by Colin Wilson
At this point, the problem links up with the main subject of this essay, the hero. The aim of the new existentialism is identical with that of the hero and the inner-directed man: to be reconnected with the vital impulses and the sense of purpose. The old hero was simply the man who had defeated most enemies, rescued most damsels, overcome the most obstacles in his search for the Grail. But Faust had stumbled on the solution for the new hero, when the Easter bells revealed to him that his salvation lay in a deepening of internal experience. Unfortunately, he failed to grasp the meaning of the insight. It remains a completely unexplored direction in literature (if Proust’s experiment is excepted).
It will be pointed out that a book about what goes on inside a man’s mind might be rather a bore. In fact, this constitutes one of the great challenges of a new existentialism. Mental processes are usually stimulated and paralleled by physical experiences; the writer who finally solves the problem will be able to add another chapter to James’ classic treatise on the art of the novel.
The basis of a new existentialism must be an understanding of the nature of action. A man might go through a whole series of actions with a sense of total unreality; in that case, he cannot be said to have acted. In the same way, a man who has been to bed with a hundred girls would not necessarily have known deeper sexual experience than an imaginative boy who is having his first love affair.
This is only to say that the fundamental experience of existentialism is the sense of being reconnected to reality. Lawrence recognized the power of the sexual act to bring this about; he was mistaken in supposing that it was the only way. A very slight acquaintance with Blake or Traherne, or even Proust, is enough to confirm this point.3
The writers of England and America have a slight advantage over their continental colleagues in possessing a native tradition of positive existentialism. It is a tradition of affirmative and irrational mysticism that can be found in Blake, Whitman, Yeats, Joyce, and Shaw, as well as in a host of lesser figures. In twentieth-century American literature, it can be found in Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Jack Kerouac; in England in Chesterton, Belloc, and Rupert Brooke. Kerouac’s On the Road furnishes an interesting example; it is full of Whitmanesque dithyrambs on the size and variety of America, and outbursts of sheer joy at being alive. In this, Kerouac may have been influenced by Wolfe’s Of Time and the River and Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald was certainly influenced by the mystical optimism of Chesterton and Belloc. It is a mood that seems foreign to French and German writers (Nietzsche being the sole exception I can bring to mind).
It might be objected that many of the writers I cite have (or had) the advantage of youth; the later work of Wolfe and Fitzgerald has pessimistic overtones. But this is no final argument against irrational mysticism. Whitman, Blake, and Chesterton maintained their attitude into old age. Yeats’ Last Poems provide many examples; the poems “Lapis Lazuli” and “Under Ben Bulben,” and the lines from “The Gyres”:
Out of cavern comes a voice,
And all it knows is that one word “Rejoice!”
The Absurd Man
Can this mysticism be placed upon a firm basis of existential philosophy? The task would require a critique of negative existentialism that is beyond the scope of this essay. But the direction of such a critique might be indicated briefly.
The existentialism of Sartre and Camus fails to take full account of the dualism of man. Their heroes are brought to earth by reality. The role of reality is rather like that of a kick in the stomach. Reality presses on them like an enemy; concepts are as useless as a broadsword in close combat. It is too close; it presses and stifles. The hero has to learn that he has no appeal. He must come to terms with this enemy within his gates. It is no use looking to religion or human companionship; only a certain stoicism and determination can be of any use.
But in fact, man never has to face anything as finally as that. No matter what realities he has to face, a part of him remains detached. Upon this rests our optimism and strength. If there is any reality that must be faced without alternative, then man is damned. His hope lies in his ultimate and indestructible freedom, a freedom that implies that he always has the choice of realities because he is the final reality.
This is the basis of all true mysticism. Because it denies our realities, it is absurd. But its absurdity is not Camus’s “malicious absurdity”; Chesterton came closer to it when he spoke of “absurd good news.”
For this reason, the hero can be defined as the absurd man. In effect, he is the man who can perform a conjuring trick by which he empties his hands and still possesses everything. If he does not believe in himself sufficiently to direct his desire towards the unattainable, he is no hero. When Auden rephrased Yeats’ lines:
Across the tohu bohu comes a voice
Uttering an absurd command: “Rejoice!”
he had caught the essence of mystical optimism.
Captain Ahab is the great absurd hero; he has no rivals. (It is unfortunate that Chesterton, who understood the spirit of absurdity so well, never embodied it in any single major work.)
In modern English writing, I know of only one attempt to convey this absurd affirmation: Joyce Cary’s novel, The Horse’s Mouth. It deals with a sixty-seven-year-old painter who lives in a broken-down shack at the side of the river in East London. Although he has every reason to be tired of life—being penniless, toothless, and practically friendless—he seems to spend most of his time in visionary ecstasies. The following is a typical example:
“ ‘Up with you,’ said Coker, pushing me on the bus, and planting me between a navvy smelling like an old stable and an old woman with a sore nose and a basket full of pig’s food.
