The Spire by William Golding

First published: 1964

Type of work: Symbolic allegory

Time of work: The fourteenth century

Locale: An English city resembling Salisbury

Principal Characters:

• Jocelin, the dean of a cathedral
• Roger Mason, the master builder of the cathedral’s spire
• Rachel, Roger Mason’s wife
• Pangall, the caretaker of the cathedral
• Goody, Pangall’s wife

The Novel

The hero of William Golding’s The Spire, Jocelin, is the dean of a large cathedral and designer of a monumental spire which is to be built atop his church. Set in fourteenth century England and narrated through Jocelin’s own consciousness, the novel concerns Jocelin’s attempt to construct the four-hundred-foot spire with the help of his master builder, Roger Mason — an impossible task, since the church’s foundations rest on a marsh and its pillars are made of rubble. Jocelin is convinced, however, that the building of the spire is an act of faith, a “diagram of the highest prayer of all.” He forces the raising of the spire despite the fact that this act destroys himself and the four “pillars” of the church, representing the other main characters of the novel and the most important people in Jocelin’s life. As a result of this process, Roger Mason becomes a drunkard and a suicide after having been compelled to oversee the maniacal construction of the spire; his wife, Rachel, becomes a troubled, shrewish woman consumed by the demands of her alcoholic husband. Pangall, the caretaker, dies in a riot caused by a group of dissatisfied construction workers who superstitiously make him a scapegoat for their troubles; Pangall’s wife, Goody, whom Jocelin has more or less prostituted to Mason in an attempt to keep him working on the spire, dies as she gives birth to Mason’s child. Jocelin himself, who knows full well that the construction of the spire is responsible for these broken lives but who ignores the fact, is demoted by his superior because he has neglected his congregation and bankrupted his church in order to realize his “act of faith.” Eventually, he dies from consumption, sick and deluded after going through the ordeal of willing the spire into existence.

The Characters

Though The Spire is populated by several important characters, in a sense the only character in the novel is Jocelin. Everything in it is rendered through his eyes; all others are seen merely as components of an emerging vision which Jocelin believes is divinely inspired. This story of a “master builder” who builds too high (often compared to Henrik Ibsen’s play of that title) is a deceptively simple account of a man beset by pride and obsessed with his own self-image. From the beginning yf the novel, when Jocelin observes the model of the spire standing in front of the cathedral’s crossways, it is clear that his “prayer” is a phallic gesture, a product of his own self-love:

  The model was like a man Iying on his back. The nave was his legs placed together, the transepts on either side were his arms outspread. The choir was his body; and the Lady Chapel, where now the services would be held, was his head. And now also, springing, projecting, bursting, erupting from the heart of the building there was its crown and majesty, the new spire.

This description prefigures what will become in the novel the close identification between Jocelin’s body and the building of the spire; here, it acts as a substitute for his sexual desires regarding Goody Pangall. He remarks that “now there was a kind of necessary marriage: Jocelin and the spire.” He dreams that his body is the church: “It seemed to Jocelin that he lay on his back in bed; and then he was Iying on his back in the marshes, crucified, and his arms were the transepts, with Pangall’s kingdom nestled by his left side.” Finally, while dying, Jocelin perceives his own body, his protruding ribs, as the stone walls and vaulting of the church. Thus, the novel presents a classically obsessed hero who confers upon an object in the world the weight of his own egotism—a burden which, apocalyptically, brings that world falling down around his ears. Like Ahab’s whale, Jocelin’s spire can be seen as the self-reflection of a narcissistic hero who can perceive, looking around the wide world, only his own image.

The other characters of the novel, the “pillars” of Jocelin’s church, represent both allegorized aspects of his own being and problematic embodiments of an “otherness” to which he is blind and which foils his plans. Goody is, clearly, the figuration of lust; Mason, the builder who is brought down by the absurdity of Jocelin’s plans and his own limitations, represents ambition. Pangall is a slightly comic figure—the “lower man” or beastlike figure of the novel who haunts Jocelin’s conscience and sporadically performs in the role of the wise fool. Rachel, like her biblical namesake, is the good but barren wife (the Old Testament Rachel is barren for seven years) who represents blind faith: Her attachment to her husband and his participation in Jocelin’s plan completely overtake her body and will. Rather than being fully developed characters, the supporting cast of The Spire represent those characteristics—lust, faith, ambition, sacrifice—upon which Jocelin depends for the completion of his design and which, ironically, bring about the destruction of his plan.

Critical Context

The Spire was Golding’s fifth novel; it might be seen as standing at the productive (though not chronological) midpoint of this Nobel Prize-winning writer’s career. As such, it represents many of Golding’s collective concerns, along with providing a superb example of his exceedingly difficult role as allegorist in an age which largely rejects allegory. From his fable about the fall of innocence in Lord of the Flies (1954) to Rites of Passage (1980, a ship-of-fools parable of damnation and salvation), Golding has worked the allegorical seam with a depth, variety, and persuasiveness which flies in the face of those who would view allegory as an outdated genre. Perhaps his success in this vein can be attributed to the kind of allegory Golding writes: never simplistic, always an exacting complication of values, usually resulting not in didacticism but, precisely, in paradox and contradiction. Even within the mode of allegory, Golding consistently experiments with the form: The anthropological symbolism of Lord of the Flies can be set alongside the controversial “trick” ending of Pincher Martin or the intrusions of modern history and psychology into the allegorical inclinations of Free Fall (1959).

Golding’s diversity as a writer has often led him to work outside allegory, however, or to so change the form that it must be recognized as something beyond allegory. In Darkness Visible (1979), for example, certainly one of Golding’s most problematic and complex novels, “consciousness” is the issue: how recollection and projection work, how the human mind is affected by the constraints of contemporary existence. This novel, then, may be paired with The Inheritors (1955), which attempts to re-create and portray the “primitive” mind. Indeed, all of Golding’s novels, regardless of whethcr they are labeled as allegories, are dramas of human consciousness. Golding’s importance as a modern writer resides in his ability to portray how “life” and “mind” cooperate, or fail to do so, within a defined framework of intentions and values, or lack of these. In The Spire, one sees one aspect of this project, where intentions have gone astray and where the “rationality” of Jocelin’s mental design overwhelms the flawed, profane beauties of a fallen life-world.

Bibliography

Babb, Howard S. The Novels of William Golding, 1970.

Crompton, D. W. A View from the Spire: William Golding’s Later Novels, 1985.

Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, and Ian Gregor. William Golding: A Critical Study, 1968.

Oldsey, Bernard S., and Stanley Weintraub. The Art of William Golding, 1965.

Tiger, Virginia. William Golding: The Dark Fields of Discovery, 1974.