The Spire by William Golding

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However, the criticism of Jocelin is obliterated by Jocelin's subjectivity, his joy at having held in his hand the model of the spire that is to be built. "He looked down, loving them in his joy." And he refuses to accept explicitly that they are talking about him. He says: "Who is this poor fellow? You should pray for him rather …" He refuses to accept delivery of the insult he has overheard – and so we cannot be completely sure what he knows and what he doesn't know. The Spire confines us to Jocelin's consciousness – not absolutely, but for most of the novel's length. Harford, Tim (8 December 2017). "The Brexit monomania built on blind faith". Financial Times . Retrieved 25 September 2020. After going to see Salisbury Cathedral and learning that Golding lived just down the street from it, near St. Anne's Gate, I was compelled to read this book in which Golding imagines the creation of the enormous spire atop the cathedral. In it, he has created is a brilliant, densely woven, intensely introspective study of obsession and faith, which pushes everyone around him to the very edge of endurance.

Throughout the Dean's language is centred on glorifying the cathedral, but as the novel progresses it is clear that his motivations are more confused and complex. At one moment the Dean has a vision of his spire reaching up into the heavens casting an ever longer shadow across the countryside. Visible from further and further afield more distant travellers and traders turn their feet towards his cathedral. He sees the routes and roads shift to centre on to his town as the new spire becomes a major landmark.Roger Mason, a medieval Master Mason is, in direct contrast to Jocelin, physically powerful and a rationalist. He is associated with the imagery of a bull and a stallion. Roger contends with Jocelin, arguing that the cathedral foundations are insufficient to support the spire. He is forced to continue with the project because Jocelin makes it impossible for him to work elsewhere. After the death of Goody, Roger becomes an alcoholic. In a moment of clarity, Jocelin visits Roger and we eventually learn of his suicide attempt. As Golding lived in Salisbury for several years, the reader easily thinks of Salisbury Spire being in the author’s mind when he worked on the scaffolding of his book. But any Spire would do. One can also forget about spires since any other building, or enterprise, could play the role. For what this novel does is edify the process through which a fixation can absorb one’s mind. Firm obsessions can dissolve uneasily as perceptions shift and flounder. And Golding’s equivocal language captures splendidly the way a fleeting chimera can take over one’s life and one’s will until it can either triumph or destroy.

Let me return to the very beginning of The Spire and ask why Jocelin is laughing? The obvious reason is that he is laughing because he is happy. He has the model of the spire in his hands. But is that all? In the stained glass there are two images. God the father exploding in his face – a phrase that suggests a disaster brought on the self by the self. It blew up in his face. The other image in the stained glass is Abraham and Isaac. In Hebrew, the name "Isaac" means "she laughed". She is Sarah, the wife of Abraham. When Abraham was over 100 and Sarah well beyond child-bearing age, Sarah was promised a son – and she laughed. But the promise comes to pass. Miracles are possible. The spire might also come to pass – and does, at an extraordinary cost. After extraordinary sacrifices. Sacrifices: again we think of Abraham agreeing to sacrifice the boy Isaac and thus demonstrate obedience to a relentless deity. "Consumed and exalted." And those rainbows created by Jocelin's tears of laughter are brilliantly naturalistic, but they also nod to the rainbow of the covenant between God and man after the flood, giving man dominion over the earth and its animals. Power. Like the imperfect power Jocelin wields. Bu kez bir manastırdayız. Bir baş rahibimiz var. Adı Jocelin. Şahsi yorumumu şimdiden söyleyeyim. Bence bu adam delinin teki. Yaşlandıkça ve Hıristyanlık aleminde yükseldikçe kafayı yemiş. Bir meleği var. (Kim bilir hangi psikolojik rahatsızlıktan muzdarip. Yazık la kimin çocuğuysa...) Meleği sürekli sırtında. Ondan hiç ayrılmıyor. Konuşmuyor da. Sadece peşinde dolanıyor, sırtında ağırlık yapıyor hepsi bu. Dolayısıyla bizim başrahip "ben seçilmiş kişiyim" diye dolanıyor ortalıkta.Live webchat with Judy Carver on The Spire by William Golding – post your questions here". the Guardian. 24 April 2013 . Retrieved 1 December 2022. The Spire' is, in fact, literature; in that Golding exposes a forgotten way of life which heretofore has had little light shed upon it. He makes his scenario as authentic as possible, and (most important) he uses whatever rigor (in language) is called for. He doesn't toss off convenient, easy reading for modern audiences. He won't hold your hand; he cleaves very tightly to his history and his historical characters. Paul, Leslie. "The Spire That Stayed out in the Cold." The Kenyon Review, vol. 26, no. 3, 1964, pp. 568–571. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4334473. Accessed 16 Apr. 2020. Kitabın sonuna doğru rahibin ustayı sıkıştırmaktan başka neler neler yaptığını da öğreniyoruz. Ama o da okuyanlara kalsın. Tabi Kulemizin akıbeti ne oldu? O da sürpriz.

