1In The Inheritors, Golding reconstructs one of the most controversial encounters in anthropological history, that between Neanderthal man and Homo sapiens. Debate still goes on as regards the reasons for the Neanderthals’ disappearance; some scientists even claim that the species may have become extinct without ever meeting the Homo sapiens, the last being simply better equipped to adapt to the environment. In Golding’s revision of the “survival of the fittest” thesis, Neanderthal would probably have survived, had he not come across the other tribe. We are led to understand that the survival of Homo sapiens was due to their greater linguistic mastery, as symbolical language provided them with an imaginative and anticipating power against which the other tribe, limited to pure immediacy, did not stand a chance.
2The Inheritors seems to offer a reconstruction of linguistic history from the birth of language among the Neanderthals (who are only discovering its power) to its total mastery and dexterous use as a tool in the other society. We learn that symbolical language grants man a power that is both liberating and enslaving. What makes this novel so specific however is that this reconstruction is achieved by the readers themselves. Indeed, there is no such thing as a narrator-historian explaining the passage from a pre-linguistic vision of the world to a symbolical one. Language, as it were, narrates its own story. The reader has no other choice but to rely on language. There is nonetheless a tragical irony that underlies the reconstruction: indeed through his aesthetic choices, Golding both makes possible the reconstruction of a pre-symbolical Neanderthalian perception of the world and inescapably condemns the transparent communicative mode that characterises the primitive tribe. Golding’s aesthetics both retrieves and dooms the lost vision.
3In his second novel, Golding seems to give us a fictional course in linguistic anthropology. He acquaints us with the Neanderthal world of presence and transparency in which comprehension is tacit and immediate. The primitive tribe uses gestures or telepathy to communicate. In this sentence, Lok, one of the Neanderthal tribe, does not need words to make Fa understand his meaning: “[Lok] spread his arms to indicate the completeness of that absence, saw that she understood, and dropped them again”. Language is perceived as an artificial supplement hindering the union of the souls. The Neanderthals perceive things under the guise of “pictures” that help them “think” the world. The primitive picture seems to occupy an intermediary position between the thing and its representation. It does not re-present life, it grasps it. More precisely, as Charles De Paolo explains, the stimuli the Neanderthals receive from the external world are transformed into “larger constructs called precepts”. The Neanderthals seem to be stuck at this “preceptual level” as they fail to reach the last level where precepts are organized into concepts and when “cognition occurs” (De Paolo 428). Able to process what they experience, the Homo sapiens have reached the conceptual level. The objects they use, belonging to the semantic field of sailing, have acquired linguistic precision; they have been given the names we have inherited: “stern”, “dugout”, “paddle”, “sail”, “bilge”, “boat”, “aft”, “balaying pins” (chapter 12).
- 1 Language can only acquire its symbolic power at the expense of a loss, that of the represented thin (...)
4Unlike concepts, “pictures” preclude any distance. The fullness of the picture prevents Fa from extracting meaning: “She paused, frustrated by the vivid detail of her picture, not knowing how to extract from it the significance she felt was there” (Golding 62). Being dependent on the world, the image is always particular: it thus lacks the generality and transferability of concepts. If the language of pictures or gestures is more faithful to the thing represented, it is deprived of the freedom that makes spoken language so powerful: the picture does not allow any displacing or transferring of signifiers from one situation to another. Ernst Cassirer makes clear that the mobility of signs is to be opposed to the fixedness of images: “the goal of repetition is in identity, that of the linguistic designation is in difference” (Cassirer 135, my translation). Symbolic language allows its speakers to distance themselves from specific situations and, in so doing, it opens up space, broadening perception. Lok is surprised to see the new people standing up and looking in the distance: “They did not look at the earth but straight ahead” (Golding 143). Language sets the body free: “They did not gesticulate much nor dance out their meanings as Lok and Fa might have done but their lips puttered and flapped” (145). By contrast, focused on the immediately present, the “pictures” of the primitive tribe are in the end constraining imitations in Ernst Cassirer’s terms: “Imitation as such is the opposite of all free form of spiritual activity. Within it the self remains captive to impressions and to the outside world” (Cassirer 132). Golding seems to illustrate here how symbolical language has freed man from the determinism he was condemned to. Because the Homo sapiens are not limited to immediacy through imitative pictures, they can talk about something in its absence and thus develop a form of memory1. They can also imagine a situation other than the one they have under their eyes. With this anticipation power however comes a fear of the future that the Neanderthals are devoid of: as Jeanne Murray Walker underlines, “whereas Lok experiences everything, even the most abstract thought, as a visceral, physical event in the present, the New Men experience it as obsession about alternatives or worry about the future” (Walker 305). Lok’s surprise at the other tribe’s food provisions is therefore understandable: having no linguistic conception of time, there is no such thing as a “tomorrow” for him. Thus anticipating on future food shortage makes absolutely no sense: “Why should the people bring all this food–he could see the pale fungi clear across the river–and the useless wood with it? They were people without pictures in their heads” (103).
