The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  It is not the idea of the duel that has produced this conversion; it is his bad conscience about a servant he has beaten the day before; suddenly he remembers his brother, who died expressing the doctrine of Christian equality. ‘No man is good enough to be another man’s master.’ After the duel, he resigns his commission and becomes a monk.

  This is the essence of Father Zossima’s life, and it constitutes Dostoevsky’s answer to Ivan’s rebellion. Zossima is an orthodox Christian; but more important, he is a mystic. His message is not ‘Christ died for man: therefore you must love your neighbour’; that would fail to meet Ivan’s argument on any level.

  He does not begin by denying Ivan’s point that men are contemptible; in fact, he fully admits it. The centre of Zossima’s message is Blake’s mystical doctrine: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear infinite’, including human beings. So Zossima’s ‘Life’ is not a reply to Ivan’s argument, any more than adulthood is a reply to childhood. Ivan could not be expected to grasp Zossima’s insights; he is still in the early stage of trusting to Reason; and the belief that everything is infinite is an existential truth not accessible to reason. As far as it goes, Ivan’s analysis of the world is completely right. Misery will never end: that is true; but that does not negate the saint’s vision, because he sees that life can never end either. They are not even two eternal warring principles; they are on a completely different level.

  Man can live on Ivan’s level or Zossima’s. Or he can do infinitely worse and live on the level of the common bourgeois. What is important is that he leave the world of common daylight; when he enters the no-man’s-land between hell and heaven, he is an Outsider. Now the difficulties begin. Unless he is very lucky he will find his face turned towards hell; human delusion, corruption, pain, stupidity, ultimate defeat, these are the realities that suddenly occupy his whole field of vision. And behind them, the canvas on which these are merely shadows, the terror of complete emptiness, unbeing, the abyss.

  It is not easy to escape; it is not easy because there seems to be no reason for escaping; this negates even the concept of freedom. The release, if it comes, involves a complete retracing of the steps through the human ground; back to the essential Will to live that underlies all existence. And this recognition of the world’s unreality, this insight that comes between death and morning, brings a certainty in its wake. It is naked insight into the purpose of the force that demands life at all costs. This insight is called mysticism.

  Ivan is half a mystic; as Alyosha says: he has only half solved the problem. Zossima is less aware of the world’s misery and man’s weakness than Ivan. He does not even hope that all men will become ‘guardians of the mystery’. He does not preach life after death, heaven for the good, hell for the wicked. ‘What is Hell? I maintain it is the suffering of not being able to love—and for that, you do not need Eternity; a day will do, or even a moment.’

  In The Brothers Karamazov, there are two more chapters that enforce the meaning of Zossima’s words, and these chapters are artistically comparable with Ivan’s ‘Legend’. The first is Alyosha’s vision of the first miracle. After the death of Zossima, the body begins to decompose immediately. The people interpret this unfavourably; Zossima was a saint, why should he rot? Perhaps it is a ‘sign’, sent to warn them not to honour Zossima as a saint. Alyosha is disturbed too, not because he doubts Zossima’s sanctity, but because this unpleasant anticlimax to his Abbot’s death seems an omen of the ultimate triumph of evil.

  In a state of wretched discouragement, he falls asleep at the side of the coffin. He has a dream that completely restores his faith: he is present at Cana in Galilee, when Christ changes the water into wine; an old man whispers to him: ‘He is changing the water into wine that the gladness of the guests may not be cut short. He is expecting new guests. He is calling new ones unceasingly for ever and ever....’ Alyosha wakes from his dream, with a feeling of renewed life. He goes out, and, under the night sky, he is overwhelmed with ‘universal consciousness’. The stars inspire him: ‘there seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his souls to them. ... It was as if some idea had seized sovereignty in his mind.’ He flings himself on the earth, weeping: ‘He could not have told why he longed to kiss it—and to love it for ever and ever.’ In such a moment, Alyosha can see and touch the answer to Ivan’s rebellion. Ivan’s indictment is valid for men as they are; but if all men could see as he sees, Ivan’s words would cease to be true.

  There is no need to point out that Alyosha’s vision can be paralleled by others described in this book: by Meursault’s, by Nietzsche’s. What is the content of this vision of Alyosha’s ? Recalling Nietzsche’s ‘pure Will, without the troubles of intellect’, we can say that it seems to be a vision of power, of Yea-saying—i Svvafus /ecu rj Soga. Normally man’s mind is composed only of a consciousness of his immediate needs, which is to say that this consciousness at any moment can be defined as his awareness of his own power to satisfy those needs. He thinks in terms of what he intends to do in half an hour’s time, a day’s time, a month’s time, and no more. He never asks himself: What are the limits of my powers? In a sense, he is like a man who has a fortune in the bank, who never asks himself, How much money have I got ?, but only, Have I enough for a pound of cheese, for a new tie?, etc. In such moments as Alyosha’s vision he pushes aside all these minor affairs, and takes stock of his powers in not terms of doing but simply of being. Since it is normally the things we do that make up our idea of what we are, this ‘stocktaking of energy’ tends to jump the personality and all “perplexities of intellect’; it is in other words a vision of pure Will, pure power, pure possibility. The personality temporarily disappears: this is the most important aspect of the vision.

