The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  It will be seen at once that there is not such a wide divergence between this view and Nietzsche’s teaching in Zarathustra. Zarathustra says ‘What is the greatest thing a man can experience? It is the hour of great [self-] contempt.’ The means are different for Nietzsche, but the end is the same.

  Tolstoy cannot take us a great deal further where the Outsider’s problems are concerned. He can take us a great distance, but if we stick to our original intention, not to plunge into any religious conclusion, then we had better stop short of Tolstoyan Christianity. Admittedly, it is a rational Christianity, that finds the meaning of Christ’s message in His life and teachings, not in His ‘atoning death’. But it also wanders to limits that can throw no light on the subject of this study, into a sort of Manicheism, for instance, where the spirit world is good and of God and the material world is evil and of the devil. In the Middle Ages, Manicheans carried their belief to its logical conclusion, and condemned even reproduction of the species; the sex-act itself was evil (as with Tolstoy); when someone was dying, they helped him on his way by starvation, assuring him that he was leaving all evil behind him with the flesh. Tolstoy pulls up short of this extremity, but his later beliefs as to what was sinful and what not suggest a religion of Talmudic law and dogma that can hardly be reached from our Existentialist premises of Chapter I.

  ***

  Who am I ?—This is the Outsider’s final problem. Well, who precisely is he? ‘Man is a bourgeois compromise’, a half-way house. But a half-way house towards what? The superman? We have seen that the superman is not a gigantic piece of Nietzschean crankery, but a valid poetic concept that develops from the same urges as the saint and spiritual reformer. But ‘the great man is a play-actor of his own ideals’, and you cannot act well unless you have a clear idea of the part you are going to play. So when Tolstoy’s madman wakes up in his carriage with a nightmare sense of horror, and the question What am I? then the road towards the superman, or the saint or the artist of genius, is temporarily blocked up. The question of Identity lies across it.

  An interesting point, this; for what is identity? These men travelling down to the City in the morning, reading their newspapers or staring at advertisements above the opposite seats, they have no doubt of who they are. Inscribe on the placard in place of the advertisement for corn-plasters, Eliot’s lines:

  We are the hollow men

  We are the stuffed men

  Leaning together

  and they would read it with the same mild interest with which they read the rhymed advertisement for razor blades, wondering what on earth the manufacturers will be up to next. Some of them even carry identity cards—force of habit—that would tell you precisely who they are and where they live.

  They have aims, these men, some of them very distant aims: a new car in three years, a house at Surbiton in five; but an aim is not an ideal. They are not play-actors. They change their shirts every day, but never their conception of themselves. Newman confessed that, when he looked at the world, he couldn’t see the slightest evidence for the existence of God.10 We, who may have known Vaslav Nijinsky’s instinctive certainty in some intuition—listening to music, perhaps— can understand that the idea of God is associated with the dynamic, ‘spirit breaking on the coasts of matter’, and understand what Newman meant, looking at this sea of static personality.

  These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.

  And, of course, the final revelation comes when you look at these City-men on the train; for you realize that for them, the business of escaping is complicated by the fact that they think they are the prison. An astounding situation! Imagine a large castle on an island, with almost inescapable dungeons. The jailor has installed every device to prevent the prisoners escaping, and he has taken one final precaution: that of hypnotizing the prisoners, and then suggesting to them that they and the prison are one. When one of the prisoners awakes to the fact that he would like to be free, and suggests this to his fellow prisoners, they look at him with surprise and say: Tree from what? We are the castle.’ What a situation!

  And this is just what happens to the Outsider. There is only one solution. He personally must examine the castle, draw his inferences as to its weaker points, and plan to escape alone. And this ‘knowing the castle’ is what we referred to at the beginning of Chapter IV: The Outsider’s first business is to know himself.’

  Naturally, the first question of the prisoner who begins to recover from the hypnosis is: Who am I?

  In Chapters II and III we spoke of Outsiders who awake to the fact that they were not what they had always supposed themselves to be when they felt something that opened up new possibilities: Krebs’s moments in the war when he did ‘the one thing, the only thing’, Strowde’s ‘glimpse of a power within him’, Steppe nwolf’s vision while listening to Mozart. And the recovery of that insight depends on finding a way back to the place where it was seen. And thought alone is no use, because it is thought that has been bound hand-and-foot by the hypnosis of the jailer: by habit, laziness, ways of ‘seeing oneself, etc. Action is necessary. A man can change his mental habits by changing his way of life; sometimes one act alone can completely change the whole mental outlook. A libertine can become a faithful married man by the mere repetition of the words ‘I will’, provided he is deeply enough impressed by their meaning. The main thing is that a man should feel an act of Will to be unreversible. These definitions, that have evolved logically from the last chapter, place us in a strange, half-lighted landscape, where the Outsider is half-hidden in an intangible prison of angles and shadows. His purpose is clear— to himself: to find his way back into a daylight where he can know a single undivided Will, Nietzsche’s ‘pure will without the troubles of intellect’. His first step is to repudiate the false daylight of the once-born bourgeois. His next problem is to find an act, a definite act that will give him power over his doubts and self-questionings.

