Virginia Tiger - William Golding: The Unmoved Target

Any critical book has perhaps more elaborate need than others to contain its authors statement of intellectual debts owed and personal ones unrepayable. As in the past, I record again my gratitude to the late Sir William Golding for his generous commitment to the ambience of literature that stimulated a private man to discuss his works in conversations and letters. Sir William, despite his passionate avowal of the hermetic nature of imaginative work, had suspended this principle to respond to my earlier study: WilliamGolding:TheDarkFieldsofDiscovery. Here it is important to reiterate that only the words attributed to him in quotations were his own. And for her irreplaceable help in responding to my dozens of queries it is a serious statement to thank J. D. Carver, herself engaged in governing and guarding her fathers published and unpublished work.

Libraries have become part of the bloodstream of literary critics; and for their unfailingly congenial transfusions I am grateful to the Reading Room of the British Library, its Newspaper Library at Colindale, the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Dana library at Rutgers University, Newark, with its especially generous and accomplished director, Lynn Mullins. I should here also thank my research assistant, Patricia Leyden, for her indefatigable search and discovery tracings of copyright holdings.

I wish also to thank the following for permission to quote from William Goldings works.

Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd: excerpts from TheDoubleTongue by William Golding 1995. Excerpts from FreeFall by William Golding 1959. Excerpts from TheHotGates by William Golding 1965. Excerpts from LordoftheFlies by William Golding 1954. Excerpts from ThePyramid by William Golding 1967. Excerpts from RitesofPassage by William Golding 1980. Excerpts from TheSpire by William Golding 1964. Excerpts from TotheEndsoftheEarth:ASeaTrilogy by William Golding 1995.

Reprinted by permission of Farrar Straus & Giroux Inc: excerpts from AMovingTarget by William Golding 1982 by William Golding. Excerpts from CloseQuarters by William Golding 1987 by William Golding. Excerpts from DarknessVisible by William Golding 1979 by William Golding. Excerpts from FireDownBelow by William Golding 1989 by William Golding. Excerpts from ThePaperMen by William Golding 1984 by William Golding.

Reprinted by permission of William Golding Ltd: excerpts from Scenes from a Life by William Golding, Aret (Spring/Summer 2000) 2000.

Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd: excerpts from WilliamGolding: TheManandHisBook by John Carey 1987. Excerpts from WilliamGolding,ACriticalStudy by Ian Gregor and Mark Kinkead-Weekes 1984.

Reprinted by permission of the Economist, London 1 April 1989: excerpt from Water and Fire Listener (April 1, 1987)

Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press: excerpt from StoryandDiscourse:NarrativeStructureinFictionandFilm by Seymour Chatman 1978 Cornell University.

Reprinted by permission of Heldref Publications: excerpt from A Password for the Darkness: Systems, Coincidences and Visions in William Goldings DarknessVisible by Gillian Stead Eilersen Critique:StudiesinModernFiction 28 (1987).

Reprinted by permission of Publishing News Ltd: excerpt from In Pursuit of a Subject by Sebastian Faulks BooksandBookmen (February 1984).

Reprinted by permission of the NewRepublic excerpt from Life Between Covers by David Lodge NewRepublic (August 16, 1984).

Reprinted with kind permission from Kluwer Academic Publishers: excerpt from On Readers and Listeners in Narrative by Gerald Prince Neophilgus (1971): 11722.

Reprinted by permission of NewStatesman: excerpt from Young Mariner by Michle Roberts NewStatesman (June 12, 1987) NewStatesman, 1999.

Reprinted by permission of Guardian Newspapers Limited: excerpt from All Hands on Deck by C. Galen Strawson, first published in the Observer (March 19, 1989).

Reprinted by permission of TwentiethCenturyLiterature:AScholarlyandCriticalJournal: excerpts from William Goldings Wooden World:

Religious Rites in RitesofPassage by Virginia Tiger TwentiethCenturyLiterature 28 (1982).

Reprinted with permission from the NewYorkReviewofBooks: excerpt from The Good Ship Britannia by Robert Towers NewYorkReviewofBooks (December 18, 1980) 1989 NYREV, Inc.

Personal debts may be the most preposterous to try to acknowledge in formal terms since they are themselves, by definition, so outside formality. Generous ingredients to this books life have been richly provided by my colleagues and friends: Steven Aronson, Patricia Bruckmann, Veronica Calderhead, Nelson Canton, Ana Daniel, Barbara Foley, Nan and Lewis Griefer, my editors Ken Hollings and Julia Silk, Elizabeth Hopkins, my publisher Catheryn Kilgarriff, Roger Kirkpatrick, Helen McNeil, Sebastian Tiger and the late Marion Boyars, publisher extraordinaire.

Virginia Tiger
New York City