No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
William Golding, in The Spire, invites us to ask how we may know the will of God, and suggests that what we take to be the will of God is often simply the projection onto history of the disguised image of our private and self-absorbed desires. Though contemporary critics tend to interpret the novel as a sympathetic exploration of moral ambiguity rather than as a compelling condemnation of Jocelin's mortifying and death-dealing sin, the novel turns on the contrast between the drive toward dominion and the capacity for assent. The final salvific discovery, given form in Jocelin's mind by the experience of the apple tree and the kingfisher, is the overthrow of the will, its panicked drowning, in terrified apprehension of implacable glory and squandered gifts.
1 Lerner, Laurence, “Jocelin's Folly; or, Down with the Spire,” Critical Quarterly 24/3 (Autumn 1982): 11, 6, 14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 There are actually two equally problematic analogies on the novel's last page: the likening of the spire to an upward waterfall and Jocelin's dying insight, “It's like the apple tree!” It is the latter that Lerner describes as “mistaken.” Concerning the former analogy, Lerner writes, “At the very end of his life he suddenly perceived the breath-taking beauty of the spire, but his final outburst has as much validity as the claim that the Taj Mahal is like the moonlight (which, in a way, it is)” (11); by this he means that even if the analogy can be supported, it tells us nothing relevant to the moral question that must be answered.
3 Gunn, Giles, “Recent Criticism and the Sediments of the Sacred” in his The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 173–96, at 178, 190–92, 195.Google Scholar
4 Golding, William, The Spire (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), 185.Google Scholar All subsequent page citations from this edition will be given parenthetically in the text.
5 Roger may be a casualty in the additional sense of having been driven to murder as a condition of construction. It is not clear by whose hand Pangall actually dies. Jocelin as much as accuses Roger, and Roger's angry response can support multiple interpretations (204).
6 Golding, William, Pincher Martin (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), 201.Google Scholar
7 It would be possible to argue that the list should be expanded to include the selfless and heroic ascent through the storm-shaken structure to drive the holy nail beneath the capstone. This account in chapter 9 might be taken to represent a new sense of his own unreliability and a turn to reliance on God; however, there is no point in the novel where Jocelin more vividly projects and externalizes the fault internal to himself.
8 This begins as early as 1965 with the treatment of The Spire in Oldsey, Bernard S. and Weintraub, Stanley, The Art of William Golding (New York: Harcourt, 1965), 132Google Scholar:“‘It's like the apple tree’ seems primarily a reference to the fact that the great spire, like the trunk of a tree, thrusts grandly upward, but also thrusts in many directions, many—like the mixed nature of man's motives and works—too complex to be seen at first view.” Kinkead-Weekes, Mark and Gregor, Ian, in William Golding: A Critical Study (London: Faber & Faber, 1967)Google Scholar, present the whole novel as an artful paradox in which every element has contradictory aspects. The spire and the apple tree are alike because both comprehend in one entity contradictory elements and fuse these apparently incompatible realities into one actuality. Virginia Tiger reinforces this logic: “It is Golding's point that the physical and spiritual are perpetually intermingled” and “That verbal paradox [the upward waterfall] images a multifarious dynamic reality where nevertheless pattern can be perceived. The truth it embodies is one composed not of sets of opposition—profane/sacred, sexual/ascetic, physical/spiritual, innocent/guilty—but as a suspension of perpetually interfused antinomies.… [H]uman acts may be seen to have elements of innocence and guilt, each modifying, each creating the other” (William Golding: The Dark Fields of Discovery [London: Calder and Boyars, 1974], 189Google Scholar). David Anderson in “Is Golding's Theology Christian?” speaks of the “recognition of evil in the best of human actions” and attributes to Golding the view that “human consciousness seems to be split between opposing modes of reality: essence and existence, innocence and guilt, the absolute and the relative, the divine and the demonic” (in William Golding: Some Critical Considerations, ed. Biles, Jack I. and Evans, Robert O. [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978], 17, 13).Google Scholar
9 We have already seen that Lerner takes it for granted that the spire must symbolize “whatever positives the book contains.” For early reviews that treat the spire as justified, see especially the review by Gardner, Harold C. in America 110 (May 16, 1964): 679;Google Scholar and the review by Elmen, Paul in Christian Century 81 (06 3, 1964): 740, 842.Google Scholar In “‘He Wondered’: The Religious Imagination of William Golding,” Ian Gregor describes three readings of the novel and characterizes the Christian reading in these terms: “In the end, Jocelin is redeemed by the realization of his pride; broken in body and in will, he gazes up and sees the spire, a thing of beauty, ‘the great dare’ is justified” (William Golding: The Man and His Books, ed. Carey, John [London: Faber, 1986], 91–92Google Scholar). Dom Compton, in his study of The Spire as the “watershed” novel between Golding's early and later works, writes, “What these visionary gleams signify for Jocelin in terms of the spire he has built is, in effect, a final vindication of the rightness of his purpose, a vindication (in Golding's phrase) of the ‘My Godness’ in man that comes and goes as quickly as the kingfisher and the blossom of spring” (A View from the Spire: William Golding's Later Novels, ed. and completed by Briggs, Julia [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985], 43Google Scholar).
10 Curiously, not even women who have written about the novel (there are not many) have been much disturbed by this persisting characterization of Goody as a witch. Perhaps we no longer appreciate the import of the accusation, or perhaps Christian aversion to sexuality and Christian hostility to women are so deep that it simply has not occurred to critics that Jocelin's demonizing of the innocent must surely create an obstacle to his salvation which demands satisfactory resolution. Perhaps this plain illusion on Jocelin's part is thought to be so transparently a superstitious rationalization that it does not require serious consideration. However, if the novel ends by overwriting Jocelin's redemption on the undertext of his unregenerate conviction that all sorrow and all blame belongs to Goody because she aroused his sexual desire, then we are left with the dilemma of saying either that Golding's theology is unsound or that Christian theology rightly presented by Golding is indeed misogynist theology. Interestingly, though David Anderson gives considerable attention to The Spire in his essay “Is Golding's Theology Christian?” he never even glances at this problem, despite the fact that he claims that the question he means to ask is this: “Are the experiences enacted and communicated by Golding the kind of experiences in which the Christian doctrine of man becomes existentially significant in terms of explanatory power?” (5).
11 Cammarota, Richard S., “The Spire: A Symbolic Analysis” in Biles, Jack I. and Evans, Robert O., eds., William Golding: Some Critical Considerations (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978), 162.Google Scholar Virginia Tiger presents another example of the same logic. The cellarage remains the locus of darkness, ugliness, violence; Jocelin's, task is “to accept the ‘cellarage’ of his own mind and its part in vision” (William Golding: The Dark Fields of Discovery, 198).Google Scholar This dimension of his being is and remains the dimension of “death, decay, and destruction” (185).
12 Cammarota, , “The Spire,” 173.Google Scholar
13 Tiger, , William Golding, 190.Google Scholar
14 Kinkead-Weekes, and Gregor, , William Goiding: A Critical Study, 205.Google Scholar The conceptual maneuver here is to assert that the image paradoxically conveys all the conflicting elements and meanings at once, and that logical objections like those of Lerner violate the insight.
15 Ibid., 235,
16 Luke 19:40: “He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out’” (RSV).