8.On several occasions Golding has stated that he has read deeply in

Greek literature and history during the past twenty years.

For most modern readers the chief obstacle in the way of proper

understanding of The Bacchae, and therefore Golding's use of it, is the

popular notion that Dionysus is nothing more than a charming god of wine.

This image descends from "the Alexandrines, and above all the Romans- with

their tidy functionalism and their cheerful obtuseness in all matters of the

spirit-who departmentalized Dionysus as 'jolly Bacchus' . . . with his

riotous crew of nymphs and satyrs. As such he was taken over from the Romans

by Renaissance painters and poets; and it was they in turn who shaped the

image in which the modern world pictures him." In reality the god was more

important and "much more dangerous": he was "the principle of animal life .

. . the hunted and the hunter-the unrestrained potency which man envies in

the beasts and seeks to assimilate." Thus the intention and chief effect of

the bacchanal was "to liberate the instinctive life in man from the bondage

imposed upon it by reason and social custom. ..." In his play Euripides also

suggests "a further effect, a merging of the individual consciousness in a

group consciousness' so that the participant is "at one not only with the

Master of Life but his fellow-worshipers . . . and with the life of the

earth."¹⁰ Dionysus was worshiped in various animal incarnations

(snake, bull, lion, boar), whatever form was appropriate to place; and all

of these were incarnations of the impulses he evoked in his worshipers. In

The Bacchae a leader of the bacchanal summons him with the incantation, "O

God, Beast, Mystery, come!" ¹¹ Agave's attack upon the lion" (her

own son) conforms to the codes of Dionysic ritual: like other gods, this one

is slain and devoured, his devotees sustained by his flesh and blood. The

terrible error of the bacchantes is a punishment brought upon the land by

the lord of beasts: "To resist Dionysus is to repress the elemental in one's

own nature; the punishment is the sudden collapse of the inward dykes when

the elemental breaks through perforce and civilization

vanishes."¹²

9. In Ovid's Metamorphoses the bacchantes see Pentheus in the form of a

boar.

10. E. R. Dodds, Euripides Bacchae, Second Edition (Oxford: The

Clarendon Press, 1960), p. xii and p. xx. Dodds also finds evidence that

some Dionysian rites called for human sacrifice.

11. From the verse translation by Gilbert Murray.

This same humiliation falls upon the innocents of Lord of the Flies. In

their childish pride they attempt to impose an order or pattern upon the

vital chaos of their own nature, and so they commit the error and "sin" of

Pentheus, the "man of many sorrows." The penalties, as in the play, are

bloodshed, guilt, utter defeat of reason. Finally, they stand before the

officer, "a semicircle of little boys, their bodies streaked with colored

clay, sharp sticks in their hands."¹³ Facing that purblind

commander (with his revolver and peaked cap), Ralph cries "for the end of

innocence, the darkness of man's heart" (186-87); and the tribe of vicious

hunters joins him in spontaneous choral lament But even Ralph could not

trace the arc of their descent, could not explain why it's no go, why things

are as they are; for in the course of events he was at times among the

hunters, one of them, and he grieves in part for the appalling ambiguities

he has discovered in his own nature. He remembers those strange, interims of

blindness and despair when a "shutter" clicked down over his mind and left

him at the mercy of his own dark heart. In Ralph's experience, then, the

essence of the fable is spelled out: he suffers the dialectic we must all

endure, and his failure to resolve it as we would wish demonstrates the

limitations which have always plagued the species.

In the first hours on the island Ralph sports untroubled in the

twilight of childhood and innocence, but after he sounds the conch he must

confront the forces he has summoned to the granite platform beside the sunny

lagoon. During that first assembly he seems to arbitrate with the grace of a

young god (his natural bearing is dignified, princely) and, for the time

being, a balance is maintained. The difficulties begin with the

dream-revelation of the child distinguished by the birthmark. The boy tells

of a snakelike monster prowling the woods by night, and at this moment the

seed of fear is planted. Out of it will grow the mythic beast destined to

become lord of the island. Rumors of his presence grow. There is a plague of

haunting dreams-the first symptom of the irrational fear which is "mankind's

essential illness."