William Golding: A Structural Reading of His Fiction

(review)

Harold H. Watts

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 33, Number 4, Winter 1987, pp. 735-736
(Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.0.1319

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/244409

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
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Philip Redpath. William Golding: A Structural Reading of His Fiction. Critical Studies
Series. New York: Barnes, 1986. $28.50.

Philip Redpath, in his book on William Golding, adds to many other readings
of the novelist a study that is quite individual. It is a reading that supplements
and corrects other readings. Or so Mr. Redpath judges, and with some justice.
Redpath calls his reading of Golding's sizable body of work structural, and
in several senses it is. For Redpath, by explicit assertion, separates himself from
critics who move from a novelist's work to perceptions of excellence that all can—or
should—subscribe to; or, beyond perceptions of aesthetic excellence that will ap-
pear the same to all readers, to still more intimate insights: insights into the author's
conscious intent, insights that all "good" readers should agree on.
These are to Redpath—at the outset at least—forbidden terrains. What ter-
rain, then, is indeed open to a careful student of a novelist? This, first of all:
the way in which novels are put together. There are overt acts of construction
that no one can—or at least should—miss. Thus in this study of Golding there
is a goodly number of pages that allow all readers to see just how certain of the
novels are assembled, how they are forced into some kind of unity. And such
arrangements are patent facts that all readers can confirm.
But Redpath turns to another feature of the work of "all readers" that does
not lead to any easy and general agreement. To Redpath, the hard fact about
any novel is not that it is written; the evidence that truly exists, as a basis for
comment and analysis, is that a novel is being read. Thus, criticism—structural
and otherwise—can only be a report of this or that person's reading. None of
these reports gives us easy access to the secret purpose of Mr. Golding over a
long career. Each critical report—and much (but not all) of Redpath's work con-
forms to this—is one person's valuable account of the play of ideas and the literary
strategies that embody them.
At this point we can be reminded of the adventures of a soul among master-
pieces. The reader of Redpath's study, however, will at many points discover
that William Golding is a book that eventually goes beyond the stated limits of
the essay. In short, what one "soul" named Redpath perceives is offered to the
"souls" who read the book as findings that all sensible readers ought to arrive
at. For in novel after novel, analysis (that of Redpath and of other adroit readers,
for that matter) will discover oppositions expressed in the structure of the books.
The oppositions are always expressed obscurely, and the oppositions vary from
novel to novel. Good and evil often alternate but never fully displace each other.
Or the lived experienced is opposed to the written, created experience. Or the
life that is conforming to convention alternates with the life that steps beyond
conventional limits.

RECENT BOOKS—BRITISH AND IRISH 735

 All these perceptions perhaps concern matters that remain within the limits
of particular novels. But toward the end of his study—a study that is always ad-
mirable and moving—Redpath steps, as it were, beyond the confines of particular
novels and sums up the point of all the obscure contrasts that are Golding's
specialty, as in a sentence such as this: "although the novels do not openly ex-
plain events in religious terms, they demand from the reader a religious inter-
pretation."
If, as Redpath argues, this is so, it would appear that his critical "soul"
and the "souls" of other readers move beyond perceptions that are unique to
a consensus that will (or should) unite all readers of Golding. If this judgment
is just, individual "readings" have at last merged, and we are left—and rather
tellingly—with a report centered not on what readers can perceive severally but
on what the novelist William Golding truly is.

HAROLD H. WATTS

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J. M. Richardson, ed. OrweU χ 8. Kingston: Frye, 1986. 126 pp. $12.95.

Mark Connelly. 77k Diminished Self: OrweU and the Loss of Freedom. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne UP, 1987. 166 pp. $22.00.

It is a commonplace of criticism that George Orwell is a kind of literary lodestone

that attracts readers and writers from all points of the compass. He draws conser-
vatives and liberals, Freudians and existentialists. He fetches professors of English,
history, political science, and sociology. Orwell χ 8, a collection of papers read
at Lakehead University in 1984, is just one of numerous examples. J. M. Richard-
son, the editor of the volume, notes that in that year Bernard Crick, Orwell's
official biographer, was "scheduled to speak at approximately twenty such events
in North America alone." The result of all this activity in and out of the univer-
sities is that it has become extremely difficult to say anything quite new about
Orwell, but some of the eight contributors to Orwell χ 8 manage to do so.
Patricia Vervoor's article, " 'Benefit of Clergy': Opposition to Salvador DaIi,"
is particularly fresh. In his long review of Dali's first autobiography, Orwell
discusses both the man and his paintings and drawings, some of which appear
as iUustrations to the book. Vervoor demonstrates that Orwell confused the historical
sequence of earlier artists, got some of the influences on DaIi wrong, knew very
little about surrealism, and could not tell good composition from bad. She
recognizes, however, that Orwell raised some larger questions: how did DaIi find

736 MODERN FICTION STUDIES