The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  Will the veiled sister pray

  For the children at the gate

  Who will not go away and cannot pray?

  If he can recover from this ‘terrifying insight’ and find belief, he may become more passionately religious than Alyosha; he will believe with the unwavering certainty of one who has been lost for a long time and is determined never to be lost again.

  But we are not to know what happened, because Dostoevsky never finished the story. There are hints in the Devil chapter. There is the story of the free-thinker, who believed there was no life after death, and when he died, was indignant to find he was wrong. As a punishment for his unbelief he was sentenced to walk a quadrillion miles. He lay down and refused to move, and a thousand years went by before he grew tired of lying down, and set out to walk the quadrillion miles. And when he had finished—(and here Ivan interrupts to ask where he got the billion years to do it in? The Devil explains that our earth has lived and died a thousand times—Zarathustra’s Eternal Recurrence)—when he had finished, and was admitted into heaven at last, he cried immediately that two seconds in heaven were worth walking for a million times as long....8

  Here Ivan interrupts with a shout, ‘You are repeating a story I made up when I was a student.’ The Devil has proved again that he is a figment of Ivan’s imagination. So!

  But consider the story itself. Its content is the same as Nietzsche’s vision on the hilltop: reconciliation, a Vision of pure Being that makes up for all the apparent terrors and miseries of living. The unbeliever walks for a quadrillion miles, yet one moment of reality makes up for it. It is like Steppenwolf’s idea that he might one day look back on himself from his ultimate goal ‘to which the difficult path seems to be taking him’, and smile with ‘a mixture of joy and pity’, or even to realize, like Meursault that ‘he had been happy and was happy still’. It is an idea, this, that turns up repeatedly in world religions; that life is such a tissue of delusions that man can never have the remotest idea of who he is or what he is doing, but that the dream can break suddenly, and the resulting glimpse is sudden complete understanding. The Bhagavad Gita expresses it:

  ‘Even if you are the most sinful of sinners, this insight will carry you like a raft above all your sin’ (IV, 36).

  Chuang Tzu says:

  ‘While they dream, they do not know that they are dreaming. Some will even interpret the dream they are dreaming (i.e. Hegel and the systematizing philosophers) and only when they wake do they know it was a dream. By and by comes the great awakening, and then we find out that this hfe is really a great dream....’

  And here is the very essence of Existenzphilosophie. The poet-philosopher has an intuition that man is so completely sunk in delusion that he can never hope to know himself consistently and act upon his knowledge. A moment comes, and it seems a moment of deeper insight than man normally has, of recognition that man does not know the world or himself. He is so sunk in delusion and a high opinion of himself that there is no hope at all of his ever knowing himself. This is a way of seeing that comes easily to Outsiders, because the Outsider sees with such penetration through the usual self-deluding, the way in which all men and women blind themselves with their emotions. The consequence is usually a Swiftian contempt for men and women, the kind of feeling that finds full expression in the last pages of Gulliver’s Voyage to the Houyhnhnms:

  My reconcilement to the Yahoo kind in general might not be so difficult if they were content with those vices and follies only which Nature has entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician, a physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this is all according to the due course of things; but when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience....

  This is not pathological loathing; there is not the slightest touch of insanity about it (in spite of the prevailing modern opinion to the contrary). It is the ordinary Outsider attitude to men, and it is also the religious attitude. The same savage indictment of human folly can be found in the Book of Ecclesiastes, as well as in the New Testament and the Pensees of Pascal. The common mob, the philistines and moneychangers, are ‘flies in the market-place’. Then, as the Outsider’s insight becomes deeper, so that he no longer sees men as a million million individuals, but instead sees the world-will that drives them all like ants in a formicary, he knows that they will never escape their stupidity and delusions, that no amount of logic and knowledge can make man any more than an insect; the most irritating of the human lice is the humanist with his puffed-up pride in Reason and his ignorance of his own silliness.

  The answer of a man like Kierkegaard to this vision that forced itself upon his over-sensitive perceptions, is the religious solution. For nothing is more natural than that the mind that has tired of its reasoning faculty should turn to the areas of the being that he below consciousness, to the instincts and intuitions. It may be a simple revolt, like D. H. Lawrence’s, but if it is too simple, it may fall into the error that Steppenwolf avoided, the ‘back to the animal’ attitude of Lawrence’s ‘St. Mawr5 or The Virgin and the Gipsy’. That is no solution. But Kierkegaard had the solution when he realized that the necessary intensity to fuse all his instincts and rational faculties lay in the religious attitude.

  And at this point, a genuinely puzzled reader who can sympathize with the Outsider, but cannot quite understand how he can jump to the religious attitude, may ask: ‘But is it true? Is it true in the same way that one and one make two?’ And here an analogy might make things clearer. When Einstein introduced his special theory of relativity, he was careful to explain that his disagreement with the Newtonian formulae did not matter unless you were dealing with particles travelling at a very high speed, at a speed approaching 186,000 miles per second, in fact. Unless you were dealing with such high speeds, you need not worry about Time being different for different co-ordinate systems in relative motion, nor about simultaneousness having no meaning without many more definitions. But if you are dealing with high speeds, then there is nothing for it; you must discard Galilei’s equations and use Lorentz’s.

