Todos tenemos en la cabeza la imagen del cruce de Abbey Road con los Fab Four caminando, pero siempre me pregunté cómo lo hicieron a la hora de la sesión, la gente que pudo pasar por ahí y encontrarse con Lennon & co, etc...
Eventually – around the time John Kennedy became President, I think – we came to feel something was missing. These stories were exciting enough, but something about them was . . . off. Part of it might have been the fact that most of the stories were set in the twenties and thirties, decades before my brother David and I were born, but that was not the greater part of it. Something about those books was just wrong. The kids in them were wrong.
Golding harnessed his unsentimental view of boyhood to a story of adventure and swiftly mounting suspense. To the twelve-year-old boy I was, the idea of roaming an uninhabited tropical island without parental supervision at first seemed liberating, almost heavenly. By the time the boy with the birthmark on his face (the first littleun to raise the possibility of a beast on the island) disappeared, my sense of liberation had become tinged with unease. And by the time the badly ill – and perhaps visionary – Simon confronts the severed and fly-blown head of the sow, which has been stuck on a pole, I was in terror. ‘The half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life,’ Golding writes. ‘They assured Simon that everything was a bad business.’ That line resonated with me then, and continues to resonate all these years later. I used it as one of the epigrams to my book of interrelated novellas, Hearts in Atlantis.
This is the farthest thing from a scholarly introduction, because there was nothing scholarly or analytical about my first reading of Lord of the Flies. It was, so far as I can remember, the first book with hands – strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat. It said to me, ‘This is not just entertainment; it’s life-or-death.’
Flies wasn’t a bit like the boys’ books in the parsonage; in fact, it rendered those books obsolete. In the parsonage books, the Hardy Boys might get tied up, but you knew they’d get free. A German Messerschmitt might get on Dave Dawson’s tail, but you knew he’d get away (by putting his Spitfire in prop-clawing mode, no doubt). By the time I reached the last seventy pages of Lord of the Flies I understood not only that some of the boys might die, but that some would die. It was inevitable. I only hoped it wouldn’t be Ralph, with whom I identified so passionately that I was in a cold sweat as I turned the pages. No teacher needed to tell me that Ralph embodied the values of civilization and that Jack’s embrace of savagery and sacrifice represented the ease with which those values could be swept away; it was evident even to a child. Especially to a child, who had witnessed (and participated in) many acts of casual schoolyard bullyragging. My relief at the last-minute intervention of the adult world was immense, although I was angry at the naval officer’s almost offhand dismissal of the ragtag survivors (‘I should have thought that a pack of British boys . . . would have been able to put up a better show . . .’).
I stayed angry about that until I remembered – this was weeks later, but I still thought about the book every day – that the boys were on the island in the first place because a bunch of idiotic adults had started a nuclear war. And years later (by then I was on my fourth of fifth reading of the novel) I came across an edition with an afterword by Golding. In it he said (I’m paraphrasing): ‘The adults save the children . . . but who will save the adults?’
To me, Lord of the Flies has always represented what novels are for, what makes them indispensible. Should we expect to be entertained when we read a story? Of course. An act of the imagination that doesn’t entertain is a poor act indeed. But there should be more. A successful novel should erase the boundary-line between writer and reader, so they can unite. When that happens, the novel becomes a part of life – the main course, not the dessert. A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog. In the best novels, the writer’s imagination becomes the reader’s reality. It glows, incandescent and furious. I’ve been espousing these ideas for most of my life as a writer, and not without being criticized for them. If the novel is strictly about emotion and imagination, the most potent of these criticisms go, then analysis is swept away and discussion of the book becomes irrelevant.
I agree that ‘This blew me away’ is pretty much of a non-starter when it comes to class discussion of a novel (or a short story, or a poem), but I would argue it’s still the beating heart of fiction. This blew me away is what every reader wants to say when he closes a book, isn’t it? And isn’t it exactly the sort of experience most writers want to provide?
Wet Illustrated : Satellite Kids from robbie simon on Vimeo.
1- "Pink Moon", de Nick Drake.
2- "Comment Te Dire Adieu", de Françoise Hardy.
3- "Hopelessly Devoted To You" (B.S.O. Grease), Olivia Newton John.
4- "La Playa", de Los Planetas.
5- "Since K Got Over Me", de The Clientele.
6- "Walk In The Park", de Beach House.
7- "Trains And Boats And Planes", de Burt Bacharach.
8- "Al Siguiente Nivel", de Javiera Mena.
9- "Commuter Love", The Divine Comedy.
10- "Autumn Sweater", de Yo La Tengo.
Las declaraciones oficiales, los conferencias de prensa, los testimonios, el "yo estuve ahí", bla, bla, bla...
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