Word: jocelin
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...aging hero, Father Jocelin, sets out to capture his religious passion in a monumental new cathedral spire. Opposed to his zeal is the practicality of the Master Builder, who points out that the cathedral's foundation will not support a spire. Father Jocelin gets it built by sheer force of will, in the process destroying the builder's self-respect and trampling on his old colleagues--neglecting the portentous advice that a solid spire "goes down as far as it goes up." At the end as the spire totters, Jocelin comes to recognize the human cost his fervor has exacted...
Doubtless Golding intends the reader to become involved in Jocelin's suffering, but the requirements of allegory constantly work against complexity of character. In order to generalize Jocelin's high, spiritual pre-occupations, Golding leaves out all but the formal vestiges of Christianity. Like Becket in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral the priest uses paternal, beatific language; but Christ, salvation, and sin are carefully left out. Golding merely gives Jocelin the symptoms of faith, and leaves it to the reader to conjure up some kind of psychological reality from such cryptic sommentary as "Joy, fire, joy." Furthermore the artificial...
...desire to draw a moral also leads him to simplify the other characters to fit general roles. He works out a set of convenient metaphors to describe each of them, and continually sticks in these formulas to remind the reader of the character's place in the general scheme. Jocelin's ecstasy always burns like a flame, and an angel continually appears behind him to stand for his inspired will. The Master Builder and his wife "revolve around each other." And the urge which entangles the Master Builder in adultery with an innocent townswoman is "the net." This repetition does...
...Jocelin discovers his own sexuality with a jolt, in his passionate guilt toward the woman he had used to detain the Master Builder. He begins to question the pious motives which led him to marry her, his "daughter in God," to an important church sweeper. But even here some of the circumstances seem arbitrary. The spire's mysterious patroness turns out to have been the dead king's mistress, angling for immortality. The news that this woman also has supervised his rise in the church hastens Jocelin further into delirium...
...still the human sting is taken out of Jocelin's fall by Golding's wish to moralize. Nature is introduced in the final pages as a healing balm, so that the dying Jocelin can say as he views the tilting spire, "It's like the apple tree." There is a kind of vague inspirationalism to it all, but the book never becomes effective as the story of a man, and emerges as a foredoomed effort to stretch a proverb into a novel...