by Colin Wilson
Nietszche and Kierkegaard evolved a philosophy that started from the Outsider; nowadays, we use Kierkegaard’s phrase in speaking of it, and call it Existentialism. When, in the nineteen-twenties, Kierkegaard was re-published in German, he was taken up by the professors, who discarded his religious conclusions, and used his methods of analysis to construct the so-called Existenzphilosophie. In doing so, they removed the emphasis from the Outsider and threw it back again on to Hegelian metaphysics. Later, in France, Existentialism was popularized by the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who once more restored emphasis to the Outsider, and finally arrived at their own conclusions upon the question of how to live a philosophy: Sartre in his ‘doctrine of commitment’ (which we shall touch upon later) and Camus with the belief: Remain an Outsider. We must examine each of these in turn.
***
In his early novel, La Nausee, Sartre skilfully synthesizes all the points we have already considered in connexion with Wells and Barbusse: the unreality, the rejection of people and civilized standards, and, finally, the ‘cinema sheet’ of naked existence, with ‘no way out or round or through’.
La Nausee purports to be the journal of an historian named Roquentin: not a full-fledged scientific historian like Wells, but a literary historian who is engaged in unearthing the life of a shifty diplomat-politician named Rollebon. Roquentin lives alone in a Hotel in Le Havre. His life would be a quiet record of research, conversations in the library, sexual intercourse with the cafe patronne: ‘I live alone, entirely alone; I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing...’
But a series of revelations disturb him. He stands on the beach and picks up a flat stone to skim on the sea, and suddenly ... ‘I saw something which disgusted me; I no longer know whether it was the stone or the sea.’ He drops the stone and walks off.13
Roquentin’s journal is an attempt to objectify what is happening to him. He searches his memory, examines his past. There was something that happened in Indo-China; a colleague had asked him to join an archaeological mission to Bengal; he was about to accept—
... when suddenly I woke up from a six-year slumber.... I couldn’t understand why I was in Indo-China. What was I doing there? Why was I talking to these people? Why was I dressed so oddly?... Before me, posed with a sort of indolence, was a voluminous, insipid idea. I di4 not see clearly what it was, but it sickened me so much I couldn’t look at it.14
Certainly something is happening. There is his ordinary life, with its assumptions of meaning, purpose, usefulness. And there are these revelations, or, rather, these attacks of nausea, that knock the bottom out of his ordinary life. The reason is not far to seek. He is too acute and honest an observer. Like Wells, he asks of everything: to what will this lead? He never ceases to notice things. Of the café patron, he comments: ‘When his place empties, his head empties too.’ The lives of these people are contingent on events. If things stopped happening to them, they would stop being. Worse still are the salauds whose pictures he can look at in the town’s art gallery, these eminent public men, so sure of themselves, so sure that life is theirs and their existence is necessary to it. And Roquentin’s criticism is turning back on himself; he too has accepted meanings where he now recognizes there were none. He too is dependent on events.
In a crowded cafe, he is afraid to look at a glass of beer. ‘But I can’t explain what I see. To anyone. There: I am quietly slipping into the water’s depths, towards fear.’15
A few days later, again, he describes in detail the circumstances of an attack of the nausea. This time it is the braces of the cafe patron that become the focus of the sickness. Now we observe that the nausea seems to emphasize the sordidness of Roquentin’s surroundings. (Sartre has gone further than any previous writer in emphasizing ‘darkness and dirt’; neither Joyce nor Dostoevsky give the same sensation of the mind being trapped in physical filth.) Roquentin is overwhelmed by it, a spiritual counterpart of violent physical retching.
...the nausea is not inside me; I feel it out there, in the wall, in the suspenders; everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the cafe; I am the one who is within it.16
Like Wells, Roquentin insists on the objective nature of the revelation.
Somebody puts on a record; it is the voice of a Negro woman singing ‘Some of These Days’. The nausea disappears as he listens:
When the voice was heard in the silence I felt my body harden and the nausea vanish; suddenly it was almost unbearable to become so hard, so brilliantI am in the music. Globes of fire turn in the mirrors, encircled by rings of smoke.17
There is no need to analyse this experience; it is the old, familiar aesthetic experience; art giving order and logic to chaos.
I am touched; I feel my body at rest like a precision machine. I have had real adventures. I can recapture no detail, but I perceive the rigorous succession of events. I have crossed seas, left cities behind me, followed the course of rivers or plunged into forests, always making my way towards other cities. I have had women; I have fought with men, and never was I able to turn back any more than a record can be reversed.
