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Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and Lord of the Flies
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While I was reading Kristeva’s essay, my mind was constantly flooded with images from Lord of the Flies, which I have read with a class fairly recently. I had an uncanny feeling (in a perhaps more colloquial meaning of the word) that the novel was haunting me and asking for a Kristevan interpretation with the help of the notion of abjection. At the same time other theorists’ concepts also kept cropping up, notably Foucault’s heterotopia and ideas of transgression and excess by Stallybrass and White, as well as Butlerian crossdressing. In this short essay I want to argue that Lord of the Flies is more than just a novel reworking the myth of the Fall. The novel begins with a literal fall from the sky of a group of boys. It is a heterogeneous group consisting of boys of different ages and from different classes. Seemingly they are homogeneous from the point of view of their gender but I will argue later that it is indeed not so. Their arrival marks a symbolic wound in the surface of the island which the author refers to as the ´scar´ but which the boys never name. Piggy only says ´And this is what the tube done´ (italics mine), as if it was something unutterable. But what is played out on this island is something more haunting than the Fall: regression, matricide, patricide (although on the surface the murders seem to be a repetition of the Cain-Abel fratricide myth), and the establishment of a new order. The island itself is a veritable heterotopia in all the senses that Foucault outlines in his heterotopology. It is a space which is clearly separate from society. It is heterogenous as it juxtaposes two spaces: a benign and nurturing one as well as a malign and dangerous one. It is a space where a state of crisis will develop, and where the boys’ behaviour will definitely deviate from the norm. In addition, it is linked to a heterochrony, namely a break with traditional time, where time is dictated by other than man-made principles. It is an eternal/permanent heterochrony in the sense that the boys don’t know whether they will ever be rescued and we the readers have the sense that we are observing the behavior of specimens in a zoo. But at he same time it is also only temporal as the boys initially hope to be and will eventually be rescued. Finally there is a system of opening and closing: the entrance is obligatory since the boys have no other choice, whereas their rescue marks the opening/exit. But what I find most uncanny about this heterotopia is that it is a site of an experiment, a scientist’s laboratory, where the initial conditions are set by the author but the outcome will depend very much on other factors not fully controllable by him. Similarly to Frankenstein or genetic engineering, a kind of monster body/society emerges which fills us readers with horror and yet continues to fascinate us. Even with the promise of its being a heterotopia this novel/island gives no comfort to the reader. The whole novel vibrates with key concepts that Kristeva is concerned with. One such concept is the question of boundary drawing. Initially the boys try to establish the boundaries of their new site of existence by literally exploring the island and designating spaces in which certain activities are supposed to take place (e.g. the assembly marked by logs, sites for huts, the site where the bodily waste is to be deposited). This is especially important as most of the island is covered in thick jungle: a threatening entity. Later a new site will be designated: the castle, the retreat/realm of Jack and his hunters. Certain functions in their society are also establish to be taken up by different boys. I would argue that these subject positions/functions are also boundaries and that they are just as fragile as the physical boundaries are. What occurs in the course of the novel is a power struggle which has a lot to do with the blurring or shifting of boundaries.
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