As if it wasn't a good island : Failed and Forgotten Utopias in the Cinematic Adaptations of William Golding's Lord of the Flies - Peter Lang
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―As if it wasn‘t a good island‖:
Failed and Forgotten Utopias in the Cinematic
Adaptations of William Golding‘s Lord of the Flies
ARTUR BLAIM
I must own that you could argue reasona-
bly enough that one of my books, or the
tone of it, is antiutopian. (William Gold-
ing, ―Utopias and Antiutopias‖ 183)
Despite explicit authorial sanction and its occasional inclusion among
canonical works of the genre,1 Lord of the Flies can hardly be regarded
as a typical example of dystopian / antiutopian fiction.2 Elements which
1 David Boroff calls it ―a kind of utopian novel in reverse‖ (3). See Palczewski 131-132
and Booker 161-163, who also include it among representative anti-utopian novels. A
radically opposed position can be found in Andrzej Zgorzelski, who firmly identifies
Lord of the Flies as a symbolic-parabolic novel, claiming that identification on the basis
of its thematic level is a gross misunderstanding (101).
2 William Golding made the following comment some 20 years after the publication of
his novel: ―I must own that you could argue reasonably enough that one of my books, or
the tone of it, is antiutopian. It was a book stemming from what I had found out during
and for a few years after the Second World War. […] I used children because I knew
about them and they were at hand. […] As for the elaborately described island, it was an
escape to a part of the world I had never seen but wanted to, a tropical island. I made
myself a haliporphuros ornis and flew away from rationed, broken England with all its
bomb damage, flew away across the flowers of foam to where lianas dropped their
cables from the strange tropical trees. It has convinced some of the people because it
convinced me. I was there; and sometimes it seemed a pity not to enjoy the place rather
than allow the antiutopia to take over. But take over it did‖ (183).
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by the mid-twentieth century had become widely recognised as the
genre‘s distinctive features do not appear in their standardised form in
the novel, which, however, displays a number of characteristics that
indicate a fairly strong, if only metonymic and generalised, presence of
utopian / dystopian conventions, often introduced by means of their
subtle equivalents,3 that shape a not insignificant, if not necessarily the
dominant, dimension of the book.
From the very beginning the exotic island in the Pacific Ocean ap-
pears as a relatively good place, with its warm climate, absence of
dangerous animals, plenitude of food and fresh water, beautiful land-
scapes, and luxuriant vegetation, to which the protagonists respond with
(almost) ecstatic joy:
The palms that still stood made a green roof, covered on the underside with
a quivering tangle of reflections from the lagoon. Ralph hauled himself on-
to this platform, noted the coolness and shade, shut one eye, and decided
that the shadows on his body were really green. He picked his way to the
seaward edge of the platform and stood looking down into the water. It was
clear to the bottom and bright with the efflorescence of tropical weed and
coral. A school of tiny, glittering fish flicked hither and thither. Ralph
spoke to himself, sounding the bass strings of delight.
―Whizzoh!‖
Beyond the platform there was more enchantment. Some act of God—a
typhoon perhaps, or the storm that had accompanied his own arrival—had
banked sand inside the lagoon so that there was a long, deep pool in the
beach with a high ledge of pink granite at the further end. (7)
and further:
Here at last was the imagined but never fully realised place leaping into
real life. Ralph‘s lips parted in a delighted smile and Piggy, taking this
smile to himself as a mark of recognition, laughed with pleasure. (10)
Ralph‘s initial response to the sudden disappearance of adults‘ supervi-
sion expresses careless, childish happiness at the unexpected freedom,
turning the island into a perfect, almost limitless playground:
‗Aren't there any grownups at all?‘
3 The notion of equivalent was originally introduced by Russian Formalist scholar Yuri
Tynianov in connections with versification and later adapted to the analysis of prose
fiction and genre evolution in general by Zgorzelski.
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‗I don't think so.‘
The fair boy said this solemnly; but then the delight of a realised ambition
overcame him. In the middle of the scar he stood on his head and grinned
at the reversed fat boy.
‗No grownups!‘ (2)
He patted the palm trunk softly, and, forced at last to believe in the reality
of the island laughed delightedly again and stood on his head. He turned
neatly on to his feet, jumped down to the beach, knelt and swept a double
armful of sand into a pile against his chest. Then he sat back and looked at
the water with bright, excited eyes. (5)
At the same time, as Kenneth Watson observes, the place also has
several disadvantages: ―The fruit is an inadequate diet which produces
diarrhoea, the littluns exist in squalor and neglect, and it is problems of
discomfort and trying to organise obvious needs, such as fire, and shelter
from both rain and fear, which soon cause the first splits and outbursts of
ill feeling‖ (3).
