Michael Quiniz

An Unheroic Hero: William Golding’s ‘Pincher Martin’

ILLIAM GOLDING’S Pincher Martin is a painful book to read; some, I suspect, ma:y have found it unreadable. The detailed account of a sailor’s agonized struggle for

survival, first in the sea and then on a bare rock in the Atlantic, may afflict a reader’s sensibilities or, if it fails or ceases to do that, may simply bore him. Yet it does raise some interesting questions about the nature of the novel, not the least the question of how a story, on the surface so repellent, can yet be so absorbing, Moreover, it seems to me to present, more clearly than any of Golding’s other novels, a crystallization of certain distinctive features of his imaginative vision.

Pincher Martin has achieved some celebrity because of what has seemed an odd twist at the end. The last words tell the reader that the protagonist died on the second page of the book and that he has been reading, not the story of a living man’s desperate battle for life, but an account of his experiences ”after death’. This has pro- voked some discussion and searching for analogues : Ambrose Bierce, 0. Henry and Michael Roberts have all been suggested as possibly contributing something to the idea, In view of several echoes from the poems of T. S . Eliot in the book, Phlebas the Phoenician might be added, for he too forgot “the profit and loss” and “passed the stages of his age and yo’uth” as the sea “picked his bones in whispers”; and certainly the reader is meant to consider the personal application of the story of Pincher Martin “who was once handsome and tall as you”. Such source-hunting might help to determine more precisely Martin’s situation, whether the main matter of the story was concerned with the thoughts that flashed through his mind at the moment of death or, as surely must be the case, was a description of his ‘life’ in Purgatory. Yet a decision, though helpful and interesting, would not, I think, be of funda- mental importance for an understanding of the novel, which must, and, I believe, can, stand on its own feel:. Whether or not we know about the ending, the greater part of the story must be read as an account of the experience of a living man struggling for survival in the sea and on the rock; there seems to be no other way of reading it.

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Only towards the end does this mode of reading give way to a different kind of response and it is essential for the effect of the book that the transition should be gradual. If Golding succeeds in his intention, the ‘twist’ on the last page should serve only to make us look back on our experience and recognize that our assessment of what we have been reading has indeed undergone a change. If we have really taken Golding’s point and grasped the nature of the emerging pattern, the reassessment produced by the revelation of the last line should not be very great.

Golding is here aiming at a special kind of concentration. In each of his first three novels, he has chosen a situation that allows him to strip man down to his bare essentials: almost literally so, since in each the characters wear a minimum of clothing so that we can observe more clearly the “poor, bare, fork’d animal” that is “unac- commodated man”. In Lord of the Flies a group of schoolboys are isolated on a paradisiac island and, freed from the complications of social mores, sex, and adult knowledge and intelligence, the boys gradually overthrow shallowly-rooted civilised habits for deeper barbaric insticts, the fruit apparently of Original Sin. In The Zn- heritors Golding avoids the need to strip off civilisation by taking as his subject a family of Neanderthal people. In both these cases the isolating situation is nevertheless a social one, but a social situation of a primitive kind, so that it can be argued that there is at least a partial breakdown in the correspondence between the problems of the characters in the stories and those of people living in a civilised society. This partial breakdown is not, I think, a casual accident; Golding has not yet shown himself capable of handling the subtleties of sophisticated social relationships and perhaps he never will ; this may be a limitation, but not a damning one. In Pincher Martin, however, the limitation becomes almost a virtue for he turns directly towards his deepest concern, the soul of an individual man, and the potentialities within it for either salvation or damnation. It is a lonely interest and all the novels are lonely books, though none so much so as Pincher Martin. The recollections from Pincher’s past life do seek to set his experience against a background of more or less sophisticated modern living, but only his life on the rock is vividly and convincingly represented and that spotlights the man in an isolation that can properly be called metaphysical, since in the last analysis it forces us to face questions about the nature of man as he exists beyond the level of social living.

