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With the clarity we have come to expect of her, Dr. Segal has brilliantly summarized Golding's book The Spire, examined those elements which help demonstrate her psychoanalytic views, and considered the concepts of delusion versus artistic creativity.
In addition to what she has done in her paper, she has stimulated me to think and ponder beyond it; to wonder most seriously, Why does the artist continue to create? I will raise that question after I have commented on Dr. Segal's synopsis and interpretation, mainly limiting my discussion to points where I differ with her.
Near the end of her synopsis, after describing the death of Goody and the child, Dr. Segal says, “Roger, having nowhere else to go, now works gloomily on the spire….” I wondered whether this did not represent Jocelin's omnipotent control over Roger through projective identification. Subsequently, as I read the book, I increasingly wondered, Why did this master builder go on—and on, and on—against his professional judgment, though it became evident and inevitable that disaster would follow? The more I asked these questions, the more the explanations given failed to satisfy. I will come back to this point.
Later in her synopsis, Dr. Segal describes how Jocelin's conviction is shaken, and how, crippled by illness, “he crawls on all fours to Roger Mason to beg his forgiveness….”
I don't believe Jocelin goes to Roger Mason to genuinely beg his forgiveness; I think that Golding, with his novelist's intuition, intends a deeper meaning, in that the illness that breaks Jocelin's spine is “consumption,” and in that Golding has Jocelin say to Roger Mason, the master builder he has destroyed:
Once you said I was the devil himself. It isn't true, I am a fool. Also, I think—I'm a building with a vast cellarage where the rats live; there is some kind of blight on my hands. I injure everyone I touch, particularly those I love. Now I have come in pain and in shame, to ask you to forgive me.
A brilliant description of a