  The same goes for the Outsider. If you are living a very ordinary dull life at low pressure, you can safely regard the Outsider as a crank who does not deserve serious consideration. But if you are interested in man in extreme states, or in man abnormally preoccupied by questions about the nature of life, then whatever answer the Outsider may propound should be worth your respectful attention. The Outsider is interested in high speeds and great pressures; he prefers to consider the man who sets out to be very good or very wicked rather than the good citizen who advocates moderation in all things.

  And this brings us back to Ivan Karamazov. Ivan is such a man who is not contented with ordinary speeds. He feels great spiritual power in himself. Like Raskolnikov, he does not feel that he has been born to be a nonentity. Dostoevsky tells us that ‘he began very early—almost in his infancy—to show a brilliant and unusual aptitude for learning’. Naturally, he feels that his way must be the way of intellect. And what is the business of intellect? It is to synthesize unendingly. The Outsider naturally sees most men as failures; in fact, he may feel that every man who has ever lived had been a failure

  So the Ivan-type applies his intellectual powers to the question: How must I live my life so as not to have to consider myself a failure? And with a standard so high, the problem must gnaw at him day and night, make leisure impossible, shatter his nerves with an unending sense of tension, urgency, like the laceration of a spur being driven into the mind. He gropes for standards. He realizes intuitively ‘If I can say: That man was a failure, then I must have an idea of what success means.’

  And the trouble has begun. If he had time to sit in a quiet spot, under pleasant circumstances, he might get to grips with it. But our life as human beings in a modern society seldom allows us those
circumstances. It is a repetition of Van Gogh’s problem, the day by day struggle for intensity that disappears overnight, all interrupted by human trivialities and endless pettinesses. When Dostoevsky made Ivan on the eve of a brainstorm see the Devil, he was only symbolizing what can happen to such an Outsider. Ivan is aiming at complete synthesis, to see the world as a whole. Blake calls it ‘fourfold vision’ in one of his poems:

  Now I a fourfold vision see

  And a fourfold vision is given to me

  It is fourfold in my supreme delight

  And threefold in soft Beulah’s night

  And twofold always. May God us keep

  From single vision and Newton’s sleep.9

  Ivan’s Devil is an embodiment of the last line, ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep’. He is a sort of version of Roquentin’s Nausea, William James’s ‘stubborn unreduceable fact’, brute reality that negates spirit or, worse than that, embodies delusion. It is this Devil who drove Van Gogh insane, who stayed at T. E. Lawrence’s elbow whispering self-distrust; no nightmare monster of evil with three faces, imperador del doloroso regno, but a breaker of wings, poisoner of the Will to live.

  ***

  In his Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann is openly indebted to Ivan’s Devil scene, and has added some interesting observations on the psychology of the Outsider that clarify Dostoevsky’s views. Mann’s Faustus (who is based on Frederick Nietzsche), argues:10

  ... the contritio without hope, as complete disbelief in the possibility of mercy and forgiveness , . . only that is true contritio.... You will admit that the everyday sinner can be but moderately interesting to mercy. Mediocrity, in fact, has no theological status. A capacity for sin so healless, that it makes a man despair from his heart of redemption— that is the true theological way to salvation.

  He (the Devil): You are a sly dog! And where would the likes of you get the single-mindedness, the naive recklessness of despair, which would be the premise for the sinful way of salvation ? Is it not plain to you that the conscious speculation on the charm that great guilt exercises on Goodness makes the act of mercy impossible to it ?

  Faustus: And yet only through this ne plus ultra can the high prick of dramatic theological existence be arrived at— I mean the most abandoned guilt, and the last and most irresistible challenge to everlasting goodness.

  He: Not bad.... And now I will tell you that precisely heads of your sort comprise the population of Hell...your theologian in grain, your arrant wiley pie who speculates on speculation because he has speculation in his blood....

  Mann makes the position even clearer. It is just that position in Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’ that I analysed in Chapter V. St. Augustine’s solution was Credo ut intelligam, believe to understand. And what if a man has not a grain of faith in him, if he is a reasoner through and through ? By reasoner I do not mean simply a rationalist—like certain modern logicians who question the possibility of the synthetic a priori, but never doubt the utility of lecturing to students three times a week and publishing books on logical positivism; to these, the Outsider would apply Mann’s harsh judgement: Mediocrity has no theological status. But the man who, like Evan Strowde, sets out to ‘get past all tricks to the heart of things’ ... is he inevitably damned? This is one of the Outsider’s worst dilemmas: to feel the whole being groaning for some emotional satisfaction, some solid reality to touch, and to feel the reasoning faculty standing apart, jeering at the possibility of satisfaction and discouraging its approach. What should such an Outsider do? Should he deliberately repress his reasoning faculty, accept a faith and hope that his reason will be reconciled to it one day? Accept Credo ut intelligam?

