nobel prizes in literature

8/14/2019 Nobel Prizes in Literature

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Colegiul National "Elena Ghiba-birta" Arad

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Nobel Prizes in Literature

Profesor coordonatorCamelia Sasu Candidat

Mariana RacXII E


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2008

Table of contents

Introduction.3

II John Steinbeck..4

III Ernest Hemingway..14

IV Thomas Stearns Elliot.23

V William Golding35

Prcis..

Bibliography..........

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Introduction

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been honoring men and women from all corners of th

globe for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and for work i peace. The foundations for the prize were laid in 1895 when Alfred Nobel wrote his last wileaving much of his wealth to the establishment of the Nobel Prize. Literature has always beea priceless part in the worlds cultural background. Thousands of writers influenced mangenerations, in the manner in which every single person felt a strong connection with one omore characters from literature. This idea is the base of my paper.

I have chosen this topic because I wanted to point out the importance of knowing the mostvaluable writers from the British and American literature. Another reason for choosing thistopic is the fact that quite few graduates decide to write about it in their similar papers. Besidethis aspect, another powerful impulse towards writing about this subject, was my pleasure of reading good books. This habit of reading valuable literature was a consequence of havinggreat teachers who tought us how to appreciate a good book.

The Nobel Prize is the greatest appreciation which a scientist or a writer can get in alifetime dedicated to their career. The British and American Writers , Nobel awarded that Ihave chosen, are, undoubtely great values, great intelectuals who managed to impress millionsof people through their literary masterpieces.

The literary Nobel Prizes were not given enough attention, as it was given to the NobelPrizes for science and this is why I tought it would be important to write about them.

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John Steinbeck - The Nobel Prize in Literature 1962

For his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception

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Biography

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John Steinbeck (1902-1968), born in Salinas, California, came from a family of moderatmeans. He worked his way through college at Stanford University but never graduated.1925 he went to New York, where he tried for a few years to establish himself as a free-lan

writer, but he failed and returned to California. After publishing some novels and short storSteinbeck first became widely known withTortilla Flat (1935), a series of humorous storiesabout Monterey paisanos.

Steinbecks novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with the economic problemrural labour, but there is also a streak of worship of the soil in his books, which does nalways agree with his matter-of-fact sociological approach. After the rough and earthy hum

of Tortilla Flat, he moved on to more serious fiction, often aggressive in its social criticism, t In Dubious Battle (1936), which deals with the strikes of the migratory fruit pickers onCalifornia plantations. This was followed byOf Mice and Men (1937), the story of theimbecile giant Lennie, and a series of admirable short stories collected in the volumeThe Long Valley (1938). In 1939 he published what is considered his best work,The Grapes of Wrath ,the story of Oklahoma tenant farmers who, unable to earn a living from the land, movedCalifornia where they became migratory workers.

Among his later works should be mentioned East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), andTravels with Charley (1962), a travelogue in which Steinbeck wroteabout his impressions during a three-month tour in a truck that led him through forty Ameristates. He died in New York City in 1968.

Banquet speech

I thank theSwedish Academyfor finding my work worthy of this highest honor.In myheart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hin respect and reverence - but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it myself.It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly commentthe nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it wouldwell to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literatur

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Such is the prestige of the Nobel award and of this place where I stand that I am impellnot to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in

profession and in the great and good men who have practiced it through the ages.Literatwas not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litaniesempty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calodespair.Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changexcept to become more needed.The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate aexclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have bedecreed by our species.

Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My gre predecessor,William Faulkner , speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear solong sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human hearconflict with itself seemed worth writing about.Faulkner, more than most men, was awarehuman strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and tresolution of fear are a large part of the writers reason for being

This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged wexposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark adangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.Furthermore, the writer is delegateddeclare and to celebrate mans proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallanin defeat - for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despthese are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.I hold that a writer who does n passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership

literature.The present universal fear has been the result of a forward surge in our knowledand manipulation of certain dangerous factors in the physical world

It is true that other phases of understanding have not yet caught up with this great step, bthere is no reason to presume that they cannot or will not draw abreast. Indeed it is a part of

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writers responsibility to make sure that they do.With humanitys long proud history standing firm against natural enemies, sometimes in the face of almost certain defeat aextinction, we would be cowardly and stupid to leave the field on the eve of our great

potential victory.Understandably, I have been reading the life of Alfred Nobel - a solitary mthe books say, a thoughtful man. He perfected the release of explosive forces, capable creative good or of destructive evil, but lacking choice, ungoverned by conscience judgment.

Nobel saw some of the cruel and bloody misuses of his inventions. He may even haforeseen the end result of his probing - access to ultimate violence - to final destruction. So

say that he became cynical, but I do not believe this. I think he strove to invent a controlsafety valve. I think he found it finally only in the human mind and the human spirit. To mhis thinking is clearly indicated in the categories of these awards.They are offered fincreased and continuing knowledge of man and of his world - for understanding acommunication, which are the functions of literature. And they are offered for demonstratiof the capacity for peace - the culmination of all the others.Less than fifty years after his deathe door of nature was unlocked and we were offered the dreadful burden of choice.We hausurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.Fearful and unprepared, we haassumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world - of all living thing

The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibilityat hand. Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.Man himself has become our greatest hazand our only hope.So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the endthe Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men.

Prior to the speech, R. Sandler, Member of theRoyal Academy of Sciences, commented:Mr. John Steinbeck - In your writings, crowned with popular success in many countries, yhave been a bold observer of human behaviour in both tragic and comic situations. This yhave described to the reading public of the entire world with vigour and realism. Your Travwith Charley is not only a search for but also a revelation of America, as you yourself s

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This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future turns out to be macrocosm of microcosm me. Thanks to your instinct for what is genuinely American ystand out as a true representative of American life.

