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,According to the records at the Jabalpur Museum, Mangal was to be
executed on April 18, but he was hanged at Barrackpor"e (w.B)
on April
gth,
10
days earlier to prevent
the regiment harbouring ill-wili against superiors. He
was hanged in front of lndian soldiers in a ground
where a new house had been
constructed for the execution of Mangal
pandey
.
Thu;s, This is the story of the illustrious son of Bharat Mata and his
drearn of complete freedom.D
REEEBENEESj
i naia Rao, Kanthapura
,
Madras, Oxford i.Jr.:iversity
press
1994 (English tmpression
)
2 GoswamiTulsidas . Ram Charit ln4anas
,Grta
[-]ress Gorakhpur
3 Shyam'Dua .The luminous Iife of flv{angal
pandey
,
Tiny Tot Publication
,
Delhi
4 Anita Gaur: Mangal Pandey
,FABLE
TO MYTH'IN THE NOVELS
OF WILI.IAM GOLDING
*
Prakash Bhadury
prakashbhadury@grnail.com
Witiiu"n Golding as a novelist is unique among the contemporaries of
50s and he continues to be one of tre most popular
novelists in the present
century for his consistent argument with human values. Golding is termed as
allegorical novelist, fabulist, anthropologist of imagination and a myth maker.
The present paper
seeks to find the fabulist as myth maker. A detailed survey of
his fiction shows that he is deeply concerned with the moral chaos and vacuurn
of his time. ln faith, he is neither a puritan
nor a transcendentalist.
His religir:n
is based upon the interpretation of his own experience of lifetime .His noyels
dealwith the basic questions
of life, and its goal in a universe of cosmic chaos.
He has dealt with the depravity of man and
'cares
cjeepty about the condition of
hurnan Iife, and shows great compassion for men who suffer and men who sin'1.
'Myth
is an image, an action out of which truth emerges,.2 Myths is
events, happenings larger than itself. The fable is a rnoral to which fictional
circumstances must be accommodated. li's always a litile less than itself,
better than a sermon, but quite
not so real as history. So the fabulist as
*
teaches English at Kumaon Engineering College, Almora, U.p., lndia
r
Rock Pebbles / J an.-J une; 2010/P 0159
artist is half doomed from the start. Golding himself has admitted in his BBC
intervielv that:
'What
I would regard as tremendous compliment to myself would
be if someone would substitute the word
"myth"
for
"fable"3.
He feels that fable is
an invented thing on the surface whereas myth is sornething which comes oui
frorn the roots of things in its ancient sense as a key to existence. lt'-q ihe whole
meaning of life and exper!ence as a whole.
His first and most successful novel tlre l-ord of th* Flies is a gripping
story of smali school boys placed in isolation on an Edenic island beyond the
reach of adult world and let them work out archetypal patterns
of human society.
It is a technical device of coherence to rnake a perrnanent appeal to generaiions
of readers. The boat- shaped island represents all mankind on their
journey'
through iife and the snrall boys are the people at large who realize it from their
own encounter.ln The lnherdfors he made his thesis statement that our developed
consciousness is mark of guilt or else, why the innocent Neanderthais would be
extinct againsi the intelligent homo sapiens? Our experience is fragmented and
to iniegrate this !s to return to the Neanderthal people, to innocence. Modern
world and science, so io say, have glfted us the myth of progress, not
rrithout
the rival myth of universal guilt. Golding accepts guilt and evil as a necessary
condition of life; he also believes in redemption. and dlvine mercy. The characters
in his novels depict all the tensions and fragmentations The fragments fornn
part of the whole in which truth is accessible. lt's the myth of total explanation.
He sharply deviates from Hobbesian view of man .Sometimes his novels are
termed as pessimistic or dystopian. He does not espouse
'Schopenhauerian
form of pessimism'a expecting that mankind will cease to desire life and its
continuation. That man is essentially a fallen being, is not a labyrinth of self
defeating nihilism. He is closer to meliorism. He has chosen a darker version of
meliorism, for it exactly suits the gloom and vacuum through which the world
has been passing since the world war. The saving grace of Sammy Mountjoy
and of the world depicted in Free Fal/ lies in the potential for compassion and
communication. Sammy could not rnount in
joy,
rather descended into sorrow.
The whole problem was of free choice, free will and his fall is the fail of everyman.
Free fall, perhaps, is the best of the lot in which epiphany occurs at the last
moment in the darkness of a cell iir a Nazi prison
camp. ln tlre face of evil and
doom in the world hurnan being rnust do the little slhe can. Sammy did this
through his prayer. The dead Pincher Martin contrnued to hold on to tire dreary
rock in the ocean, as if he was alive, through his ravenous ego and he failed.
