180
STEVEN MARCUS
compression, and an almost exclusive direction of skill toward the
dramatic rendering of theme through form. In the writing of William
Golding, the most interesting imaginative novelist to have appeared
in England during the last decade and a half, this development is
strikingly represented.
It
hardly seems an accident that Golding began his career .as
a poet; his first published work was a volume of verse. His novels
all develop what for want of a better description we may call the
structure of fantasy. They are suspended with considerable uncertain–
ty in space and time; they are all in one way or another parables
or fables; and they have become progressively internal and lyrical.
Golding'S prose is strenuous, compact, angular, extremely oblique
and elliptical. It is not to be mistaken for the sort of thing we are
familiar with in Virginia Woolf, however, or in Henry Green. These
two writers are instances of highly "poeticised" novelistic sensibili–
ties. The distinctive character of their work is that of a single, acutely
responsive sensibility operating as a medium in which .accidentally
related events are registered. In this regard, however, Henry Green's
writing apparently suffers from a divided intention; it is often doubtful
whether he is trying to achieve the purely fortuitous or the merely
inchoate. Some of his novels have either no shape or a purely ac–
cidental one; they are typically inconsequent, and sometimes have
no discernible beginning, middle, or end. When Green does. manage
to impose a form on his material, as in]v'
othing,
the upshot is likely
to be a joke or burlesque of form itself, or as in
Back,
either arbitrary
or destructive of what preceded it. But despite his efforts to achieve
brilliance and vividness of registration, to liberate the novel from the
drudgery of its own conventions, Green's writing still belongs to the
older tradition; it represents the traditional novelistic sensibility in
an extreme phase of disintegration.
Golding'S novels share few of these qualities. They are rigorously
organized and heavily controlled: they vex the reader with little that
is gratuitous. Whatever freedom or spontaneity may be discovered
in them resembles the freedom we find in a dramatic poem-it is
the result of a deftly executed conception, refers dialectically to that
conception, and
if
it is successful ultimately subserves and enriches
it. In Golding's novels there is scarcely a local touch or detail of
prose which does not perform humble service toward this proud