Plot summary The Grapes of Wrath

The narrative begins fromTom Joads point of view just after he is paroledfrom prisonafter serving four years for manslaughter . On his

journey home, he meets a preacher,Jim Casy, whom heremembers from his childhood, and the two traveltogether. When they arrive at Toms childhood farmhome, they find it deserted. Disconcerted, he and Casygo to his Uncle Johns residence a few miles away,where he finds his family loading aHudsontruck witheverything they own; he learns that his familys cropswere destroyed in theDust Bowland that they wereforced to default on loans. With their farm repossessed,the Joads seek solace in hope; hope inscribed onhandbills that are distributed everywhere inOklahoma,describing the beautiful country of Californiaand high pay to be found out west. The Joads, along with Jim Casy, are seduced by this faade ainvest everything they have into the journey. Although leaving Oklahoma would be break parole, Tom decides that it is a risk, albeit minimal, that he has to take.

En route, they discover that the roads and highways are saturated with crowds of othfamilies making the same trek, ensnared by the same promise. As the Joads continue and hstories from others, some coming back from California, they are forced to confront t possibility that their prospects may not be what they had hoped. This realization, supported

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the deaths of Grandpa and Grandma and the departure of Noah (the eldest Joad son) aConnie (the husband of the pregnant Joad daughter, Rose of Sharon), is forced from ththoughts: they must go on because they have no other choice.

Upon arrival, they find hordes of applicants for every job and little hope of finding a decwage, because of the oversupply of labor,lack of rights, and the collusion of the big corporatefarmers. The tragedy lies in the simplicity and impossibility of their dream: a house, a famand a steady job. A gleam of hope is presented byWeedpatch , the clean, warm camps operated by the Resettlement Administration , a New Deal agency that tried to help the migrants.However, the benevolent bureaucrat Jim Rawley who manages the camp does not have enoumoney and space to care for all of the needy.

In response to the exploitation of laborers, the workers begin to joinunions.The survivingmembers of the family unknowingly work on an orchard involved in astrikethat eventuallyturns violent, killing the preacher Casy and forcing Tom Joad to kill again and becomefugitive. He bids farewell to his mother, promising that no matter where he runs, he will btireless advocate for the oppressed. Rose of Sharons baby isstillborn; however, Ma Joadremains steadfast and forces the family through the bereavement. In the end, Rose of Sha

commits the only act in the book that is not futile: she breast feedsa starving man, still tryingto show hope in humanity after her own negative experience. This final act is said to illustrthe spontaneous mutual sharing that will lead to a new awareness of collective values.

Title

Steinbeck had unusual difficulty devising a title for his novel.The Grapes of Wrath ,suggested by his wife, Carol Steinbeck, was deemed more suitable than anything the authcould come up with. The title is a reference tothe Battle Hymn of the Republic , by Julia WardHowe:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

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Ernest Hemingw ay-The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954

for his mastery of the art of narrative , most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style

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Biography

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writein a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States enterethe First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at thefront, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerabltime in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian anAmerican newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the GreeRevolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americanin Paris, which he described in his first important work,The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equallysuccessful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officersdisillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel,The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fishermans journey, his long andlonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways omodern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward proshis spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in hishort stories, some of which are collected inMen Without Women (1927) andThe FifthColumn and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.

Banquet Speech

As the Laureate was unable to be present at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall inStockholm, December 10, 1954, the speech was read by John C. Cabot, United StateAmbassador Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor andomination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobe

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for this Prize.No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it othe

than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his owlist according to his knowledge and his conscience.It would be impossible for me to ask thAmbassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which arin his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in thisometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree oalchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writersloneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds hi

loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a gooenough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning wherehe tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He shouldalways try for something that has never been done or that othershave tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he willsucceed.How simple the writing of literature would be if it wereonly necessary to write in another way what has been wellwritten. It is because we have had such great writers in the pastthat a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and nospeak it. Again I thank you.

Prior to the speech, H.S. Nyberg, Member of theSwedish Academy, made the followingcomment: Another deep regret is that the winner of this years Nobel Prize in LiteratureMr. Ernest Hemingway, on account of ill health has to be absent from our celebration. Wwish to express our admiration for the eagle eye with which he has observed, and for thaccuracy with which he has interpreted the human existence of our turbulent times; also fo

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the admirable restraint with which he has described their naked struggle. The human problems which he has treated are relevant to all of us, living as we do in the confuseconditions of modern life; and few authors have exercised such a wide influence oncontemporary literature in all countries. It is our sincere hope that he will soon recover healtand strength in pursuit of his life-work.

The Old man and the sea

Most biographers maintain that the years following Hemingways publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 until 1952 were the bleakest in his literary career. The novel

Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) was almost unanimously disparaged by critics asself-parody. Evidently his participation as anAllied correspondentin World War IIdid notyield fruits equivalent to those wrought of his experiences inWorld War I( A Farewell to

Arms , 1929) or theSpanish Civil War ( For Whom the Bell Tolls ).

Hemingway had initially planned to use Santiagos story, which becameThe Old Manand the Sea , as part of a random intimacy between mother and son and also the fact ofrelationships that cover most of the book relate to the Bible, which he referred to as The SeBook. Some aspects of it did appear in the posthumously published Islands in the Stream .Positive feedback he received for On the Blue Water (Esquire, April 1936) led him to rewriteit as an independent work. The book is a novella because it has no chapters or parts and islightly longer than a short story. He also referred to the Bible as the Sea of Knowledgeand other such things.

The novel first appeared, in its 26,500-word entirety, as part of theSeptember 1, 1952 edition of Life magazine. 5.3 million copies of that issue were sold within two days. Themajority of concurrent criticism was positive, although some dissenting criticism has sincemerged. The title was misprinted on the cover of an early edition asThe Old Man and theSea .

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Plot summary The old man and the sea

The Old Man and the Sea recounts an epic battle between an old, experienced fishermanand a giant marlin said to be the largest catch of his life.

It opens by explaining that the fisherman, who is named Santiago (but only directlyreferred to outside of dialogue as the old man), has gone 84 days without catching any fis

at all. He is apparently sounluckythat his youngapprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden byhis parents to sail with the old man and been ordered to fish with more successful fishermenStill dedicated to the old man, however, the boy visits Santiagos shack each night, haulin back his fishing gear, feeding him, and discussing American baseball most notablySantiagos idol,Joe DiMaggio. Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venturefar out into the Gulf to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end.