In Lord of the Flies Golding successfully combined a twentieth- century allegory with a tremendously exciting story: some may have felt that the allegory was occasionally a little contrived, but very few can have failed to respond to the excitement and suspense of the story. His success there makes his procedure in Pincher Martin all the more surprising. Not only does he abandon the allegorical framework that enabled him to draw out his significances with

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precision and some subtlety, but he also abandons all the major ingredients of an exciting story: with only one character, there is no possibility of dramatic conflict in the normally understood sense and the setting, unlike, say, that of Robfnson Crusoe, offers little for exploitation. Instead of excitement on the narrative level, Golding draws on our odd but undeniable interest in the simple fact of human activity: as the exponents of the French anti-novel have shown, though of course with very different intentions, we can be genuinely fascinated by a detailed description of a human being performing some action. For instance, when we read the description of Pincher taking off his seaboots in the water, we mentally perform the “grim acrobatic” with him and, since this is a matter of life or death, we share something of the urgency that the activity has for him (p. 10).1 Throughout Golding achieves a remarkable precision in his descrip- tions of Martin’s physical actions and, in so far as the reader is interested in human experience per se, he can be held by such descriptions. There is, however, a very definite limit to this kind of appeal, though the limit can be extended when the actions are closely associated with physical pain and mental suffering.

Martin’s sustained agony raises a rather different kind of problem. Golding clearly felt that the terrible suffering of the man on the rock had to be established with considerabde precision and elaborate detail because it was an essential element in the total impression he wished to create. But the experience of suffering is scarcely matter for art unless it can be shown to have some meaning and purpose, however obscurely apprehended, and the demand for such explana- tion grows more urgent as the story, painful to read from the start, becomes more disgusting and humiliating. Golding has then to give meaning to Martin’s ghastly experiences without making the whole thing too blatantly symbolic and thus losing the force of the evocation of physical and mental suffering and, moreover, without sacrificing too much of the feeling of a hfe in which meaningfulness was almost overwhelmed by the minute-to-minute struggle to sur- vive.

Golding achieves a certain flexibility by telling the story in the third person which enables him on occasion to slip out of the restricted circle of the character’s own consciousness and to bring to bear on the reader a growing pressure of moral judgement. For instance, after an opening description of the man struggling in the sea, in which the effect of desperate endeavour in a whirlpool of destructive movement is brilliantly conveyed, there comes a sudden stillness, which is in fact the moment of Martin’s death:

But the man lay suspended behind the whole commotion, detached from his jerking body. The luminous pictures 1 hat were shuffled before him were drenched in light but he paid no attention to them. Could he have

‘All page references are in the Faber paper-back edition of 1960.

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controlled the nerves of his face, or could a face have been fashioned to fit the attitude of his consciousness where it lay suspended between life and death that face would have worn a snarl. But the real jaw was contorted down and distant, the mouth was slopped full. The green tracer that flew from the centre began to spin into a disc. The throat at such a distance from the snarling man vomited water and drew it in again. The hard lumps of water no longer hurt. There was a kind of truce, observation of the body. There was no face but there was a snarl. (p. 8.)

From a description of Martin’s activity in the water we turn to the question of “the attitude of his consciousness”. If this were ex- pressible, it could be described as “a snarl”; in fact, the man was not snarling because “the mouth was slopped full”. The snarl is then a ‘spiritual’ or psychological snarl, but Golding immediately takes up the metaphor as a fact and the sailor becomes “the snarling man”. Furthermore, the concentration on the word raises questions about the moral status of snarling in human beings and implies a distinction between “a face” and “a snarl” : the rest of the book might even be described, in one of its aspects anyway, as an exploration of the significance of these words. The controlling hand of the author is fairly evident here but he would be unlikely to get very far if he had to rely only on such methods. Much more than verbal hints are needed if the process of moral and spiritual self-discovery, for which the physical and mental agony of Martin is clearly meant to stand, is to be adequately presented.

