Golding and Bergson: The Free Fall of Free Will

Abstract

Each of William Golding's novels is, in one form or another, a discussion of free will. While this is not especially rare in modem literature, Golding persistently resists the mainstream of thought by maintaining that man has a great amount of control over the success or failure of his existence and is not the victim of a chaotic, deterministic universe that so many modem artists prefer to imagine he is. Pincher Martin, for example, finally knows he ruined his own life and The Spires Jocelin is in the process of discovering the same about his. Most Golding heroes wait patiently for God, Nature, or just their best friend to show up and claim the blame; but in ,the end each walks off admitting his own. And so, a Golding novel usually attempts to present characters in the course of discovering their own culpability and to demonstrate, both artistically and philosophically, why it is necessary that they do so. His summary statement of his attitudes toward human freedom and guilt is presented, I feel, in Free Fall, a novel whose structure and argument are highly dependent upon Bergsonian psychology. While I have no evidence which assures that Golding read and comprehended Bergson, his interest in the general subject would make it probable that he did, and the discussions in his novels make it quite evident for me that he did. In terms of structure, Golcling nearly duplicates the manner in which Bergson says, in Matiere et Memoire, the memory operates and feeds data to the conscious intellect. With regard to argument, he seems to be positing the analysis of free will that Bergson presents in his Essai sur les immediates de la conscience. Rather than mere paraphrase, Golding's is a demonstration of identical concepts in poetic terms. Rather than being an assertive presentation of well-reasoned thought, Free Fall is the groveling search for awareness of one individual who obviously fears the implications a full understanding of free will brings with it. The similarities between Golding and Bergson are evident from the opening five pages of Free Fall, for here the narrator-a middle-aged artist named Samuel Mountjoy-pauses before he even begins to tell his story to establish the very special nature of the problem he is about to present to his readers. More than anything else, it is an attempt to pinpoint the exact moment in his life when, he is now quite sure, he made a free decision to dispose of his free will. He cannot remember having done it, but the choice has rendered him without volition and morally impotent for the rest of his life, or until age forty-two, the age at which he narrates.