Thus on the eighty-fifth day, Santiago sets out alone, taking hisskiff far into the Gulf. Hesets his lines and, by noon of the first day, a big fish that he is sure is amarlintakes his bait.Unable to pull in the great marlin, Santiago instead finds the fish pulling his skiff. Two dayand two nights pass in this manner, during which the old man bears the tension of the linwith his body. Though he is wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses compassionate appreciation for his adversary, often referring to him as a brother.

On the third day of the ordeal, the fish begins to circle the skiff, indicating his tiredness tthe old man. Santiago, now completely worn out and almost in delirium, uses all the strengthe has left in him to pull the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with aharpoon, therebyending the long battle between the old man and the tenacious fish.

Santiago straps the marlin tohis skiff and heads home, thinking

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about the high price the fish will bring him at themarketand how many people he will feed.However, the old man determines that because of the fishs great dignity, no one will bworthy of eating the marlin.

While Santiago continues his journeyback to the shore,sharksare attracted to the trail of blood left by the marlin in the water. The first, a greatmako shark,Santiago kills with hisharpoon, losing that weapon in the process. He makes a new harpoon by strapping hisknife to the end of anoar to help ward off the next line of sharks; in total, five sharks are slain andmany others are driven away. But by night, the sharks have devoured the marlins entirecarcass, leaving only its tail left. The old man castigates himself for sacrificing the marlinFinally reaching the shore before dawn on the next day, he struggles on the way to his shack

carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and enters very deep sleep.

Ignorant of the old mans journey, a group of fishermen gathers the next day around th boat where the fishs skeleton is still attached.Touristsat the nearbycafmistakenly take itfor a shark. Manolin, worried during the old mans endeavor, cries upon finding him safasleep. The boy brings him newspapers and coffee. When the old man wakes, they promisto fish together once again. Upon his return to sleep, Santiago dreams of lions on the Africa

beach.

Inspiration for character

While Hemingway was living in Cuba beginning in 1940 with his third wifeMartha Gellhorn, one of his favorite pastimes was to sail and fish in his boat, named the Pilar . General biographical consensus holdsthat the model for Santiago inThe Old Man and the Sea was,

at least in part, the Cuban fishermanGregorio Fuentes.

Fuentes, also known as Goyo to his friends, was born in1897 onLanzarotein the Canary Islands,migrated to Cubawhen he was six years old and met Hemingway there in1928.In the 1930s, Hemingway hired him to look after his boat.

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During Hemingways Cuban years, a strong friendship formed between Hemingway anFuentes. For almost thirty years, Fuentes served as the captain of the Pilar ; this included timeduring which Hemingway did not live in Cuba. Fuentes at times would admit that the storwas not exactly about him. He related that the true inspiration of the old man and the boy dexist but they never knew who they were. The story goes that in the late 1940s, upon returfrom an early morning fishing trip, Fuentes and Hemingway saw a small rowboat 10 mileout to sea. Hemingway asked Fuentes to approach the vessel to see if they needed helpInside the boat was an old man and a boy. As the vessels closed in the old man began yellinat them with insults including telling them to go to hell, indicating that they had scared awathe fish. According to Fuentes, he and Hemingway looked at each other in surprise. Just thsame, Hemingway asked Fuentes to lower them some food and drinks while the old man an

boy glared at them. Without another word exchanged, the two boats parted ways. Accordinto Fuentes, Hemingway began immediately to write in his notebook and later asked him tfind the old man. According to Fuentes, he never was able to find the fisherman that hamade such an impression on Hemingway. Fuentes recounts that this was the real origin of thlore. A few years after The Old Man and the Sea was published, residents of Cojimar believed that the old fisherman that Fuentes and Hemingway ran into at sea was a humbllocal fisherman they calledel viejo Miguel ; some described his physical appearance as a wirySpencer Tracy.

Fuentes, suffering fromcancer, died in 2002; he was104 years old. Prior to hisdeath, he donatedHemingways Pilar to theCubangovernment.

Symbols & Style

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In the past, hardly anyone ever suspected Hemingway novels of symbolism. Then,in The

Old Man and the Sea , people saw symbolsthe old man stood for mans dignity, the bigfish embodied nature, the sharks symbolized evil (or maybe just the critics).No good boohas ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in, saysHemingway. That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is aright, but plain bread is better. He opens two bottles of beer and continues: I tried to maka real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them gooand true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make somethinreally true and sometimes truer than true.He looks ahead at some floating sargasso weedwhere some flying fishes are skittering through the air. Could be fish there, he says. A ree

gives out a soft whine, and Hemingway goes into action again. Beautiful! he criesDolphin. Theyre beautiful. After landing his fish, shimmering blue, gold and greenHemingway turns his attention to his guest. Take him softly now, he croons. Easy. EasyWork him with style. Thats it, up slowly with the rod, now reel in fast.Suave . With style.With style. Dont break his mouth. After the second fish at last flops onto the deckHemingway continues his reflections. The right way to do itstyleis not just an idlconcept, he says. It is simply the way to get done what is supposed to be done. The fac

that the right way also looks beautiful when its done is just incidental.

This feeling about style, perhaps more than anything else, has always been Hemingwaycredowhether it concerned the right way to kill a bull, track a wildebeest, serveValpolicella or blow up a bridge. And it was usually the redeeming feature and ultimattriumph of his characters: they might die, but they died with style. They left behind themsome aura of virtue, some defiant statement of this-is-the-way-it-should-be-done thaamounted to a victory of sorts.