Nonetheless, despite certain shortcomings and imperfections, the is-
land gradually acquires the characteristics of the best state possible, as
the information about the outside world scattered throughout the narra-
tive is communicated to the reader who—unlike the characters—
becomes fully aware of what actually happened there, especially after
the narrator‘s comment that ―Roger‘s arm was conditioned by a civilisa-
tion that knew nothing of him and was in ruins‖ (65; emphasis added).
Most of the boys seem to tacitly assume that the world to which they
want to return has remained the same as the one they came from. Even
Piggy, who shows some awareness of what really happened, as evident
from his response to Ralph‘s suggestion that his father would learn about
their location from the people at the airport (―Not them. Didn‘t you hear
what the pilot said? About the atom bomb? They‘re all dead‖ [9]), thinks
the nuclear destruction was only local rather than global: ―In a year or
two when the war‘s over they‘ll be travelling to Mars and back‖ (90).
Devoid of any real internal or external enemies, the island gradually
reveals its potential as the stage for a group of innocent children to
institute a better order, away from the world torn by uncontrollable
conflicts leading to its destruction in a nuclear war. It becomes the place
of a new beginning (although the absence of females indicates the
ultimate end and natural demise of the prospective utopia), metonymi-
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cally hinted at by the recurrent expression ―It is a good island‖ and
explicit intertextual references to several realised juvenile utopias of fun
and adventure known from nineteenth-century desert island narratives,
such as R. M. Ballantyne‘s Coral Island and Jules Verne‘s Two Years’
Vacation:
‗But this is a good island. We—Jack, Simon and me—we climbed the
mountain. It‘s wizard. There‘s food and drink, and—‘
‗Rocks—‘
‗Blue flowers—‘
Piggy, partly recovered, pointed to the conch in Ralph‘s hands, and Jack
and Simon fell silent. Ralph went on.
‗While we‘re waiting we can have a good time on this island.‘
He gesticulated widely.
‗It‘s like in a book.‘
At once there was a clamor.
‗Treasure Island—‘
‗Swallows and Amazons—‘
‗Coral Island—‘
Ralph waved the conch.
‗This is our island. It‘s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us
we‘ll have fun.‘(33)
The literary (desert island narratives) and cultural (―We‘re English, and
the English are best at everything. So we‘ve got to do the right things‖
[42]) models suggest and define the potential for reconstitution of a
better society, one offering a simple but pleasurable way of life based on
democratic (though class / age-based) socio-political organisation (sym-
bolically represented by the conch), and involving freedom of speech,
free election of the leader, and regular assemblies at which all important
decisions are debated and made. Ralph and Piggy function as the found-
ing fathers of this purified replica of the civilised world separated from it
by physical (the sea) and cognitive (the outside world has no knowledge
of the boys‘ whereabouts) boundaries.
The introduction of civilised order manifests itself in acts of spatial
appropriation, the imposition of conventional / artificial divisions onto
the naturally continuous space of the island: the assembly platform, the
shelters, the pool on the beach for bathing, the ‗lavatory‘ behind the
rocks washed by the tide, the designated place for the signal fire, etc.
Philip Redpath characterises the space of the novel further as consisting
of two dimensions: horizontal (subdivided into the assembly platform
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associated with light and reason, and the jungle as ―an area of hunting,
darkness, and irrational fear‖ [43]) and vertical (the mountain). The
mountain overlooking the island is of particular significance as ―it is a
‗law‘ of the novel that whatever force of reason or unreason—
symbolised in the signal fire and the dead airman—dominates the moun-
tain-top dominates the boys and dictates their actions‖ (Redpath 43).
The future collapse of the potential utopia is hinted at even before its
attempted implementation by the disturbing though at this point still
ambivalent images associated with the estranged presentation of the
choir boys walking along the beach:
Within the diamond haze of the beach something dark was fumbling along.