College students in the 1950s and 1960s gave the attention to Lord of the Flies, first novel of Golding; their attention drove that of literary critics. He was awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth. He received knighthood in 1988.However, as the spire is gradually erected, a hole is dug that seems to point to the fragility of the cathedral's underpinnings, an insufficiency of the original beams, also revealing an array of crawling specimens below ground that make the place resemble a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The author's verbal imagery is often stunning and the interplay between good & evil is quite reminiscent of The Lord of the Flies, Golding's best-known work. Second readings are dangerous enterprises. Anything can happen. When I first read this novel, I thought the Spire, that gives the name to the title, stood defiantly by the end of the book. My attention was focused on the descriptions of how architects and builders managed to pull up the complex architectural structures that miraculously were built during the Middle Ages. I did not pay too much attention to the writing. At the time, my English did not have strong foundations, and it was as much a guess-work as the art & craft of the medieval masons. During World War II, he served as part of the royal Navy, which he left five years later. This experience strongly influenced his future novels. Later, he taught and focused on writing. Classical Greek literature, such as that of Euripides, and The Battle of Maldon, an Anglo-Saxon oeuvre of unknown author influenced him.

Recent interest includes comparisons between The Spire and Brexit [18] and as an example of contemporary historical fiction. [19] Reception [ edit ] And in spite of all the troubles and hindrances the construction of the spire continues… But the process of building is taking its toll corrupting minds and souls… And immense fear grows around…

Oddly perhaps, there is little sense of ongoing religious services within the church amidst scaffolding, dust & building materials during the endeavor to raise the spire; in fact the cathedral seems spiritually bereft as construction proceeds. Jocelin continues to see the cathedral as "a diagram in prayer & our spire will be a diagram of the highest prayer of all." Meanwhile, Roger Mason, the master builder has become a kind of prisoner of Jocelin, proceeding against his better judgment & envisions the 4 columns opening apart & "everything--wood, stone, iron, glass & men on the scaffolds sliding down into the church, like the fall of a mountain." With it all, he views the spire as a "dunces cap." The master builder pointedly asks Jocelin: "Are you the devil?" Nothing William Golding wrote about is what Golding wrote about—he was a master of metaphor, and his 1964 novel The Spire is a good example (as was his masterful Lord of the Flies, still on many reading lists). On the basis of that reality – and although it contradicts my scant knowledge of Salibsury Cathedral (which is to say, that it still exists and it has a spire), I'd be tempted to guess that the tower did not survive. There was calamity foretold in the way those supporting pillars bent and sang, and in the way Roger and Rachel Mason, Pangall and Goody (who represented the pillars in Jocelin's mind) all broke. Then there was actual catastrophe in the great climactic storm that plunged such large sections of masonry down to earth – and Jocelin along with them. Given what happens in the bulk of the novel, it would be almost miraculous if the spire survived. It doesn't quite make sense, or it doesn't make immediate sense. It is like Gerard Manley Hopkins's opening trump, "As kingfishers catch fire …" Kingfishers don't catch fire. Hopkins is using a metaphor to capture the burst of colours given off by the kingfisher. Ted Hughes uses the same idea of combustion for bold colours in "Macaw and Little Miss", a poem from his first book, The Hawk in the Rain: "the macaw bristles in a staring / combustion …" The brilliant extra touch is that adjective "staring" appended to "combustion". All the indignation peculiar to the macaw is there.