Judgment & Pride

The matter of style reminds Hemingway of many things, including his Nobel Prize. H

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knows just what he would like to say if he went to Stockholm for the acceptance ceremonyHe would like to talk about a half-forgotten poet and great stylistEzra Pound. Poet Pounused to look over Hemingways early manuscripts in Paris and returned them, mercilessl blue-penciled, the adjectives gone. Indicted for treason for his pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italduring World War II, Pound was declared mentally incompetent in 1946 and is now inWashingtons St. Elizabeths Hospital. Ezra Pound is a great poet, says Hemingwayfiercely, and whatever he did he has been punished greatly and I believe should be freed tgo and write poems in Italy where he is loved and understood. He was the master of T. SEliot. Eliot is a winner of the Nobel Prize. I believe it might well have gone to Pound . . . believe this would be a good year to release poets. There is a school of thought in Americwhich, if encouraged far enough, could well believe that a man should be punished for th

simple error against conformity of being a poet. Dante, by these standards, could well havspent his life in St. Elizabeths Hospital for errors of judgment and of pride.Alongside th

Pilar , the bait keeps bobbing and Dante gives way to the dolphins. In little time the Pilar boats 15 beauties. Excited as a boy, Hemingway overlooks a promise to quit early and takelate-afternoon nap. Not until almost dusk does the boat put in to harbor. The sun seems to bsetting only a few yards off a corner of Havana, four miles distant, and Hemingway savors as if it were his first sunsetor his last. Look! he exclaims. Now watch it go down, anthen youll see a big green ball where it was. The sun falls as if jerked below the horizonand for a long instant a big, green, sun-sized ball hangs in its place.

As the Pilar turns the harbor mouth, Hemingway takes the controls. Ceremonially,Gregorio the mate hands up to him what remains of the tequila and a fresh-cut half of limHemingway does not actually drink the tequila, and the whole thing bears the appearance ofritual, as if to ward off sea serpents. Only at the dock does he pass around the bottle. Wewent out and had a good day and caught plenty fish and got pooped, he says. Now we ca

relax for a while and talk and go to sleep. With a tired smile on his tired, grizzled face, hlumbers up the gangway and off to his car and home.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Ernest Hemingway

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Thomas Stearns Eliot - The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948

For his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry

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Banquet Speech

Thomas Stearns Eliots speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1948

When I began to think of what I should say to you this evening, I wished only to expresvery simply my appreciation of the high honour which theSwedish Academyhas thought fitto confer upon me. But to do this adequately proved no simple task: my business is withwords, yet the words were beyond my command. Merely to indicate that I was aware ohaving received the highest international honour that can be bestowed upon a man of letterwould be only to say what everyone knows already. To profess my own unworthiness woul

be to cast doubt upon the wisdom of the Academy; to praise the Academy might suggest thI, as a literary critic, approved the recognition given to myself as a poet. May I therefore asthat it be taken for granted, that I experienced, on learning of this award to myself, all thnormal emotions of exaltation and vanity that any human being might be expected to feel asuch a moment, with enjoyment of the flattery, and exasperation at the inconvenience, o being turned overnight into a public figure? Were the Nobel Award similar in kind to anyother award, and merely higher in degree, I might still try to find words of appreciation: bu

since it is different in kind from any other, the expression of ones feelings calls for resourcewhich language cannot supply.

I must therefore try to express myself in an indirect way, by putting before you my owninterpretation of the significance of the Nobel Prize in Literature. If this were simply threcognition of merit, or of the fact that an authors reputation has passed the boundaries ohis own country and his own language, we could say that hardly any one of us at any time imore than others, worthy of being so distinguished. But I find in the Nobel Award somethinmore and something different from such recognition. It seems to me more the election of aindividual, chosen from time to time from one nation or another, and selected by somethinlike an act of grace, to fill a peculiar role and to become a peculiar symbol. A ceremony tak place, by which a man is suddenly endowed with some function which he did not fill beforSo the question is not whether he was worthy to be so singled out, but whether he can

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perform the function which you have assigned to him: the function of serving as representative, so far as any man can be of thing of far greater importance than the value owhat he himself has written.

Poetry is usually considered the most local of all the arts. Painting, sculpture,architecture, music, can be enjoyed by all who see or hear. But language, especially thlanguage of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead ouniting them.

But on the other hand we must remember, that while language constitutes a barrier, poetritself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier. To enjoy poetry belonging to

another language, is to enjoy an understanding of the people to whom that language belongan understanding we can get in no other way. We may think also of the history of poetry iEurope, and of the great influence that the poetry of one language can exert on another; wmust remember the immense debt of every considerable poet to poets of other languages thahis own; we may reflect that the poetry of every country and every language would declinand perish, were it not nourished by poetry in foreign tongues. When a poet speaks to hiown people, the voices of all the poets of other languages who have influenced him arspeaking also. And at the same time he himself is speaking to younger poets of othelanguages, and these poets will convey something of his vision of life and something of thspirit of his people, to their own. Partly through his influence on other poets, partly througtranslation, which must be also a kind of recreation of his poems by other poets, partlythrough readers of his language who are not themselves poets, the poet can contribute towaunderstanding between peoples.

In the work of every poet there will certainly be much that can only appeal to those whinhabit the same region, or speak the same language, as the poet. But nevertheless there is meaning to the phrase the poetry of Europe, and even to the word poetry the world oveI think that in poetry people of different countries and different languages - though it beapparently only through a small minority in any one country - acquire an understanding oeach other which, however partial, is still essential. And I take the award of the Nobel Priz

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in Literature, when it is given to a poet, to be primarily an assertion of the supra-nationavalue of poetry. To make that affirmation, it is necessary from time to time to designate a poet: and I stand before you, not on my own merits, but as a symbol, for a time, of thesignificance of poetry.

