1

WARRING SOVEREIGNS AND MIMETIC RIVALS: ON SCAPEGOATS AND

POLITICAL CRISIS IN WILLIAM GOLDING’S LORD OF THE FLIES

ERIC WILSON

Abstract: My paper argues for the relevance of the French literary critic Rene Girard to
contemporary critical legal theory. In order to prove my thesis, I undertake a ‘dual’ reading of a
foundational text from the field of Law and Literature—William Golding’s Lord of the Flies—by
subjecting it to both a Hobbesian and Girardian interpretation. The relevance of Thomas Hobbes to
the novel is obvious—the ‘constitutional crisis’ faced by the Boys is an allegorical re-enactment of
Hobbes’ famous division between the Commonwealth-by-Institution (represented by Ralph and
Piggy) and the Commonwealth-by-Acquisition (represented by Jack and Roger). What is less obvious
is the manner in which the struggle over the political order of the island strictly parallels a sub-
textual mimetic rivalry between the two boy-sovereigns, Ralph and Jack. Employing Girard’s as a
supplementary reading to Hobbes’, a much more challenging interpretation of the novel may be
offered: the mimetic rivalry between the two Boys replicates the mimetic dynamic between the
competing forms government that they symbolize, subverting any absolute distinction between
liberal and dictatorial forms of the State. The narrative core of the novel is a ‘double story arc’: the
movement from the representational theory of language (Hobbes) to the anti-representational
theory of substitution (Girard) and the movement from Social Contract (the conch) to the sacrificial
mechanism (the scapegoat).

‘As far back as we can go in History we find that the two signs of
Man are a capacity to kill and a belief in God.’—William Golding
‘Violence is the heart and soul of the sacred.’—Rene Girard

Lord of the Flies (1954) is one of the greatest allegorical novels of the 20th Century, so much

so that it serves as a veritable secondary school primer for literary symbolism (‘the conch

signifies…’, ‘the pig’s head represents…’, ‘Jack stands for…’). My first encounter with

William Golding’s magnificent but interminably nebulous novel took place when my father,

a High School teacher of Classics, warmly encouraged me to read it, selling it to me as a

cautionary fable of what happens when the thin veneer of civilisation is stripped away; in

other words, an allegory, or even a metaphysical thriller, about the always tenuous

foundations of civilisation and the ineradicable threat of historical regression towards

barbarism. My father’s superficial but not inaccurate characterisation was strongly endorsed

on numerous occasions by the cheerfully verbose Golding, who, in innumerable scholarly and
popular interviews, also counselled his readers as to the essentially moral nature of his text; to

cite just one example, ‘The theme [of Lord of the Flies] is an attempt to trace the defects of

society back to the defects of human nature. The moral [sic] is that the shape of a society

must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system…The

whole book is symbolic in nature.’1 I grew up, eventually, and turned my directions towards

darker things, predominantly Continental Philosophy and Critical Criminology, and, as a

result, when I revisited Lord of the Flies many years later, I knew enough, or had been ruined

enough, to throw down the gauntlet to my father’s inherently moralistic reading (I had also

read enough Lacan by this time to realise that I will spend my entire life in an utterly

desperate but wholly futile effort to obtain the Phallus). For I knew now that Golding had lied

(so had my father, but he didn’t know it)—the events described in the novel do not detail the

collapse of civilisation; rather, they outline the process by which Golding’s version of ‘the

Lost Boys’, now radically immersed within the State of Nature and unknowingly following

the social logic of community, mimetically re-enact the true sequence of cultural formation.

Rather than destroy civilisation they overthrow the foundations of a false model of social

being and invent for themselves an original, and self-sustaining, aboriginal society. In short, I

read Lord of the Flies as a satire of Thomas Hobbes’ theory of the State of Nature and the

Social Contract as the foundation of legal and political order (‘Society’) clandestinely

expressed in the form of an allegorical novel.

1 Golding cited in Howard S. Babb, The Novels of William Golding (Toledo, The Ohio State University Press,
1970), 7. For Golding as moralist, see Samuel Haynes, ‘William Golding’s Lord of the Flies’, in James R. Baker
(ed.), Critical Essays on William Golding (Boston, G.K. Hall & Co., 1988), 13-21.
 3

A. Social Contracting on the Beach: the inadequacy of secular reason

‘The theme of Lord of the Flies is grief, sheer grief, grief, grief, grief.’—William Golding

Arguably the single greatest work of British political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan

(1651) takes its name from the allegorical sea-monster, or Beast, cited in The Book of Job.

Very much like William Golding was to do three hundred years later, Hobbes is meticulous

in expressing his authorial intent.

And thus I have brought to an end my Discourse of Civill and Ecclesiasticall Government,
occasioned by the disorders of the present time [the Puritan Revolution], without partiality,
without application, and without other designe, than to set before mens eyes the mutuall
Relation between Protection and Obedience; of which the condition of Humane Nature, and
the Laws Divine, (both Naturall and Positive) require an inviolable observation.2

Although wide ranging in scope, today almost the entirety of the text is ignored; our

contemporary interest is focused primarily upon Chapters XIII and XIV of Book One (‘Of

Man’) and Chapter XVII of Book Two (‘Of Common-Wealth’) where Hobbes provides the

reader with what we take to be the core, and defining, elements of his theory of

constitutionality. The first such expression is well known: ‘Hereby it is manifest that during

the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition

that is called War, and such a war is of every men against every man.’3 The second is even

more famous.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of War, where every man is enemy to every
man; the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security, than what
their own strength, and their invention shall furnish them with all…and [what] is worst of all
[in such a condition], continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short.4

2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Edited by Richard Tuck, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), 491.
(fully corrected 1651 edition, Cambridge University Library, Syn.3.65.1)

3 Hobbes, Leviathan (1991), 88.

4 Hobbes, Leviathan (1991), 89.

If I were to superimpose Hobbes’ political treatise upon Golding’s literary fiction we would

make the uncanny discovery that the latter is an almost point-for-point poetical

embellishment of the former. Take, for example, the description of the original communal

mingling of the Boys following their stranding upon the nameless island provided in Chapter

One, ‘The Sound of the Shell’.5

Some [of the children] were naked and carrying their clothes; others half-naked, or more-or-
less dressed, in school uniforms; grey, blue, fawn, jacketed or jerseyed. There were badges,
mottoes even, stripes of color in stockings and pullovers. Their heads clustered above the
trunks in the green shade; heads brown, fair, black, chestnut, sandy, mouse-colored; heads
muttering, whispering, heads full of eyes that watched Ralph and speculated. Something was
being done.6

Note how the complex narrative of the first chapter manages to both encapsulate Hobbes’

foundational concerns and successfully anticipates (or ‘foreshadows’) all of the Hobbesian

themes that will play themselves out to the homicidal end of the later chapters. The first is the

focus on the apparently representational nature of language; the iconic conch is the ‘natural’

symbol of authority/reason as embedded within the landscape (‘Let him be the chief with the

trumpet-thing.’7). The second is that the ‘State of Nature’ is identical to the absence of the

‘common power’. The third is that the successful creation of the ‘common power’ guarantees

the elimination of that self-same State of Nature. The first thing that the Boys must do is to

establish some rules (‘That’s why Ralph made a meeting. So as we can decide what to do.’8),

including the maintenance of the all-important bonfire that will be used to perpetually

generate a smoke-signal. To do so, they collectively subordinate themselves to the procedure

of democratic assembly and structured debate both signified by the holding of the conch, the

master-sign of political reason. In short, they all voluntarily enter into a political compact

5 William Golding, Lord of the Flies (London, Faber and Faber, 1954), 1-29, generally. (original edition)

6 Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954), 14.

7 Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954), 19.

8 Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954), 17.