  At the same time, of course, Alyosha has realized the truth that Zossima and Kirilov also knew: that everything is good. Evil is ultimate bondage; this suggests the possibility of ultimate freedom.

  Mitya has a vision too; and his vision, as we would expect, is of a totally different kind from Alyosha’s. Mitya lacks self-control, and he is completely self-centred. To escape the prison of his own self-regard, he needs to become an Outsider; he needs to discover that he is in a world that is so full of misery that his only business is to love. Mitya is not basically bad or selfish; it is only that he has never had to think of anyone but himself. He has almost driven himself mad, lusting after a sloe-eyed Russian wench who (the author cynically admits) will run to fat in another ten years. Now he is accused of murdering his father and stealing his money. There has been a long cross-examination scene (more than fifty pages of it) in which Mitya has been subjected to something like a third-degree. The irony, the stupidity of it, bewilder him; he seems to have lost touch with reality. I quote the scene that follows in full; it is a supreme instance of Dostoevsky’s artistic power of evocation:

  He felt more and more oppressed by a strange physical weakness. His eyes were closing with fatigue. The examination of the witnesses was, at last, over. They proceeded to a final revision of the protocol. Mitya got up, moved from his chair by the corner to the curtain, lay down on a large chest covered with a rug, and instantly fell asleep.

  He had a strange dream, utterly out of keeping with the place and time.

  He was driving somewhere in the steppes, where he had been stationed long ago, and a peasant was driving him in a cart with a pair of horses, through snow and sleet. He was cold, it was early in November, and the snow was falling in big, wet flakes that melted as soon as they touched the earth. And the peasant drove him smartly; he had a long, fair beard.... Not far off was a village; he could see the black huts, and half the huts were burnt down, with only the charred beams sticking up. As they drove in, there were peasant women drawn up along the road, a lot of women, a whole row, all thin and wan, with their faces a sort of brownish colour—especially one woman at the edge, tall and bony, who looked forty but might have been twenty, with a long, thin face. And in h
er arms was a little baby, crying. And her breasts seemed so dried up that there was not a drop of milk in them. And the child cried and cried, and held out its little bare arms, with its little fists blue from cold.

  ‘Why are they crying, why are they crying?’ Mitya asked, as they dashed gaily by.

  ‘It’s the babe,’ answered the driver, ‘the babe’s weeping.’

  And Mitya was struck by his saying, in his peasant way, ‘the babe’, and he liked the peasant calling it a ‘babe’. There seemed more pity in it.

  ‘But why is it weeping?’ Mitya persisted stupidly, ‘Why are its little arms bare? Why don’t they wrap it up?’

  ‘The babe’s cold. Its clothes are frozen and don’t warm it.’

  ‘But why is it? Why?’ Mitya foolishly persisted.

  ‘Why, they’re poor people, burnt out. They’ve no bread. They’re begging because they’ve no bread.’

  ‘No, no.’ Mitya, as it were, still did not understand. ‘Tell me why it is these poor mothers stand there. Why are these people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don’t they hug each other and kiss? Why don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why don’t they feed the babe?’

  And he felt, though the questions were unreasonable and senseless, that he wanted to ask just that, and he had to ask it in just that way. And he felt that a passion of pity, such as he had never known before, was rising in his heart, that he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do something for them all, so that the babe should weep no more, so that the dark-faced, dried-up mother should not weep, that no one should shed tears again from that moment, and he wanted to do it all at once, regardless of all obstacles, with all the recklessness of the Karamazovs.

  ‘And I am coming with you. I won’t leave you now for the rest of my life’ he heard close beside him Grushenka’s voice, warm with emotion. And his heart glowed, and he struggled towards the light, and he longed to love and live, and to go on and on, towards the new beckoning light, and to hasten, hasten, now, at once.

  ‘What ? Where ?’ he exclaimed, opening his eyes and sitting up on the chest, smiling brightly. Nicolay Parfenovitch was standing over him, suggesting that he should hear the protocol read aloud, and sign it.... He was suddenly struck by the fact that there was a pillow under his head that had not been there when he fell asleep, exhausted, on the chest.

  ‘Who put that pillow under my head? Who was so kind?’ he cried, with a sort of ecstatic gratitude....

  He never found out who the kind man was—perhaps one of the peasant witnesses... but his soul felt tense with the emotion. He went to the table and said he would sign whatever they liked.