Prior to the speech, Gustaf Hellstrm of the Swedish Academy made these remarksHumility is also the characteristic which you, Mr. Eliot, have come to regard as manvirtue. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. At first it didnot appear that this would be the final result of your visions and your acuity of thought. Borin the Middle West, where the pioneer mentality was still alive, brought up in Boston, thstronghold of Puritan tradition, you came to 9Europe in your youth and were there

confronted with the pre-war type of civilization in the Old World: the Europe of Edward VIKaiser Wilhelm, the Third Republic, andThe Merry Widow . This contact was a shock to you,the expression of which you brought to perfection inThe Waste Land , in which the confusionand vulgarity of the civilization became the object of your scathing criticism. But beneatthat criticism there lay profound and painful disillusionment, and out of this disillusionmenthere grew forth a feeling of sympathy, and out of that sympathy was born a growing urge trescue from the ruins of the confusion the fragments from which order and stability might brestored. The position you have long held in modern literature provokes a comparison witthat occupied by Sigmund Freud, a quarter of a century earlier, within the field of psychimedicine. If a comparison might be permitted, the novelty of the therapy which he introducewith psychoanalysis would match the revolutionary form in which you have clothed youmessage. But the path of comparison could be followed still further. For Freud the mos profound cause of the confusion lay in theUnbehagen in der Kultur of modern man. In hisopinion there must be sought a collective and individual balance, which should constantltake into account mans primitive instincts. You, Mr. Eliot, are of the opposite opinion. Fo

you the salvation of man lies in the preservation of the cultural tradition, which, in our mormature years, lives with greater vigour within us than does primitiveness, and which we mu preserve if chaos is to be avoided. Tradition is not a dead load which we drag along with uand which in our youthful desire for freedom we seek to throw off. It is the soil in which thseeds of coming harvests are to be sown, and from which future harvests will be garnered. A

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a poet you have, Mr. Eliot, for decades, exercised a greater influence on your contemporarieand younger fellow writers than perhaps anyone else of our time.

Biography

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis,Missouri, of an old New England family. He was educated atHarvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne,Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England,where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, andeventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber,of which he later became a director. He founded and, during theseventeen years of its publication (1922-1939), edited theexclusive and influential literary journal Criterion. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church

Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. Nevecompromising either with the public or indeed with language itself, he has followed his beli

that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization inlanguage and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry. Despite thidifficulty his influence on modern poetic diction has been immense. Eliots poetry from

Prufrock (1917) to the Four Quartets (1943) reflects the development of a Christian writer:the early work, especiallyThe Waste Land (1922), is essentially negative, the expression of that horror from which the search for a higher world arises. In Ash Wednesday (1930) and the

Four Quartets this higher world becomes more visible; nonetheless Eliot has always taken

care not to become a religious poet. and often belittled the power of poetry as a religiouforce. However, his dramasMurder in the Cathedral (1935) andThe Family Reunion (1939)are more openly Christian apologies. In his essays, especially the later ones, Eliot advocatestraditionalism in religion, society, and literature that seems at odds with his pioneer activitas a poet. But although the Eliot of Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) is an older man than the poet of The Waste Land , it should not be forgotten that for Eliot tradition is a

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living organism comprising past and present in constant mutual interaction. Eliots playMurder in the Cathedral (1935),The Family Reunion (1939),The Cocktail Party (1949),TheConfidential Clerk (1954), andTheElderStatesman (1959) were published in one volume in1962;Collected Poems 1909-62 appeared in 1963.

About T.S.Elliots work

When I wrote a poem calledThe Waste land, T.S.Elliot noted in 1931, some of theapproving critics said that I had expressed the dissilusionment of a generation, which nonsense. I may he continued, have expresed for them their own illusion of beindisillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention. T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot, the moimportant and influential English poet of his own and of the two subsequent generations, dinot writeThe Waste Land(1922) as an Englishman. He was like his friend and early mentor Ezra Pound (il miglior fabbro , the better craftsman, of the dedication toThe Wasted

Land) , an American resident in London.

If the body of Eliots work can be claimed as much for English as for American

literature it is because of the distinctively cisatlantic pointing that marks it ( in his essay oWilliam Blake, for example, he adresses his fellow English readers). Although much of htopography, vocabulary, and awareness of public history and culture are self-conscciouslBritish, Eliots literary roots were cosmopolitan. As a student at Harvard between 1906 an1914 he had become aquainted with an eclectic range of philosophical, historical, and literarscolarship. In Paris in 1911 he attended lectures by Henry Bergson, practised Frenchconversation with Henri Alain-Fournier, ande encountered the monarchist Catholi journalism of Charles Maurras. At Harvard in 1908 he had been sufficiently fired by ArthuSymonss account of recent French poetry inThe Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899).To send off to Paris for the poems of Jules Laforgue(1860-87). Through Laforgue he hadiscovered the attractions of a reticent, ironic, clever, and referential poetry, a poetry oftecast in the form of free verse dramatic monologues in which a wry persona express himserather than acts out the private emotions of his creator. The influence of the brittle Laforgue

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though crucial in moulding Eliots early style, was transient; that of Baudelaire and Dant proved more lasting and more haunting. Baudelaire remained for him the great inventor ofmodern poetry because his verse and language seemed the nearest thing to a completerenovation that we have experienced. In Dante, by contrast, he found a medieval spirituand a poetic authority which seemed to him to adress the modern condition directly.

The Waste Land

APRILis the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.The Waste Land does not merely reflect the breakdown of an historical, social, and

cultural order battered by violent forces operating under the name of modernity. For Eliot thdisaster that characterized modernity was not an overturning, but the unavoidable, and ironiculmination of that very order so lovingly celebrated in Victorias last decade on the throneUnlike the older generation, who saw in events like the Great War the passing of a golde

age, Eliot saw only that the golden age was itself a heap of absurd sociopolitical axioms an perverse misreadings of the cultural past that had proved in the last instance to be made othe meanest alloy. The poems enactment of the contemporary social scene in The Burial othe Dead, A Game of Chess, and The Fire Sermon exhibits the negative liberasociety in which such events and people are typical. Eliots choice of these events an peopleMadame Sosostris, the cast of characters in A Game of Chess, and the typistarepresentative of a particular society is susceptible, of course, to a political analysis, which isto say, their representativeness is not self-evident, though they are presented as if it is. Thone bold stare of the house-agents clerk, put back in the bourgeois context where staring one of the major lapses in manners, does not hold up the mirror to a simple gesture, builluminates the underlying conditions that make a mere clerks swagger possible. What iexposed is the fact that clerks in general no longer know their place. What we are to mak

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of this fact is pointedly signaled by the disgust that the specifics of the rendering provoke anthe social distance generated by the Tiresian foresufferance. . . .

As its social critique was aimed negatively at the liberal ethos which Eliot felt hadculminated in the War and its disorderly aftermath,The Waste Land could not visibly adoptsome preliberal code of values. In the same way, the poem could not propose a postliberahistoricist or materialist ethic without an historicizing epistemology. The poems authorityrested instead on other bases that provided, not a system of ideas as the primary form olegitimation, but a new lyric synthesis as a kind of experiential authenticity in a world iwhich the sacred cosmologies, on the one hand, had fallen prey to astrologers and charlatanwhile, on the other, the cosmology of everyday life, i.e. the financial system (the City ithe poem), had fallen into the soiled hands of racially indeterminate and shady importers o

currants and the like, among them, of course, the pushing Jews of the plunderbund. . . .The poem attempts to penetrate below the level of rationalist consciousness, where th

conceptual currencies of the liberal ethos have no formative and directive power. Below thlevel lay the real story about human nature, which liberal thought perversely worked tobscure, by obscuring the intersection of the human and the divine at the deepest levels oconsciousness. That stratum did not respond to the small-scale and portable logics oEnlightenment scientism, butto the special rationality of mythic thought. Its logicand narrative forms furnishthe idiom of subrationalist,conscious life. To repeat: if not on the conventionalrationalist basis, where doesEliot locate the authority of The Waste Land , andauthority that can save the poem from mere eccentricsputter and give it a more commanding aspect? I think it was important for Eliot himself tfeel the poems command, and not simply to make it convincing to skeptical readers; Lynda

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Gordons biography makes this inner need for strength in his own convictions a centratheme in Eliots early life. But to answer our question: the authority the poem claims has twdimensions.

The first is based on the aesthetics of French symbolisme and its extension into theWagnerian music-drama. Indeed the theoretical affinites of Baudelaire et al. and Wagnerwhich Eliot obviously intuited in the making of The Waste Land, can be seen now as nothingshort of brilliant. Only in our own time are these important aesthetic and cultural connection being seriously explored. From symbolisme Eliot adopted the notion of the epistemologicalself-sufficiency of aesthetic consciousness, its independence from rationalist instrumentalityand thus its more efficacious contact with experience and, at the deeper levels, contact witthe divine through its earthly language in myth. From his French and German forebears, Eli

formulated a new discourse of experience which in the 1920s was still very much the voicof the contemporary avant-garde in Britain and, in that sense, a voice on the margins, withouinstitutional authority. But here the ironic, even sneering, dismissal of the liberal stewardshiof culture and society reverses the semiotics of authority-claims by giving to the voice on thmargins an authority the institutional voices can no longer assume since the world they armeant to sustain has finally been seen through in all those concrete ways the poemmercilessly enacts.The Waste Land is quite clear on that point. We are meant to see in TheFire Sermon, for example, the loitering heirs of City directors weakly giving way to thhated mtques, so that the City, one of the holy places of mercantilism, has fallen to profane hands, The biting humor in this is inescapable. . . .

The second dimension of the authority on whichThe Waste Land rests involves the newdiscourse on myth that comes from the revolutionary advances in anthropology in Eliottime associated with the names of mile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and the CambridgSchool led by Sir James Frazer and Jane Harrison. We know that Eliot was well acquaintewith these developments at least as early as 1913-14. The importance of these new ideainvolved rethinking the study of ancient and primitive societies. The impact of thesrenovations was swift and profound and corresponds, though much less publicly, to theimpact of On the Origin of Species on the educated public of midcentury Victorian life.Modernist interest in primitive forms of art (Picasso, Lawrence, and many others), andtherefore, the idioms and structures of thought and feeling in primitive cultures, makes sens

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in several ways. Clearly the artistic practices of primitive peoples are interesting technicallto other artists of any era. Interest in the affective world or the collective mentality of a primitive society is another question altogether. That interest, neutral, perhaps, ischolarship, becomes very easy to formulate as a critique of practices and structures in th present that one wants to represent as distortions and caricatures of some original state onature from which modernity has catastrophically departed. Eliots interest in the mythithought of primitive cultures, beginning at Harvard, perhaps in the spirit of scientific inquirytakes a different form in the argument of The Waste Land. There it functions pointedly as anegative critique of the liberal account of the origins of society in the institutions of contracabstract political and civil rights, and mechanistic psychology.

The anthropologists rescued the

major cultural production of primitivesocietiesmythfrom the view thatsaw these ancient narratives either asthe quaint decorative brio of simplefolk or, if they were Greek, as thenarrative mirrors of heroic society.Instead myth, and not just the myths of the Greeks, was reconceived as the narrative thematics of prerationalist cosmologies tha provided an account of the relationship between the human and the divine. Myth was alsinterpreted psychologically, and Nietzsche is crucial in this development, as making visiblthe deeper strata of the mind. If the concept is the notional idiom of reason, myth is thlanguage of unconscious life. What Eliot intuited from this new understanding was that myt provided a totalizing structure that could make sense, equally, of the state of a whole culturand of the whole structure of an individual mind ( Notes 25). In this intuition he found theidiom of an elaborated, universalizing code which was not entirely the product of rationalithought. In addition, this totalizing structure preserved the sacred dimension of life by seeinit inextricably entwined with the profane. For the expression of this intuition in the context oan environment with a heavy stake in the elaborated codes of a rationalist and materialisworld view which had subordinated the sacred to the profane, Eliot adapted for his own us

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the poetics of juxtaposition.

The textual discontinuityof The Waste Land has usually been read as the technicaladvance of a new aesthetic. The poetics of juxtaposition are often taken as providing thenabling rationale for the accomplishment of new aesthetic effects based on shock ansurprise. And this view is easy enough to adopt when the poem is read in the narrow contexof a purely literary history of mutated lyric forms. However, when the context is widened anthe poem read as a motivated operation on an already always existing structure o

significations, this technical advance is itself significant as a critique of settled forms ocoherence. Discontinuity, from this perspective, is a symbolic form of blasting and bombardiering. In the design of the whole poem, especially in its use of contemporaranthropology, the broken textual surface must be read as the sign of the eruptive power osubrational forces reasserting, seismically, the element totalities at the origins of culture anmind. The poems finale is an orgy of social and elemental violence. The Falling towers,lightning and thunder, unveil what Eliot, at that time, took to be the base where individua

mind and culture are united in the redemptive ethical imperatives spoken by the thundeWhat the poem attempts here, by ascribing these ethical principles to the voice of nature an by drawing on the epistemological autonomy posited by symbolisme, is the construction of anelaborated code in which an authoritative universalizing vision can be achieved using notional (mythic) idiom uncontaminated by Enlightenment forms of rationalism.

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Powerful as it is in the affective and tonal program of the poem, functioning as theconclusion to the poems argument, this closural construction is, at best, precarious wheseen beyond the shaping force of the immediate social and cultural context. Thisconstruction, achieved rhetorically, in fact is neither acceptable anthropology, nor soundtheology, nor incontestable history, but draws on all these areas in order to make thenecessary point in a particular affective climate. The extent to which the poem still carrieunsurpassable imaginative power indicates the extent to which our own time has not brokeentirely with the common intuitive life that the poem addressed 60 years ago.

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Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far

they can go

Thomas Stearn Eliot

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William Golding The Nobel Prize in Literature 1983

for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversityand universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today

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Biography

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and waseducated at Marlborough Grammar School and at BrasenoseCollege, Oxford. Apart from writing, his past and presentoccupations include being a schoolmaster, a lecturer, an actor, asailor, and a musician. His father was a schoolmaster and hismother was a suffragette. He was brought up to be a scientist, butrevolted. After two years at Oxford he read English literature

instead, and became devoted to Anglo-Saxon. He spent five yearsat Oxford. Published a volume of poems in 1935. Taught atBishop Wordsworths School, Salisbury. Joined the Royal Navy in 1940 and spent six yearafloat, except for seven months in New York and six months helping Lord Cherwell at th Naval Research Establishment. He saw action against battleships (at the sinking of thBismarck), submarines and aircraft. Finished as Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship. Hwas present off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Walcheren

After the war he returned to teaching, and began to write again. Lord of the Flies , his firstnovel, was published in 1954. It was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. His other books are:

The Inheritors (novel) 1955 Pincher Martin (novel) 1956The Brass Butterfly (play) 1958

Free Fall (novel) 1959The Spire (novel) 1964The Hot Gates (essays) 1965

The Pyramid (novel) 1967The Scorpion God (three short novels) 1971

Darkness Visible (novel) 1979

Rites of Passage (novel) 1980 A Moving Target (essays and autobiographical pieces) 1982

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The Paper Men (novel) 1984 An Egyptian Journal 1985Close Quarters (novel) 1987

Fire Down Below (novel) 1989

In 1980 he won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage . He retired fromteaching in 1962. After that, he lived in Wiltshire, listing his recreations as music, sailingarchaeology and classical Greek.

William Golding died in 1993.

Banquet Speech

William Goldings speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1983

Your Majesties, your Royal Highnesses, your Excellencies, Fellow Laureates, Ladies andGentlemen,I came to Sweden characterized as a pessimist, though I am an optimist. Nowsomething - perhaps the wonderful warmth of your hospitality - has changed me into acomic. That is a hard position to sustain. It reminds me of days long ago when as a pooteacher I would take turn about during the night with my wife, getting our infant daughter tsleep. I remember once, how at three oclock in the morning when I began to creep awafrom the cradle with its sleeping child, she opened her eyes and remarked: Daddy, sasomething funny.However, the moment has come for me to put off the jesters cap and bells.

I do thank Sweden for its wonderfully warm hospitality and I do thank the Nobel

Foundation and the Swedish Academy for the welcome and unexpected way in which thehave, so to speak, struck me with lightning. I only wish all borders were as easy to cross anall international exchanges as friendly.

I have been in many countries and I have found there people examining their own love olife, sense of peril, their own common sense. The one thing they cannot understand is wh

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that same love of life, sense of peril and above all common sense, is not invariably shareamong their leaders and rulers.Then let me use what I suppose is my last minute oworldwide attention to speak not as one of a nation but as one of mankind. I use it to reach amen and women of power. Go back. Step back now. Agreement between you does not neecleverness, elaboration, manoeuvres. It needs common sense, and above all, a daringenerosity. Give, give, give!It would succeed because it would meet with worldwide relieacclaim and rejoicing: and unborn generations will bless your name.

From Goldings Diary

On Monday 6 October 1983, Golding wrote in his journal:

This morning at ten oclock, Ingmar Whatsit rang from Stockholm. He thenmysteriously talked about a phone call I might get in a couple of hours time and went on tsay it was a fifty/fifty chance that I would get the Nobel Prize! It is an example of thoughtleselfishness that he should try to get a foot in the door by inflicting a couple of hours anxietythen a probable disappointment on me. That is a journalist all over. He is getting his foot ithe door. How thoughtless can you get? I am shaking with a quite unnecessary excitement no Im not. Im dismissing the idea and being calm.

Golding had been disappointed before. However, this time his experience was differentHis journal records:

At five past one the news was on radio and television Ive won the nobel prize. Aftethat the phones been on all day. I went riding, having left Ann in charge of the phone buwhen I got back to the stables the television people were there. Then more television an photographers and journalists turned up. Its about ten oclock and the last lot of Swedis journalists have just gone.

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The day was a strange one, but punctuated by moments of normality. It gave theGoldings great pleasure that the first person to congratulate them in the flesh was their oldefriend in Bowerchalke, Nancy Butler, whom they first met in 1940 and who appeared at the back door minutes after the news was broadcast. Unfortunately, at some point during thafternoon, Golding injured his right hand.Subsequently, as each well-wisher vigorously wrungthat hand, Golding found himself concealing pain,rather than the expected disappointment.

The award made Golding and his family veryhappy. Controversy was generated by some remarks

attributed to one of the judges, implying that Goldingshould not have had the prize. However, this matter receded, and Golding himself was able to put it behindhim, acknowledging to himself that his writing couldrank with the work of many previous winners.In November, Golding and his wife travelled to Stockholm to receive the award. They took withem Goldings long-time editor and friend, Charles Monteith, who had picked Lord of thFlies off the reject pile at Faber and Faber in 1953. Golding always acknowledged his greadebt to Monteith, and the group of these three, the author, his wife and (always) first readeand his editor and publisher, was absolutely appropriate at this occasion.When Goldingreceived his medal from the king of Sweden, he was astonished to hear the young masay:Its a pleasure to meet you, Mr Golding. I had to do Lord of the Flies at school.

The Nobel prize changed Goldings life in many ways. There were more reporters, morof a world-wide audience. However, his books were already widely available in manylanguages, including minority ones. The difference was that after 1983 he became personallmore recognised. He was glad to use such fame for issues about which he felt deeply, abovall his environmental concerns, which figure in his Nobel lecture ( Moving Target, 2nd

edition, 1984), and as ever the existence of mans inhumanity. On such matters he continueto write and to be concerned until his death. A sombre interchange in his journal, with holiday acquaintance, records their agreement that they felt they had made the world fairl

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safe for their children, but were not so sure about their grandchildren.Goldings medal ancitation are on indefinite loan to his old college, Brasenose College, Oxford, and can be seeon request. In the citation, the Nobel Foundation spoke of:his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate thhuman condition in the world of today.

On December 22nd 1983, Golding wrote in his journal:

This morning David [his son] and I went into Salisbury and bought some presents onfor him, and one each for the little boys [his three grandsons]. I have Anns. I think the NobPrize is enough for me.

The plot summary to the Lord of the Flies

The novel begins when two boys, Ralph and Piggy find themselves next to a plane crassite, they are unaware of their surroundings. The boys soon find a conch shell, Piggy sugges

that Ralph blows on the conch to call for any others who might be on the island. Thsituation on the island soon becomes apparent; there are many British school boys on thisland and no adults. Ralph holds animpromptu election and becomes the elected leader, beating out another boy, Jack who was vying for the position. Ralph quickly calls everyontogether to work toward two common goals, 1)To have fun and 2) to be rescued.

For a time things on the island are civil, all the boys work toward building sheltersgathering food and water, and generally surviving. The one goal which constantly getsidelined is keeping a signal fire going. All the fires on the island are lit using Piggysglasses, The children are not organized enough to keep the fire going. Most distracting to thgoal is Jacks wish to hunt the wild pigs on the island.

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corrupted world of humankind ...... Conch: Civilized authority, democracy

...... Eyeglasses of Piggy and Piggy Himself: Insight, wisdom, knowledge

...... Death of Piggy and Destruction of Conch: Failure or breakdown of society on the island

...... Signal Fire: Hope

...... Imagined Beast: Fear, superstition. (The boys imagine that a monster in the form of a snake, a

sea monster, an ape, or other .beasties that they dream about lurks nearby.)

...... Dead Parachutist: The beast. (In fact, the parachutist is a beast, for he has taken part in a war to

kill fellow human beings.)

...... Chanting and Dancing of the Hunters: Blind emotion, loss of reason

...... Logs on Which Ralph and Jack Sit: Seats of authority; thrones

...... The Big Boys: The emerging generation of evil .......

...... The Little Boys: The next generation of evil

...... The Naval Officer: The present generation of evil

...... The Killing of the First Pig: Original sin

The Killing of the Second Pig, the Sow: Release of perverted, Oedipal urges ...... Jacks Knife, Sticks Sharpened Into Spears: Weapons of war in the macrocosmic world; phalluses

as representations of ....... masculine aggression

...... Jack and Ralph: Perhaps Cain and Abel (although Ralph does not die, as Abel did in the Bible)

...... The Impaled Pigs Head (Lord of the Flies): The evil in every mans

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heart

References to other works

Lord of the Flies borrows key elements fromR.M. Ballantynes The Coral Island (1857).Ballantynes book, a simple adventure without any deep social themes, portrays three boyRalph, Peterkin and Jack, who land on an island. Golding used two of the names in his bookand replaced Peterkin with Simon. Lord of the Flies has been regarded as Goldings responseshowing what he believed would happen if children (or generally, people) were left to formsociety in isolation.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.M._Ballantynehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coral_Islandhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.M._Ballantynehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coral_Island


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Golding read The Coral Island as he was growing up, and thought of Ballantyne asracist, since the book teaches that evil is associated with black skin and is external. InChapter 11 of the original Lord of the Flies , Piggy calls Jacks tribe a pack of paintedniggers. The term was not viewed as offensive in 1960s British society as it is today as therewas slightly more racism, being seen as a descriptive (rather than abusive) term for people odark skin. In any case, the word was changed to savages in some editions and Indians ithe mass media publication.

Influence

Printed works

Robert A. Heinlein s Tunnel in the Sky , published in 1955, can be seen as a rebuttal to Lord of the Flies as it concerns a group of teenagers stranded on a uninhabited planet whomanage to create a functional tribal society.

Stephen Kinghas stated that the Castle Rock in Lord of the Flies was the inspiration for the town of the same namethat has appeared in a number of his novels. The book itself alsoappears prominently in his novels Hearts in Atlantis and Cujo .[7] Kings fictional town in turninspired the name of Rob Reiner s production company,Castle Rock Entertainment.

TheDC ComicsseriesSalvation Runis an adaptation of the Lord of the flies conceptwith all the major DC Supervillains being marooned on an Alien planet

Television

Lord of the Flies inspired Sunrise Animations classicanimeseries Infinite Ryvius , whichfollows the lives of nearly 500 teenagers stranded aboard a space battleship.

Also the Das Bus episode of the Simpsons is based on this book.

Weve got to have rules and obey them. After all,were not savages. Were English, and the Englishare best at everything.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinleinhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_in_the_Skyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Kinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Rock_(Stephen_King)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts_in_Atlantishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts_in_Atlantishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cujohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cujohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_The_Flies#cite_note-6http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Reinerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Rock_Entertainmenthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Comicshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_Runhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Ryviushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Ryviushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinleinhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_in_the_Skyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Kinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Rock_(Stephen_King)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts_in_Atlantishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cujohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_The_Flies#cite_note-6http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Reinerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Rock_Entertainmenthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Comicshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_Runhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Ryvius


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WILLIAM GOLDING, Lord of the Flies

nobel prizes in literature

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