For every generated, body in its inward form
Is a garden of delight and a building of magnificence
Built by the sons of Los.”
This is the way in which Cary gains most of his effects; contrasting Jimson’s attitude with his thoughts (helped out with liberal quotations from Blake). And Jimson’s last speech in the novel summarizes its mood:
The angel, in fact, that presided at my birth—her name was old mother Groper or something like that—village midwife. Worn-out tart from the sailor’s knocking shop. Sad little creature born of joy and mirth. Though I must admit that poor Papa was so distracted with debt and misery that I daresay he didn’t know what he was doing. And poor Mamma, yes, she was glad to give him what she could, if it didn’t cost anything and didn’t wear out the family clothes… Go love without the help of anything on earth… A man is more independent that way, when he doesn’t expect anything for himself.
It will be seen that the actual content of the passage is Dostoevskian: human misery and injustice contrasted with a sense of visionary affirmation; many passages from Crime and Punishment, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov could be cited as parallels. But Cary’s tone is completely different; there is an attempt to see the greatness and misery simultaneously. This is not always successful; the mysticism often fails to blend with the Rabelaisian humor, and the result is an effect of strain and clumsiness. Moreover, Jimson fails to convince as a “man of genius”; some of his transitions from earthy humor to visionary ecstasy seem labored. The short, terse sentences are reminiscent of Joyce’s, but their flow is clogged by constant attempts to be funny. To be really convincing, Jimson should convey an impression of unreflective sincerity; instead, he often sounds like a third-rate comedian.
The Horse’s Mouth is not, finally, a successful novel, but it is the only attempt I know to present man’s “two-fold vision” in every aspect of his life. Jimson is an embodiment of Rilke’s idea of dennoch preisen, “praising in spite of.” Joyce had brushed past the theme in Ulysses, where Stephen walks along the beach and quotes fragments of Blake and Boehme (“Signature of all things I am here to read” and “Am I walking into Eternity along Sandymount Strand”). Certain phrases in the last section also suggest a mystical intent, while whole passages in Fin
negans Wake seem to express a pure affirmation. These occasional attempts of Joyce are more convincing than Cary’s; their emotional drive is unhampered by facetiousness. But it is difficult to see how the problem might be ultimately solved; how the two fold vision could be presented as seriously as in Joyce and as fully as in The Horse’s Mouth.
To some extent, the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and his disciples represents a protest against the unheroic premise. Robbe-Grillet is the avant-garde novelist who describes objects at such extraordinary length. In an article, “A Fresh Start for Fiction,” in the Evergreen Review (No. 3), he explains his dislike of the way in which writers treat objects as mere background material and imbue them with their emotions. A landscape becomes “soothing,” a broken tree “menacing,” and so on. Robbe-Grillet attempts to bring objects to the foreground in his work; the actions of his characters take place among an infinitely real and obtrusively solid set of objects. In practice, of course, his everlasting descriptions slow down his work and rob the action of its impact. But the theory behind it has something in common with the idea which Blake expressed in his lines:
How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, closed to your senses five?
Blake is protesting against the way in which we allow things to become familiar until we take them for granted. The world becomes narrow, boring, personal. But Blake insists on an infinite mystical reality concealed behind the facade of the everyday, and believes that it is the artist’s function to express it. Robbe-Grillet rejects the familiarity of objects but has no vision of their mystical strangeness. Like the Angries and the Beats, his revolt stops halfway.
A God or a Worm?
The central preoccupation of existentialism can be defined in one phrase: the stature of man. Is he a god or a worm?
Modern literature takes the latter view. This is not because all modern writers are unaware of the alternative. Even Sartre’s Roquentin has strange godlike moods. But the tendency of the age has been to emphasize the insignificance of man, his misery and weakness. It is all a question of emphasis. In most cases, there is no question of the writer’s conviction. He follows the trend of the age. William James observed that the religious man is not necessarily the man who has had most religious experience; he is the man who makes his religious experiences his center of gravity. The same is true of the writer. He can affirm or deny, according to an act of will. And he is determined by that act of will, not by “the facts.” There are no facts, only experiences of the facts that are determined by the individual’s attitude. Sartre’s insistence on man’s fundamental freedom is only a restatement of the religious concept of faith, and the “faith” is another name for belief in the absurd.
Neither is it true to assert that the ages of faith are past and that we live in an age of skepticism or defeat. The age is an abstraction; only the individuals who make it are real. Man’s experience of himself is at all times a simultaneous experience of greatness and misery, god and worm. He is free to give primacy to either of these experiences. Like a compass, he is pivoted between acceptance of defeat or belief in the absurd. Whichever he chooses can determine his existence and, ultimately, his age.
The acceptance of this view could affect the writer in certain obvious ways. The novelist or playwright who creates characters who are slaves of their environment does so because he accepts their predicament as his own. The conscious rejection of the unheroic hypothesis, the insignificance premise, might produce some interesting results. It might reveal that the influence of the writer on society is actually greater than the influence society is supposed to have on the writer. If this were established, it would reveal that all writers are committed whether they know it or not, committed up to the hilt in determining the attitudes of the society they live in.