Ralph saw it first, and watched till the intentness of his gaze drew all eyes
that way. Then the creature stepped from mirage on to clear sand, and they
saw that the darkness was not all shadow but mostly clothing. The creature
was a party of boys, marching approximately in step in two parallel lines
and dressed in strangely eccentric clothing. Shorts, shirts, and different
garments they carried in their hands; but each boy wore a square black cap
with a silver badge on it. Their bodies, from throat to ankle, were hidden
by black cloaks which bore a long silver cross on the left breast and each
neck was finished off with a ham-bone frill. (15)
Other disquieting signals include the recurrent references to snakes
(―snake-thing‖ [34] ―snakes‖ [47]), the beast (―beastie‖ [34]), and the
jungle associated with darkness and fear: ―The silence of the forest was
more oppressive than the heat, and at this hour of the day there was not
even the whine of insects‖ (49).
On the plot level, the future collapse is foreshadowed by the growing
conflict over leadership between Jack and Ralph, the disdainful treat-
ment of Piggy, and the first uncontrollable fire leading to the death of
one of the little boys.
The dystopian part begins properly with such acts of accidental de-
struction and irresponsibility as the throwing down a stone that destroys
part of the forest, the killing of a pig, and the evident preference for
talking about impossible grandiose schemes instead of doing tiring and
boring work to improve their living conditions:
‗Meetings. Don‘t we love meetings? Every day. Twice a day. We talk.‘ He
got on one elbow. ‗I bet if I blew the conch this minute, they‘d come run-
ning. Then we‘d be, you know, very solemn, and someone would say we
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ought to build a jet, or a submarine, or a TV set. When the meeting was
over they‘d work for five minutes, then wander off or go hunting.‘ (50)
Democratic meetings become yet another form of entertainment, and the decisions
collectively made are hardly ever followed:
‗We have lots of assemblies. Everybody enjoys speaking and being togeth-
er. We decide things. But they don‘t get done. We were going to have wa-
ter brought from the stream and left in those coconut shells under fresh
leaves. So it was, for a few days. Now there‘s no water. The shells are dry.
People drink from the river.‘ (85)
Failure to keep watch over the fire and allowing it to die down not only
represents a missed opportunity of being rescued but also initiates the
process of cutting off the links with the civilised world and its norms:
The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away. Once
there was this and that; and now— and the ship had gone. (98)
Apart from negligence brought about by sloth and carelessness, another
major factor undermining the ideal order initially implemented is rising
irrational fear—―But you can feel as if you‘re not hunting, but—being
hunted, as if something‘s behind you all the time in the jungle‖ (53)—
which produces taboos and other modes of irrational behaviour:
‗They talk and scream. The littluns. Even some of the others. As if—‘
‗As if it wasn‘t a good island.‘
Astonished at the interruption, they looked up at Simon‘s serious face.
‗As if,‘ said Simon, ‗the beastie, the beastie or the snake-thing, was real.
Remember?‘
The two older boys flinched when they heard the shameful syllable. Snakes
were not mentioned now, were not mentionable.
‗As if this wasn‘t a good island,‘ said Ralph slowly. ‗Yes, that‘s right.‘
(53)
Thus the original happy condition is undermined:
‗Things are breaking up. I don‘t understand why. We began well; we were
happy. And then—‘ He 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.‘ (87-88)
Another destructive factor is sheer evil resulting from the pleasure of
possessing (essentially) useless power over others that affects all ele-
ments of the chain of being on the island:
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Roger led the way straight through the castles, kicking them over, burying
the flowers, scattering the chosen stones. Maurice followed, laughing, and
added to the destruction. […] This was fascinating to Henry. He poked
about with a bit of stick, that itself was wave-worn and whitened and a va-
grant, and tried to control the motions of the scavengers. He made little
runnels that the tide filled and tried to crowd them with creatures. He be-
came absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control
over living things. […] Roger stooped, picked up a stone, aimed, and threw
it at Henry—threw it to miss. The stone, that token of preposterous time,
bounced five yards to Henry‘s right and fell in the water. Roger gathered a
handful of stones and began to throw them. (62-64)
With the rejection of self-imposed laws and other limitations, the system
of social relations begins to be governed by brute force and unrestricted
desire for domination:
His [Jack's] mind was crowded with memories; memories of the
knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling
pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will
upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink. (74)
‗Bollocks to the rules! We‘re strong—we hunt! If there‘s a beast, we‘ll
hunt it down! We‘ll close in and beat and beat and beat—!‘ (99)
‗Conch! Conch!‘ shouted Jack, ‗we don‘t need the conch any more. We
know who ought to say things. What good did Simon do speaking, or Bill,
or Walter? It‘s time some people knew they‘ve got to keep quiet and leave
deciding things to the rest of us.‘ (110-111)
Henry brought him a shell and he drank, watching Piggy and Ralph over
the jagged rim. Power lay in the brown swell of his forearms: authority sat
on his shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape. (165)