Golding explains Martin’s immediate experience of himself on the rock by an ingenious but effective dissection of the whole man into a number of separate elements. At one extreme is what he calls “the centre”:

There was at the centre of all the pictures and pains and voices a fact like a bar of steel, a thing-that which was so nakedly the centre of everything that it could not even examine itself. In the darkness of the skull, it existed, a darker dark, self-existent and indestructible. (p. 45.)

For a proper understanding of Golding’s theology, a precise defini- tion of what is involved in this word ‘centre’ would, I think, be a primary requisite, but for the moment we may define it simply as the central organizing principle, that which makes a man a man; or, perhaps, the being of a man. Something of the significance of the term may be gathered from the fact that, in the earlier stages of Martin’s agony, an intermittent dissociation occurs between the ‘centre’ and the man’s body. The body is conceived of as an assem- blage of component parts which, when there is any weakening or relaxing of the grip of the central organizing principle, are liable to take on a kind of independent existence: so, for example, Martin’s hands become increasingly detached from him, looking more and more like lobsters until, in a sense, they are lobsters:

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He eyed the peculiar shapes that lay across the trousers indifferently for a while until at last it occurred to him hiow strange it was that lobsters should sit there. Then he was suddenly seized with a terrible loathing for lobsters and flung them away SO that they cracked on the rock. The dull pain of the blow extended him into them again and they became his hands, lying discarded when he had tossed them. (p. 131.)

A similar ‘objectification’ or detachment occurs with other parts of his body: the brows over his eyes, aftler the initial metaphor, are spoken of as ‘arches’, his eyes as ‘windows’, and so on. Golding uses this device, not only to evoke the sense of agony, but primarily to define the distinction between the body and that which makes a man truly a human being and to suggest the kind of dissolution with which Martin feels himself to be threatened.

One of Pincher Martin’s major endeavours on the rock is to bring these two extremes of ‘centre’ and body together and so to re- establish himself as a unified human being. The first stage in this process of ‘re-creation’ is the recognition or recollection of his own identity. The operation is slow and painful, beginning even before he kicks off his seaboots when “suddenly he knew who he was and where he was”. (p. 10.) Through the maelstrom of physical and mental affliction “the groping consciousness” struggles towards the realization that “wherever you are, you are here!” (p. 24.) He achieves a major peak in this quest when he recovers his name: looking at his identity disc, he speaks “with a kind of astonishment”: “Christopher Hadley Martin. Martin. IChris. I am what I always was.” (p. 76.) The act of speaking also signifies a material advance in his progress, for “speech is identity”. (p. 115.) “In normal life to talk out loud is a sign of insanity. Here it is proof of identity.” (p. 81.) We can, of course, enquire whether there can be true ‘talk’, or even perhaps ‘identity’, where there is no possibility of dialogue; nevertheless, speech does mark an important stage in Pincher’s advance because it is the perceptible sign of his power to think.

Pincher Martin’s recovery of the power of thought is the keystone of his ‘re-creation’ of his personality. At first it serves only as an aid to the re-assembly of his fragmented consciousness :

He had a valuable thought, not because it was of immediate physical value but because it gave him back a bit of his personality. He made words to express this thought. . . At once he was master. (p. 27.)

Later it operates more positively, though still very simply, by naming, like Adam in Genesis, the parts of the rock and thus bringing them under the control of the mind, even if not of the body. The real value of intelligence, however, is that it “sees so clearly what is to be done and can count the cost beforehand.” (p. 114.) It enables a man to evade disaster by anticipating future threats and needs, to estimate “the profit and loss” and so, in some sense, control his environment. Most important of all, intelligence can explain every- thing that happens to a man and so strip the world of mystery; as

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long as things are explicable, they are not beyond man and he remains master. “Men make patterns” and Martin’s design of seaweed on the rock is intended “to impose an unnatural pattern on nature, a pattern that would cry out to any rational beholder-Look! Here is thought. Here is man!” (p. 109.) As the pressure of inimical and destructive forces increases, Pincher asserts more and more urgently that nothing unexpected can happen to him: he knew that he would be sick and he was sick; he knew that it would rain and it did rain. “Let there be rain and there was rain.” (p. 171.) The parody of Genesis would seem to imply that such faith in reason, in the limited mechanistic sense of an understanding of causal relations, represents an assumption by man of a pseudo-divine autonomy. The first real cracks in Pincher’s defences appear only when this funda- mental conviction begins to be undermined.