In the second part of this essay, I criticized certain American writers for lacking an awareness of “man as an evolving spiritual being.” The phrase goes to the heart of the hero problem. It has been universally taken for granted that inner-direction is preferable to other-direction (except, perhaps, in the writings of certain Soviet pundits). But why should this be so? What is the ultimate justification of inner-direction? Unless a phrase like “man as an evolving spiritual being” can be given precise signification, inner-direction cannot be justified; it can only be taken for granted. A new existentialism can only be built upon the psychological concept of purpose, but “inner-direction” itself is not a purpose; it is only a means.
It is self-evident that any psychology I appeal to will be, of necessity, my own psychology; that is, my own observations of my psychological responses to such experiences as the nausea, vision, self-deception, and so forth. If I find the psychology of Sartre and Camus inadequate, it is not because I challenge their conclusions in the way that one scientist might challenge the conclusions of another, but because their final picture of the world does not correspond to my own intuitive perception of it. But the attempt to present this perception as existential thought demands that I express it in the same language, using the same concepts, as Sartre and Camus.
Like religion, existentialism begins from the concept of the fallen man—that is, of man’s feeling of the world’s hostile strangeness. This is Sartre’s “nausea.”
When I inquire into my own experience of nausea, I discover that it is closely connected with a great number of other terms: “unreality,” “boredom,” “futility,” “frustration.” In the journal I kept from the age of sixteen, these were the terms that expressed my sense of alienation.
It happens often that after a long period of boredom, the sense of purpose has been so far submerged that the physical actuality of the world becomes a denial of meaning. Yeats expressed the nausea in that poem called “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” where he spoke of his early romantic idealism as a ladder and ended:
Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
On my first reading of Ulysses, these lines of Yeats seemed to express its whole meaning.
In a sense, Sartre is right: the nausea is the ultimate reality. But men live on two planes at once; no ultimate can negate man’s freedom. Sartre and Camus accept this to some extent (as many “unheroic” writers do: William Faulkner, for instance). But they are mainly aware of the “rag and bone shop”; their vision of freedom is, in comparison, distant and nostalgic. This leads to a neo-stoic position. No doubt these writers would object (quite understandably) that this is the way they see the world. And yet once it is established that the question is one of the balance between freedom and necessity (nausea), it becomes possible to reply that many other writers, Blake among them, have possessed a vision of the world in which there is a far higher percentage of freedom.
In the final analysis, the nausea is the fallacy of insignificance. It is expressed in Eliot’s lines:
and leave me sitting, pen in hand…
Not knowing what to feel, or if I understand.
This feeling is existential; it refuses to put an interpretation on the world.
But the point that is being forgotten is that an ignorance of meaning is not the same thing as a belief in meaninglessness. It may be bad faith to transform the surface of reality with unverifiable beliefs of the Hegel type, but the attitude of perpetual and urgent questioning is in itself a transformation. A Roquentin suffering from nausea is also suffering from boredom and his own littleness. A Pascal torn between the greatness and the misery of man, a Van Gogh who never ceases to be simultaneously aware of ultimate agony and ultimate ecstasy, has already achieved a greater stature than Roquentin by an intensity of questioning. They may suffer from exhaustion, but never from the self-contempt that comes from inaction. The existentialism of Sartre or Camus lacks this final urgency of interrogation and consequently lacks a dimension of freedom. To speak of an impasse is to give the wrong impression, for it sugges
ts a logical cul-de-sac. It would be more accurate to speak of a rocket that stops for lack of fuel. The fuel for all existential thinkers must be that Dostoevskian passion for measuring the paradoxes of the human condition; symbolically, it sees man suspended in a void between heaven and hell, god and worm. Sartre’s preoccupation with politics, Camus’s desire to reduce the paradox to the language of the teddy boy rob their interrogation of motive power.
I stated at one stage in this essay that the hero’s problem is to turn inward, and then outward again. The above paragraphs provide a basis on which to expand this conception. The purpose of turning inward is to discover one’s freedom. All men are supplied by a power house of will and subconscious drive, but very few are aware of anything but the need to keep alive. It is hardly surprising that most men think of their motives in terms of everyday necessities. Considered from this point of view, all life is seen as an ascending hierarchy of mechanisms, beginning with the need to eat and breathe, and developing to levels of ambition, self-assertion (will to power), and so on. This is to hold the problem upside down, but it makes very little difference so long as men are committed to some objective purpose. It is also the unheroic hypothesis. But confronted by any man with an inborn sense of purpose, it appears as nausea, a denial of life and freedom. The highest compliment Shakespeare’s Antony could pay Brutus was: “This was a man.” Nietzsche or Sartre would retort that only insofar as he was unaware of his freedom was he a man; insofar as he was free, he was not anything but potentiality of will and purpose.