modern humans.
3. An allegory falls in line with the moral of a story. While an allegory is a story, poem, or picture, it's used to reveal a hidden meaning or message, like the moral. Allegories are exciting because they use characters and events to convey a meaning. They don't just come right out and say it.
It's fun to sniff out the artist's intent and see what you can walk away with after you've read a piece of writing or studied a piece of art. It's safe to say the creator's intent is always to inspire, whether that's to elicit an emotional response or get you to think about something in a new or different way.
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding presents allegories about society, morality, and religion, to name a few. Specifically, the island represents the whole world, the conch stands for law and order, and the fire represents hope and destruction.
The novel "Lord of the Flies" can certainly be considered an allegory. Each character represents a different part of human nature. Simon is the best in all of us. He could be considered the "Christ like " figure. Ralph is our reason and Jack is our animalistic side. The head of a pig on the stake is even referenced as the devil. According to Enotes references to literary terms an allegory is
"an extended metaphor in which a person, abstract idea, or event stands for itself and for something else. It usually involves moral or spiritual concepts which are more significant than the actual narrative."
Keeping this in mind we can easily see that the concepts and details in this novel create the allegory. Being familar with Golding's philosophy also aids in the understanding of the underlying meanings. Golding is trying to say that mankind, when left to his own devices will become animalistic to survive. Each human being has a dark side and an ability to return to our basic roots when threatened.
William Golding explores the rational and the spiritual experience in a moment of crisis in a fabulous setting through the protagonists who are posed as binary opposites. He was concerned with larger, more fundamental and abstract issues that may be called metaphysical and theological. The theme he found of his first novel is to trace harsh diagrams of human history.
An exploration of the man's mind from superficial consciousness to the most hidden recesses of
the unconscious depth is most succinctly carried out. The dialogue between the scientist and the mystic is juxtaposed in a number of characters and the conflict seems to resolve itself in Golding’s story which comes through shifting point of view, differing symbols and metaphors.
Given the somber purpose, symbols and metaphors have been powerful tools played upon the characters and settings to present allegorical truth obliquely against plane statement which reverberates within as lasting myth, and never to cease its guarding light. ‘Darkness’ has been his
recurrent symbol which as a type manifests itself at varying degree in different situations.
In each novel Golding creates a unique world with fabulous settings for a meaningful action to be completed by its protagonists. They face a crisis moment in their new world where life is put to litmus test for its meanings .Perhaps, the allegorical significations assert themselves through differing symbols in a moment of crisis. The symbols are all traditional within natural surroundings such as, the sea, the rock, the black lightening, lens, night, day, storm, lightning, the fire the forest and so on, so that the readers could at once relate those from their obvious meaning to their allegorical correspondence. Keene affirms, “Mr. Golding is interested in the moment of awareness, the time of solitude, Privation, when real human nature asserts itself, when the human condition becomes plain, and when the necessity of a truth becomes so painful that it cannot be ignored”(6).
In Golding’s view, the human impulse toward essential goodness, or a bent of civilized mind is not as deeply rooted as the human impulse toward evil and savagery. Unlike all the other boys on the island, Simon acts morally not out of guilt or shame but because he believes in the inherent value of morality. Sammy’s moment of fall is more mythic rather than a scientific or historical fall. Simon, the epileptic boy, makes communion with the beast that is inside all human being and his discovery accost his life. The sea symbolizes as the infinity where his body gets washed away and a hallowed presence by the moonlight spreads across in a surrealistic manner.
Piggy’s lens, one is broken and the other representing Science or Reason brings fire. The broken one is lost wisdom and the next one brings the myth of progress that engulfs the whole world into atomic fire.