The successive stages of Pincher’s struggle-taking off his sea- boots, blowing up his lifebelt, scrambling on to the rock, finding food and shelter, nursing his broken body and his tottering mind, and, above all, slowly reassembling himself as a unified human being-manifest the heroic potentiality of man battling against the alien elements.

He looked at the quiet sea. ‘I don’t claim to be a hero. But I’ve got health and education and

He may not claim to be a hero at this stage but an essential element in the effect of the whole book is the gradual building-up of Pincher Martin to heroic proportions until, in the later stages, he con- ceives himself as an archetypal hero. “He became a hero for whom the impossible was an achievement.” He describes himself as Atlas and Prometheus, while background music from Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Holst “underlined the heroism of a slow, undefeated advance against odds.” (p. 164). The exaggeration of this final heroic passage marks it clearly as parody, yet the man’s fierce and cunning struggle to survive must surely move the reader’s admira- tion, if only in the sense of ‘wonder’.2 The book seems to be con- structed on a basis of parallel but related development of two antithetic themes, the heroic theme of survival against all odds and an anti-heroic theme that depends largely on the progressive con- solidation of an adverse moral judgement in the reader’s mind.

In the account of Martin’s experiences on the rock there are several pressures urging a modification of the reader’s natural admiration for heroic endurance and resolution. The focus of these pressures seems to be fear: fear of facing the fact that the rock has an 21 recall from my childhood a novel of Jack London’s that presented a somewhat similar account of a man’s almost incredible ability to hang on to life and I can even recall something of the heroic quality with which this tenacity invested the man.

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intelligence. 1’11 beat you.’ (p. 77.)

uncanny resemblance to a tooth, fear of facing the possibility that he might not survive, that all his efforts are pointless and his faith in his intelligence, education and will baseless. In other words, Martin is afraid to face the whole truth about his own situation and condition. This evasiveness hardly conforms to (our traditional ideal of the heroic. But even more disturbing is the effect created by a long- sustained battle the object of which is predominantly physical and wholly selfish: such concentration on the self and the body, no matter how intelligent and how much dictated by circumstances, ultimately tends to reduce the subject to the level of a beast, snarling at bay. Golding points the incongruity of the heroic beast by making the high point of Martin’s endeavour the giving of himself an enema : the interlacing of the grandiose orchiestration with the detailed account of this humiliating operation represents, I think, a consider- able imaginative achievement and is a good example of Golding making his effect in a way proper to the novel.

Golding was not content, however, to leave impressions as vague as this and the moral judgements implicit in the account of Martin on the rock are conceptualized more precisely in the recollections from his past life. The gradual linking of these fifteen or sixteen fragmentary memories into a more or less coherent pattern repre- sents a development parallel to Martin’s, re-creation of himself into a unified human being; they are indeed an important part of that process but ironically related to the main movement of definition, since they are so selected a5 to define hirn as a certain kind of man in adverse moral terms: one who maims a friend to avoid being beaten by him in a race on motorcycles, conducts ‘unsatisfactory’ sexual experiments with a little boy, pinches another fellow’s girl and invites him to look at her in his bed, makes love to another man’s wife, tries to seduce and almost rape a decent girl. These episodes are too brief to be imaginatively realized and their very brevity and sharply-pointed moral judgements suggest a rather crude con- ception of sin and a surprisingly selective and moral memory in Pincher. Admittedly, in the circumstances Golding had to resort to a kind of shorthand but nevertheless the relation between ‘the two lives of Christopher Martin’ (the title: of the American edition) remains tenuous.

