‘El sueno de la razon produce monstruos’ or, ‘The Dream of Reason Creates Monsters’: Two Little Piggies Went to the Apocalypse in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

Operating on the assumption that William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) was written as a satire of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), I use the novel as a means of offering an extended reflection upon Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. Contrary to the popular, and misleading, reading of the text, I argue that Lord of the Flies stands for the exact opposite proposition so frequently espoused by the moralist: rather than constituting a cautionary parable concerning the reversibility of the ‘thin veneer of civilization,’ what Golding really has the boys on the island doing is discovering for themselves the universal pattern of cultural formation: that the pre-representational logic of substitution and sacrifice provides the symbolic machinery necessary for cultural formation and abstract thought. The price to be paid lies with the murder of the scapegoat as the cornerstone of society. The unifying narrative arc of the tale imitates the evolution of sacrifice: from Simon to Piggy to Ralph and culminating in the establishment of Jack’s theocracy and the cementing of ritualistic sacrifice as the foundation of social and political order, the endless replacement of the victim through the deliberate repetition of the original violence of generative unanimity. Which, as it turns out, was all the result of an accident caused by a very ‘middling’ sort of boy.