Ralph while cry for the end of innocence brings back the civilizing instincts. The readers come to know of Martin’s death only at the last moment as the final sentence of the novel reads, "He didn't even have time to kick off his sea boots"(PM 214).The sea as a symbol of infinity celebrates Simon’s hallow while denies Martin’s Satanic struggle to survive on solipsistic rock. The ‘Rockall’ has been “a near miss" and turned into nothingness. Martin’s case is a classic predicament of the soul pitched against God. At the outset of the novel Martin seeks his lost world, but he was so brazenly depraved that he puts his hands before his eyes and searches for light. ‘Rockall’ on what he held on to as a decomposed body is the limit, a negation of self-less dying. The flashback shows that the rock seems to him the most familiar as it sprang from his mind’s limit. He avoids the word ‘dead’ as it heightens his fear against his solipsistic ego, against surrendering to God which has stark contrast against his spiritual friend Nathanael’s will to surrender to God. Golding’s binary world has always put binary characters in sharp contrast only to resolve the dialectic through the tortuous journey and experiences of living, rather than a plain statement of synthesis. The last novel the Double Tongue (1994) reflects two binary characters namely Ionides and Arieka, both dialectically opposite, yet, they can be explained in terms of modern science of physics or chemistry as the former’s name begins with ion which may be positively or
negatively charged particle. Where as Arieka is free air which accommodates all the gaseous substances and floating particles. Air is one of the most essential elements for life to germinate and pull on. Arieka has fulfilled her scientifically assigned task to this world while accommodating the mundane and the quintessential together. Ionides has ever been differently charged as while editing the LF and scrapping the matters of Simon as a divine presence in the book, he took to negative charge, though it was his limits.
The title Double Tongue is justified in terms of Ionides’ approach to the world. He knew that Arieka would not concoct any truth, where as he is apt in it. He wants Arieka to speak out in his agreement and if not, he is ready to pass them as his own even though people say, “Ionides is a false priest and should be destroyed here and now” (84).He clarifies his position, “I speak with the tongues of men. You should speak with the tongues of Holy Messengers” (84).Immediately the omniscient narrator makes the double standard of Ionides clear, “But-’and here he smiled his wonderful, sad smile-‘If we can not have the one let us at least have the other’ (84). Nathaniel too speaks as a holy messenger, “Take us as we are now and heaven would be sheer negation. Without form and void. You see? A sort of black lightning, destroying everything that we call life-"(Pincher Martin: 234).Martin in his attempt to deny this black lightening is drawn to conversing with God the way Sammy in the Free Fall questioned his moment of fall, “You gave me the power to choose and all my life you led me carefully to this suffering because my choice was my own"(253).Keene comments here, “Who else can it be but God? What happens in purgatory is also a reflection of what happens on earth. The futility of
Martin's efforts to avoid his real condition is an image of the futility of purely humanist answers to existence. For example: ‘But time had infinite resource and what had at first been a purpose became grey and endless and without hope. He began to look for hope in his mind but the warmth had gone or if he found anything it was an Intellectual and bloodless ghost’"(7).
Sammy in Free Fall could focuses on the crucial moment of his fall, at last, making the gap between his being and the action of his becoming more explicit. He repeatedly asks himself:
when did he lose or alienate his freedom, when did he fall from his childhood state or grace? The loss of freedom and the fall of man are one and the same event which Sammy Mount joy is predestined by his ironical name. As he goes to bid farewell to school, Nick suggests him to pursue his free will. His headmaster gives him the parting advice: “If you want something enough, you can always get it provided you are willing to make the appropriate sacrifice.
Something, anything. But what you get is never quite what you thought; and sooner or later the sacrifice is always regretted (Free Fall: 235).
The allegorical world of the Inheritors (1955) moves around the binary world of the Homo sapiens (new men) and the primitive people in pre -historic period of time in which the crafty people annihilate the pre-historic innocent tribe for a mark of their scientific progress.
Martin enacts the same drama of the new men as he too plans the murder of Nathaniel by swerving the ship at mid sea and the result is his own annihilation as the torpedo strikes his ship. The so called civilized Homo sapiens, now, are beset with world wars and a constant threat of extinction amid a host of socio-economic and geo-political condition even in the 21st century. A close analyses of the characters show that all the protagonists cried for freedom. What we want out of our knowledge is freedom. A universal cry of freedom is heard from every one, from every breast, from every nooks and corners. Sammy, Matty, Simon- all cried for the same freedom. But the whole problem lies with the ‘I’. The questions are answered at the end of the chapter on Pincher Martin. So long as one cannot free oneself of the ‘I’, of the burden of the finite consciousness, one continues to be guilty and ‘fall down’ (251). His nature continues to be flawed and guilt ridden. But once he is purged of his ego, as Sammy in the prison cell, he can regain the wholeness of his being and see harmony all around. Professor Subba Roa comments here that: “However, such moment of revelation cannot… save from self condemnation and provide an enduring inner harmony” (66). Sammy comes closer to Matty and Jocelin in his tragic awareness of the ‘natural chaos of existence’. Matty stands for ‘good’ in Darkness Visible but the novel shows Good and Evil as completely independent, the one incapable of existing without the other. The central movement within the novel is towards reconciliation, and “the idea of unity is pervasive throughout the novel” (Sinfield: 165).