5Drawing on Todorov’s analyses of language in La Conquête de l’Amérique: la question de l’autre, we could say that the Neanderthalian picture is always part and parcel of its “object”, whereas the Homo sapiens’ messages are borne by their “purposes” (Todorov 154): the Neanderthal picture has no objectives, it does not aim at anything new; on the contrary, it finds its source within the pre-established order it conforms to. The image indeed often stems from a situation they have already encountered, serving as a reference point to deal with a new difficulty. On the opposite, the Homo sapiens’ discourse aims at obtaining a result: “[It] is not determined by the object it describes nor by its conformity to a tradition but solely builds itself in regard to the objective it seeks to achieve” (Todorov 151, my translation). Golding seems indeed to have well perceived the pragmatic dimension of language. In the Homo sapiens tribe, language has become a weapon designed to master the world and to manipulate the others. It is not solely a liberating force, it is also a mastering, enslaving device used by the new civilisation. The language of the Homo sapiens is indeed described as inherently violent to world and man. It seems responsible for the establishment of a hierarchical society dominated by the old man (Marlan). The orders he gives linguistically subordinate the new people who reluctantly obey him. In the Homo sapiens world, language seems to have condemned any harmonious communion between human beings. By contrast, the orders given by the old man in the Neanderthal community are not perceived as constraining authority: rather, they are injunctions that have an immediate performative power: “When the word had been said it was as though the action was already alive in performance” (37). They are naturally accepted because they are not the expression of some power exercised at the expense of the other. The Neanderthals show respect for one another and live in “complementarity” with the world, as Eugene Enriquez recalls about the primitive tribes: “The ‘primitive’ has thus managed—what western rationality tends to make us forget—to preserve deep links (Lévy-Bruhl would say participatory links) with the world and to live in complementarity and not antagonism with it” (Enriquez 336). Reconstructing the history of language acquisition and development, Golding brings our attention to the fact that the language we have inherited probably ensured our survival (over the Neanderthals) but it has estranged us both from nature and from one another.
6In the very act of reading, we unknowingly operate the transition from a pre- linguistic world to a symbolic one. We indeed play an active part in the reconstruction of this linguistic history. As there is no omniscient narrator in The Inheritors resorting to some metalanguage warning us when we move from one camp’s point of view to the other, the only clues are linguistic. It is a linguistic lens that adjusts the reader’s vision to the different narrative focuses. Language adapts itself to the context and atmosphere it depicts. The narrative does not simply describe the evolution of language: it linguistically stages it.
- 2 We are here borrowing Gilles Deleuze’s term: according to the French philosopher, writers tend to m (...)
- 3 Dreams are marked by their denial of the non-contradiction law, deploying itself on the inclusive “ (...)
