Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE INHERITORS” by William Golding (first published in 1955)

There must be a certain amount of frustration for a writer whose career produced eleven novels (really fourteen, if you realize one “novel” is a trilogy), a number of short stories, and some plays – and who yet remains best known for his first published novel. This was the fate of William Golding (1911-1993), who was (for the little that it’s worth) knighted for his literary achievements, but who more importantly won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. Mention his name and most people know he wrote Lord of the Flies (published in 1954). Given that it’s often set as a school text, and given that it’s twice been filmed and once turned into a stage-play, it is certain that Lord of the Flies has been read more often than all Golding’s other works combined. This is a pity because – especially in the first half of his writing career - Golding wrote a number of resonant novels, all of them (like Lord of the Flies) having the inspiration and structure of a moral fable or allegory – Pincher Martin, Free Fall, The Spire and The Pyramid among them.

In a Guardian article some years after her father’s death, Golding’s daughter wrote that the one of his own works Golding most treasured was his second novel, The Inheritors, published the year after Lord of the Flies. Like the preceding work, it dealt with the inherent moral flaws of human beings, not caused by environment but embedded in our very nature. (This theme, as I pointed out in another posting, was also dealt with years earlier in Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica.) Christians would call it Original Sin, and in many respects The Inheritors is Golding’s version of the Garden of Eden and the Fall.

The tale is set in distant prehistoric times. An earlier, and apparently gentler, version of human beings find themselves confronting the “new people” whom they have never encountered before and who will eventually supplant them. All commentators on The Inheritors readily identify these two groups as, respectively, Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens Sapiens, or us. This seems reasonable to me, so I will refer to the main characters in the novel as Neanderthals, and therefore the story must be set about 40,000 years ago, which is the time when, for a thousand years or so, Neanderthals in Europe interacted with our more direct ancestors, who are “the inheritors”.

The Inheritors follows a “family” of Neanderthals - the younger adult male Lok; his female partner Fa; the young girl Liku; the older male Ha; the older female Nil, who has recently given birth and is still lactating; and the very old male Mal, who is more-or-less the visionary of the group. We might as once grasp that that, if “old” Nil is lactating, then she can’t be all that old by our standards, pointing to the obvious fact that our distant ancestors probably lived relatively short lives. As for the visionary nature of old Mal, he sees “pictures” in his mind, which seem to be memories as much a prophecies. Golding often refers to the adults in this group seeing “pictures” and conveying them to one another. This has led some commentators to assume Golding is suggesting that these Neanderthals communicate by a form of mental telepathy, but I’m not convinced of this. I think, rather, that Golding’s reference to “pictures” assumes that these Neanderthals have very limited vocabulary in their speech, and no abstract words. Their “pictures” simply mean their thoughts, which they can articulate only in terms of literal images. It is an important moment, well into the novel, when one character conceives of the abstract concept “like”. In Golding’s vision, lacking abstract vocabulary may well be a moral adavantage for the Neanderthals in that they relate more directly with their physical environment than they would if they were hemmed in by abstract concepts.

It is the male Lok who is the novel’s protagonist – the character through whose eyes (although the novel is written in the third person) we see events. Yet the group’s simple religion is matriarchal. As old Mal explains it in Chapter 2: “There was the great Oa. She brought forth the earth from her belly. She gave suck. The earth brought forth woman and the woman brought forth the first man out of her belly.” A doll-like fetish of this Earth Mother Goddess is carried around by young Liku. It is also clear that, although the male Lok is the novel’s focus, the female Fa is cleverer than he is, sees more “pictures” than he does (i.e. has more thoughts) and in a way takes charge of him. When an existential threat to them is detected midway through the novel: “She became very solemn and there was the great Oa, not seen but sensed like a cloud around her. Lok felt himself diminish. He clasped his twig with both hands nervously and looked away….Fa spoke… ‘Do what I say; ‘Fa do this.’ I will say: ‘Lok do this’. I have many pictures.” (Chapter 6) Indeed it is Fa who devises an important plan which, at a crucial point, Lok ruins by disobeying her.

This Neanderthal “family” cares for one other and remembers anybody in the group who has died. When Ha has apparently died: “The feeling that Ha was still present by his many evidences grew so strong in Lok that it overwhelmed him.” (Chapter 4). When old Mal dies (“Oa has taken him into her belly.”) he is buried with a simple stone over him to mark the place – a basic sort of ritual ceremony.