 5

premised upon the act of conveyance of their freedom (signified by isolation) towards the

group, or, less charitably, the crowd; for Hobbes, the ‘mutual transferring of Right is that

which men call CONTRACT.’9 As the Boys discover for themselves, the entering into the

Social Contract is the foundational act that creates the legal and political community; ‘To lay

down a man’s right to anything, is to divest himself of the liberty of hindering another of his

own right to the same.’10 Matters are immediately complicated, however, by the intuitive

realisation that pure democracy is inadequate: the state of emergency (‘We’ve got to decide

about being rescued’11), a life or death situation compounded by the absence of any grown-

ups, or ‘natural’ leaders, requires the self-selection of an executive power—a chief.12 As

Hobbes put it

The only way to erect such a Common Power, as may be able to defend men from the
invasion of foreigners and the injuries of one another…is to confer all their power and
strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their own Wills by
plurality of voices into one Will; which is as much to say, to appoint one Man, or Assembly
of men, to bear their Person; and every one to own, and acknowledge himself to be the author
of whatsoever he that bears their Person , shall act, or cause to act, in those things which
concern the common peace and safety; and therein to submit their Wills, everyone to his
Will, and their Judgments to his Judgment. This is more than consent or concordance; it is a
real unity to them all, in one and the same person, made by the contract of every man with
every man, in such a manner as if every man should say to every man, I authorize and give
up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition,
that you give up your right to him, and authorize all of his actions in like manner. This done,
the multitude so united in one person, is called a Commonwealth…This is the generation of
that great LEVIATHAN, or…of that Mortal God.13

For anyone who is familiar with Leviathan, or the great Beast from the Waters, the paradox at

chthonic work in the novel is in clear view: with Hobbes the completion of the Social

Contract which is identical with the suspension of the State of Nature constitutes the true

9 Hobbes (n 2), 94.

10 Hobbes (n 2), 92.

11 Golding (n 5), 18.

12 Golding (n 5), 18-19.

13 Hobbes (n 2), 120.

beginning of civilisational ascent whereas with Golding it is the beginning of the (apparent)

descent, colloquially known as ‘the downward spiral into violence’. Read (somewhat

didactically) from a Law and Literature perspective, Lord of the Flies forces us to consider

whether the contractarian theory of the foundation of Law is adequate and whether

‘something else’ besides rational (and self-interested) contracting is necessary to explain the

existence and nature of the State. As the saga of the Boys goes on to show, violence cannot

be ‘suspended’ by the act of contract alone; it must be assimilated directly into the

community by means of symbolic transference. And as the unruly protagonists learn for

themselves, the successful completion of the legal and political order (‘the State’) can only

come with the institutionalisation of a formalised mechanism of ritualistic sacrifice—or

Religion. The established (or permissible) Church cannot be separated from the State; rather,

it must be collectively accepted as the true foundation of the community.

And all because of a Beast.

B. From the State to Religion: Justice as Vengeance

Man is a fallen being. He is gripped by original sin. His nature is sinful and his state
perilous. I accept the theology and admit the triteness; but what is trite is true; and a truism
can become more than a truism when it is a belief passionately held.—William Golding
The most remarkable feature of Leviathan (and the one that cost its author the most in his

later life) was its uncompromising exclusion of Religion from political discourse; the Social

Contract, as a self-grounding activity, is to be preserved from the contra-rational subjectivity

of private Faith; organised Religion is to be understood solely as an instrument of

Government.

From this consolidation of the Right Politique, and Ecclesiastique in Christian Soveraigns, it
is evident, they have all manner of Powers over their Subjects, that can be given to man, for
the government of men’s externall actions, both in Policy and Religion; and may make such
Laws, as themselves shall judge fittest, for the government of their own Subjects, both as they
 7

are the Common-wealth, and as they are the Church: for both State, and Church are the same
men.14

Two of the four books of Leviathan are devoted to organised Religion and the Church15; yet

in this text, unlike elsewhere in his writings, Hobbes’ sole concern is with the relative value

of civil Religion: not only the strict separation of private conscience from public speech, but

the wholesale subordination of ecclesiastical institutions to secular government. Religious

belief, or language, is itself void of persuasive value, the poetical expression of mere

subjective opinion and unruly passion.16 My problem here is that my close reading of Lord of

the Flies accepts the text as an allegorical acting out of the political imaginary of the cultural

logic of the Social Contract, culminating in the establishment of the ‘cult’ of the Beast. We

also know that Religion formed an essential part of Golding’s abiding concern as an author.

How do we manage the ambiguities generated by Golding’s (implicit) appropriation of an ‘a-

theistick’ work for the purposes of a quasi-religious allegory?

An answer lies with juxtaposing Hobbes’ revolutionary materialism with an equally

challenging anthropological model of cultural formation that privileges Religion as the source

of Society. And it is here that I wish to commence an oppositional reading of Hobbes

afforded to me by the work of Rene Girard, dedicated to the radically anti-secularist

proposition that Religion is the true foundation of Society. 17 Much of Girard’s work

constitutes a highly unorthodox form of legal anthropology, hybridised by both Durkheim’s

14 Hobbes (n 2), 377-8; see also, 375-9 and 479-80.

15 Book Three, ‘Of a Christian Common-Wealth’, 255-415, and Book Four, ‘Of the Kingdome of Darknesse’,
or, more simply, Roman Catholicism, 417-82. .

16 See for example Chapter XXXI of Book Three, ‘Of the Kingdom of God By Nature’, wherein Hobbes
restricts proper religious speech to that uniformity of public worship governed directly by civil law; Hobbes,
245-54.

17 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press,
1977), generally. See Michael Kirwan, Discovering Girard (Chicago, A Cowley Publications Book, 2005) in
general, especially 43-50.
Functionalist sociology of religion and Freud’s cultural criticism (primarily Totem and

Taboo), yielding us the following general conclusion.

The efficiency of our judicial system conceals the problem [of violence], and the elimination
of the problem conceals from us the role played by religion. The air of mystery that primitive
societies acquire for us is undoubtedly due in large part to this misunderstanding. It is
undoubtedly responsible for our extreme views of these societies, our insistence on
portraying them alternately as vastly superior or flagrantly inferior to our own. One factor
alone might well be responsible for our oscillation between extremes, our radical evaluations:
the absence in [‘primitive’] societies of a judicial system…If we compare societies that
adhere to a judicial system with societies that practice sacrificial rites, the difference between
the two is such that we can indeed consider the absence or presence of these [judicial]
institutions as a basis for distinguishing primitive societies from ‘civilised’ ones.18

The foundational, but thoroughly repressed, continuity between the modern and the archaic is

of course a classic trope of Freudian psycho-analysis. Yet, Girard largely eschews the

Freudian theory of drive, or instinct (Trieb), finding greater insight in the application of

psycho-analysis to the collective (impersonal) dynamics of cultural formation; in effect, the

translation of Freud’s late metapsychology into the referential terms of Emile Durkheim’s

notion of function: ‘The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to

reinforce the social fabric. Everything else derives from that.’19 For Girard, the ‘fundamental

truth about violence’ is that, ‘if left unappeased, violence will accumulate until it overflows

its confines and floods the surrounding area. The role of sacrifice is to stem this rising tide of

indiscriminate substitutions and redirect violence into “proper” channels.’20 Key to the

success of the sacrificial mechanism is its status as ritual which is invariably a ‘re-enactment

of a “prior event”.’21 Since every ritual is a re-enactment, its governing logic is mimesis, the

ritual is both a representation and a substitution for an earlier crisis of violence. But this

18 Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1977), 18-19.

19 Girard, Violence (1977), 8.

20 Girard, Violence (1977), 10.

21 Burton Mack, ‘Introduction: Religion and Ritual’ in Robert G. Hammerton-Kelly (ed.), Violent Origins:
Walter Burkert, Rene Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford,
Stanford University Press, 1987), 8.
 9

governing logic is anti-representational: under the sign of substitution, all differences are

abolished and any one thing can be traded for and replaced with any other thing. In Girard’s

case the vital ritualistic dimension of the sacrificial mechanism is the mimetic evocation of an

earlier act of killing that was successful in resolving social crisis.

[T]he sacrificiers…are striving to produce a replica, as faithful as possible in every detail, of

a previous crisis that was resolved by means of a spontaneously unanimous victimization. All
the dangers, real and imaginary, that threaten the community are subsumed in the most
terrible danger that can confront a society: the sacrificial crisis. The rite is therefore a
repetition of the original, spontaneous ‘lynching’ that restored order in the community by
reestablishing, around the figure of the surrogate victim [the scapegoat], that sentiment of
social accord that had been destroyed in the onslaught of reciprocal violence…In the
scapegoat theme we should recognize the very real metamorphosis of reciprocal violence into
restraining through the agency of unanimity. 22

In Girard’s view, every ritual bears the traces of a double movement: the re-invocation of the

past event and the projection of that earlier event’s cathartic effect into future time. The ‘prior

event’ that all ritual killings represent through mimetic substitution is a collective murder, an

act of mob violence. ‘“Sacrifice” then becomes a term that can be used to refer to the

complex phenomenon of the collective killing of a human victim, its mythic rationalization,

and its ritualization.’23 Collective murder mediated by ritual is the true beginning of human

culture and the scapegoat is the first cultural artefact of human history.24 The necessary

precondition for the historical survival of the community is the successful exorcism of the

unclean spirit of revenge. This is secured through the periodic enactment of the rituals of the

machinery of sacrifice, which is itself the mimetic repetition of an earlier killing of a

designated victim (the scapegoat) which successfully broke the cycle of retributive violence.

22 Girard (n 17), 94-5 and 96.

23 Mack (n 21), 8.

24 Girard (n 17), generally. ‘All systems that give structure to human society have been generated from [the
scapegoat mechanism]: language, kinship systems, taboos, codes of etiquette, patterns of exchange, rites, and
civil institutions. Thus a theory of sacrifice has produced a comprehensive account of human social formation,
religion, and culture.’ Mack (n 21), 7.
 The first of several obvious questions to be asked here is: why, exactly, is the will-to-

violence so virulent? Girard’s answer is that the ferocity of social violence is structurally

embedded within the form of its transmission, best understood as a form of contagion.

