1Dealing with ‘impersonality and emotion’ in literature apparently calls for a dialogue between literary critics and psychologists. However, the subject happens to be totally connected as well with research in neurolinguistics and linguistics or, to be more precise, the theory of enunciation.

2How can impersonality and emotion be defined? Are impersonality and emotion incompatible/irreconcilable notions? Is impersonality an effacement of the self, entailing an effacement of any subjectivity? These questions are fundamental not only for literary analysis but also for neurolinguistics. They have determined the orientations of this study, which will rest on the analysis of the opening passage of Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

3In fiction, the task of the writer is to introduce the reader to his fictional world through the medium of the printed word. This is done through the intermediary agency of a narrative and a narrator. Contemporary literary theory is divided along lines defined by the degree of emphasis granted to various aspects of literary communication. The words ‘writer’ or ‘author,’ for instance, are at the core of many a debate opposing the intentionalist school (for which literary explanation consists in inferring the authorial intention of a text) to structuralist theory (for which authorial intention simply does not exist). Yet, while the ‘death of the author’ theory has gained plenty of ground over the last decades, the existence of the biological writer should not be ignored.

4In the present study, the word writer refers to the biological writer, whether he appears in the fiction or not under a narrative mask. It is postulated here that the biological writer can no more stand apart from his creation than an artist can, which partly concurs with the intentional thesis. In any case, it certainly goes against Genette’s assumption that, in literary analysis, one should never mention the author, because, or so he says in Figures III, there is no such thing as an author but only a ‘scriptor’ or ‘narrator.’1 But it can be argued that the narrator is nothing but a fictive creation emanating from the writer’s brain, or the writer’s mask according to current terminology—while the author does exist. We contend that, like all human activities, all artistic creation is the product of a brain, and that the flesh-and-blood biological writer is the only real enunciative instance with a brain in literary communication, even if he lends his voice to his narrator and to his other fictional instances.

5In the second place, whatever his claims may be (for instance in terms of effacement of personality or expression of emotion), the writer of fiction must always create a world the pillars of which are time and space, and in which people or places must acquire sufficient solidity to be believed in. To achieve this, the writer can only use the uni-dimensional linear sequence of words. However, even if words can only be used in a linear sequence, they clearly convey many different dimensions. Words and the way they are stringing together to make coherent utterances are the result of the pre-established setting existing in the writer’s brain before he sets pen to paper. Such a statement certainly sounds trite. But it implies, in other words, that the pro-forma representation of the scene requires the combined activities of the writer’s two brain halves. This entails that whatever his literary options and the status he chooses for his narrator, all the writer’s pre-existing perception of the setting (whether rational or emotional) is willy-nilly transcribed into words.

6On the other hand, if we consider the flesh-and-bones reader and not the brainless (because fictional) narratee, the words and utterances he receives are decoded by his two brain halves, and the text also induces at once a rational and emotional perception of the same setting—somewhat differing with each biological reader’s specific affect, or rather with each specific right hemisphere: even if the reader is not the main topic of the present study, the reader’s response could also be analysed from a neurolinguistic point of view—and would deserve such an analysis.

7How can the emotional manifestations originating from the writer’s brain be transcribed into words and in turn implicate the reader’s?

8At first sight the opening passage of Golding’s Lord of the Flies might be described as a case-study of impersonality in literature, exempt from any implication of the biological writer. The main hypothesis is that though the text does not seem to reveal any amount of personal involvement on his part, the writer is not as neutral as he appears to be or would like to be. This study aims at demonstrating that since words and the meanings they convey emanate directly from the combined activation of the writer’s two brain halves, the writer’s involvement is both a rational and an emotional involvement.

9To begin with, we will have a quick glance at the way in which the brain functions; then the different, but complementary, participation of each hemisphere in language will be addressed. In the second place, we will focus our attention on the narrative structure of the opening passage of Lord of the Flies, attempting to decode the writer’s cerebral functioning as he prepares to write this opening passage. The writer’s pre-established conception of the main structures of the narrative (in terms of time, space, character) and various figures of speech will be discussed.

1 Brain functioning

10Most information about the workings of the brain has been obtained by observations of brain-damaged patients. Nowadays, new techniques such as MRI and PET scan allow for a better understanding of this complex mechanism in normal subjects.