  ‘I’ve had a good dream, gentlemen,’ he said, in a strange voice, with a new light, as of joy, in his face.6

  Again we see, in the phrase ‘he longed to live and live, and to go on and on’, the same Yea-saying vision as had happened to Alyosha, as well as to Kirilov and Shatov. We can even parallel it with Raskolnikov’s in the scene of Crime and Punishment in which Sonia reads him the Gospel:

  How it happened he did not know. But all at once something seemed to seize him and fling him at her feet. He went and threw his arms round her knees. He had risen again and knew it, and felt it with all his being’.7

  Even Stavrogin has experienced something of the kind; he tells about it at the end of his ‘confession’: his dream of a golden age as in the Claude picture: warm sea and perfect harmony of human beings. Then the face of the dead child he raped rises in his memory and destroys the vision. Here again, Mitya evokes the Golden age: ‘Why don’t they sing songs of joy?’ just as Ivan had evoked it at the end of the ‘Rebellion’ Chapter. This is Dostoevsky’s Pro and Contra: in one balance-pan, human misery; in the other, the unconquerable force of Life from which human beings cut themselves off with their trivial, tied-to-the-present personalities. Mitya learns that man can become aware of that pure Will to live only by ceasing to care about his own little affairs.

  We now come to Ivan’s ‘vision’, one of the most important sections in the book.

  For some reason, critics who have acclaimed the Grand Inquisitor section as ‘the concentrated essence of Dostoevsky’ have paid no attention to Ivan’s scene with the Devil, although it is obviously intended to supplement the earlier chapter. Actually, as I hope to show, Ivan’s ‘vision’ is the climax of the book. In it there is not only a summary of the Outsider’s dialectic, there are seeds of the development of a whole field of modern literature.

  Ivan is sick. The narrator tells us he is on the eve of a brainstorm. This is the point to which unending thinking has brought him. After a last interview with Smerdyakov (his ‘ape’—a reminder of his baser part), in which he wrings a confession of the murder from his half-brother, he goes back to his empty room. And now occurs the scene towards which the Outsider’s destiny has always tended. The room is no longer empty. There is Another.

  The Devil is a seedy would-be gentleman, wearing a reefer jacket and check trousers. Dostoevsky’s portrait of him is as circumstantial as a description by Balzac of some small tradesman. This is a very human devil. Ivan had told Alyosha in the Pro and Contra section:

  ‘I think if the Devil doesn’t exist, and man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.’

  Here he is: human, all too human; something of a buffoon, like Ivan’s dead father; something of the ape, like Smerdyakov.

  Is he real? And here is Dostoevsky’s point: He is as real as anything in a world of unrealities. Ivan believes he is unreal and tells him so: the Devil laughs and admits it. All is unreal. Being? What is it? Perception. What you see exists for you. If I am delusion of your mind, you are also a delusion of mine, the Devil tells him. Each man exists in a solipsist universe in which he treats his delusions as realities. Exploding logic; reason, tired of proceeding forward, tries to erupt out of the page. You, the reader holding this book—one level of reality; Ivan, another—less real; the Devil another—less real still; but all is relative. Are you reading for amusement ? No ? You have some serious interest in reading? You don’t mind reading of Ivan’s confusion between real and unreal, but when you put down this book, what then ? You must take up your own life. Real or unreal ? The intellect pretends to be sincere, pretends to question everything, but the arm-chair you are sitting in, the chest of drawers, the fire, you don’t question their existence, nor the work you must do tomorrow and the day after. The intellect can go off on quixotic voyages, but you, the being, the personality, have to go forward along your destiny, what Minkowski would call your ‘geodesic’.

  This uncoils from Ivan’s interview with the Devil; it is always latent in it. It will always be there until human beings have attained ultimate reality and can read The Brothers Karamazov from an ultimately real arm-chair which is just what it appears to be, facing their lives with an ultimate knowledge of who they are, what life is, what death is, where they come from and where they are going. Then they can know that Ivan’s Devil was unreal, but then, The Brothers Karamazov is only a book, and Dostoevsky was only a man, and for unreality there is not much to choose between them. Behind Ivan there is a universe of chaos, cinders. Ivan accuses the Devil of re-hashing the ideas from his student days; but what does that matter? It may be one more evidence of the Devil’s unreality, but does it prove the ideas unreal ? Are the ideas realler than Ivan ? Plato would say yes; Kierkegaard and the modern Existentialists, no. This too lies latent in the situation between Ivan and the Devil.

  And these ‘ideas’ of Ivan’s: as soon as we touch them it sets the whole merry-go-round off again. As a student, Ivan had argued that good and evil have no relation to the soul. They are only two poles in life, two lumberjacks at either end of a double-handed saw. Or compare evil to the clapper of a bell; remove it and the bell is silent, unmanifest. Good and evil, what are they? the Devil asks. When man is uncivilized, his good and evil are completely arbitrary; his gods are immoral and his devils are only graveyar
d bogies. As he learns to use his reason, he sorts out good from evil. But where does it end? Only at the Outsider’s Truth, what do they mean by it?’ He does not reason himself towards God, or towards becoming a god himself, but only into the position of Burridan’s ass, starving between two equal loads of hay. The notions of good and evil evaporate. He finds himself—in his room, staring at the wall; and if Another exists, then he is like this one, a shabby vulgarian in check trousers. This is the end of the great God Reason, when it goes far enough; eternity, a dusty room with cobwebs; the Devil, a human being, and Heaven, perhaps, as in Rupert Brooke’s sonnet, where:

  An idle wind blew round an empty throne

  And stirred the heavy curtains on the walls...

  And belief? It is not that Ivan does not want to believe. Spiritual starvation has made him sick and afraid of his own existence.