Why does the spirit of revenge, wherever it breaks out, constitute such an intolerable
menace? Perhaps because the only satisfactory revenge for spilt blood is spilling the blood of
the killer; and in the blood feud there is no clear distinction between the act for which the
killer is being punished and the punishment itself. Vengeance professes to be an act of
reprisal, and every reprisal calls for another reprisal. The crime to which the act of vengeance
addresses itself is almost never an unprecedented offense; in almost every case it has been
committed in revenge for some prior crime.25

Homo Sapiens, unlike other animals, is assumed by Girard to lack a genetically inscribed

‘braking mechanism’ for intra-group aggression: the dynamic of intra-community

relationships leads automatically to a proliferating escalation of retribution. Violence within

the human community can be nothing else other than endemic, or contagious; since the ‘only

answer to murder is another murder, cycles of reciprocal retaliation create unending series of

revenge-killings. To bring the series to an end, a “final” killing is necessary. The final killing

is achieved in the “mechanism of the surrogate victim.”’26 On one level, this is nothing more

than an exceptionally elegant and sophisticated restatement of the principle of vendetta, the

primary retributive mechanism of ‘primitive’ justice (inclusive of the modern vigilante)

recognised as a universal phenomenon by legal anthropology. Girard’s true originality begins

to emerge when he expands upon the first insight.

Vengeance, then, is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process. Every time it turns up in

some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body. There is the risk
that the act of vengeance will initiate a chain reaction whose consequences will quickly prove
fatal to any society of modest size. The multiplication of reprisals instantaneously puts the
very existence of a society in jeopardy, and that is why it is universally proscribed.27

25 Girard (n 17), 14.

26 Mack (n 21), 8.

27 Girard (n 17), 14-15.

 11

Language counts. The phrase ‘interminable, infinitely repetitive process’ directly evokes

Freud’s theory of repetition/compulsion as an erotic principle, classically expressed as

Thanatos, or the ‘death-drive’. As I have already pointed out, Girard rejects Freud’s theory of

sexuality; however, he clearly appropriates the unconscious logic of a certain kind of desire

as the trigger mechanism for a reactive process of social evolution.

Vengeance is a vicious circle whose effect on primitive societies can only be surmised. For us
the circle has been broken. We owe our good fortune to one of our social institutions above
all: our judicial system, which serves to deflect the menace of vengeance. The system does
not suppress vengeance; rather, it effectively limits it to a single act of reprisal, enacted by a
sovereign authority specializing in this particular function. The decisions of the judiciary are
invariably presented as the final word on vengeance.28

For us moderns, justice-as-revenge has been effectively superseded by, or, in less Hegelian

terms, thoroughly sublimated into the universalist rule of law and the impersonal formalism

of due process. I would expect the contemporary reader to tolerate Girard’s assumptions

concerning the archaic genealogy of judicial Modernity, although our prejudice would be in

favour of the irreversibility of the long progressive narrative of over-coming: any deviation

from, or reversal of, the global course of rationalist rehabilitation can be nothing other than

barbarism. I think that what the typical reader would unreservedly reject is Girard’s

valorisation of Theology as the vital cultural mechanism at work in the human drama. After

years of the middle-brow media sponsored ‘War on Religion’ (Christopher Hitchens, Richard

Dawkins, A.C. Grayling et al)—which, I suspect, is merely one of the propagandistic wings

of the more wide-ranging ‘War on Terror’ (perhaps better understood in crypto-Hobbesian

terms as the ‘War on the Fear of Unexpected Death’)—our common inclination to view

Religion as the master-sign of social dysfunction and cultural pathology would make such a

notion secular heresy.

It does sound uncannily like William Golding, however.

28 Girard (n 17), 15.

 C. ‘They used to call me “Piggy”’: The Scapegoat

According to Girard, people ‘can dispose of their violence more efficiently if they regard the

process not as something emanating from within themselves, but as a necessity imposed from

without, a divine decree whose least infraction calls down terrible punishment.’29 From this it

follows that when ‘we minimize the dangers implicit in vengeance we risk losing sight of the

true function of sacrifice.’30 We need to examine with care that process Girard posits at the

core of primitive religion as the ‘circuit-breaker’ that pre-empts the contagion of violence

spread through retributive acts of vengeance: the sacrificial machinery, or ‘mechanism’, of

the scapegoat. The internal cultural logic of the mechanism operates by means of the mimetic

transference of collective violence towards a sacrificial substitute/surrogate (the ‘victim’)

who is symbolically re-constituted as the contagious and contaminating source of all hatred

and vengeance—that social dysfunction which Hobbes pointedly identified with ‘Grief’.31

This explains the most obvious, and well known, characteristic of the sacrificial victim: its

impurity (pollution; stain) as a sin-bearing object.32 Out of necessity, the scapegoat must

always be socially marginal in some way, an ‘expendable’ victim, human or animal, whose

death will not cause violence to rebound because no one will bother to avenge them but

which, for whatever reason, can serve as the focus of universal opprobrium.

29 Girard (n 17), 14.

30 Girard (n 17), 18.

31 See below.

32 Which is one of the crucial demarcations between ‘primitive’ religions and the later Hellenistic paganisms
and monotheistic faiths; for Girard the transformation of the status of the victim is the master-sign of a
revolution in civilisation. In the ‘primitive phase’ of Religion, the victim itself is impure or contaminated in
some way, and purification, always communal, is achieved through the sacrifice/expulsion/destruction of the
surrogate. But, beginning with Greek Tragedy and the later Hebrew prophets, such as in the Book of Job (the
spawning ground of Leviathan), the victim becomes elevated through the inversion of the binary logic of
impurity/purity: the victim, beloved of God(s) is him or herself inherently pure but becomes an object of
supernatural power and value (the original meaning of pollution, meaning a dangerous magic) by drawing unto
themselves the collective impurity of the group. See Girard (n 17) in general and Rene Girard, Job: The Victim
and His People, Translated by Yvonne Freccero (London, The Athlone Press, 1987), generally.
 13

All our sacrificial victims, whether chosen from one of the human categories [slave; prisoner;
captive] or…from the animal realm, are invariably distinguishable from the non-sacrificeable
beings by one essential characteristic: between these victims and the community a crucial
link is missing, so they can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal. Their death does
not automatically entail an act of vengeance. The considerable importance this freedom from
reprisal has for the sacrificial process makes us understand that sacrifice is primarily an act of
violence without risk of vengeance…The desire to commit an act of violence on those near us
cannot be suppressed without a conflict; we must divert that impulse, therefore, toward the
sacrificial victim, the creature we can strike down without fear of reprisal, since he lacks a
champion.33

On another level, one of unexpected depth, the scapegoat is always the object of a ‘double’

transference: not only is the victim chosen to be the bearer of the collective sins of the

community through some inherent flaw of its nature, but, through the projection of sin into

the alien object the community (temporarily) releases itself from its capacity for violence,

which remains eternally latent. The ‘psychic price’ to be paid for this ritualistic transference

is high: if sacrifice is the essence of Religion (and Religion is the essence of community),

then the social body must constantly repress its self-awareness of the violence of its own

origins, precisely because, as Hobbes intuited, we adhere to the group precisely in order to

subdue the violence within (strife) and to shield ourselves from the threat of the outside

(war). This collective act of repression usually seeks some sort of outlet through emotional or

symbolic displacement, a process that is historically without end, because, in accordance with

the logic of atavism, the recapitulation of ‘primitive’ traits within the more ‘advanced’

organism (biological or cultural) will always work to undermine the stable (and stabilising)

demarcations between the primitive and the advanced.

From a Law and Literature perspective, this dilemma is most evident in the liminality, or

reversibility, that operates between both ‘public’ and ‘private’ justice and between natural

law and positive law, as has been clearly recognised by Girard.

Vocabulary is perhaps more revealing here than judicial theories. Once the concept of
interminable revenge has been formally rejected, it is referred to as private vengeance. The
33 Girard (n 17), 13.
term implies the existence of a public vengeance, a counterpart never made explicit. By
definition, primitive societies have only private vengeance. Thus, public vengeance is the
exclusive property of well-policed societies, and our society calls it the judicial system.34

It should now be obvious why Girard’s highly original theory of mimesis serves as the

philosophical antithesis of the contractual rationality of Hobbes’ Commonwealth: words are

radically disassociated from facts, the scapegoat is both profoundly true (cultural; subjective)

and completely false (material; objective) at the same moment. Richard Tuck’s excellent

critical commentary upon Hobbes is very helpful on this point.