Works of art cannot affect him. Art is thought, and thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show. Only something as instinctively rhythmic as the blues can give him a sense of order that doesn’t seem false. But even that may be only a temporary refuge; deeper nervous exhaustion would cause the collapse of the sense of order, even in ‘Some of These Days’.
In the Journal, we watch the breaking-down of all Roquen-tin’s values. Exhaustion limits him more and more to the present, the here-now. The work of memory, which gives events sequence and coherence, is failing, leaving him more and more dependent for meaning on what he can see and touch. It is Hume’s scepticism becoming instinctive, all-destroying. All he can see and touch is unrecognizable, unaided by memory; like a photograph of a familiar object taken from an unfamiliar angle. He looks at a seat, and fails to recognize it: ‘I murmur: It’s a seat, but the word stays on my lips. It refuses to go and put itself on the thing.... Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, stubborn, huge, and it seems ridiculous to call them seats, or to say anything at all about them. I am in the midst of things—nameless things.’18
In the park, the full nature of the revelation comes to him as he stares at the roots of a chestnut tree:
I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished, and with them, the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference men have traced on their surface. I was sitting... before this knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. ... It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of existence. I was like the others.... I said with them: The ocean is green, that white speck up there is a seagull, but I didn’t feel that it existed.... And then suddenly existence had unveiled itself. It had lost the look of an abstract category; it was the very paste of things; this root was kneaded into existence.... These objects, they inconvenienced me; I would have liked them to exist less imposingly, more dryly, in a more abstract way...19
He has reached the rock bottom of self-contempt; even things negate him. We are all familiar enough with his experience in the face of other human beings; a personality or a conviction can impose itself in spite of resistance; even the city itself, the confusion of traffic and human beings in Regent Street, can overwhelm a weak personality and make it feel insignificant. Roquentin feels insignificant before things. Without the meaning his Will would normally impose on it, his existence is absurd. Causality—Hume’s bugbear—has collapsed; consequently there are no adventures. The biography of Rollebon would have been another venture of ‘bad faith’, for it would have imposed a necessity on Rollebon’s life that was not really there; the events didn’t really cohere and follow one another like a story; only blindness to the fact of raw, naked existence could ever produce the illusion that they did.
What then? Is there no causality, no possible meaning? Sartre summarizes life: ‘L’homme est un passion inutile.’ There is no choice, in Roquentin’s reckoning; there is only being useless and knowing it and being useless and not knowing it.
Yet Roquentin had had his glimpse of meaning and order; in ‘Some of These Days’. There was meaning, causation, one note following inevitably on another. Roquentin wonders: why shouldn’t he create something like that; something rhythmic, purposive—a novel, perhaps, that men could read later and feel: There was an attempt to bring order into chaos? He will leave Havre and the life of Rollebon; there must be another way of living that is not futile. The Journal comes to an end on this note.
***
Roquentin lives like Barbusse’s hero; his room is almost the limit of his consciousness. But he has gone further and deeper than the hole-in-the-wall man. His attitude has reached the dead-end of Wells; ‘Man is a useless passion’: that could be taken as a summary of Mind at the End of Its Tether. Complete denial, as in Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’: We are the hollow men, we are the salauds. Roquentin is in the position of the hero of The Country of the Blind. He alone is aware of the truth, and if all men were aware of it, there would be an end of life. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But his kingship is kingship over nothing. It brings no powers and privileges, only loss of faith and exhaustion of the power to act. Its world is a world without values.
This is the position that Barbusse’s Outsider has brought us to. It was already explicit in that desire that stirred as he saw the swaying dresses of the women; for what he wanted was not sexual intercourse, but some indefinable freedom, of which the women, with their veiled and hidden nakedness, are a symbol. Sexual desire was there, but not alone; aggravated, blown-up like a balloon, by a resentment that stirred in revolt against the bewilderment of hurrying Paris with its well-dressed women. ‘Yet in spite of this I desire some compensation.5 In spite of the civilization that has impressed his insignificance on him until he is certain that ‘he has nothing and he deserves nothing’, in spite of this he feels a right to ... to what? Freedom? It is a misused word. We examine L’Enfer in vain for a definition of it. Sartre and Wells have decided that man is never free; he is simply too stupid to recognize this. Then to what precisely is it that the Outsider has an inalienable right?
The question must take us into a new field: of Outsiders who have had some insight into the nature of freedom.
