Faith Rising—Between the Lines

Intimations of Faith Embedded in Modern Fiction

David B. Bowman

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781666700305, 9781666700312
• eBook ISBN: 9781666700329
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

This writing intends to rouse would-be believers to faith--or enhance the faith of others--through the adventure of modern fiction. While taking note of the secularity of our era, the author insists the Spirit of God has not departed the scene.The opening poem by Emily Dickinson, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant, " proposes the author's contention that the "indirect discourse" of fictional writers may welcome readers to faith's door in ways sermonic speech never did.The modern authors chosen for this purpose are Izak Dinesen, Annie Dillard, Kent Haruf, Loren Eiseley, Gary Trudeau, Garrison Keillor, William Golding, Walker Percy, Frederick Buechner, and Gabriel Marcel.Having explained one work each by these noted authors, the book closes by pointing to ways in which embedded faith may rise out of these pages to meet the reader where he or she lives.

7

William Golding

The Author: William Golding (19 September 1911—19 June 1993) born to Alec Golding, a mathematics teacher, and Mildred Curnoe Golding, an early suffragette, at Newquay, Cornwall, England.

Raised in St. Columb Mina, Cornwall, a sector in southwest England, he remained in the area all his eighty–two years. He loved the countryside and held a special affection for the four medieval cathedrals dotting the region’s landscape at Exeter, Winchester, Bath and Salisbury. Golding’s appreciation for the natural environment surfaced in his descriptions of nature on a fictional island paradise where he locates Lord of the Flies.

In 1930, between the great wars in Europe, Golding entered Brasenose College, Oxford, to study science. To his father’s dismay, he discovered a preference for English. After a period of teaching, in 1940 he joined the British Royal Navy. There he commanded a rocket–launching ship that helped to sink the German Bismarck. The war experience produced a critical reversal in his view of life. His biographer wrote, “By the time the war was over, he had rejected his father’s confident, scientific humanism; he had witnessed war’s brutality and had adopted a pessimistic view toward his fellow humans.”127

Golding began his career as a schoolteacher. His publishing success enabled him to leave teaching and devote his efforts to writing fiction. He wrote thirteen novels and three nonfiction books over a thirty–one–year period, 1954–1989. His stories usually present a conflict between good and evil, written in such a way that he has been characterized as a fabulist. In an era of unbelief his stories often warn of human waywardness, without expressing marked optimism about the future of humankind on this planet.

Lord of the Flies, Golding’s first published novel, appears in 1954 after receiving rejects from twenty–one publishers. It describes a group of English boys, left to their own devises on a desolate island, seeking to establish a civilized order among themselves. Their failures and the murderous events that follow constitute the heart of the novel. The final rescue bears grim irony, since their relief comes in the person of a naval officer dispatched from a vessel of atomic warfare, awaiting them just offshore.

Based on his body of writing and its significance in the world of literature, Golding received a number of awards. In 1980 he won England’s prestigious Booker McConnell prize for Darkness Visible, judged to be the year’s best novel. This was followed in 1983 by the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1988 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. The “Times,” in 2008, named him third on the list of “The fifty greatest British writers since 1945.”

A definitive biography of William Golding, with access to many previously unavailable letters and papers, appeared in 2009. John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, refreshed the continuing interest in this British fabulist author in a 571–page volume titled, William Golding, the Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies.128

In terms of his religious beliefs, Golding’s war experience gave him a grim view of human nature, an attitude he never changed. His father, Alec, maintained an atheist philosophy all his life. Though never becoming a church member, when called a Christian Golding did not deny it, though in humility he thought himself not worthy of the name.

Lord of the Flies: The Human Flaw

I believe that man suffers from an appalling
ignorance of his own nature.

—William Golding

Something Like Eden

A basic premise of the Christian faith revolves around the conviction that humankind suffers from a problem—profound, pervasive and perennial. Without this appraisal of the human situation no need arises to seek a savior.

The biblical story placed the original action in the garden called Eden, where “Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food . . . (Gen 2:9a). But into this mythic, idyllic paradise which the human couple, Adam and Eve, were to supervise, crept the deceptive serpent. Soon enough the couple “claim mastery of their own lives” and “become exploiters and despoilers. They lose their humanity in futile striving and are left in rebellion, despair and isolation.”129

Some have thought Golding’s placement of abandoned boys on an island derived from an earlier novel by R. M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island. Perhaps. But more surely he had in mind the paradise of mythic Eden, since he described his island in such lyric passages as, “Within the irregular arc of coral the lagoon was still as a mountain lake—blue of all shades and shadowy green and purple.”130

Into the Edenic paradise crawled the serpent described as “more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made” (Gen 3:1a)...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Isak Dinesen
• Annie Dillard
• Kent Haruf
• Loren Eiseley
• Garry Trudeau
• Garrison Keillor
• William Golding
• Walker Percy
• Frederick Buechner
• Gabriel Marcel
• Commentary
• Bibliography