The problem which exercised Hobbes, almost alone among the theorists of his time, was that
even if men are basically self-protective and therefore in principle pacific towards one
another, their independency of judgment about the world will lead to conflict. His proposed
solution was therefore to eliminate independent judgment about most matters of fact. Natural
man, he argued, would see the necessity for everyone to transfer their individual judgment in
cases of uncertainty to a common-decision-maker, whose opinion about what constitutes a
threat would be conclusive.35

Hobbes is clearly situated within the classical episteme of the 17th century, signified by the

onto-epistemological apparatus of the camera obscura: sensory data may be inherently

unreliable but they can be assigned precise evidentiary value through the correct perception

by and operation of an irreducible Mind that itself is devoid of constituent parts.36 Technically

Hobbes was a nominalist; like Descartes, he was extremely sceptical concerning the validity

of sensory knowledge.37 However, as Tuck has pointed out, Hobbes, also like Descartes, was

concerned to ‘emphasise that a mind can know, without any doubt, whatever went on purely

within itself. He put into this category all language—which he took to be the labelling of our

34 Girard (n 17), 15.

35 Richard Tuck, ‘Introduction’, in Hobbes (n 2), xvii.

36 ‘Thus the camera obscura is inseparable from a certain metaphysics of interiority: it is a figure of both the
observer who is a nominally free sovereign and a privatized subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off
from a public exterior world.’ Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass MIT Press, 1990), 39; see also 25-66.

37 Tuck (n 35), xiv and xv.

 15

internal experiences by terms intended to help us in recalling and organising them.’ 38 If we

take the time to read Book One of Leviathan, where Hobbes lays out his representational

theory of knowledge,39 we find that it is premised upon an equally robust representational

theory of language consisting of three distinct propositions. The first, and most foundational,

is a radical but simplistic Empiricism: sensation is the source of all human knowledge.

The Originall of them all [the Thoughts of Men], is that which we call SENSE; (For if there
is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten
upon organs of Sense). The rest are derived from the original…All which qualities called
Sensible, are in the object that causeth them, but so many several notions of the matter, by
which it presseth our organs diversely.40

The second is an equally robust anti-Scepticism, tantamount to a form of Rationalism: the

Self can be rendered transparent to itself; language is perfectible. As with Descartes,

knowledge, mediated through correct language, can achieve self-validation, or self-

grounding.

For it is most true that Cicero sayth of [the Philosophers] somewhere; that there can be
nothing so absurd, but may be found in the books of Philosophers. And the reason is
manifest. For there is not one of them that begins his ratiocination from the Definitions, or
Explications of the names they are to use; which is a method that hath been used onely in
Geometry[41]; whose Conclusions have thereby been made indisputable. The first cause of
Absurd conclusions I ascribe to the want of Method; in that they begin not their Ratiocination
from Definitions; that is, from settled significations of their words: as if they could cast
account, without knowing the value of the numerall words, one, two, three…By this it
appears that Reason is not as Sense, and Memory, borne with us; nor gotten by Experience
onely, as Prudence is; but attained by Industry; first in apt imposing of Names; and secondly
by getting a good and orderly Method in proceeding from the Elements, which are Names, to
Assertions made by Connexion of one of them to another, till we come to a knowledge of all
the Consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it, men call
SCIENCE.42

38 Tuck (n 35), xv; Hobbes (n 2), Chapter Five, 31-7.

39 Hobbes (n 2), 13-115.

40 Hobbes (n 2), 13 and 14.

41 Compare this with Hobbes (n 2) 28: Geometry ‘is the onely Science that it hath pleased God hitherto to
bestow upon Mankind.’

42 Hobbes (n 2), 34 and 35.

Third is Hobbes’ signature contribution, as indicated by Tuck: the premise of the onto-

political. Even if neither of the above were true (and it is vital to note the internal frisson, or

tensions, that run throughout Leviathan), the political and social utility of the enforcement of

standard (-ised) judgment makes objectivity and certainty indispensable (even if, perhaps,

practically unattainable): the Sovereign is a beast of discourse, the censor of the process of

naming (denotation), with the regulation and guaranteeing of ‘proper’ speech the highest

mark of Sovereignty.

There being nothing simply and absolutely; nor any common Rule of Good and Evill, to be
taken from the nature of the objects themselves43; but from the Person of the man (where
there is no Common-Wealth) or, (in a Common-Wealth,) from the Person that representeth it;
or from an Arbitrator or Judge, whom men disagreeing shall by consent set up, and make his
sentence the Rule thereof [44]… [the multitude shall] therein…submit their Wills, everyone to
his Will, and their Judgments, to his Judgment.45

Therefore, the core of Girard’s challenge to Hobbes lies not so much with an anti-

representational theory versus a representational one, but rather with the critical interrogation

of Leviathan’s proclamation of success in attaining self-grounding: the Social Contract, while

intelligible is ultimately impractical, for even if Hobbes succeeds in demonstrating the first

and the second propositions (a very tall order) he must necessarily fail with the third. Hobbes’

representational theory of knowledge is the foundation of his onto-political theory of the

transference, or conveyance, of judgment of fact to a common decision-maker: an executive

power that is as much epistemological as it is political. But Hobbes’ move is undercut by

Girard’s theory of mimesis, an instance of the anti-representational approach to language.

The social functionality of the sacrificial mechanism depends upon the operation of a literally

43 Invariably neutral ‘in and of themselves’.

44 Hobbes (n 2), 39.

45 Hobbes (n 2), 120. Although the term was not developed prior to David Hume in the mid-18th Century, it is
fairly clear that Hobbes’ dilemma is essentially that of the Is verus Ought dichotomy: even if it were possible to
self-ground Reason along the foundational principles elucidated by Hobbes it does not follow, from that fact
alone, that anyone is actually bound (contractually or otherwise) to follow them. Geometers may really speak
the truth, but the vulgar crowd is still governed by its ‘base passions’—only direct Executive Action will do the
job of enforcing the uniform rules of correct speech.
 17

false but culturally and psychologically effective act of substitution (the

hated/feared/unclean/ugly = scapegoat); ‘Violence and the sacred are inseparable. But the

covert appropriation by sacrifice of certain properties of violence—particularly the capability

of violence to move from one object to another—is hidden from sight by the awesome

machinery of ritual.’46

As the reader knows full well, throughout the Lord of the Flies it is the hapless Piggy who

serves as the Hobbesian monomaniacal eliminator of ‘independent judgment about most

matters of fact’. He acts as the ‘reality principle’ (‘So now we can decide on what’s what.’47)

to Ralph’s dithering (i.e., bound by democratic procedure) chief. He is also the novel’s

paramount scapegoat and its most dramatic sacrificial victim48: his own name literally speaks

his fate. The central narrative drama of Lord of the Flies is the working through to the horrific

end of the political consequences of a seemingly intractable crisis of representation, the

solution of which demands the re-emergence of the religious imaginary—and, paradoxically,

the successful re-establishment of an indigenous culture on a self-sustaining foundation.

D. ‘What’s grown-ups goin’ to say?’: the mimetic succession of sacrifice(s)

The narrative spine of Lord of the Flies is a logical sequence of three separate acts of murder

(or attempted murder49), each one of ascending anthropological and jurisprudential

46 Girard (n 17), 19.

47 Golding (n 5), 141.

48 The excruciating and prolonged set-up of Piggy’s death by a politically incited mob, self-consciously
manipulated by Jack and Roger, takes up almost the whole of Chapter Eleven, ‘Castle Rock’. See Golding (n 5),
187-202. It is also blackly comic: take, for example Piggy’s ‘asking for it’ remark on page 189: ‘“I’m going to
him [Jack] with this conch in my hands.”’ Simon, by contrast, is completely dismembered in less than one page
at 168. Strikingly, the text spends far more time on the transmogrification of his mutilated carcass than on the
actual moment of death which, because it is a spontaneous action by the crowd, is temporally compressed and
‘muddled’ as both sensation and memory. See below.

49 With the exception of the appropriately nameless mulberry-faced boy, the announcer of the presence of the
Beast (and, therefore, the author of the violence to come), the accidental victim of the contagion of violence via
the conflagration/immolation mediated by the crowd, and the direct precursor of the parade of sacrificial victims
to come. His catastrophic exit, an enforced disappearance in effect, encapsulates the entirety of the mimetic
discourse of the text. ‘The older boys first noticed the child when he resisted. There was a group of little boys
urging him forward and he did not want to go. He was a shrimp of a boy, about six years old, and one side of his
significance, all of which mimetically repeat the co-evolution of both the State and Religion.

The first victim is Simon, a key member of the Ralph-Piggy faction, who serves the

archetype for the other two victims precisely because his manner of death is the simplest (or

most primitive): the ignorant and blind (or arbitrary) violence of the crowd, classically known

as diasparagmos,50 or the wholly spontaneous ‘Dionysian assault’.51 The tearing apart of

Simon during the ritualistic frenzy of the crowd’s celebration of the hunt is the act that,

ironically, is misinterpreted (or misnamed) by the Boy’s as the gesture that temporarily

exorcizes the Beast, whom the reader is now aware is really the body of a jet-fighter pilot

whose parachute has become entangled in the trees. As Simon is dismembered in frenzy after

having been mistakenly identified as the Beast by the crowd, the ‘real’ Beast undertakes his

phantasmagoric migration to the deep waters of the Biblical Leviathan.