A more effective contribution to the emerging pattern of moral judgement is made by the repetition and elaboration, almost in the manner of Shakespearean image-themes, of certain, at first sight relatively unimportant, aspects of the memories. Particularly significant is the definition, in the episode of the casting for the Morality play, of Pincher as Greed :

‘This painted bastard here takes anything he can lay his hands on. Not food, Chris, that’s far too simple. I-Ie takes the best part, the best seat, the most money, the best notice, the best woman. He was born with his mouth and his flies open and both hands out to grab. He’s a

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cosmic case of the bugger who gets his penny and someone else’s bun.’ (p. 120.)

The idea had been introduced earlier in one of Martin’s desultory meditations, though without the explicit judgement:

The whole business of eating was peculiarly significant. They made a ritual of it on every level, the Fascists as a punishment, the religious as a rite, the cannibals either as a ritual or as a medicine or as a superbly direct declaration of conquest. Killed and eaten. And of course eating with the mouth was only the gross expression of what was a universal process. You could eat with your cock or with your fists, or with your voice. You could eat with hobnailed boots or buying and selling or marrying and begetting or cuckolding . . . (p. 88.)

The competitive ethos of the modern capitalist world is here worked out in the sphere of personal relations through the same metaphor that Jonson used in Volpone and other plays and Swift in A Modest Proposal. Golding’s most symbolic statement of the nature and destiny of Greed is in the story of the Chinese box: a fish is buried in a tin box, the maggots eat it up and then eat each other until “where there was a fish there is now one huge, successful maggot”; then the Chinese dig up the box and enjoy the “rare dish”. (p. 136.) The simple parable becomes a mirror in which Martin sees the reflection of his own maggot nature; life for him was simply a matter of ‘eating’, not just in the sense of pursuing physical satisfactions but, more seriously, in the sense of conquering, killing and eating, other human beings. And this presents a major problem for him in his ‘re-creation’ of himself on the rock, for, as he explains to himself, in his past life

‘I could find assurance of my solidity in the bodies of other people by .warmth and caresses and triumphant flesh. I could be a character in a body. But now I am this thing in here, a great many aches of bruised flesh, a bundle of rags and those lobsters on the rock. . . There were other people to describe me to myself-they fell in love with me, they applauded me, they caressed this body, they defined it for me. There were the people I got the better of, people who disliked me, people who quarrelled with me. Here I have nothing to quarrel with. I am in danger of losing definition.’ (p. 132.)

For Martin existence depends on a continual assertion of the conquering will; life has no other meaning for him: hence the absolute importance for him of survival.

Pincher’s selfishness is challenged by Nat, Golding’s simple, one- dimensional symbol of goodness: he is the direct antithesis of Martin, awkward, ugly, incompetent, gauche, loving and “inner-directed”. Epitomising everything that Pincher rejects and despises and yet winning the girl whose resistance to Pincher’s appetite represents for him a permanent frustration, Nathaniel naturally becomes the object of his hate and the climax of his life comes when at last he makes the move to kill Nat. Yet, on the rock, he realizes, with

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“astonishment and terror”, that his hate was mixed with love. Nat felt that he had a special mission to perform for Pincher, to teach him “the technique of dying into heaven”:

‘Take us as we are now and heaven would be sheer negation. Without form and void . . . A sort of black lightning, destroying everything that we call life. . . ’ (pp. 70, 183.)

To a corrupt human being the experience of the pure meaningfulness and harmonious order of heaven would be utterly destructive; so men invent “a sort of heaven” for themselves “if we aren’t ready for the real one”.

At last Martin begins to “understand the pattern”. (p. 197.) All his endeavours represent an affirmation that he is a man, that man has the equipment-intelligence, education, health, will-necessary for survival as a man, that man can help himself and is not in any sense dependent. Thus, in his last dialogue with the ‘hallucination’, which has a look of Nat but is evidently a personification of God, Martin insists that he has created out of his own mind, not only this hallucination, but also God Himself:

‘On the sixth day he created God. Therefore I permit you to use nothing but my own vocabulary. In his own image created he Him.’ (p. 196.)