  No. The Outsider cannot countenance such an idea. And, in fact, we have seen him solving the problem in this study. Man is not merely intellect and emotions; he is body too. This is easiest of all to forget. The life of the Outsider pivots around his intellect and emotions, and as often as not, he retreats into a cork-lined room as did Proust and forgets he has a body. It was Hemingway’s main achievement to restore the sense of the body into literature; he has done this even more successfully than D. H. Lawrence, who was always getting bogged down in his emotions. In Hemingway, especially in the early volumes, there is a sense of physical freshness, a direct, intense experience of natural things that makes the ‘troubles and perplexities of intellect5 seem nonsense. And this was also Zarathustra’s vision; in a passage that might be set as an epigraph to Lawrence’s Man Who Died, he declares:

  While Jesus the Hebrew only knew the tears and the melancholy of the Hebrew, together with the hatred of Goodness and Righteousness, the longing for death overtook him.

  Would that he had remained in the desert, far from the good and righteous! Perhaps he would have learned how to live and love the earth—and to laugh as well.11

  And this judgement, apart from its implied criticism of the founder of the Christian religion, would be endorsed by many mystics, Christian and otherwise. In speaking of Blake and Traherne in the last chapters it will be seen just how important is the part that the mystic ascribes to ‘love of the earth’. This is where Mann’s Doktor Faustus fails (and it is a very bad portrait of Nietzsche in that it ignores the Whitmanesque aspect of Nietzsche’s message and concentrates on intellectual problems). And, it would seem, it is the point where Ivan fails too, in spite of his assurance that he loves ‘the blue sky and the sticky buds in spring’. And Dostoevsky makes his meaning unequivocal by the ‘vision’ scenes of the other two brothers. Alyosha is overwhelmed with sheer physical love of the earth, like Van Gogh’s, and kisses it and weeps on it. And Mitya is made to realize that the earth is full of suffering human beings, and that no one can be whole and complete without a sense of kinship with the suffering of all other living beings.

  In his ‘Snows of Kilimanjaro’, Hemingway writes of Scott Fitzgerald:

  Poor Julian and his romantic awe of [the rich] ... he thought they were a special glamorous race, and when he found out they weren’t, it wrecked him just as much as anything had wrecked him.

  He [the hero] had been contemptuous of those who wrecked. ... He could beat anything... because nothing could hurt him if he did not care12

  This book has been a study chiefly in men who ‘wrecked’ for different reasons, men who cared too much about something or other, and cracked under the strain.

  Now Dostoevsky has brought us to the threshold of new developments, and he has helped to summarize most of the themes of previous chapters. What we cannot have failed to notice, as the analysis has taken us from Barbusse, Sartre, Hesse, towards Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, is that the greatest men have been those who were most intensely concerned about the Outsider’s problems, and the question of how not to wreck. The Outsider must keep asking the question: Why? Why are most men failures? Why do Outsiders tend to wreck?

  We lack the concept of an enemy: that is the trouble. We talk vaguely of ‘the Outsider’s problems’, and we even get around to defining them in terms of ‘freedom’, ‘personality’, but that only leads us into metaphysical discussions about meanings. What we haven’t yet got around to is a bare statement: ‘This is where the Outsider is going, and this is what he often falls over, breaking his neck.’ That is what we need, to sort out some of the threads we have unravelled in previous chapters: a statement of destination and a concept of an enemy (or of an ‘obstacle’, if the word fits the metaphor better).

  Let us summarize our conclusions briefly:

  The Outsider wants to cease to be an Outsider.

  He wants to be ‘balanced’.

  He would like to achieve a vividness of sense-perception (Lawrence, Van Gogh, Hemingway).

  He would also like to understand the human soul and its workings (Barbusse and Mitya Karamazov).

  He would like to escape triviality forever, and be ‘possessed’ by a Will to power, to more life.

  Above all, he would like to know how to express himself, because that is the means by which he can get to know hi
mself and his unknown possibilities.

  Every Outsider tragedy we have studied so far has been a tragedy of self-expression.

  We have, to guide us, two discoveries about the Outsider’s ‘way’:

  (i) That his salvation ‘lies in extremes’.

  (2) That the idea of a way out often comes in Visions’, moments of intensity, etc. It is this latter possibility that we must investigate further in the next two chapters.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE OUTSIDER AS VISIONARY

  The visionary is inevitably an Outsider. And this is not because visionaries are a relatively small minority in proportion to the rest of the community; in that case, rat-catchers and steeple-jacks would be Outsiders too. It is for the very different reason that he starts from a point that everybody can understand, and very soon soars beyond the general understanding. He starts from the ‘appetite for fruitful activity and a high quality of life’, the most profound and ineradicable human instinct. And before long you have him making statements like this:

  I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action; it is as the dirt upon my feet, no part of me. ‘What,’ it will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire, something like a guinea?’ Oh no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying: ‘Holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty.’1