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A 'Knight of Faith' Looking Into the Face of the Other: Existential Transformation of Dean Jocelin from William Golding's

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A 'Knight of Faith' Looking Into the Face of the Other: Existential Transformation of Dean Jocelin from William Golding's FOLIA 175 Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis Studia Anglica IV (2014) Małgorzata Kowalcze Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland A ‘KNIGHT OF FAITH’ LOOKING INTO THE FACE OF THE OTHER: EXISTENTIAL TRANSFORMATION OF DEAN JOCELIN FROM WILLIAM GOLDING’S THE SPIRE Abstract The Spire presents to the reader a surprisingly true to life story ‘knight’ through William ‘being’Golding in his novel ‘self’ by means of intricate relationships with other people of a man who undergoes an existential transformation from Kierkegaard’s whoSartre’s follows the arriving path of at an Levinas’s existentialist, undergoing the process of a profound alteration of and a process of painful himself-discovery. Jocelin, the main character of the novel, is a man personality. He begins as a Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of faith,’ perceiving himself as a God’s Tool, and ends up as a Sartre’s ‘existence’ aware of his abandonment and consequent responsibility. In different moments of his makeover Jocelin embodies the contrasting concepts within existential philosophy, the theistic and atheistic ones, which are woven around the themes of self-examination, free will versus determinism, humility and pride, as well as the enigmatic Keystruggle words: of good existentialism, and evil within the Other, a human transformation being. William Golding is the author whose gloomy account of human nature, permeating spirit of doom and what seems to be a programmed lack of happy endings in his novels gained him the name of a downright pessimist, and it seemsWilliam that the Golding. writer, Thewho Man in his Who private Wrote journal Lord callsof the himself Flies, claims ‘a monster,’ that such would a self-assessmentnot deny that. John might Carey, be the author of his most recent biography edited in 2009, entitled a result of the war atrocities he took part in or his destructive behavior towards his son David, but it might also be a result of the fact that Golding was a profoundly monstrous,introspective in andhis imagination.”‘self-blaming’1 man who, as he kept repeating, “saw the seeds of all evilThe in confidencehis own heart, with and which who Williamfound monstrous Golding struggledthings, or thingsfor literary he accounted success obscures the uneasiness which accompanied him while waiting for critics’ reviewsJ. Carey,after publishingWilliam Golding. his novels. The Man Whether Who Wrote it was Lord the of traumathe Flies he experienced 1 (London, 2009), Chapter 19. [30] Małgorzata Kowalcze with Lord of the Flies being rejected by numerous publishers before finally Charles Monteith, a former lawyer who had been employed in Faber and Faber as an editor The Spire, was written at the time when for just a month, noticed the potential of a provincial schoolmaster, is extremely difficultindependent, to know could for abandon sure. His his fifth position novel, of a teacher and focus on writing. That Golding, having gained readers’ recognition as a writer and becoming financially critical reception of his works, and although the first draft of The Spire was written amount of free time made him even more self-examining and apprehensive about the 2 in just a fortnight, the following fine-tuning of the novel was lengthy and laborious so that it had a much more “tormented birth than any of his previous novels.” claimMark Kinkead-Weekesthat The Spire and Ian Gregor, the critics whose study of Golding’s novels3 is still regarded as the most comprehensive introduction to the author’s fiction, was a novel which revealed Golding’s unparalleled artistry. Golding did not provide any help for his interpreters, as his comments on his work are rather reticent and superficial. What the author used to say in the interviews is referred to by Carey as ‘a gramophone record put on for an interviewer’ the aim of which was to ‘keep the world at bay.’ This does not, however, discourage critics from4 facing Golding’s monsters as his novels ‘constitute a major achievement in contemporary English literature and deserve to be better known than they yet sameare.’ Hopefully,time feared a itcloser more look than at anything one of his else. novels presented in the following paper will bring the reader closer to the writer who craved human contact, but at the can recognizeA haggard him beggar to be is the wandering former dean along of the a local streets Cathedral of a quaint Church medieval of Our Lady,town trying to discover the whereabouts of a man named Roger Mason. Hardly anyone Jocelin,which recently the clergyman has been could in the not centre expect of kindnessthe whole and community’s respect on attention the part dueof his to congregationa massive spire for being it was built the Dean on the who top. initiated And if anybodythe building was of able the toimmense identify edifice Dean despite the lack of proper foundations. Now the shaky construction poses a threat to the whole cathedral. What is more, there are rumors of some pagan rituals being performed by the workers hired to build the spire; the cathedral’s sacristan, who child.had been Although constantly the Dean persecuted has not by left the the workers premises for of his the impotence, cathedral finally for months, vanished his into the blue and his wife died at childbirth while giving birth to the master builder’s him from his function. The old man, whose tuberculosis-affected spine makes him bentmadness double, has beenis now reported literally to thrown the church into authorities the gutter whoby the have angry decided mob. to Begging remove other people’s mercy, Jocelin is in stark contrast to the proud clergyman who used to perceive others from the height of his elevated position. Ibid. 2 P. Redpath, William Golding. A Structural Reading of His Fiction 3 H. Babb, The Novels of William Golding 4 (London, 1986), p. 205. (Columbus, 1970), p. 2. A 'KNIGHT OF FAITH' LOOKING INTO THE FACE OF THE OTHER: EXISTENTIAL... [31] The Spire, is a cathedral dean who The main hero of William Golding’s novel, believes that God has assigned him a mission to build a spire at the top of the cathedral’s roof. The spire would supplement the temple so that it would represent ‘the pattern of worship’ recognizable to all believers:5 “The building is a diagram of prayer; and our spire will be a diagram of the highest prayer of all. God revealed it toprofoundly me in a vision, transforms his unprofitable the Dean servant.”in three aspects:The risky his venture, self-perception, however, nothis relationshiponly changes with the appearancepeople and hisof the notion cathedral of God. as such, but even more importantly, philosophical theories, but existential philosophy deals with the issue in These three spheres of man’s life are subjects of multiple, often contrasting, a particularly personal way by putting an individual in the centre of their discourse. atheisticDuring the theory process of Jeanof his Paul makeover, Sartre. Jocelin The clergyman embodies the two reader extreme is introduced concepts within to on the existential philosophy, namely the theistic model of Søren Kierkegaard and the “knight of faith,”6 the initial pages of the novel appears to be a perfect exemplification of Kierkegaard’s a relentless servant of God, determined to fulfill his master’s will. awareAs the ofplot his progresses, weakness and however, ontological the main abandonment, character asalters well so as dramatically responsibility that he towards the end of the book Jocelin resembles more Jean Paul Sartre’s ‘existence,’ cannot disavow. For Kierkegaard each human being is ontologically dependent theon andexistence directed of atowards higher power:God, thus “[…] he anyone must bewho perceived stands alone only infor the any context length of God’s existence. Similarly, every individual7 has a natural inclination to recognize astime an soon unconditioned discovers that existence. there is The a God.” two concepts,Sartre presents extreme the as opposite they are, view; focus since on there is no God, a human being is alone in the universe and must be thus regarded the struggle between free will and psychological determinism. These concepts at thecertain same common time constitute themes concerning major themes human of The life, Spire such. as self-discovery of man and A Kierkegaardian Man of Faith The existential approach of Søren Kierkegaard emerged as a reaction to the holistic philosophy of Georg Hegel’s. The Danish thinker wanted to underline the meaning of an individual man, who in the universal system of Hegel’s occupied a minor position of a mere element of the pervasive Zeitgeist, ‘The Spirit of the Times.’ What Kierkegaard wants to stress is that an abstract system encompassing Kierkegaardthe totality of wanted reality to:is not “find applicable a truth which to dealing is true with for the me dilemma that individuals encounter throughout their existence and leaves them with no moral guidance. – the idea for which I can W. Golding, The Spire 5 S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London, 1980), p. 121. 6 Ch. Moore, Provocations. Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard 7 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 63–70. (Farmington, 2007), p. 5. [32] Małgorzata Kowalcze what I am to do, not action.live and The die thing […] What is to understand I really lack myself, is to be to clear see what in my God mind really wishes me to do.”8 what I am to know, except in so far as a certain understanding must precede every Kierkegaard’s philosophy would, therefore, focus on specific actions undertaken by a human being, which aim at discovering his own meaning. The word ‘discover’ is not accidental here because the philosopher’s Christian theism entails the presumption that man, as God’s creature, has a pre-established sense and purpose.
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