Golding is primarily a religious novelist. His central theme is to find a relationship of man to the universe and through the universe to God. Irrational faith, ignorance and material progress have obscured our vision. The root cause of man’s fall is spiritual blindness which has made man stranger to himself. His moral view that man is basically a fallen creature is hardly inseparable from the doctrine of original Sin. This concept may be disputable but what can not be denied is the depth and seriousness of this purpose and the sharp reality of our response to it.
Golding has made his task to break down all false illusion: “his creed is that of the Delphic Oracle, Know yourself.” (McCarron: 78).It is self-knowledge made explicit through his allegorical fictional world.
Though not an exclusively prolific writer, and also not the one amazingly popular outside of Britain apart from his success with Lord of the Flies, William Golding was recognized worldwide as one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. His success is mostly due to the universality of his themes and because he wrote what he wanted to write regardless of what the popular market wanted. In his novels, he never avoided exploration of the dark sides of human-beings, showing the uncomfortable parts of ourselves. As I have already mentioned – on a basis of the quotation from Alexander:
William Golding […] is a name likely to last, and not only for Lord of the Flies, a fable about a party of boys from a Cathedral Choir School marooned on a Pacific island. A teacher, Golding knew something of boys, and his strong tale is believably reported through the eyes and idioms of Piggy, Ralph, Simon, Jack and Co. As com­mander of a rocket ship in the Royal Navy, Golding also knew something of how people behave in emergencies.
His novels, such as Lord Of The Flies, The Inheritors, or Darkness Visible, are thoroughly deep, straightforward portraits of the darkness in human’s soul. His stories push normal characters to the edge of existence, where we are able watch the ugliest parts of them emerge.
On the other hand, the author of these books was a gentle man, who was called by his own students “Scruff”, while he was teaching at Bishop Wordsworth’s School. He was an extremely learned man, with a sharp wit and sense of humour, also - with knowledge and concern over mankind’s fate in the face of atomic weapons and the smashing power of ecological disaster yet to come. The winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature, William Golding is definitely among the most popular and influential British authors to have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century.
LECTURE 12. PECULIARITIES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE XX - XXI CENTURIES
PLAN:

1. 
   New principles of development of English literature (issues of defining the concept of "Englishness").
   
2. 
   The eclecticism of artistic style
   
3. 
   Neovictorian novels.
   
4. 
   The difference between English literature and literature in English
   

The 20th century opened with great hope but also with some apprehension, for the new century marked the final approach to a new millennium. For many, humankind was entering upon an unprecedented era. H.G. Wells’s utopian studies, the aptly titled Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1905), both captured and qualified this optimistic mood and gave expression to a common conviction that science and technology would transform the world in the century ahead. To achieve such transformation, outmoded institutions and ideals had to be replaced by ones more suited to the growth and liberation of the human spirit. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the accession of Edward VII seemed to confirm that a franker, less inhibited era had begun.
Many writers of the Edwardian period, drawing widely upon the realistic and naturalistic conventions of the 19th century (upon Ibsen in drama and Balzac, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Eliot, and Dickens in fiction) and in tune with the anti-Aestheticism unleashed by the trial of the archetypal Aesthete, Oscar Wilde, saw their task in the new century to be an unashamedly didactic one. In a series of wittily iconoclastic plays, of which Man and Superman (performed 1905, published 1903) and Major Barbara (performed 1905, published 1907) are the most substantial, George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate upon the principal concerns of the day: the question of political organization, the morality of armaments and war, the function of class and of the professions, the validity of the family and of marriage, and the issue of female emancipation. Nor was he alone in this, even if he was alone in the brilliance of his comedy. John Galsworthy made use of the theatre in Strife (1909) to explore the conflict between capital and labour, and in Justice (1910) he lent his support to reform of the penal system, while Harley Granville-Barker, whose revolutionary approach to stage direction did much to change theatrical production in the period, dissected in The Voysey Inheritance (performed 1905, published 1909) and Waste (performed 1907, published 1909) the hypocrisies and deceit of upper-class and professional life.
Many Edwardian novelists were similarly eager to explore the shortcomings of English social life. Wells—in Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900); Kipps (1905); Ann Veronica (1909), his pro-suffragist novel; and The History of Mr. Polly (1910)—captured the frustrations of lower- and middle-class existence, even though he relieved his accounts with many comic touches. In Anna of the Five Towns (1902), Arnold Bennett detailed the constrictions of provincial life among the self-made business classes in the area of England known as the Potteries; in The Man of Property (1906), the first volume of The Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy described the destructive possessiveness of the professional bourgeoisie; and, in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907), E.M. Forster portrayed with irony the insensitivity, self-repression, and philistinism of the English middle classes.