  At this point, we can pass the threads of the argument into the hands of another Russian writer, and leave him to unravel them further for us.

  ***

  There were a number of events in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life that were ‘turning-points’, sudden, violent experiences that raked across his mental habits and placed him in the Outsider’s position of seeing himself as a stranger. This gives him a peculiar value in our study, as combining the characteristics of the Van Gogh Outsider and the Herman Hesse type: men who write about their problems, and the men who live them.

  Dostoevsky’s father was murdered by his peasants; they attacked him one day when he was drunk, and killed him by the strange method of crushing his testicles. They succeeded so well in hiding the fact that he had died by violence that they were never brought to justice. Dostoevsky learned of the death of his father while he was an engineering student in Petersburg.

  Fame broke on him suddenly when he was only twenty-four; his short novel Poor Folk was hailed by the foremost Russian critics as the most outstanding novel since Dead Souls. The unknown engineering student was acclaimed as a great writer. Three years later, the reversal came when he was arrested for being involved in a nihilistic plot. The story of the fake ‘execution5 in the Semyonovsky Square is well known (Dostoevsky makes Prince Myshkin retell it in The Idiot). By the time the ‘pardon’ arrived at the last moment, one of the condemned men had gone insane, and never recovered. Dostoevsky spent the next ten years in exile in Siberia.

  His later life is equally a story of sudden brilliant successes, and catastrophes that fell on him without warning. In his dealings with p
eople, especially women, he often showed revolting weakness and stupidity; in his recovery from disasters and in the writing of his books he revealed extraordinary spiritual strength. It is the same with his books. The Brothers Karamazov, The Devils, The Idiot arc surely the sloppiest great novels ever written; this must be qualified by adding that they are also among the greatest novels ever written.

  The Outsider theme is present in everything that Dostoevsky ever wrote; his five major novels represent an increasingly complex attack on it. Since the English edition of his works runs into fifteen volumes, it is obvious that our attention must be very strictly limited to his most important work. (The alternative would be to extend this section on Dostoevsky out of all proportion to the sections on other writers.) This means that certain works that would well repay our study must be ignored completely: The Double, The House of the Dead, The Gamblers and A Raw Youth.

  The novels that are most important for our purpose are Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

  Notes from Underground is the first major treatment of the Outsider theme in modern literature. With Hesse’s Steppenwolf it can be considered as one of the most important expositions of the Outsider’s problems that we shall deal with in this study, Written sixty-four years before Hesse’s and forty-six before Barbusse’s book, when no other ‘Outsider’ literature existed, it stands as a uniquely great monument of Existentialist thought.

  Its title in Russian, Notes from Under the Floorboards, carries the suggestion that its hero is not a man, but a beetle. This is just what he makes himself out to be; his first words are: ‘I am sick. I am full of spleen and repellent....’

  And the character-analysis that follows shows us why he considers himself a beetle. He has been like this, he says, for twenty years, living alone in his room, seldom going out, nursing his dyspepsia and ill-temper, and thinking, thinking.... For fifty pages he rambles on, expounding his ideas. He ‘is neurotically over-sensitive: ‘No hunchback, no dwarf, could be more prone to resentment and offence than I....’

  Yet all this rings false; we begin to grow impatient of the beetle-man’s word-spinning, when suddenly we become aware that, in spite of the longwindedness, he is really trying to define something important. He is full of fantastic illustrations of his ‘complicated state of mind’. Here is an example (greatly abridged): ‘People who are able to wreak vengeance on an assailant, and in general to stand up for themselves—how do they do it? It can only be supposed that momentarily their whole being is possessed by a desire for revenge, and no other element is ... in them. A man of that sort goes straight to his goal as a mad bull chargesI do not consider a man of that type to be the “normal”, as his mother Nature—would have him be. Yet I envy him with all the power of my spleen‘ [Italics mine.]11

  We are reminded of T. E. Lawrence’s envy of the soldier with a girl or a man caressing a dog. Yes, we know all about this aspect of the beetle-man. He thinks too much. Thinking has thinned his blood and made him incapable of spontaneous enjoyment. He envies simpler, stupider people because they are undivided. That is nothing new. What more has the beetle-man to tell us?

  Well, there is the odd fact that he likes suffering.