All this leads to the final collapse of civilised norms, culminating in the
dark carnival of savage dance,4 followed by the division of the island
into the ‗democratic‘ and ‗totalitarian‘ parts, and the subsequent domina-
tion of the dystopian mode of organisation which various critics have
called savage, tribal, tyrannical or fascist, based on violence, pure force,
arbitrariness, military-like organisation, sloth, malice, ignorance, irre-
sponsibility, superstition and fear, symbolically represented by ―[t]he
4 See Crawford 50–80.
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breaking of the conch and the deaths of Piggy and Simon,‖ which ―lay
over the island like a vapour‖ (204).
Alongside progressive decay of the initial order (―We‘re all drifting
and things are going rotten‖ [101]; ―The island was getting worse and
worse‖ [153]), for many of the boys, the memory of the outside world
undergoes the counterfactual process of utopianisation, with its adult
inhabitants turned into all-knowing and wise ‗saviours‘:
‗At home there was always a grown-up. Please, sir, please, miss; and then
you got an answer. How I wish!‘
‗I wish my auntie was here.‘
‗I wish my father … Oh, what‘s the use‘
[…]
‗Grown-ups know things,‘ said Piggy. ‗They ain‘t afraid of the dark.
They‘d meet and have tea and discuss. Then things ‘ud be all right—‘
‗They wouldn‘t set fire to the island. Or lose—‘
‗They‘d build a ship—‘
The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the
majesty of adult life.
‗They wouldn‘t quarrel—‘
‗Or break my specs—‘
‗Or talk about a beast—‘
‗If only they could get a message to us,‘ cried Ralph desperately. ‗If only
they could send us something grown-up … a sign or something.‘ (101-102)
The world of the past becomes a pastoral space of joy, safety and happi-
ness, a hoped-for and dreamed-about ‗no-place‘ that cannot be reached,
because—objectively—it no longer exists:
When you went to bed there was a bowl of cornflakes with sugar and
cream. And the books—they stood on the shelf by the bed, leaning together
with always two or three laid flat on top because he had not bothered to put
them back properly. They were dog-eared and scratched. There was the
bright, shining one about Topsy and Mopsy that he never read because it
was about two girls; there was the one about the magician which you read
with a kind of tied-down terror, skipping page twenty-seven with the awful
picture of the spider; there was a book about people who had dug things
up, Egyptian things; there was The Boy’s Book of Trains, The Boy’s Book
of Ships. Vividly they came before him; he could have reached up and
touched them, could feel the weight and slow slide with which The Mam-
moth Book for Boys would come out and slither down.… Everything was
all right; everything was good-humoured and friendly. (122-123)
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The idealisation of the outside world becomes ironic in light of the
subsequent fulfilment of the children‘s wishes, as the hoped-for ‗mes-
sage‘ from the outside world does indeed arrive, inciting the boys to
even greater violence and savagery:
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 corkscrew trail across the sky; then darkness again and stars. There
was a speck above the island, a figure dropping swiftly beneath a para-
chute, a figure that hung with dangling limbs. (103)
Even more ironic is the final scene of the novel, when the boys are saved
from the burning island by representatives of the outside adult world that
itself lies in ruins, including an officer who apparently originally shared
the same ideals and expectations:
‘I should have thought … 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—‗
[… Then he relents.]
‗I know. Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island.‘
Ralph looked at him dumbly. For a moment he had a fleeting picture of the
strange glamour that had once invested the beaches. But the island was
scorched up like dead wood—Simon was dead—and Jack had.… […] The
officer, surrounded by these noises, was moved and a little embarrassed.
He turned away to give them time to pull themselves together; and waited,
allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance. (225)
The reasons for the utopia‘s failure coincide to a large extent with those
suggested by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, although, unlike
Gulliver, Simon, the seer / prophet who comes down to tell the truth, is
not a madman, and Piggy‘s rationalism is less demanding than the model
proposed by the king of Brobdingnag. Things fall apart because of a
certain propensity of human nature manifesting itself in the misplaced
fear of evil that looks for it outside rather than inside individuals and
society, although, as Simon stutteringly observes, ―What I mean is …
maybe it‘s only us‖ (96).