Now a great wind blew the wind sideways, cascading the water from the forest trees. On the
mountain-top the parachute filled and moved; the figure slid, rose to its feet, spun, swayed
down through a vastness of wet air and trod with ungainly feet the tops of the high trees;
falling, still falling, it sank towards the beach and the boys rushed screaming into the
darkness. The parachute took the figure forward, furrowing the lagoon, and bumped it over
the reef and out to sea.52

Wholly consistent with Girard, the ‘accidental’ victim, involuntarily butchered in Dionysian

frenzy, is subsequently sanctified: the murder of the victim ‘solves’ the immediate crisis (the

Beast leaves the island after the cathartic discharge of group violence), so that the victim is

face was blotted out by a mulberry-coloured birthmark. He stood now, warped out of the perpendicular by the
fierce light of publicity, and he bored into the course grass with one toe. He was muttering and about to cry.’ He
would be well advised to do so; as the anthropologically ‘hip’ reader is immediately aware, the kid is doomed.
And it is none other than Piggy, the pivotal victim of the sacrificial drama to unfold, who proclaims his
extermination—perhaps out of an act of unconscious identification. ‘“The little ’un—‘gasped Piggy—“him with
the mark on his face, I don’t see him. Where is he now?” The crowd was as silent as death…A tree exploded in
the fire like a bomb. Tall swathes of creepers rose for a moment into view, agonized, and went down again. The
little boys screamed at them…”The little ’un had a mark on his—face—where is—he now? I tell you I don’t see
him.” The boys looked at each other fearfully, unbelieving…Beneath them, on the unfriendly side of the
mountain, the drum-roll continued.’ Golding (n 5), 33-4 and 46-7. In creative writing classes we call this ‘fore-
shadowing’.

50 Girard, (n 16), 131-2.

51 Golding (n 5), 168-70.

52 Golding (n 5), 169.

 19

invested with supernatural power after the fact.53 But most important is that Simon is re-cast

as a scapegoat only after his death; the ‘fault’ (sin) of the wrongful murder is retroactively

attributed to the victim himself. This constitutes the core of the ‘morning after’ conversation

between Ralph and Piggy, who, as we should expect, is the one Boy most in denial over the

nature of the events of the ‘night before’.

He jumped to his feet and stood over Ralph.

‘It was dark. There was that—bloody dance. There was lightning and thunder and rain. We
was scared!’
‘I wasn’t scared,’ said Ralph slowly, ‘I was—I don’t know what I was.’
‘We was scared!’ said Piggy excitedly. ‘Anything might have happened. It wasn’t –what you
said.’
He was gesticulating, searching for a formula.54

‘Oh Piggy!’
Ralph’s voice, low and stricken, stopped Piggy’s gestures. Ralph, cradling the conch rocked
himself to and fro.’
‘Don’t you understand Piggy? The things we did—.’…
Ralph continued to rock to and fro.
‘It was an accident,’ said Piggy suddenly, ‘that’s what it was. An accident.’ His voice shrilled
again. ‘Coming in the dark—he had no business crawling like that out of the dark. He was
batty. He asked for it.’ He gesticulated widely again.
‘It was an accident—.’
‘You didn’t see what they did.’
‘Look, Ralph. We got to forget this. We can’t do no good thinking about it, see?’55

Pregnant with meaning, the dialogue is most notable for juxtaposing the ritualistic features of

the diasparagmos with the beginning of the end of Hobbesian political reason: the conch as

53 ‘Dismemberment is emblematic of triumph and resurrection; it reflects the operation of the surrogate victim,
the transformation of maleficent violence in beneficent violence.’ Girard (n 17), 286.This is clearly elaborated in
one of the most beautiful passages in the novel, where Simon’s mutilated cadaver is invested with the spectral
luminosity of the micro-animals of the Deep. Golding (n 5), 169-70.

54 As is the wont of Geometers.

55 Golding (n 5), 173.

the sign of public discourse is now revealed as a prop, or a fetish, leaned upon by Ralph in a

clearly infantile manner. What announces itself in a steadily growing crescendo is that the

nameless nature of the Beast—artificially created through a series of misperceptions and un-

regulated speech—is the unassimilable thing that forces a fatal crisis of representation

identical with an alteration of the island Common-Wealth. Golding’s mixture of the political

with the epistemic is the narrative motor of the second, and far more elaborate sacrificial act,

the death of Piggy as a result of a politically incited act of mob violence.

At this point it is worthwhile to discuss Girard’s theory of the scapegoat in a bit more

detail.

Strictly speaking, there is no essential difference between animal sacrifice and human
sacrifice, and in many cases one is substituted for the other. Our tendency to insist on
differences that have little reality when discussing the institution of sacrifice—our reluctance,
for example, to equate animal with human sacrifice—is undoubtedly a factor in the
extraordinary misunderstandings that still persist in that area of human culture…all victims,
even the animal ones, bear a certain resemblance to the object they replace; otherwise the
violent impulse would remain unsatisfied.56

And what are the characteristics of the scapegoat that determines his/her identification and

selection?

From within the group, one person is separated out as victim. The selection is arbitrary and
spontaneous, though there are requisites. The victim must be recognizable as a surrogate for
the guilty party (or parties, and ultimately for the group itself); he must be vulnerable, unable
to retaliate, without champions to continue the vengeful violence; and there must be
unanimity within the group that he is the one at fault. When this unanimity is achieved the
victim is treated as a criminal, killed, and expelled. This brings the violence to an end. The
group has redirected its aggressions and its members are now able to cooperate.57

The irony that is normally missed by those who advocate a moral reading of the novel,

ordinarily the same crowd who frequently interpret Piggy as the allegorical personification of

the ‘voice of Reason’ or the ‘reality principle’ ( a kind of ‘failed hero’), is that it is precisely

these characteristics that render him the ideal object of the scapegoating mechanism. His gory
56 Girard (n 17), 10-11.

57 Mack (n 21), 8.
 21

death in Chapter Eleven (‘Castle Rock’58) at the hands of the atavistic crowd as a sacrificial

killing that doubles as a political assassination59 is the perfect allegorical expression of the

radical insufficiency of political reason. As we have already seen, in Chapter Ten of the novel

(‘The Shell and the Glasses’60) Piggy is depicted as the bearer of false consciousness,

precisely because he is the one who most ferociously denies the logic of the sacrificial

murder of Simon. Piggy’s fatal error is that he believes that the rationality underlying the

original contract is adequate to guarantee the foundation of the community, beautifully

expressed in perhaps the most famous passage of the novel: ‘And in the middle of them, with

filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the

darkness of men’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.’ 61

Therefore, his ‘fall, which the by now thoroughly traumatised Ralph weeps over, is not just

his literal fall to his physical death, but an allegorical ‘fall’: the de-construction of

Humankind as rationally contracting agents. But the narrative groundwork for this convulsive

act is established much earlier, in Chapter Five, ‘Beast from the Water’,62 in which the

community as a whole imperceptibly slides towards the anti-representational theory of

language—the epistemological sine qua non of the sacrificial mechanism.

Chapter Five is the moment of intractable political crisis which is the mirroring of an even

more foundational crisis of knowledge: the failure to arrive at a final determination of the

nature (or ‘name’) of the Beast. As far as I am aware, no commentator has paid sufficient

attention to the pivotal speech delivered to the assembly by Maurice, a shadowy character

like Jack’s indecipherable lieutenant Roger but one who is vaguely within the Ralph-Piggy
58 Golding (n 19), 187-202.

59 Golding (n 5), 199-201.

60 Golding (n 5), 171-86.

61 Golding (n 5), 225.

62 Golding (n 5), 81-102.

faction. The crucial chapter begins innocuously enough: as survival is the paramount function

of the Hobbesian Sovereign Ralph calls an ‘emergency session’ of the assembly in order to

reaffirm the binding nature of democratic decision-making.63 (It also provides him with a

wonderful Machiavellian opportunity to self-reflect upon the essentially discursive nature of

Sovereignty: ‘He was searching his mind for simple words so that even the littluns64 would

understand what the assembly was about. Later, perhaps, practiced debaters—Jack, Maurice,

Piggy—would use their whole art to twist the meeting; but now at the beginning the subject

of the debate must be laid out clearly.’)65 But once democracy is invoked, everything turns

into shit66: everybody wants to talk about the Beast.

He [Ralph] moved the conch gently, looking beyond them at nothing, remembering the
beastie, the snake, the fire, the talk of fear.
‘Then people started getting frightened.’…
‘We’ve got to talk about this fear and decide there’s nothing in it. I’m frightened myself,
sometimes; only that’s nonsense! Like bogies. Then, when we’ve decided, we can start again
and be careful about things like fire.’67

The assembly scene is Golding’s ultimate riposte to both the representational theory of

language in general and to the Hobbes’ prescriptive regime of the correct, or principled, use

of speech in particular, as the elliptical grandeur of Maurice’s rhetoric gloriously

demonstrates.
63 Golding (n 5), 81-4.

64 The fairly nameless Boys of the lower forms.

65 Golding (n 5), 84.

66 Literally. One of the reason why Ralph convenes the Assembly is to establish some new rules about public
sanitation as the Boys have been using the gathering spot as a latrine: ‘We’ve got to use the rocks again. This
place is getting dirty.’ Golding (n 5), 86. It is widely underappreciated how scatological the Lord of the Flies is;
images of dirt, filth and blood populate the landscape. The constant referencing of the ‘dirty’ clearly signifies
the latent violence of the community (impurity) which is unconsciously awaiting the collective cleansing effect
(purification) of the ritualistic sacrifice. But I also believe that the scatological imagery also invokes the latent,
and ultimately ineradicable violence of Nature itself, a cosmic tapestry of overlapping predator-prey
relationships. For a discussion of the scatological in the novel, see L.L. Dickson, ‘Lord of the Flies’, in Harold
Bloom (ed.), William Golding’s Lord of the Flies New Edition (Infobase Publishing, 2008), 51-2. In the hands
of a master, even fecal matter may be allegorical.

67 Golding (n 5), 87-8.

 23

Maurice spoke—so loudly that they jumped.

‘Daddy said68 they haven’t found all the animals in the sea yet.’

Argument started again. Ralph held out the glittering conch and Maurice took it obediently.
The meeting subsided.
‘I mean when Jack says you can be frightened because people are frightened anyway that’s
all right. But when he says there’s only pigs on the island I expect he’s right but he doesn’t
know, not really, not certainly I mean’—Maurice took a breath—‘My daddy says there’s
things, what d’you call ’em that make ink—squids—that are hundreds of yards long and eat
whales whole.’ He paused again and laughed gaily.’ I don’t believe in the beast of course. As
Piggy says, life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean—’69

It is an inconvenient truth that the successful operation of the logic of exclusion (or reasoning

a priori) is wholly contingent upon the completion of the system of knowledge being

deployed. Maurice’s epistemic ‘slide’ is the true turning point of the political narrative: no

one can agree upon the correct use of language leading to an act of secession based upon the

nature of reality and the proper naming of things.

Someone shouted.
‘A squid couldn’t come up out of the water!’
‘Could.’
‘Couldn’t’.
In a moment the platform was full of arguing, gesticulating shadows. To Ralph, seated, this
seemed the breaking-up of sanity. Fear, beasts, no general agreement that the fire was all-
important: and when one tried to get the thing straight the argument sheered off, bringing up
fresh, unpleasant matter…The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping
away. Once there was this and that; and now…70

The stage is now set for the irreversible descent into political violence—a crisis that can only

be fully resolved through the elevation of the sacrificial mechanism raised to institutional

practice with Ralph as the first fully ‘realised’ scapegoat.

68 A nice patriarchal touch that makes Maurice’s rhetorical subversion that much more fatal; the ‘trace’ of the
grown-ups.

69 Golding (n 5), 94-5. Emphasis added.

70 Golding (n 5), 95 and 98.

 E. ‘I’m not going to play any longer. Not with you.’: mimetic crisis and political crisis

‘We persist in disregarding the power of violence in human societies; that is why we are
reluctant to admit that violence and the sacred are one and the same thing.’—Rene Girard
As Ralph himself memorably puts it, ‘Things are breaking up. I don’t understand why. We

began well; we were happy. And then—’71 The lethal power struggle between Ralph and Jack

that makes up the second half of the novel appears easy to understand in terms of my analysis

so far: Ralph names the Beast wrongly (he uses the wrong language), while Jack identifies

the enemy correctly and establishes his chiefdom.72 The problem is that they are both wrong.

The Boys, like Hobbes, are focused upon external reality, the object of representational

discourse; but as the Lord of the Flies himself (a visceral incarnation of Beelzebub) makes

clear to Simon during his mystic or epileptic trance (take your pick) in Chapter Eight, the fear

of the Beast is nothing more than the externalised projection of the latent fear induced by the

social order: ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why

it’s no go? Why things are what they are?’73 The real question is why does ‘the break up’ (or

the downward spiral into violence) begin only after the Social Contract has been entered into

and the answer is because the contract alone is inadequate to expel the latent violence from

within the community. The unexpurgated remnant of violence forms the sinews of the novel’s

second narrative thread that entwines itself around the public procession of scapegoats: the

unrequited libidinal (mimetic) rivalry between the two candidates for the chieftainship, Ralph

and Jack.

He [Ralph] argued unconvincingly that they would let him alone; perhaps even make an
outlaw of him. But then the fatal unreasoning knowledge came to him again. The breaking of
the conch and the deaths of Piggy and Simon lay over the island like a vapor. These painted
71 Golding (n 5), 87.

72 I am certain that the reader by this time will be aware of the obvious applicability of the radical, if not
nihilistic, constitutional theories of Carl Schmitt to Golding’s novel. I am equally aware of them, but I simply
lack the space to pursue them here. I hope to do so on another occasion.

73 Golding (n 5), 158.

 25

savages would go further and further. Then there was that indefinable connection between
himself and Jack; who therefore would never let him alone; never.74

In superficially political terms, Jack is the personification of the military power, which

always rests upon the residual threat of and use of violence, that aspect of the Executive that

is the most likely source of dictatorship. The need to hunt and kill the Beast provides the

perfect rationalisation for Jack to expand his ‘emergency powers’ at the expense of the

democratic community. In contrast, Ralph is the personification of the principle of assembly,

democratic governance through consultation, debate, and the ‘correct’ use of political and

legal speech, symbolised by his possession of the conch—the discovery of the conch having

been shown in Chapter One to be identical with the invention of the community. On a deeper

and more interesting level, both Jack and Ralph allegorically represent the contending forms

of the legal and political order; or, as Golding suggestively puts it, ‘Jack and Ralph smiled at

each other with shy liking.’75

Readers unfamiliar with Leviathan may be surprised to learn that Hobbes offers two

competing versions of the Commonwealth either of which may be borne by the thoroughly

personalized nature of Hobbesian SovereigntySovereign: ‘And he that carries this Person [of

the community] is called Sovereign, and said to have Sovereign Power; and everyone besides,

his Subject.’76 Even more surprising is the stance of strict neutrality that Hobbes assumes vis-

à-vis both of them.

The attaining to this Sovereign Power is by two ways. One, by natural force; as when a man
makes his children to submit themselves, and their children [in turn], to his government, as
being able to destroy them if they refuse; or by war subdues his enemies to his will, giving
them their lives on that condition. The other, is when men agree among themselves to submit
to some Man, or Assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against

74 Golding (n 5), 204.

75 Golding (n 5), 19-20.

76 Hobbes (n 2), 121.

all others. The later may be called a Political Commonwealth, or Commonwealth by
Institution; and the former, a Commonwealth by Acquisition.77

This passage does great ‘violence’ to our 21st century Human Rights-driven sensibilities:

Hobbes is postulating a strict equivalence between the democratic and authoritarian forms of

Sovereignty, in which dictatorship is the onto-political equal of democracy provided that it

was founded upon the Social Contract whereas we collectively (or metaphysically) refuse to

recognise the non-liberal State as a rightful Sovereign. But on Golding’s island this

equivalence is scrupulously upheld, allegorically embodied by the two contending boy-

sovereigns, Ralph signifying Commonwealth-by-Institution and Jack Commonwealth-by-

Acquisition.

On a strictly political reading of the novel, the obvious problem emerges: given their

different political identities, both material and symbolic, should not Ralph and Jack be

enemies? Instead, Golding insists upon their friendship and mutual admiration for each other.

At the return Ralph found himself alone on a limb with Jack and they grinned at each other,
sharing the burden. Once more, amid the breeze, the shouting, the slanting sunlight on the
high mountain, was shed that glamour, that strange invisible light of friendship, adventure
and content.
‘Almost too heavy.’
Jack grinned back.
‘Not for the two of us.’ 78

Part of the answer is that Golding is ironically subverting the ‘bright-line distinction’ that we

normally accept as separating democracy from tyranny. As with Hobbes, Golding sees the

relationship between the Assembly and the One Man as inherently fluid, as the individual’s

submitting to any form of political and legal structure necessarily involves the surrender of

liberty, identical with the earlier act of conveyance of liberty to the Sovereign in exchange for

77 Hobbes (n 2), 121.

78 Golding (n 5), 38-39.

 27

life. Golding, however, goes beyond Hobbes through his literary deployment of the cultural

logic of ritualistic sacrifice: all forms of political order require the internalisation and then

outward projection of that immortal violence based upon the eternal recurrence of rivalry and

imitation. Nowhere in Lord of the Flies is the logic of mimetic rivalry more clearly

allegorised than through the narrative positioning of Ralph and Jack as doubles, each

constituting a personification of the dual nature of Sovereignty. Exempting the Hobbesian

instinctual ‘appetites’ such as self-preservation or fear-of-death, Man, for Girard, ‘is the

creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his

mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.’79 Golding stages an

almost point-for-point enactment of this in Chapter One.

‘Vote for a chief!’

‘Let’s vote—’
This toy of voting was almost as pleasing as the conch. Jack started to protest but the clamor
changed from the general wish for a chief to an election by acclaim of Ralph himself. None
of the Boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence had been shown was
traceable to Piggy while the most obvious leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about
Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance; and most
obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch. The being that had blown that, had sat
waiting for them on the platform with the delicate thing balanced on his knees, was set
apart.80

Ralph is now the model and Jack the thwarted imitator. For Girard, this is the moment of

catastrophe.

What are the consequences of imitation when, instead of patterning our desires according to
the suggestion of some cultural model, we imitate one another in our choice of desirable
objects? The model is anyone who suggests an object of desire to anyone else by desiring that
object himself. The model and his imitator desire the same object, and they necessarily
interfere with each other.81

79 Rene Girard, ‘Generative Scapegoating’ in Robert G. Hammerton-Kelly (ed.), Violent Origins: Walter
Burkert, Rene Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford, Stanford
University Press, 1987), 122.

80 Golding (n 5), 19.

The quasi-Hobbesian paradox at work here is that as soon as man enters into a community

with others, desire will invariably ‘mutate’ into a condition of irrepressible mimetic rivalry

between the ‘doubles’. If Girard’s theory of mimetic desire is correct, then the entrance into

the Hobbesian Social Contract guarantees that violence will escalate precisely because inter-

personal conflict is generated through the rivalry over possession of objects that are desired

by the group.

As I imitate the desire of my neighbour, I reach for the object he is already reaching for, and
we prevent each other from appropriating this object. His relation to my desire parallels my
relation to his, and the more we cross each other, the more stubbornly we imitate each other.
My interference intensifies his desire, just as his interference intensifies mine. This process of
positive feedback can only lead to physical and other forms of violence. Violence is the
continuation of mimetic desire by violent means…Violence is a symmetrical, reciprocal
process because it is mimetic.82

Girard’s concern with the mimetic nature of desire (the libido understood in a non-Freudian

sense) closely matches Hobbes’ abiding concern with the socially disruptive effects of the

passion of envy, discussed at fair length in Chapter XIII (‘Of the Naturall Condition of

Mankind, as concerning their Felicity and Misery’) where that particular vice is

conceptualised as an essential part of the State of Nature.

From this [natural] equality of ability, arises equality of hope in the attainment of our
objectives. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they
cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end, (which is principally
their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only), endeavor to destroy, or subdue
one another.83

Not only is envy unavoidable given the social existence of Man (necessary for self-

preservation), but its ability to inflict misery is almost unrivalled among the passions.

81 Girard (n 79), 122. The obvious homoerotic allusions in Golding’s text merely reinforces this vial point: ‘
Like violence, sexual desire tends to fasten upon surrogate objects if the object to which it was originally
attracted remains inaccessible; it willingly accepts substitutes.’ Girard (n 17), 35.

82 Girard (n 79), 122-3.

83 Hobbes (n 2), 87.

 29

Again, men have no pleasure (but on the contrary a great deal of griefe) in keeping company
where there is no power able to over-awe them all. For every man expects that his companion
should value him at the same rate he sets upon himself: and upon all signs of contempt, or
under-valuing, naturally endeavors, as far as he dares (which amongst them that have no
power to keep them subdued, is far enough to make them destroy each other), to extort a
greater value from his critics by gift; and from others, by the example. So that in the nature of
man, we find three principall causes of quarrel. First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence
[Self-Assertion]; Thirdly, Glory.84

Girard, as we know, proposes a grand solution to this eternal grief: the ritualistic sacrifice of

the scapegoat.

The real solution to the problem of vengeance must lie in the very unyielding intensity of
mimetic rivalry. It must lie within murderous violence itself…The ‘scapegoat’ or unanimous-
victimage hypothesis satisfies this requirement. When mimetic violence permeates an entire
group and reaches a climatic intensity, it generates a form of collective victimage that tends
toward unanimity precisely because of the participant’s heightened mimetic susceptibility. 85

Ralph puts it well: ‘“Then people started getting frightened.’”86

But Piggy puts it better: ‘“…I know there isn’t no fear…Unless we get frightened of

people.”’87

Here, Golding appears to follow Hobbes strictly in assuming that fear is the primary motive

of social formation; however, Hobbes himself postulates envy as a universal constant of

society, which renders fully consistent with both texts Girard’s defining insight that the

unavoidable escalation of unsustainable intra-community rivalry will seek a natural outlet

through the re-direction of community wide violence towards the properly identified and

named scapegoat.

It is up not to Ralph but to Jack to make theory reality.

F. ‘Roger sharpened a stick at both ends’: the return of the repressed

84 Hobbes (n 2), 88.

85 Girard (n 79), 125.

86 Golding (n 5), 88.

87 Golding (n 5), 90.

The final, and most ritualistically prescribed sacrificial murder, the one prepared for Ralph, is

an inherently political and legal act. It establishes Jack’s absolute (and unrivalled) leadership

(Commonwealth-by-Acquisition) through the killing of his mimetic rival/double

(Ralph/Commonwealth-by-Institution). 88 It is also the performance of the founding act of

violence that will create the ‘truer’ community than the one premised upon the false (and by

now falsified) notion of the Social Contract. Most important of all, Jack’s (and Roger’s) tribal

society self-consciously utilises Religion and Theology, unlike Ralph’s Assembly which

dominated by the tepid and superficial rationalism of Piggy.

In the silence that followed each savage flinched away from his individual memory.
‘No! How could we—kill—it?’
Half-relieved, half-daunted by the implication of further terrors, the savages murmured again.
‘So leave the mountain alone,’ said the Chief, solemnly, ‘and give [the Beast] the head if you
go hunting again.’…
‘I expect the beast disguised itself.’
‘Perhaps,’ said the Chief. A theological speculation presented itself. ‘We’d better keep on the
right side of him, anyhow. You can’t tell what he might do.’89

While it is clear that the establishment of Jack’s rule of One Man is concurrent with the

creation of a native Religion, it is frequently underappreciated that Jack and his hunters are

88 Admittedly, Golding’s narrative does some violence to the integrity of my close reading: as Girard makes
clear, the rival himself can never act as the victim, for the killing of the rival will perpetuate the cycle of
vengeance through retaliation (it will also appear too much like a ‘mere’ homicide); ordinarily another person,
or, even better, an animal is substituted for the rival who is then only ‘mimetically’ killed. What I can rely on
here is another of Girard’s observations: that the animal-surrogate selected will always bear a physical
resemblance to the original object. In Chapter Eight, ‘A Gift for the Darkness’, Jack impales the head of the sow
on a stick that is sharpened at both ends—the pig’s head later mutates into the ‘Lord of the Flies’ while, of
course, remaining a pig, which naturally reminds us of Piggy. The impaling of Ralph’s head on the stick
sharpened at both ends mimetically evokes Piggy, the bearer of the false consciousness of secular rationality and
the archetypal victim. So, in effect, the by now fully ritualistic killing of Ralph will be the re-enactment of the
foundational murder of Piggy/pig, with whom Ralph bears an almost fraternal similarity (Ralph = Piggy = pig)
and who is now the stand-in for Jack’s true enemy, the ‘atheistick’ Social Contract. (It is interesting to note that
in Chapter Eight at 138, Jack makes the following comment about Ralph: ‘“He’s like Piggy. He says things like
Piggy. He isn’t a proper chief.”’) And, of course, in the end all of Ralph’s followers have deserted him, meaning
that there is no one to avenge him; he becomes something of an obsolete rival. Strikingly, Golding inverts the
historical progression here: the offering of human-surrogates for an original animal victim. The correct mimetic
sequence should have been from Simon to Ralph to Piggy to the pig/Lord of the Flies, but this would have
presented too many narrative difficulties and threatened the all-important ‘moral of the story’. Girard (n 17), 11.

89 Golding (n 5), 177-78. Emphasis added.

 31

the progenitors of a nativist culture, specifically a form of body-art, the (re-) discovery of

which neatly recapitulates the onto-epistemological foundations of the text.