  ... it is just in this same cold, loathesome semi-mania, this same half-belief in oneself.. . this same poison of unsatisfied wishes... that there lies the essence of the strange delight I have spoken of.12

  And this “strange delight’ is the centre of the beetle-man’s dialectic. For upon it pivots the whole question of freedom. Is man really incapable of absolute evil, as Boethius (following Plato) asserts ? Does he always strive for what he instinctively apprehends as the Good? The arguments for it are strong. For the criminal, crime is a response to the complexities of his social life. In that case, is the soul, then, governed by natural laws like Einstein’s gravitational formulae? ‘Tout est pour le mieux dans ce meilleur de mondespossible9; and Hegel, with a grand sweep, completes the System begun by Leibiiz. (It was Leibniz, after all, who originated the conception of philosophy as glorified logic that has had such depressing results in modern philosophy.) So after Hegel, Reason governs all; men are cogs in a great machine that makes for ultimate Good.

  And suddenly, Dostoevsky’s beetle-man starts up, with his bad teeth and beady eyes, and shouts: ‘To hell with your System. I demand the right to behave as I like. I demand the right to regard myself as utterly unique.9

  And now we can see what the beetle-man is really getting at, with his nasty leers and shrill giggles. His belligerence is a reaction against something, and that ‘something’ is rational humanism. And before long we recognize the Nietzschean note:

  To maintain theories of renovating the human race through Systems ... is about the same thing as to maintain that man grows milder with civilization. Logically, perhaps, this is so; yet he is so prone to Systems and abstract deductions that he is for ever ready to mutilate the truth, to be blind to what he sees or deaf to what he hears, so long as he can succeed in vindicating his logicCivilization develops in man nothing but an added capacity to receive impressions —that is all. And the growth of that capacity increases his tendency to seek pleasure in spilling blood. You may have noticed that the most enthusiastic blood-letters have always been the most civilised of men....13

  This is the essence of Nietzsche’s vision on the hilltop... unreason, the smell of blood, violence, and utter contempt for mere intellect. We can imagine how disgusted the beetle-man would have been with Freud’s psychology, which expounds the most picturesquely complicated accounts of the ‘mechanisms’ that produce ‘irrational’ human actions.

  ...On the contrary, you say, science will in time show that man does not possess any will or initiative of his own— but that he is as the keyboard of the piano. Above all, science will show him that there exist certain laws of nature which cause everything to be done.... Consequently, you say, those laws will only have to be explained to man and at once he will become divested of all responsibility, and find life much easier to deal with. All human acts will then be mathematically computed according to nature’s laws and entered in tables of logarithms....

  But who would care to exercise his will-power according to a table of logarithms?

  And here we can pause to observe that this dialectic of the beetle-man, this anti-rationalist tirade, was published many years before the name Kierkegaard was heard outside Denmark, or Nietzsche outside Germany. Kierkegaard’s Unscientific Postscript, which is the bettle-man’s case extended to several hundred pages, had been published under the curious pseudonym ‘Johannes Climacus’ in the same year as Poor Folk, but it had made no impression comparable to Dostoevsky’s story. Neither was Kierkegaard the first exponent of Existenzphilosophie: half a century earlier, another unknown man of genius had written:14

  All bibles and sacred codes have been the cause of the following errors:

  That man has two really existing principles, viz., a body and a soul

  That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the body, and Reason, called Good, is alone from the soul.

  But the following contraries to these are true:

  Man has no body distinct from his Soul—for what is called body is that portion of the soul discerned by the five senses....

  Energy is the only life, and is from body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy.

  Energy is eternal delight!

  William Blake also had no love of philosophers and their ‘logarithms’, and he detested systems as much as did Kierkegaard. Yet he had to labour at his own attempt at an existence-philosophy, for:

  I must create my own System or be enslaved by another man’s

  My business is not to reason and compare; my business is to create.16

  So we can see at a glance that we have here a strange group of men—Blake, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky: two violently unorthodox Christians, one pagan ‘philosopher with a hammer’, and one tormented half-atheist-half-Christian, all begi
nning from the same impulse and driven by the same urges. Since we can see plainly, after our painstaking analysis, that this impulse is fundamental in the Outsider, it is not a bold step to assert that these men held basically the same beliefs. The differences that seem to separate them are only differences of temperament (imagine Blake’s reaction to Kierkegaard’s Diary of the Seducer, or Nietzsche’s to Dostoevsky’s Life of Father Zossima!); the basic idea is the same in all four.

  To recognize this conclusion is, in fact, to have made a great step towards conceding the contention of this book, that the Outsider’s values are religious ones, but elaboration of this point can wait until we have finished with Dostoevsky.

  The beetle-man’s argument reaches a climax with this important statement:

  If you say that everything—chaos, darkness, anathema— can be reduced to mathematical formulae—then man will go insane on purpose to have no judgement, and to behave as he likes. I believe this because it appears that man’s whole business is to prove that he is a man and not a cog-wheel... And perhaps, who knows, the striving of man on earth may consist in this uninterrupted striving for something ahead, that is, in life itself rather than some real end which obviously must be a static formula of the same kind as two and two make four—I am sure that man will never renounce the genuine suffering that comes of ruin and chaos. Why, suffering is the one and only source of knowledge.16 [Italics mine.]