Adaptations
The temporal gap of almost half a century between the two film adapta-
tions of Golding‘s novel separates two radically different historical and
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cultural epochs. Peter Brook‘s film (1963), made at the height of the
Cold War (the Berlin Wall crisis [1961] and the Cuban missiles crisis
[1962]),5 belongs roughly to the same period as Golding‘s novel, where-
as Harry Hook‘s version appeared almost concurrently with the final
collapse of the communist system, hailed at the time as ―the end of
history.‖
Brook‘s Lord of the Flies begins with a metonymic representation
(still photographs and drawings) of events preceding the landing on the
island, providing most of the information about the outside world that is
scattered throughout the opening part of the novel: several images of a
public school, the evacuation notice, bombers over London, missiles
about to be launched, the dead body of the pilot, the wreck of the air-
plane, dark skies, etc.
The utopian aspect of the novel undergoes a radical reduction not on-
ly by the lack of visual rendering of numerous longer and shorter de-
scriptive passages emphasising the attractive qualities of the island, but
also by the black and white cinematography, and the elimination of the
recurrent implicit contrast with the outside world. This reduction results
in foregrounding the survival arrangements rather than the ideological
opposition between the apocalyptic dystopia outside and the utopian
potential of the island. What is preserved is the ‗civilised‘ appropriation
and division of space as well as the introduction of rudimentary ‗demo-
cratic‘ order, and the particular stages of its collapse, leading to the
emergence of dystopian reality after the killing of Simon and Piggy,
followed by the near annihilation of the island.
Turning the island into a dystopian place is shown as beginning with
its division into two parts—one maintaining ‗democratic and civilised‘
values (democratic meetings), the other governed by the arbitrary rule of
savagery and tribalism. The latter is represented by images of violence
against the other group of boys: several fights between them, the stealing
of Piggy‘s glasses, chaotic running with lighted torches around a bon-
fire, ―beating up of an offender,‖ and tribal chants (―Kill the pig! Cut his
throat! Spill the blood!‖), shown against the background of equally
violent images of wild nature (the storm, stormy waves), which culmi-
nates in setting the whole island on fire. Brook retains also the meto-
5 During the first week of film shooting on the Island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, the Bay of
Pigs invasion began (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057261/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv).
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nymic relation between the ‗tribal‘ conflict on the island and the war
going on in the outside world, as suggested by both the opening images
and the final ‗rescuing‘ of the children by a Royal Navy cruiser.
Unlike Brook‘s film, the American version of Lord of the Flies simp-
ly does away with the utopian / dystopian motifs altogether as the oppo-
sition of the exotic island and the outside world is largely neutralised.
Consequently, the desert island becomes a place of isolation and surviv-
al, with no potential for creating an alternative, better place envisaged or
even suggested. Most importantly, there is no nuclear war and subse-
quent destruction of the civilised world, so the island can hardly be seen
as a safe haven, a sanctuary of peace and potential happiness. Instead, it
becomes simply a place of survival and adventure. Potentially apocalyp-
tic conflict with the Russians hardly poses a real threat, being here
reduced to a pretext for a humorous exchange among the boys:
‗I bet you out past the reef lots of boats come by every day, and one of
them could rescue us.‘
‗Yeah? Well, suppose it didn‘t.‘
‗Suppose it was Russian. Then what? We‘d be taken prisoner.‘
‗The Russians wouldn‘t take us prisoner.‘
‗I don‘t know. Major Dingledine, my new dad, told me…‘
‗Major Dingledine?‘
‗Yeah. He said that if the Russians invaded the US, they would take the
kids and separate us from our parents—and I know it sounds weird—but
they might make us go into the Olympics or something like that.‘
‗I don‘t see what‘s so funny.‘
‗Piggy, I don‘t think you have to worry about the Russians forcing you into
the Olympics.‘
‗Hey, what‘s that? Where do you think it comes from?‘
‗A Russian submarine, full of Olympic athletes.‘
The boys who land on the island are cadets from a military academy
returning home after holidays and / or military exercises. The outside
world is clearly modelled on the present, with advanced technology
(sophisticated helicopters, a glow stick) and with frequent references to
contemporary life and popular culture (e.g., ―OK, Rambo, you‘ve made
your point‖; ―I bet it‘s really about eight o‘clock and ALF‘s causing
some trouble right now‖). The updatings also include references to girls
and sexuality (―No parents, no teachers, no academy, no girls‖; ―Shove
their dick in the conch!—Put a stick up their butt‖) and swear words
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(―Why don‘t you two fuck off?‖; ―Face it, you fucked up‖; ―I‘m sick of
your shit and so‘s my gang‖). The possibility of the castaways‘ being
lost seems to be more of a subjective perception of some boys (especial-
ly Jack, who has his own agenda in maintaining this fiction) than a real
possibility.
