Posted on 08/22/2009 5:00:13 PM PDT by MrEdd
William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies, the allegorical novel about childhood, admitted that he had once tried to rape a girl.
He confessed to the incident in an unpublished memoir which he wrote for his wife in an effort to explain how his own “monstrous” character had developed.
The attack is among the revelations about the Nobel prize-winning novelist in a new biography. It also turns out that when he was a school-teacher, Golding would pitch the boys in his care against each other in a real-life forerunner of his famous work.
John Carey, the literary critic and an emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford, has had access to the previously unseen archive of Golding, who died in his native Cornwall in 1993, aged 81.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Now he’s worse than Rigoberta Menchu.
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I think it was Flaubert who said, upon being asked to write a novle on the life of an ideal artist, that it would be a waste of time because he would be a monster.
Not a great surprise.
I read “Lord of the Flies” and several of his other books when they came out, and developed a considerable distaste for his work. It always seemed to me that it was a great mistake to assign this book as a school text. (”Catcher in the Rye,” too, but that’s another story.)
Original sin is, I believe, a fact of human existence. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is a great poem on the subject. Augustine’s “Confessions” is a great book. “King Lear” is yet another study of evil in human nature. But those writers don’t seem to take pleasure in sin. Golding does.
The article doesn’t give the sense that the incident was out-and-out rape, even if Golding uses the word. Not that it was no more than a boy getting too “fresh,” but there is a middle ground.
“But those writers don’t seem to take pleasure in sin. Golding does.”
I don’t doubt that he did. The article paints him as struggling with darkness and somehow being tortured by the evil in humanity. But his stories often revel in evil. That’s their primary appeal to the consumer, anyway.
I don’t mind that the book is assigned in school. It’s short and easy to read, which works for teachers. And Piggy is sympathetic enough to counterbalance the evil.
No worries. He’s currently being raped in hell as we speak.
Menchu was 100% liar, this guy actually did his “research”. What a messed up world some days
ok...it’s time to get those developers on an “auto search” and “auto append” feature...
What’s the motivation for this? Just trying to one-up the Kennedys?
I don't know, but I did.
Who asked you?
How's that job working out for you by the way?
You believe God is a rapist?
If you want to ask a private question, try FReepmail.
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