The Neanderthals have some limited skills. They can keep warm in the overhang where they live by controlling fire. But, as depicted by Golding, they have no more advanced technology, and they are afraid of water, even if they live near a booming waterfall. It is a great shock to them early in the book when the log, over which they walk to cross a shallow stream, is no longer there and some of them actually have to enter the water.

Perhaps most significant in Golding’s depiction of Neanderthals, they are basically pacifistic, not aggressive - gatherers but not hunters. They have no weapons. They eat berries and grubs and wild honey, but eat meat only if it has already been killed by other creatures. In Chapter 3 Lok knows it is “very bad” to do so, but he and his group nevertheless eat the remains of a doe which has been killed by a “cat” (presumably something like a sabre-toothed tiger).

The arc of the story has the Neanderthals gradually becoming aware that other, very different, human creatures live in their neighbourhood, and gradually realising that these “new people” can be lethal. It is through the eyes of the Neanderthals  - especially Lok – that we see this. So Golding has set himself the task of reproducing the mentality and patterns of thought of a different species from ourselves. One point is obvious. Like most other mammals, these Neanderthals have a far more acute sense of smell than we do. Smell is one of their key means of gathering information. It is through smell that Lok first realises there are alien, unidentified strangers (“a smell without a picture”) in his vicinity:

“He began to use his nose consciously, crouching sideways and sniffing at the rock. The smells were very complex and his nose did not seem to be clever. He knew why that was and lowered himself head downward till he felt the water with his lips. He drank then cleared out his mouth. … He stood for a while over the monstrous booming of the fall and attended to his nose. The scents were a pattern in space and time. Here, by his shoulder, was the freshest scent of Nil’s hand on the rock. Below it was a company of smells, smells of people as they passed this way yesterday, smells of sweat and milk and the sour smell of Mal in his pain… Each smell was accompanied by a picture more vivid than memory, a sort of living but qualified presence, so that now Ha was alive again. He settled the picture of Ha in his head, intending to keep it there so that he would not forget…. …There was something else. It was not noticeable when all the people were considered together, but sort and eliminate them and it remained, a smell without a picture. Now that he noticed, it was heavy by the corner. Someone had stood there, his hand on the rock…”  (Chapter 4)

But, for both Golding and his readers, there is difficulty in trying to see things as a Neanderthal might. Quite apart from the fact that we are in the world of speculation (we have abolutely no way of knowing how Neanderthals really thought or understood), there is the fact that we have to work out what exactly the Neanderthal is interpreting – or misinterpreting.

Here, for example, is the episode where Lok first sees, full-on, the face of one of the “new people” and does not understand what bow-and-arrow are:

“The bushes twitched again. Lok steadied by the tree and gazed. A head and a chest faced him, half-hidden. There were white bone things behind the leaves and hair. The man had white bone things above his eyes and under the mouth so that his face was longer than a face should be. The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Lok along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the middle. Lok peered at the stick and the lump of bone and the small eyes in the bone things over the face. Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again. The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice. “Clop!” His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the bitter berries that Lok’s stomach told him he must not eat…” (Chapter 5)

Lok does not connect the “twig” with the bow, does not understand that he has just been shot at, and he continues with this unawarenss in a later scene:

“He looked towards the island, saw the bushes move, then one of the twigs came twirling across the river and vanished beyond him in the forest. He had a confused idea that someone was trying to give him a present. He would have smiled across at the bone-faced man but no one was visible there…” (Chapter 6)

As readers, we simlarly have to work out that, from a distance, Lok sees the “new people” performing religious ceremonies with a shaman dressed in the skin of a deer; drinking some sort of (presumably fermented) drink – a primitve wine maybe – which intoxicates them and makes them behave wildly; drinking from wineskins; and using dug-out canoes which Lok sees merely as “logs”. We are even aware that the “new people” fight among themselves. Even if he senses danger, Lok sees but does not understand.  He identifies one of the “new people” as Tuami, because he has heard that name shouted out. But, as he watches Tuami and a woman copulating, he does not understand what they are doing:

“The two people beneath the tree were making noises fiercely as though they were quarrelling. In particular the woman had begun to hoot like an owl and Lok could hear Tuami gasping like a man who fights with an animal and does not think he will win. He looked down and saw that Tuami was not only lying with the fat woman but eating her as well for there was black blood running from the lobe of her ear.” (Chapter 9)

Dare I say that I read this as one of the less convincing pieces of Neanderthal misperception in the novel? Obviously Neanderthals must have copulated themselves. But perhaps Golding’s implication is that Neanderthals did it “doggie style” as most mammals do, and without much love play. So this is the first time Lok has seen face-to-face copulation.