11Table 1 on this page below sums up the specific skills of each hemisphere working in isolation according to the task to be performed. This table summarises observations of brain-damaged patients whose pathologies involved impairments in one hemisphere.

12This is of course a theoretical study aiming at showing each cerebral hemisphere’s specific skills.2 Actually, in healthy subjects, the two brain halves do not work in isolation, but in close collaboration, since they are connected by the corpus callosum. The left column shows various activities involving the global brain. The middle column shows the abilities and the inabilities of the left hemisphere in isolation, that is to say functioning without any connection with its right counterpart. In the same way, the right column shows the abilities and the inabilities of the right hemisphere in isolation. The complementarity of the two brain halves is obvious and constant: when a task is poorly achieved by one hemisphere, the other performs it.

13To put it briefly: the right hemisphere (RH) is especially devoted to spatial skills such as visuospatial abilities and spatial orientation. As an example, observations of right damaged patients reveal that they often display profound disturbances in orientation and awareness. Such right-hemisphere patients can be so disoriented in space that they are unable to find their way around a house in which they have lived for years. Spatial agnosia, which is a disorientation with respect to locations and spatial relationships, is also associated with damage to the right hemisphere. Some right-hemisphere patients also present deficits in their ability to comprehend depth and distance relationships or to deal with mental images of maps and forms.3

14The global recognition of shapes and objects is essentially processed by RH, whereas concepts and abstract thoughts are essentially processed by the left hemisphere (LH).

15Visual memory preferentially activates right occipital areas,4 episodic memory triggers activation in the right prefrontal cortex, whereas semantic memory activates the left prefrontal cortex.5 LH controls="true" voluntary memory, which is the privilege of consciousness, whereas RH controls="true" involuntary memory, which is the emergence of unconsciousness.

16The positive mental behaviour belongs to LH, negative thoughts and pessimism are triggered off by RH, which is the emotional hemisphere.

17As for all cerebral activities, where language activities are concerned, when a language task is poorly performed by one hemisphere, it is performed by its counterpart.

18As far as speech perception is concerned, the capacity for speech repetition is an easy task for LH, since speech production is dependent on speech perception, whereas voice and sound identifications are performed by RH (Table 2). All the emotional parts of language conveyed by metaphors, puns and affective lexis trigger activation in many right cortical areas, suggesting the participation of many processes such as episodic memory and mental imagery.6

19As for speech production, lexis and syntax are processed by LH, whereas intonation patterns are processed by RH. Indeed, right damaged patients cannot use the figurative meanings of words anymore; they can only use the original meanings of words.7

20Some dominant characteristics of each hemisphere can be drawn from table 2 on the current page:

21Generally speaking, the LH abilities can be referred to as analytic, rational and impersonal, whereas the RH abilities can be referred to as global, synthetic and emotional.

22Considering speech, LH controls="true" the expression dimension and has the privilege of consciousness while being bound to logical constraints, whereas RH is sensitive to emotional aspects, which can only be drawn from unconsciousness.

2 Analysis of the opening passage of Lord of the Flies

23A neurolinguistic approach of the opening passage of Lord of the Flies shows that the way the scene is described and the way the story is launched prove that the writer does not stand back but on the contrary, is definitely involved in this passage, both emotionally and rationally. It can be assumed that Golding’s apparently neutral stance is achieved for manipulative purposes.

24Joint knowledge of the workings of the brain and the theory of enunciation makes it possible to decode the diverse but complementary manifestations of the writer’s two brain halves through the narrative technique, the lexical choices and the syntactic organisation of utterances to be found in the text.

2.1 Space

25All Golding’s words and utterances show that he has an extremely precise notion of the setting, allowing him (and subsequently, the narrator, the narratee and the reader) to orientate himself within the scene he describes.

26Many sentences begin with or contain a place marker:

... All round him the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat. He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks. ... The undergrowth at the side of the scar was shaken and a multitude of raindrops fell pattering.... He was hurrying towards the screen that still lay between him and the lagoon... ground beneath them was a bank covered with coarse grass... behind this was the darkness of the forest proper.... Out there... the white surf flinked on a coral reef, and beyond that the open sea was dark blue. Within the irregular arc of coral, the lagoon was still.... The beach between the palm terrace and the water was a thin bow-stave, endless apparently, for to Ralph’s left. . . .