7Golding was indeed brought to modify standard English to be faithful to Neanderthal perception. Mark Adriaens explains the writer’s predicament in these words: “The first obstacle that rises here is the linguistic medium itself—the English language of today—, which has already segmented and organized the world in a particular manner so that the author is forced ‘to see the universe in certain set ways, to the exclusion of other ways’. If Golding wants to insist on what is typical of the primitive’s behaviour, he will have to compel language to conform to the mode of experience by using specific techniques” (Adriaens 45). The author had to deter readers from their familiar perception of the world by dissociating them from their usual reference points. The primitive world had to be expressed by a language that defied classical linguistic norms. In The Inheritors, the linguistic frontiers that delimit the beings and objects in our world have indeed been dissolved. The Neanderthal tribe for instance makes no difference between animate and inanimate beings. The branch possesses its own strength: “the bough shot away”. In this minorization2 of the standard ideological language, the reader is forced to relinquish her usual way of perceiving things. The new semantic distribution brings about modifications at the syntactic level as well, through the associations of categories that we would normally keep separate. In the sentence “Lok sat between him and the wind”, the reader would have expected another character after “and”, in parallel with the first one. The syntactic leveling of elements traditionally belonging to different spheres is a linguistic rendering of the symbiosis that exists between man and nature in the Neanderthal world. Lexical categories are linked by a simple “and” that suggests no hierarchy: “leaving a void of air between them and the smoke and the island” (24). Thus, as in dreams, the conjunction “and” allows the coexistence of what our logic would command us to separate3.
- 4 I am here drawing on Paul Ricœur’s definition of metaphor as tension (Paul Ricœur, La Métaphore viv (...)
8Golding makes us see and hear a forgotten pre-deductive originary mode of being and seeing. What could sound like a metaphor to the reader is in fact the Neanderthals’ natural way of perceiving things. If metaphor is usually based on a tension-torsion of meaning in which the thing both is and is not what the metaphor refers to4, in The Inheritors this tension disappears: literal and figurative meaning cannot be distinguished. Moreover, as metaphors tend to break up usual collocations and operate novel connections, they are particularly apt to translate the Neanderthals’ decompartmentalized way of perceiving the world. That is why light can flow and obscurity swarm in the primitive vision: “then there was a flood of firelight to wrestle with the swarm of darkness under the still, bright sky” (165). In bringing together heterogeneous elements, metaphors tend to appeal to several senses: this again is particularly apt to describe Neanderthal man whose senses are all convened simultaneously: “linguistically speaking there is a kind of fluctuation between two spheres, an interpenetration of two lexical fields (e.g. lexical field of sight and of touch)” (Adriaens 50). The senses (sight and touch) but also the sensations are solicited in the “burning water”, “chilly sunlight”, “there was a kind of darkness in the air”, “the water light shivered up and down”.
9After this defamiliarization with our traditional way of perceiving, what is familiar to us surreptitiously returns. The more the Neanderthal people approach the other tribe the more indeed we recognize ourselves in the Homo sapiens. The description they give of the “new people” progressively becomes a mirror held to the reader. This projection into the familiar world of civilized man through innocent primitive eyes and language tends to push us to interpretation: it makes us inevitably resort to symbolical language. The reader cannot help conceptualizing what the narrative (still from Lok’s point of view) renders in approximate periphrases and superordinates. The signified “jewels” is bound to come to mind in the interpretation of “lines of teeth and sea-shells hung round their necks over grey, furry skin” (138). The same can be said of the tools the new tribe owns. We immediately operate the conceptual translation of “bent sticks” or “curved sticks” (bows) equipped with “twigs” (arrows) in “He held his stick by the middle as he had done when the twig flew across the river” (115). This is certainly how Golding intended it. In resorting to concepts the reader inevitably measures the gap there is between the two perceptions and realizes what symbolical language makes possible.
- 5 Hobbes indeed took up the Roman poet Plautus’ saying “homo homini lupus” in the dedicatory Epistle (...)