Rock Pebbles / J on.- J une. 2010/P.0150
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O,-e snould have hope and faith on anotherlife in anotherworld. Thus, Golding
G'eates the myth of human struggle
'with
Being, not Becoming's
Goiding maintains a constant system of symbolism that allows for
a egorrcal meaning. He has created modern fabulations which tend away from
-epresentation
of reality but returns i(:,vord actual human life by way of ethically
:c-rroiled fantasy. Allegories are a for:^n of extended metaphor in which action,
persons, meanings etc. lie outside the narrative itself. His allegories as found in
his series of novels are on man's propensity to evil as
'a
bee produces honey'6.
He deviates from the optimisrn of evolutionary progress of Darwin or Huxley. His
allegories on man's inherent imperfection are not something original, but it has
to be stated differently in different times.
Golding's vision of the world is a complex one in which a number of
conflicting ideas and philosophies exist in tension. The mutually oppoSDd ideas,
the dichotomy of good and evil are complex in their preseniation
and coexistence.
There is no straight forward answer to what man's nature is. The message in
Golding novel is not a straight forward account for; there is always an alternative
answer or solution. Human being is neithef fully rational nor fully irrational. Both
will and fate, chance or action plays its role in life. So, he creates a myth of a
concrete situation in which different conflicting ideas are in tension. The situation
is of prime importance. The process of interpretation plays a great role. The
Spire is the diagram of prayer, but built on ill gotten
money. lt also symbolizes
the phallus. The end in Jocelyn's life is both visionary and equivocal. Like his
own life he dies with unresolved tension and dies like a bird shouting, screaming
to leave behind the world of magic and incomprehension. He realizes:
'Now-l
know nothing at all.' Rifes of Passagethe first book of the trilogy won the Man
Booker award in 198Oand deals with Talbot's reversion to savagery in the wake
of isolation. ln the beginning of the Lord of the Flies Simon is quiet and retained;
he never really voices his opinion. He represents the innocence on the island as
well as a Christ like figure" His death assists in the fall of civilization and the
loss of innocence as Ralph and Jack lack the balance in coping with their
environment. He even shows this when he isolates himself in a glade in the
forest, which somewhat appears as a church. Finally, William Golding explains
the fall of civilization on the island through the boys' primitive way of life.
Golding novels are simpie in so far they deal with the primordial patterns
of human experience in a cloak of a fable. But the narratives slowly moves to
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worNds, worlds of myth to reverberaie wiihin our being to seek the pattern
the
way $ar^nmy at one stage finds no bricige yet,
seeks forgiveness and walks intc
the world of vlsicn. Rousseau, the pr:iiiicai
scientisi, pointed
eut thai society
coc"r'upts rnan whereas Gclding fable
proves
that it's man that corrupts the society.
Here iies the visionary power
of the n'ran who is now in the haiiowerj precrr.icts
of
noveiist as theologisi with his myth of total exsianation. E
REEEF-ESGE$i
1.i C.B.Cox "Cn
Lord of the Flies", Wiitiarn Gclciing;: I,Jcuets,
.tSS4
*
6Z lase
Book Sei-ies, ed" A. E Dyson
{Maerniilen,
l$95},.
2 http//jestor orgtpsst?T5.40940).
3" Frank Kermcde. "Goldrng's
intellectuatr Econarty", witiiarn Gcidiirg:
l',love!s. 1u54 --
67 ease Eock $eries, *ri" ,:r. E *1;*ori
{fllac:"nillan,
1g6si..
4 S\ii',rei': ii4tr:t;':i" "G:!cling's \,r,ie\r,,
?n i.jurn*l: C,;nrjili;.:1 ;n i:rec !:aii.,-
Wiliiam
G,;iJirg. fj1i",r:is. 1S54 -
ET ;ase t*,;:k.5icire;:.
*C.
r+
I iiv=t"1.: llMacniillan,
1
9c5
'i.
i'vlar"k r'.i:'r <eaii vleers.
aro ran
r),2e,$'\,'.':i;,ar;-
Giiij',-l.Ar,:rt,ia,
sirrcy'
Lc'i-dir-:. Falei- anC
traber.
'1 g67,
r=p
:ii
f ., A.D rleck.'Tre Gcjding Bcugl-r A:p;cir. cf i.4yti-r anc Rir-ral in Tre Lci-r r
of i-i..e Mes'. On The Novel. Ed. E
-S.
Bei,ecl iKz. Lon,jon: .-.;.M.
Deni. 1?71
ffi
$&lF#i#"fd 7
'ihe
digniiaries releasing Voi. Xlll, No. ll (July-Dec.2009
!ssue) of Rock
pebbles
on the
22nd Annuai Day celebration on 6th Dec. 2c09 at N.c. Town Hall, Jajpur Town, cdisha
Rock Pebbles / Jon.-trunz.'2OlA/P 0162