27These place markers reflect the way the writer orientates himself in the scene and thus the unambiguous activity of his right hemisphere, which, as mentioned before, is mainly devoted to visuospatial skills and spatial orientation. The writer first mentally or cerebrally locates the space relationships and then transcribes this implicit knowledge into words.

28The activity of his RH is also revealed by the way he expresses depth and distance relationships: words or utterances such as ‘the last feet of rock,’ ‘their green feathers were a hundred feet up in the air,’ ‘perhaps a mile away,’ ‘the perspectives of palm and beach and water drew to a point at infinity’ are visuospatial markers written by his LH but triggered off by his RH.

2.2 Characters

29The first sentence beginning with ‘The boy with fair hair,’ the metaphoric curtain goes up on a scene, which has, as it were, already started, conducted by a boy presented as if his prior existence needed no establishing. This is undoubtedly a narrative strategy: for the reader, ‘the boy’ is both forward pointing (cataphoric, or proleptic) and endophoric (that is to say related to the context): the character’s exact identity will be revealed in the course of the narrative. For the writer, ‘the boy’ is backward pointing (anaphoric) and exophoric (that is to say is situated out of the context) (Fig. 1). In fact, it is a fictional exophora existing in the writer’s brain before he starts writing.

30A stylistic analyst would have said the text presents us with a figure of style called ‘antonomasia,’ in which a person, or a character, is represented by a noun phrase, or adjective, instead of by his proper name. The fact that the character’s name cannot possibly be known by anyone before the character himself volunteers the information is a more realistic, or rather verisimilar rendering of the situation than any realistic novelist ever performed.

31Moreover, the verbs used by the writer to describe his characters are all motion verbs:

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon. Though he had taken off his school sweater and trailed it now from one hand, his grey shirt stuck to him and his hair was plastered to his forehead.... He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks.... The fair boystopped and jerked his stockings.... He put on his glasses, waded away from Ralph, and crouched down among the tangled foliage.... Ralph disentangled himself cautiously and stole away through the branches. In a few seconds, the fat boy’s grunts were behind him and he was hurrying towards the screen that still lay between him and the lagoon. He climbed over a broken trunk and was out of the jungle.... Ralph stood, one hand against a grey trunk, and screwed his eyes against the shimmering water.

32Those motion verbs are proof that the writer uses his RH to locate his characters within the space of the setting before he starts.

2.3 Time

33Purely literary analysis reveals little concrete, specific information concerning time. Linguistic analysis is more helpful: in fact, the important information is situated in the second utterance with the HAD+EN aspect ‘though he had taken off his school sweater and trailed it now from one hand, his grey shirt stuck to him and his hair was plastered to his forehead.’ The preterit, which is the dominant tense throughout the passage, is the mark of the narrative proper as it is used to describe the setting. It can be defined as positively past with respect to the moment of enunciation specified by ‘now’ in ‘and trailed it now’ (Fig. 2).

34The past perfect (HAD+EN aspect) is used by the writer-commentator. In aspectual terms, the event is presented transcendentally, that is to say, in the aftermath of the action expressed by the lexical verb.8

35This is confirmed by the fact that the HAD+EN aspect occurs in an adverbial clause of concession. The writer marks a pause in the on going of the narrative while a retrospective parenthesis is opened. In fact, the writer refers the reader to circumstances which took place prior to the rise of the reader’s metaphoric curtain (for example the plane crash which caused ‘the scar’ in the jungle and whatever else happened before).

36Both the occurrence of the aspect and the occurrence of the adverbial clause of concession are proof that not only has the writer a preliminary knowledge of the setting before he starts writing, but that he also has a preliminary interpretation of the events, which is a trace of the writer’s judgement on the scene. This judgement, which emanates directly from the writer’s brain, has first been filtered by his RH before his LH puts it into words.