10Not only does symbolical language enable us to grasp things in a simple and concise concept, but it opens the way for multi-layered interpretation. In the gap it introduces between the word and the thing, it makes space for a plurality of interpretations. As a result, if the metaphors trying to capture Neanderthal perception were to be taken literally, an inversion is taking place here: we must/can apprehend metaphorically the literal meaning of the words used to describe the new tribe. Some signifiers have indeed concealed metaphorical significance. Only the reader, as a member of the symbolic order himself, can perceive it. As Peter S. Alterman specifies “the complete lack of intellectual overlay is ideal for the narrator-observer perception, for it allows the humans to be perceived as far as possible, without human prejudgments” (Alterman 7). Lok’s ingenuous viewpoint unintentionally provides a bitter denunciation of human relations. The new men are indeed compared to “wolves”, a term employed to designate a physical reality (their teeth are strangely sharp): “They were teeth that remembered wolf”(174). However, the signifier acquires an inter-textual density that only people possessing symbolical language and the form of memory it develops can decipher. The description of the new tribe in which man seems to be a wolf to man indeed echoes Hobbes’s text5.
- 6 As Camille Fort aptly puts it, “metaphors prove misunderstandings right [...]: alcohol is in close (...)
- 7 Pagden defines the Barbarian as a being with an ambiguous status between humanity and animality “vi (...)
- 8 Wells’ epigraph is a telling view of the partial attitude of the scientists at the time: “Says Sir (...)
11Other comparisons provide a disturbing comment on the civilization of which we are the inheritors. The signifier used to describe the alcohol container has grating resonance: “The sour smell of the drink from the wobbling animal rose up to Look like the decay of autumn” (160). As Camille Fort points out, the term chosen for its resemblance with something familiar in the Neanderthal world (“a wobbling animal”) turns out to be an accurate description of the effect produced by alcohol on the new people6. Under its influence, Homo sapiens does become half-man half-animal, ready to indulge in barbaric7 acts-the cannibalistic act on the little Neanderthal girl Liku for instance. Golding is here exploiting the reader’s symbolical capacity to detect deeper meaning in order to deconstruct traditional scientific history. He is ironically making use of Homo sapiens’ superior linguistic abilities to question the historical and scientific certainties on their “humanity”. In the epigraph to the book, Neanderthal man was indeed scientifically presented as the ogre far behind the bright Homo sapiens in his evolution8. Golding’s reconstruction of linguistic history makes it a heavy legacy to carry, as symbolical language, that is to say what characterises humanity, seems paradoxically to have made us less human. When Lok and Fa drink some of the humans’ “wobbling animal”, they become “savage” in an ironical reversal of the traditional categories highlighted by Paul Crawford: “The mesalliance of the ‘savage’ inheriting savagery from the progenitors of humankind is powerfully subversive” (Crawford 75). But there is some deeper irony underlying The Inheritors.
12Indeed at the heart of the novel lies some tragic irony. Golding’s deconstruction of symbolical language implies aesthetic choices that tragically condemn the very ideal transparent communication mode of the Neanderthal tribe. The communicative mode on which Golding’s novel is based precludes any communicational utopia. The author could have created a “natural” primitive language where the sounds of the words mirror the ideas they express in some absolute mimesis. On the contrary, in The Inheritors, the language supposed to mirror Neanderthal man’s transparent relationship to the world is sometimes very obscure. The writer exploits uncertainty, indeterminacy and misunderstanding to distort our usual interpretative patterns. The reader remains helpless when confronted with certain descriptions. For instance when Lok and Fa are looking for food, they meet two hyenas which have killed a doe, but things are not presented this way. The victim is straight away designated by “the kill” (52), without prior explanation. The reader is puzzled by this use of “the”, supposed to determine something we are already familiar with. The article does not relate to a previous reference here, but conveys an idea of monstration: the animal is designated thus because it is within Lok’s and Fa’s sight. The second mention is just as enigmatic: “struggling with the limp body”. Then appears the personal pronoun “her”, a clue still not precise enough to identify the victim: “A cat has sucked all her blood”. The nature of the animal is at last revealed on the next page: “[Fa] was tearing fiercely at the doe’s belly with the flake” (53). The actions are thus related as they are experienced and seen by the characters (Lok, most of the time), confounding the reader who is absent from the scene. In the first part of the novel, we are invited to suspend our interpretation.