This is the ultimate ground of Martin’s faith in his own autonomy, a faith that is challenged explicitly by Gold’s echoing of his assertion, “You are a projection of my mind.” (p. 194.) But the real challenge comes from the form of the whole book. Since Martin asserts his own autonomy and independence, the logical and appropriate retribution is for his premises to be accepted and realized. This is the purpose of the ‘metaphysical isolation’ at which Golding has aimed; to bring his protagonist to the point where he must face his essential contingency. Golding has played God’s game. “You gave me the power to choose and all my life you led me carefully to this suffering because my choice was my own.” (p. 197.) And the essence of this suffering is the fierce hammering home of the truth that man must have something on which to operate, a rock to control, a body to nurse and use, a mind to make patterns. For Martin the final horror comes when rock, body and mind all give: way and there is left

nothing but the centre and the claws. They were huge and strong and inflamed to red. They closed on each other. They contracted. They were outlined like a night sign against the absolute nothingness and they gripped their whole strength into each other. (p. 201.)

Stripped first to the bare flesh of a scarred and crumbling body, deprived of all the aids to personal definition that society provided, and then denied even the conviction of material existence and his own rationality, Martin is reduced to a ‘centre’, an appetite for satisfactions where there are no longer any satisfactions, a will clinging fiercely, not to a rock nor even 1.0 the memory of an aching

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tooth, but simply to itself. Martin insisted that he could create his own heaven and God told him, “You have created it”. Martin’s heaven is hell.

The whole shape of Pincher Martin is dictated by a firm, even crude, conviction that “the wages of sin is death” and that man’s eternal destiny is ultimately his own responsibility. Nat represented the chance for Martin to become Christopher the Christ-bearer instead of Pincher, to become a face instead of a snarl, for his hqnds to link in prayer and not become lobster claws “huge and strong and inflamed to red” that “closed on each other” and “contracted”. But Pincher remains a demonstration of Eliot’s assertion that “the glory of man. . . is his capacity for damnation”. The assertive, selfish will that throughout the book gives Martin his heroic quality is not surrendered. He prefers his own ‘heaven’, “pain and all”, to the only alternative, “the black lightning” of submission: “I spit on your compassion!” “I shit on your heaven!” As with Macbeth, we are moved to a wondering admiration at the determination of man to assert himself, even in a context that makes that assertion eternal folly. What is challenged, in the last analysis, is our own inclination to admire a certain kind of self-assertiveness and resolution and even to give it the name of ‘heroism’.

The last paragraph of Pincher’s personal story raises questions that seem more theological than literary. The story ends with the focus, not on Pincher’s resolution, but on the activity of the Antagonist that he has defied :

The lightning crept in. The centre was unaware of anything but the claws and the threat. It focused its awareness on the crumbled serrations and the blazing red. The lightning came forward. Some of the lines pointed to the centre, waiting for the moment when they could pierce it. Others lay against the claws, playing over them, prying for a weakness, wearing them away in a compassion that was timeless and without mercy. (p. 201.)

The whole form of the story requires the acceptance of the ‘fiction’ of time in eternity; whereas traditional Christian teaching presents eternity as a static state, and the condemnation to hell or acceptance into heaven as final and immutable, even allowing for the inter- mediary state of Purgatory, the whole conception of Pincher Martin requires time to go on. The implication of these last lines seem to be that eventually the black lightning of God will succeed in breaking the grip of the claws and Martin’s resolution will break and he will submit to God. One is left wondering, however, what he has got to bring to heaven, after the destruction or negation of everything that went to make him a human personality. But this no doubt is a purely theological question and, whatever the explanation, these closing lines present a sufficiently mysterious, impressive and faintly opti- mistic ending-some small consolation for the agony we have endured.

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