37The two occurrences of the BE+ING aspect ‘he was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks...’ and ‘he was hurrying towards the screen...’ are further proof of the writer’s judgement. Enunciativist linguists explain that the copula BE can be considered as the algebraical sign ‘equal to’ and that the morpheme ING is, by essence, anaphoric.9

38The anaphora is in both cases an exophoric anaphora referring to the writer’s preliminary knowledge of the events pertaining to the setting. Linguists would refer to a mental exophora, and thanks to neurolinguistics, we can say more precisely that this exophora refers to the close collaboration of the writer’s two brain halves (Fig. 3).

39Actually, in the first instance, the writer makes a value judgement on the subject-predicate construction by the use of the attitudinal adverb ‘heavily.’ In other words, the writer (who is at the origin of the narrative since he lends his voice–and thus his brain–to his narrator), is not only involved in the core of the construction ‘HE/clamber among the creepers and the broken trunks’ by his deliberate choice of the BE+ING aspect, but he is also fully involved by the judgement he passes on that subject-predicate construction, this judgement involving the activity of his right hemisphere.

40Even if the second instance ‘he was hurrying towards the screen’ does not contain an attitudinal adverb, the writer’s RH involvement is revealed by his deliberate combination of the lexical verb ‘Hurry’ with the BE+ING aspect.

2.4 Discursive strategies

41Sounds:

42Among the passages evoking sounds, the nominal group ‘the fat boy’s grunts’ has been selected for our analysis. A mere stylistic analysis of this segment would limit the description to the skilful association of an antonomasia (the fat boy) with a synecdoche (the grunts of a pig) introducing the second character by identifying him with a pig, thus preparing the ground for the other boy’s cruel adoption of the nickname ‘Piggy.’

43A neurolinguistic approach would put it this way: this is another occurrence of the RH involvement of the writer as testified by the words ‘fat’ and ‘grunts.’ At first, the writer makes a value judgement on the boy by qualifying him as fat. This negative attitudinal adjective is directly triggered off by the writer’s RH.

44Moreover, the use of the article ‘the’ sets up a dual referential movement (Fig. 4):

451. The first level is both endophoric and anaphoric, that is to say referring to the context and situated in the before-text. The utterance ‘the grunts’ looks back to ‘I’ll be out again in just a minute’ that is to say to Piggy’s speech.

462. The second level is both exophoric, that is to say is situated out of the context, and anaphoric, that is pointing backwards. The utterance ‘the grunts’ refers to the way the writer has identified Piggy’s speech (or the way Ralph has identified it, depending on the point of view—, which is proof that there may be here a shift in focalisation from external to internal).

47Piggy’s speech is first identified, interpreted and judged by the writer’s RH as being ‘grunts,’ and then this judgement is transcribed into words by his LH. Thus, it can be said that the exophora is situated in the writer’s RH.

2.5 Synaesthesia

48The pre-existing representation of the setting in the writer’s mind, or more exactly in the writer’s brain, summons up all his senses. As an atmosphere cannot be easily transcribed into words, sight and hearing are mixed in order to create the suitable atmosphere. One example drawn from the text is the way in which Golding describes the heat.

49At the beginning of the passage, the heat is specifically referred to, for the first time, in the sentence ‘the jungle was a bath of heat,’ the second specific occurrence of the notion of heat being situated at the end of the passage: ‘and always, almost visible was the heat.’

50Linguists would say that the article ‘the’ contains the morpheme ‘TH-’ which is anaphoric—I that is to say mentally retrospective—and refers to something that should have been or has actually already been mentioned in the text. In the latter sentence, the definite article ‘THE’ points backwards to the first occurrence of the word ‘heat’ creating a strong link between those two occurrences, and thus between the visibility of the ‘heat’ and its association with the tactile sensation of dampness formerly expressed by ‘bath.’ Moreover, the sensation of heat is suggested as early as the second sentence, in ‘his grey shirt stuck to him and his hair was plastered to his forehead.’ (Fig. 5) In fact, on both this occasion and the second specific occurrence of the word heat at the end of the passage, the writer uses sight to denote the temperature, which is clearly connected with the sense of touch.

51A stylistic analyst would say this is a well-known figure of speech known as synaesthesia.