In keeping with the attempts to update the spatio-temporal dimen-
sion, several changes to the plot and characters are introduced. The plane
is not shot down, but makes an emergency landing. The future ‗beast‘ is
not some unspecified parachutist, but the wounded pilot of the plane
carrying the boys home. It is he who, lying semi-conscious in a tent,
wakes up one night and runs away to hide himself in a cave in the
mountain. Moreover, the boys, as cadets, are ‗pre-organised,‘ with pre-
given hierarchies, the younger boys automatically addressing the older
ones as ―sir.‖ Further changes involve the de-sanctification of the figure
of Simon, who no longer engages in an imaginary conversation with the
Lord of the Flies, and the ‗domestication‘ of Piggy, who does not stand
out as belonging to a different (lower) social class and has no particular
objection to being called ―Piggy.‖
Most importantly, the foregrounding of the mimetic and the adven-
turous eliminates the metonymic function of the conch and the assem-
blies. As a result, the opposition utopia-dystopia (democracy-
totalitarianism) is replaced by the opposition civilised ‗adult‘ order vs.
wild ‗juvenile‘ tribalism, as the film tends to focus on a potentially
positive and instructive adventure gone wrong. In this altered context,
Jack‘s tribe can hardly be seen as metaphorically representing an alter-
native totalitarian or fascist mode of social organisation.
The radical reduction or elimination of the utopian / antiutopian di-
mension in the two adaptations seems to have been brought about
mainly by the commercial requirement of standard 90-minute format-
ting. However, whereas in the case of Hook‘s film this dimension would
be clearly irrelevant and unnecessary, in Brook‘s version the utopian /
dystopian level not only would not contradict the overall thematic
organisation of the film (the moral and social dimensions of evil, the
collapse of civilised norms, the corruptibility of innocence, etc.) but
would actually enhance its ideological ‗message.‘
Theoretical implications of the two ‗failed‘ adaptations indirectly
support the usefulness of introducing the fundamental distinction be-
Artur Blaim and Ludmila Gruszewska-Blaim - 9783631628447
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via Victoria University of Wellington―As if it wasn‘t a good island‖ 107
tween utopias and dystopias in their basic meaning as imaginary /
fictional constructions of good and bad places, with the term anti-utopia
reserved for the possible function of questioning the validity of utopian
thinking in general (as in Golding‘s case)6 or of any given utopia in
particular. In both adaptations the initially good island becomes a radi-
cally bad, dystopian place, literally consumed by flames, although, as
suggested above, neither film makes use of the anti-utopian potential of
the novel, which Golding himself formulated explicitly after the novel‘s
publication:
As a diagnosed and perhaps condemned antiutopian I offer you the dis-
tilled wisdom of fifty years. It is my only contribution to political thought
and it could be inscribed on a large postage stamp. It is simply this. With
bad people, hating, unco-operative, selfish people, no social system will
work. With good people, loving, co-operative, unselfish people, any social
system will work. (William Golding, ―Utopias and Antiutopias‖ 184).
Works Cited
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Utopias and Dystopias of Today and of Yore. Ed. Ligia Tomoiaga, Minodora
Barbul and Ramona Demarcsek. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2012. 173-177.
Blaim, Artur. ―Hell upon a Hill. Reflections on Anti-utopia and Dystopia.‖
Dystopia(n) Matters. On the Page, on Screen, on Stage. Ed. Fátima Vieira.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 80-91.
Booker, M. Keith. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Boroff, David. ―They Speak the Teen-agers‘ Language.‖ New York Times Book
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Cotrau, Liviu. ―William Golding and the Magical Power of Words.‖ From Francis
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6 For a detailed account of the proposal to consider anti-utopia in terms of function or use
of the dystopian text, see Blaim 80-91.
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Flies (1954).‖ From Francis Bacon to William Golding: Utopias and
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rozwojem gatunków. Warszawa: PWN, 1980.
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