13The narrative lines are sometimes abruptly interrupted, disconcerting the reader who is compelled to read between the discontinuous lines. In chapter 5 for example, from one paragraph to the other, we move from the description of Lok falling asleep next to the fire to the very same character’s dream. The change in aspectual form—the emergence of the preterite form in –ING—constitutes the only help given to spot the narrative rupture:
Lok’s hand was too near the fire. She bent down and moved it back to his face. He rolled right over and cried out.
Lok was running. The scent of the other was pursuing him and he could not get away [...]. He was running along the bank. (93)
14The blurring of narrative modes confronts us with difficulties in understanding similar to those experienced by the primitive tribe before the other tribe. The reader must take time to restore the continuity in the (logical, temporal, causal) ruptures, as the subordinate and relative clauses or any deep structures have been suppressed. The act of reading is characterized by interpretative hesitation or even mistakes that always already condemn the Neanderthal “linguistic” utopia. The lost transparent communicative mode the writer is trying to express is both retrieved and doomed by Golding’s aesthetics at the very same time.
15The whole novel’s tragic irony is echoed at the diegetic level. The modern conscience that emerges at the end of the novel under the features of an artist who is also a thinker, Tuami, reminds us too that the aesthetics of modernity is characterised by an opacity of communicational exchanges. Challenging the chief’s authoritarian discourse (Marlan), Tuami initiates a reconciliation with the other. His description of the “new one” (the kid stolen from the other tribe) marks the beginnings of a possible integration of the stranger. The destructive drives and power desires give way to an artistic vision. Vivani and the “new one” form a symbiotic image which is for the sculptor to carve: “The rump and head fitted each other and made a shape you could feel with your hands. They were waiting in the rough ivory of the knife-haft that was so much more important than the blade” (233). Thus if the Homo sapiens are to be held responsible for the annihilation of the other tribe (dooming it), they are also the ones who make an (artistic, aesthetic) reconciliation possible with the other (retrieving it), as stated by Jeanne Delbaere: “Man is at once destroyer and creator. Each of his conquests begins in destruction and guilt (the sharpening of the blade) and ends in creation and reconciliation (the carving of the haft)” (Delbaere 73). Vivani and the “new one” seem to be the key to a door opening onto a new level of understanding of the world: “They were an answer, the frightened, angry love of the woman, and the ridiculous intimidating rump that was wagging at her head, they were a password” (Golding 233). Yet the access to this new vision of the world still requires a linguistic device (password), which precludes a total transparent access to this vision.
16could feel with your hands. They were waiting in the rough ivory of the knife-haft that was so much more important than the blade’(233). Thus if the Homo sapiens are to be held responsible for the annihilation of the other tribe (dooming it), they are also the ones who make an (artistic, aesthetic) reconciliation possible with the other (retrieving it), as stated by Jeanne Delbaere: “Man is at once destroyer and creator. Each of his conquests begins in destruction and guilt (the sharpening of the blade) and ends in creation and reconciliation (the carving of the haft)” (Delbaere 73). Vivani and the “new one” seem to be the key to a door opening onto a new level of understanding of the world: “They were an answer, the frightened, angry love of the woman, and the ridiculous intimidating rump that was wagging at her head, they were a password” (Golding 233). Yet the access to this new vision of the world still requires a linguistic device (password), which precludes a total transparent access to this vision.
17This password is in the image of The Inheritors, a coded obscure language that the reader must try to decipher if she wants to get to a new mode of being and seeing. But these very reading efforts inherently put an end to transparent communication. Deconstructing our symbolic system still implies its existence. Playing on all the possibilities it offers means remaining within it. Thus the reconstruction through modern language can only be partially successful. As inheritors, we have to make do with this ambivalent legacy which makes possible what it destroys at the very same time.
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