52Incidentally, the word synaesthesia has been adopted by neurologists to describe a pathological brain condition in which a stimulus received in one sensory modality gives rise to an experience in another. Synaesthetic patients may ‘hear’ colours, ‘feel’ tastes, or ‘see’ sounds. In our example, the sensation of heat is visible. Recent neurological studies suggest the possibility that the frontal lobes, and especially the right ones, manifest a high degree of sensory integration. Implied in this is the possibility that the brain, when it performs abstraction, is relying on a hybrid sensory system.10

53This is not to suggest that Golding suffered from the pathological condition of synaesthesia, but that his (or other writers’) recurring use of this figure of speech may originate in an increased activity of his right frontal lobes mainly involved in cognitive-emotional interactions.

54Before concluding, let us mention a further point of interest such as the imagery created by Golding and more precisely his references to colours. Even if many rational colour-words such as red, green or dark may convey symbols according to basic literary explanation, many other utterances such as ‘the jungle’ or ‘the shimmering water’ trigger off coloured visions even if no colour is explicitly mentioned. This figure, called a ‘free image’ or a ‘floating image’ in literature, conjures up a specific and implicit perception of colours according to people’s real-life experiments. This is undoubtedly one of the writer’s strategies aiming at arousing his reader’s emotions, that is to say aiming at implicating the reader’s RH. As mentioned above (cf. Part I), one cannot either produce or decode the figurative meanings of words if suffering from right-hemisphere damage; it can thus be hypothesised that Golding’s RH is fully involved in this strategy, even if, as it is directed by his LH, it is a conscious and deliberate one.

55The writer’s lexical choices would also have deserved further development even if they are more easily recognisable as a proof of Golding’s RH involvement, since he first feels the setting, interprets it and then puts his feelings into words. As an example, words such as ‘cautiously’ in ‘Ralph disentangled himself cautiously’ or ‘decaying’ in ‘scattered with decaying coco-nuts and palm saplings’ first reflect the writer’s feelings and then the writer’s judgement. Those words are a means of escaping from the logical rigour of the discourse.

3 Conclusion

56Like all artistic creation, literary creation is the result of a cerebral process which triggers off jointly the two cerebral hemispheres: LH, which controls="true" the linguistic and writing rules and techniques, but which at the same time is bound by all that is logical and rational in the writing process; and RH, more competent as regards perception, space manipulation, sensorial stimuli and emotions, and which probably plays the larger part in the originality (that is the personal idiosyncracies—the expression of personality) of a literary or artistic work. As a matter of fact, a kind of permanent modulation, which makes for a balance in hemispheric participation, is established. In other words, a work of fiction is the result of cerebral dialectics.

57Though the opening passage of Lord of the Flies may look impersonal and entirely rational, that is anything but emotional, since entirely exempt from the usual semantic markers of subjectivity, it does have an emotional content and therefore an emotional impact. A thorough linguistic and neurolinguistic analysis of the passage reveals that its emotional content is triggered off by the emotive element constitutive of the writing process. Neither are the words taken in isolation nor the segments of the text semantically pregnant with emotion, but when used as cues to trace the genesis of the writing process, they enable the analyst (i.e. both the enunciativist and the neurolinguist) to discover a combined activation of the writer’s two cerebral hemispheres. As demonstrated in the second part, the implication of the writer’s RH can be unmasked beyond the logical rigour of the discourse controlled by his LH. This is proof that Golding is both rationally and emotionally involved in the fiction he creates: even though he may think he controls="true" his creation entirely, and wholly disappears behind his narrative mask, his LH cannot control his RH: when, with his LH, Golding carefully, consciously, intentionally, sets up the space structure of the narrative, that is the setting, he involuntarily, unconsciously, unintentionally, triggers off his RH.

58Neutral and impersonal as it seems in its linear structure, this textual object nevertheless triggers off emotions in the reader. In fact, the reader’s RH cannot fail to be activated in the course of the cerebral process of semantic decoding.

59To conclude, the new approach offered in the present study allows for a better understanding of the writing process. An interest in brain functioning should enable all linguists and literary critics (of whatever school) to go beyond words by drawing on the sources of the writing process. This new approach is not a new literary theory, but rather a new tool to explore literature which might furnish food for thought to everyone concerned with literature.