CHAPTER TWO
WORLD WITHOUT VALUES
The outsider tends to express himself in Existentialist terms. He is not very concerned with the distinction between body and spirit, or man and nature; these ideas produce theological thinking and philosophy; he rejects both. For him, the only important distinction is between being and nothingness. Barbusse’s hero: ‘Death, that is the most important of all ideas/
Barbusse and Wells represent two different approaches to the problem. Barbusse’s approach can be called the ‘empirical’. His hero is not a thinker; he accepts living; it is its values he cannot accept. Wells goes much further in rejection; his conclusions have been pushed to nihilism; his approach is, like Hume’s, rationalist.
In Roquentin’s case, the conclusions are reached through an interaction of reason and experience. Again, it is the rational element that pushes him into nihilism; his only ‘glimmer of salvation’ comes from a level of experience untouched by discursive thought, from a Negro woman singing ‘Some of These Days’. Reason leads into an impasse. If a solution exists, it must be sought, not in reasoning, but in examination of experience. We must keep in mind the logical possibility that a solution may not exist. In any case, it is the empirical approach that must be examined now.
Albert Camus’s Outsider is even more of an empiricist than Barbusse’s. He thinks even less; he has ‘no genius, no unusual feelings to bestow’; in fact, he has hardly any feelings at all.
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure.’1
This tone of indifference persists throughout the novel L’Etranger. Like L’Enfer and La Nausée, it observes the convention that the hero is keeping a diary. Meursault is an Algerian. The first page establishes his character. When he asks his employer for time off to attend his mother’s funeral, he says:
‘Sorry, sir, but it isn’t my fault, you know.’ Afterwards it struck me that I needn’t have said that...it was up to him to express his sympathy and so forth.2
If Meursault had ‘felt’ his mother’s death he wouldn’t have apologized. As the reader soon discovers, he feels very little.
This is not to say that he is disillusioned or world-weary. His type of lightheadedness bears more relation to P. G. Wodehouse’s ‘Young men in spats’. He enjoys eating and drinking, sunbathing, going to the cinema. He lives in the present. He tells of his mother’s funeral, objectively but unfeelingly; it exhausted him because he had to sit up all night, but did not otherwise affect him. The next day he goes swimming and begins an affair with a girl. In half a page he outlines the development of the relation; they go to see a comic film, then return to his room and sleep together. In the morning, after she has gone: ‘I slept till ten. Then I stayed in bed until noon, smoking cigarettes.’3
This is the atmosphere of Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’:
I read much of the night and go south in the winter.
What surprises us, by comparison, is the lack of moral disapproval in Camus’s book; there is no suggestion that the author intends us to condemn Meursault as a futile idler.
The unusual quality about Meursault is his honesty. The girl asks him to marry her and he promptly agrees:
Then she asked me again if I loved her; I replied, much as before, that her question meant nothing or next to nothing, but I supposed I didn’t.4
This honesty springs out of indifference to issues of feeling; he does not attach importance to anything; why should he lie?
Meursault becomes friendly with a pimp, anc1 finds himself involved in a feud between the pimp and an Arab. A day spent lounging on the beach culminates in the shooting of the Arab by Meursault. It was self-defence, but the Arab was unarmed, and there were no witnesses. Meursault finds himself on trial for murder.
And it is now that his strange qualities as an Outsider are against him. A man who has committed a murder should at least show some interest in what he has done; his best chance of acquittal lies in his weeping, protesting, showing himself overwhelmed by this terrible accident. But from the beginning, Meursault’s indifference disconcerts his questioners. They can only put it down to callousness. And then there was the affair of the funeral. Why was he so unaffected by his mother’s death? Didn’t he love her? Again his honesty is against him:
I could say quite truthfully that I’d been fond of my mother, but that didn’t mean much.
The magistrate is a humane and religious man who would be only too happy to find grounds for acquitting Meursault, for ‘There is more joy over one sinner that repenteth....’ With tears in his eyes, he shows Meursault a crucifix and exhorts him to repent. But Meursault looks on with mild surprise. All this is meaningless. It is so completely beside the point. Repent of what?
Finally Meursault is tried. Now Camus no longer bothers to disguise the irony. Meursault, as innocent as Mr. Pickwick, hears the prosecutor summing up in a deeply moved voice:
‘Gentlemen of the jury, I would have you note that, on the day after his mother’s funeral, that man was visiting a swimming pool, starting a liaison with a girl and going to see a comic film. That is all I wish to say.’5
That is all he needs to say, for Meursault is condemned to death.
In his cell, the chaplain visits him, with more exhortations to repent. Suddenly, Meursault can stand the stupidity no longer; he seizes the priest by the collar and pours out his irritation: