The Measure of a Manuscript
A new book is the best type of blind date. I relish the tremulous thrill of meeting young writers, as well as finding fresh works from long-established favorites. However, it may not surprise you to learn that I’m also the kind of guy who enjoys reading the same book more than once. I find myself returning again and again to the same fields of high literary grass. Like a happy cow, I chew over and re-digest the styles, bringing up a cud of prose and masticating the cellulose of words into the simple sugars of underlying meaning. However, it’s not always just about safe and familiar tastes. A repeat viewing helps me see my own shifting piebald spots, their realignment a Rorschach of how I’ve changed as a person since the last time I read it. The first time I cracked open Lord of the Flies was nearly thirty years ago and I’ve finished it a full five times since.
While the large-print symbolism of the narrative wasn’t entirely lost on me, Golding’s classic was little more than a cool adventure story that first run through. Like the angsty tween I was, the novel brimmed with a bloodlust born of the timeless truculence of boy becoming man. I couldn’t see past myself far enough to notice much else. As I bent page after page while nestled tightly in the press of rush hour bodies on the crosstown L – Canarsie train, I had no idea of the subtext that lurked in plain sight.
The real subtleties were only to be revealed to me with subsequent stops at other stations laying far down the physical and philosophical tracks. In that moment, only an ill-founded bravado roiled in my veins as I witnessed the power struggle between Jack and Ralph as merely a straightforward conflict between two manly ideals. It was a myopic pragmatism that stopped me there, just like the Piggy I could not yet admit to being. Time chugged on, skip-stopping from local to express and a second reading didn’t happen until I was in college, three thousand miles and a developmental lifetime away.
My Lord came trundling back to me almost by accident, as I was unpacking a box in my first apartment in Berkeley. As I disgorged the array of familiar, comforting totems, I found that junior high copy wedged between my high school yearbook and a beribboned packet of letters from my first real girlfriend, herself now somehow pregnant and married to anyone but me. I was on my own for the first time, sitting on the floor of a two-bedroom apartment that housed three young men and a concurrent parade of practice paramours. Leaned back against my cheap futon, I read it cover to cover in one sitting; I did everything with an angry fervor back then it seems. In my stubbornly pre-Kindle world, reading with both hands and eyes was still a revolutionary act.
To the shock of none, I’m sure, this trip through the novel revealed a political manifesto defining the struggle between the seductive power of cutthroat competition and the careless ideal of a collective good in the operation of government. It was entirely energizing in a new and different way. Jack and Ralph now anchored two opposing ideologies, stanchions of a suspension bridge called, “The Way the World Must Be.” As if I had any damn idea! But even in that reading, I was still an outsider, a third-person omniscient judging the participants from a safe distance. My as yet unwitting Piggy-ness scratched at me a bit this time, but only subconsciously, parenthetically, at best. I still wasn’t ready to see myself fully in those days. Almost another five years would stretch themselves out before I would be.
The third time the novel found me, it was in the form of a dog-eared copy I acquired on yet another 5K run through my only haven, the legendary Strand bookstore back in New York City. I was then a bored graduate student looking for a recreational alternative to the cut-and-dried world of molecular biology. And with this tertiary iteration, I finally saw the work as I now believe the author intended: a meditation on the true nature of humanity itself, etched broadly against a perpetual wartime backdrop. Like all effective art, it made me ask myself directly and distinctly, “Who am I?”
It was becoming readily apparent that I wasn’t quite Jack, the hunter without conscience, which left only a stakes race between Ralph the impotent coalition builder and Piggy the abject intellectual tool, with a longshot of the schizophrenically two-headed Samneric creeping up on the outside. I can admit only now that the moment Piggy appeared at the paddock, the gallop was brutishly decided. There was no real choice for me but that fatally flawed fat kid in cracked spectacles I usually pretended not to see in the mirror.
For the first time in my life, I could finally face him, though. I perceived clearly the likely end reserved for a life lived mostly in your head. My probable destination was akin to his, brains dashed carelessly on a metaphorical rock, an ivory tower becoming a chalky tomb. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake was to me little more than a cheap hack saw, a thin blade to be discarded once sharpness dulls or a better cut comes along. However much I could admit to this reality in that moment, I couldn’t yet bring myself to truly care. Like it or not, the insular world of the laboratory setting obviated most social grace.
Frankly, beyond the occasional clumsy romantic pursuit, I felt no need to be socially apt. My hubris told me I only had to read theory, grind bugs, and extract genome. All else was pretty posturing, window-dressing for those who couldn’t understand the questions, let alone suss out the real answers. But, as with the original, my off-brand Piggy fell down the cliff eventually, meeting the hard reality of fragile flesh and spongy bone. A wandering decade passed thereafter. Graduate school gave way to a career completely unintended, but none the less inevitable and the fourth time I picked up the book, it was out of a hasty, professional necessity.
I was about to enter the classroom as a newly credentialed school teacher, desperate to stay ahead of thirty sharp teenagers probing me daily for weakness. I was afraid that I had to know every word in order to convince them that I deserved to be their educator. Focused almost entirely on the atomized mechanics of Golding’s authorship, I designed exhaustive lessons centered tightly on literary technique in the construction of setting, character, and theme. I saw it for the mastery of the writer’s process, the building of a narrative that has endured the changes of a world that still reads it. Yet, I saw the beauty as one views a dried rose. My detached, almost editorial perspective trained more on its fade than its bloom.
It was still worthwhile, but for more selfish reasons. It was altogether clinical and I found less of myself in it. I see now that I was overly fixated on the teacher role. The perpetual student in me was ignored, even shouted down. Sadly, it was because I felt compelled to see it as “a real grown-up” for the first time. It was disheartening in a way. In preparing to teach it, I somehow relinquished the power to just feel it. Like wind through the reeds, several years passed before I would think of it again.
Packing for a recent trip to China, I threw into my bag that treasured Strand copy. It was an “if I get bored and finish these other three books before I get home” sort of thing. However, two hours into the journey, I dug past the new Neal Stephenson and old Haruki Murakami and read Lord of the Flies first. And, on a plane with fifty-two Eighth Graders - a few in the air for the initial flight of their lives, several more leaving California for the first time, and most never having traveled internationally at all - it was different again. A fiery crash leading to the founding of a society doomed by its own intoxicating naiveté was a far-fetched, but hardly impossible possibility.
I mused over the prospect of creating a world from scratch, with the only rules being those they would make. Searching their faces, I found myself deep in a genuine envy. Suddenly, it was a cool adventure story again. I was happy to find myself immersed in the plot line, but this time as narrator, not inside the story itself, but still essentially involved, somewhere behind and above it. I was all the characters now, but none individually.
Sitting in the crowded Economy Class, my career path confidently constrained me as surely as the captain turning on the Fasten Seatbelt sign. I relived the unfolding of a new and scary world, surrounded by eyes as wide as mine were at that first perusal decades ago. The ghosts of all five readings stood side by side. Kill the pig, yes, but what is the nature of Man? Further, who gets to even decide? Once again, I had more questions than answers. That seems a prudent approach even now, knowing I’ll likely someday pick it up yet again. The story is exactly the same, but I’m still happily changing.