These novelists, however, wrote more memorably when they allowed themselves a larger perspective. In The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), Bennett showed the destructive effects of time on the lives of individuals and communities and evoked a quality of pathos that he never matched in his other fiction; in Tono-Bungay (1909), Wells showed the ominous consequences of the uncontrolled developments taking place within a British society still dependent upon the institutions of a long-defunct landed aristocracy; and in Howards End (1910), Forster showed how little the rootless and self-important world of contemporary commerce cared for the more rooted world of culture, although he acknowledged that commerce was a necessary evil. Nevertheless, even as they perceived the difficulties of the present, most Edwardian novelists, like their counterparts in the theatre, held firmly to the belief not only that constructive change was possible but also that this change could in some measure be advanced by their writing.
Other writers, including Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, who had established their reputations during the previous century, and Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Edward Thomas, who established their reputations in the first decade of the new century, were less confident about the future and sought to revive the traditional forms—the ballad, the narrative poem, the satire, the fantasy, the topographical poem, and the essay—that in their view preserved traditional sentiments and perceptions. The revival of traditional forms in the late 19th and early 20th century was not a unique event. There were many such revivals during the 20th century, and the traditional poetry of A.E. Housman (whose book A Shropshire Lad, originally published in 1896, enjoyed huge popular success during World War I), Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden represents an important and often neglected strand of English literature in the first half of the century.

The most significant writing of the period, traditionalist or modern, was inspired by neither hope nor apprehension but by bleaker feelings that the new century would witness the collapse of a whole civilization. The new century had begun with Great Britain involved in the South African War (the Boer War; 1899–1902), and it seemed to some that the British Empire was as doomed to destruction, both from within and from without, as had been the Roman Empire. In his poems on the South African War, Hardy (whose achievement as a poet in the 20th century rivaled his achievement as a novelist in the 19th) questioned simply and sardonically the human cost of empire building and established a tone and style that many British poets were to use in the course of the century, while Kipling, who had done much to engender pride in empire, began to speak in his verse and short stories of the burden of empire and the tribulations it would bring.
No one captured the sense of an imperial civilization in decline more fully or subtly than the expatriate American novelist Henry James. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881), he had briefly anatomized the fatal loss of energy of the English ruling class and, in The Princess Casamassima (1886), had described more directly the various instabilities that threatened its paternalistic rule. He did so with regret: the patrician American admired in the English upper class its sense of moral obligation to the community. By the turn of the century, however, he had noted a disturbing change. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and What Maisie Knew (1897), members of the upper class no longer seem troubled by the means adopted to achieve their morally dubious ends. Great Britain had become indistinguishable from the other nations of the Old World, in which an ugly rapacity had never been far from the surface. James’s dismay at this condition gave to his subtle and compressed late fiction, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), much of its gravity and air of disenchantment.
James’s awareness of crisis affected the very form and style of his writing, for he was no longer assured that the world about which he wrote was either coherent in itself or unambiguously intelligible to its inhabitants. His fiction still presented characters within an identifiable social world, but he found his characters and their world increasingly elusive and enigmatic and his own grasp upon them, as he made clear in The Sacred Fount (1901), the questionable consequence of artistic will.
Another expatriate novelist, Joseph Conrad (pseudonym of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, born in the Ukraine of Polish parents), shared James’s sense of crisis but attributed it less to the decline of a specific civilization than to human failings. Man was a solitary, romantic creature of will who at any cost imposed his meaning upon the world because he could not endure a world that did not reflect his central place within it. In Almayer’s Folly (1895) and Lord Jim (1900), he had seemed to sympathize with this predicament; but in Heart of Darkness (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911), he detailed such imposition, and the psychological pathologies he increasingly associated with it, without sympathy. He did so as a philosophical novelist whose concern with the mocking limits of human knowledge affected not only the content of his fiction but also its very structure. His writing itself is marked by gaps in the narrative, by narrators who do not fully grasp the significance of the events they are retelling, and by characters who are unable to make themselves understood. James and Conrad used many of the conventions of 19th-century realism but transformed them to express what are considered to be peculiarly 20th-century preoccupations and anxieties.