Jack planned his new face. He made one cheek and one eye-socket white, then rubbed red
over the other half of his face and slashed a black bar of charcoal across from right ear to left
jaw. He looked in the mere for his reflection, but his breathing troubled the mirror…
He knelt, holding the shell of water. A rounded patch of sunlight fell on his face and a
brightness appeared in the depths of the water. He looked in astonishment, no longer at
himself but at an awesome stranger…He began to dance and his laughter became a
bloodthirsty snarling. He capered towards Bill and the mask was a thing on its own, behind
which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness…The mask compelled them.90

Jack’s impulsive act both represents and successfully solves Ralph’s great political dilemma,

which is exactly the same as Hobbes’: monopolising the act of judgment through the proper

naming of things.

Ralph turned to the chief’s seat. They had never had an assembly so late before. That was
why the place looked so different. Normally the underside of the green roof was lit by a
tangle of golden reflections, and their faces were lit upside down, like—thought Ralph, when
you hold an electric torch in your hand. But now the sun was slanting in at one side, so that
the shadows were where they ought to be. Again he fell into that strange mood of speculation
that was so foreign to him. If faces were different when lit from above or below—what was a
face? What was anything?91

Which is exactly what you get for trying to enforce the Social Contract on an island that is

haunted; or, more precisely, where things do not objectively equate with the words we assign

them.

Strange things happened at midday. The glittering sea rose up, moved apart in planes of
blatant impossibility; the coral reef and the few, stunted palms that clung to the more elevated
parts would float up to the sky, would quiver, be plucked apart, run like rain-drops on a wire
or be repeated as in an odd succession of mirrors. Sometimes land loomed where there was
no land and flicked out like a bubble as the children watched. Piggy discounted all this
learnedly as a ‘mirage’; and since no boy could reach even the reef over the stretch of water
where the snapped sharks waited, they grew accustomed to mysteries and ignored them, just
as they ignored the miraculous throbbing stars. At midday the illusions merged into the sky
and there the sun gazed down like an angry eye.92

90 Golding (n 5), 66-7.

91 Golding (n 5), 83.

92 Golding (n 5), 60.

The latent and ineradicable violence of the island is coeval with its inherent namelessness;

naming is order, as Hobbes shows in his brief disquisition on Adam and the naming of the

animals.93 But since the Boys are unconsciously governed by the logic of mimetic

substitution, nothing definitive about Nature can ever be definitively or conclusively said. As

Hobbes expresses it, ‘Naturall sense and imagination are not subject to absurdity. Nature it

selfe cannot erre: and as men abound in copiousnesse of language; so they become more

wise, or more mad than ordinary.’94 Or as Golding conveys it through the poetic imagination

that is immune to absurdity, ‘A flurry of wind made the palms talk and the noise seemed very

loud now that darkness and silence made it so noticeable. Two grey trunks rubbed each other

with an evil squeaking that no one had noticed by the day.’95

Silence is pregnant with Being.

G. A Counter-Intuitive Conclusion

‘The trouble is: Are there ghosts, Piggy? Or beasts?’

‘Course there aren’t.’
‘Why not?
‘’Cos things wouldn’t make sense. Houses an’ streets, an’—TV—they wouldn’t work.’
The dancing, chanting Boys had worked themselves away till their sound was nothing but a
wordless rhythm.
‘But s’pose they don’t make sense/ Not here, on this island? Supposing things are watching
and waiting?’96

The orthodox reading of Lord of the Flies is very similar to any superficial reading of

Sigmund Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents: without the rule of law, or the presence of

93 Hobbes (n 2), 24-5.

94 Hobbes (n 2), 28.

95 Golding (n 5), 96-7.

96 Golding (n 5), 100.

 33

the super-ego, ‘Man’ will naturally regress into savagery—or the domain of the Id. I have

argued, however, that the true twins to Golding’s text are Hobbes’ Leviathan and Girard’s

Violence and the Sacred. It is not the case that the Boys regress; rather, they unconsciously

act out the mimetic logic of cultural formation by transforming themselves into a real, but

‘primitive’ society, collectively undergoing not a descent but a kind of ascent. The island of

Piggy is a ‘bubble’ of false consciousness, bounded by the infinite envelope of the irrational,

acted out through the grown-up’s waging of limited atomic war.

A sliver of moon rose over the horizon, hardly large enough to make a path of light even
when it sat right down on the water; but there were other lights in the sky, that moved fast,
winked, or went out, though not even a faint popping came down from a battle fought at ten
miles height.97

The Beast that descends, the dead fighter-pilot who, as Golding helpfully explains to us,

represents the intrusion of History into the hermetically sealed of the Hobbesian thought

experiment,98 is perfectly real (literally a ‘fallen man’99), although, crucially, misnamed.

But a sign came down from the world of grown-ups, though at the time there was no child
awake to read it. There was a sudden bright explosion and a corkscrew trail across the sky;
then darkness again and stars. There was a speck above the island, a figure dropping swiftly
beneath a parachute, a figure that hung with dangling limbs. The changing winds of various
altitudes took the figure where they would. Then, three miles up, the wind steadied it and
bore it in a descending curve round the sky and swept it in a great arc in a great slant across
the reef and the lagoon towards the mountain. The figure fell and crumpled among the blue
flowers of the mountain-side, but now there was a gentle breeze at this height too and the
parachute flopped and banged and pulled…When the breeze blew the lines would strain taut
and some accident of this pull lifted the head and chest upright so that the figure seemed to
peer across the brow of the mountain. Then, each time the wind dropped, the lines would
slacken and the figure bow forward again, sinking its head between its knees. So as the stars
moved across the sky, the figure sat on the mountain-top and bowed and sank and bowed
again.100

97 Golding (n 5), 103.

98 Peter Edgerly Firchow, Modern Utopian Fictions: from H.G. Wells to Iris Murdoch (Washington D.C., The
Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 149.

99 Dickson (n 66), 46.

100 Golding (n 5), 103-4.

Which leads us directly to the ‘tragic irony’ of Piggy: the mimetic imitation of the grown-ups,

the collective authors of the atomic warfare that envelops the children, yields the

diametrically opposed outcome to the self-grounding secular society of the contract—the

reinvention of Religion and the successful establishment of the Commonwealth-by-

Acquisition. The real reason why the Boys are the prisoners (or victims) of History is due not

to the weakness of civilisation but to its central and defining paradox: the political economy

of the Modern is the atavistic descendant of the sacrificial economy of the Paleolithic. And

like all first rate comedians, Golding saves his best joke for last.

He [Ralph] staggered to his feet, tensed for more terrors, and looked up at a huge peaked cap.
It was a white-topped cap, and above the green shade of the peak was a crown, an anchor,
gold foliage. He saw white drill, epaulettes, a revolver, a row of gilt buttons down the front of
a uniform.
A naval officer stood on the sand, looking down at Ralph in wary astonishment. On the beach
behind him was a cutter, her bows hauled up and held by two ratings. In the stern-sheets
another rating held a sub-machine gun.
The ululation faltered and died away.101

The deus ex machina-style entrance of the Navy Officer constitutes the novel’s ultimate

mimetic substitution: not the resurrection of Piggy but the trans-figuration of Jack. Ralph’s

encounter with the Man-in-Uniform (Jack as grown-up) on the beach reveals the truth of the

historical (and legal) line of succession from the ‘primitive’ to the ‘modern’ society, both

premised upon the ritualistic deployment of violence. The ululation stops because the arc of

History has been completed.

‘“Jolly good show,”’ said the Man-in-Uniform.102

101 Golding (n 5), 222.

102 Golding (n 5), 224. A final observation: on an island full of British schoolboys, only Jack and the naval
officer make any reference to their nationality. In the beginning Jack says: ‘“I agree with Ralph. We’ve got to
have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English; and the English are the best at
everything. So we’ve got to do the right things.”’ At the end, the man-in-uniform says: ‘“I should have thought,”
said the officer as he visualized the search before him, “I should have thought that a pack of British boys—
you’re all British aren’t you?—would have been able to put up a better show than that—I mean—”’. Golding (n
5), 42 and 224.
 35

BIODATA: ERIC WILSON

Eric Wilson is a senior lecturer of law at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. In 1991
he completed his Doctorate in the history of early modern Europe under the supervision of
Robert Scribner, Clare College, Cambridge. In 2005 he received the degree of Doctor of
Juridical Science (S.J.D.) from the University of Melbourne. He is the author of The Savage
Republic: De Indis of Hugo Grotius, Republicanism, and Dutch Hegemony in the Early
Modern World System (c.1600-1619), published by Martinus Nijhoff in 2008. He is the editor
of a series of works on critical criminology, the first volume of which was published by Pluto
Press in 2009 as Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty. The
second volume in the series, The Dual State: Parapolitics, Carl Schmitt and the National
Security State Complex, was published by Ashgate in late 2012. He is currently preparing the
third volume, which is a study of the covert origins and dimensions of the French and
American wars in Viet Nam. His research interests include Law and Literature, the
comparative law of Southeast Asia, critical jurisprudence, the history and philosophy of
international law, and critical criminology.