I will not give a detailed account of how the story develops. It is enough to say that the male Ha is probably killed by the “new people”, Liku is kidnapped and enslaved by them, and Lok and Fa fail in their attempts to rescue her. The Neanderthal family is broken up. Lok and Fa are all that remain and they flee. So the hunting, killing, weapon-carrying “new people” (i.e. us) triumph and the peaceable Garden of Eden ceases to exist as its Adam and Eve are expelled.

In the last chapter-and-a-half, however, the novel’s viewpoint changes. Suddenly we see things as the “new man” Tuami does, and he thinks in the language of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. The “logs” are now called “canoes”, the “leaves” that drive them are called “paddles” and the Neanderthals are seen as primitive and scary – indeed as “devils”. It is clear that the “new people” were as afraid of the Neanderthals as the Neanderthals were of them. The difference is that the “new people” know how to kill (and make intoxicating drinks). But there is a little compensation. Just because he likes to, Tuami  carves patterns on the handle of his bone knife. As well as having greater consciousness and self-consciousness than the human forms that preceded us, we have art and creativity to offset our innate violence and destructiveness. It is also worth noting that, as the “new people” abduct, carry away and seem to cherish an infant Neanderthal, Golding is possibly suggesting that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens Sapiens later interbred – a theory which (I understand) had now been proven by DNA research. So we each carry at least a little of Neanderthal within us.

How do I rate this novel?

Like others of Golding’s novels, it is essentially an allegory, or, more precisely a “myth” – an explanation of why we are the morally-flawed creatures that we are. We have been this way since our greater intelligence taught us to hunt and kill and destroy our more peaceable evolutionary cousins.

But there are problems with this scheme. Golding was in part reacting against the stereotype of Neanderthals as violent, primitive, cave-dwelling brutes. Indeed, as epigram to The Inheritors, he uses ironically a quotation from H. G. Wells depicting Neanderthals in just such unflattering terms. In the process, however, Golding has over-compensated and created something like the counter-cliché of the “noble savage”. His Neanderthals are not quite credible because, being a modern human being, Golding is forced to present them as more “sapiens” than they probably were, or at least to have them express themselves in ways which, for all his attempts to make it alien to us, sound suspiciously modern.

Something external to the novel also now damages our suspension of disbelief. In the 60-plus years since the novel was written, the best scientific research suggests that Neanderthals were hunters, and were at least as aggressive among their own kind as Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been. This effectively destroys the image of Neanderthals as peaceable gatherers only. It also seems likely that Neanderthals were unafraid of crossing wide bodies of water.

In a way, this puts The Inheritors in the category of wishful thinking. Golding, correct though he may be about the innate moral flaw in our nature, is in literary line of descent with those who have created human-origin myths that suit their world view. In Leviathan, in the 17^th century, Thomas Hobbes said that we were violent, self-interested beasts in our most natural form, and therefore we needed a strong ruling authority to tame and control us. In direct contrast Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the 18^th century, in his De l’Inegalite Parmi Les Hommes, said that in our natural state we were wonderful loving and cooperative beings, but that the invention of private property made us competitive and violent.  Then there are those feminist tracts (Herstory etc.) which tell us that we were cooperative and peaceable when we worshipped female gods, but then the horrible Patriarchy came along and spoiled everything.

Though Golding, son of an atheist father, was a non-denominational Christian, his myth is closest to Rousseau’s. And he seems to have fallen into the same trap as Jane Goodall, who for years believed that her beloved chimpanzees were peaceful; but who then discovered that they waged war on their own kind. When she discovered this, she said “This was a dark time for me - I thought they were like us, only better”. (See the footnote to my posting Meeting Our Relatives.) Golding wants to believe that Neanderthals were like us, only better. It’s a beguiling myth.

In spite of the objections I raise here, The Inheritors is still a forceful attempt to suggest what is innately wrong with us – a concept which is vigorously denied by utopians and those who would like to believe that all our moral flaws can be eliminated by a little social tweaking.