"Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket"
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Golding’s line is a small act of rebellion against his own medium: the novelist admitting that words, for all their seductions, are also restraints. The image does the heavy lifting. A straight-jacket isn’t just tight; it’s imposed, institutional, a device for making unruly bodies legible to authority. By pairing language with that apparatus, Golding hints that speech doesn’t merely fail to capture experience - it disciplines it. We don’t translate life into words so much as compress it until it behaves.
The subtext is classic Golding: suspicion toward the story we tell ourselves about rational control. Language arrives with categories, grammar, causal order. Experience arrives messy, simultaneous, half-conscious. When we narrate, we don’t just describe; we select, rank, and sanitize, turning sensation into something that can be shared, judged, and remembered. The cost is that the unclassifiable parts - dread, appetite, moral panic, the animal heat under civility - get shoved into the margins or mislabeled entirely.
Context matters. Golding wrote in the shadow of World War II, after seeing how civilized nations used bureaucratic, euphemistic language to launder brutality. In that world, “language” isn’t innocent craft; it’s propaganda’s raw material, the tool that makes violence sound procedural. As a novelist, he also knew the paradox: the straight-jacket is still necessary. Without it, experience stays private and inarticulate. With it, we gain meaning - and lose truth in the same motion.
The subtext is classic Golding: suspicion toward the story we tell ourselves about rational control. Language arrives with categories, grammar, causal order. Experience arrives messy, simultaneous, half-conscious. When we narrate, we don’t just describe; we select, rank, and sanitize, turning sensation into something that can be shared, judged, and remembered. The cost is that the unclassifiable parts - dread, appetite, moral panic, the animal heat under civility - get shoved into the margins or mislabeled entirely.
Context matters. Golding wrote in the shadow of World War II, after seeing how civilized nations used bureaucratic, euphemistic language to launder brutality. In that world, “language” isn’t innocent craft; it’s propaganda’s raw material, the tool that makes violence sound procedural. As a novelist, he also knew the paradox: the straight-jacket is still necessary. Without it, experience stays private and inarticulate. With it, we gain meaning - and lose truth in the same motion.
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| Topic | Deep |
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