The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  And the function of imagination was to look inward. In ‘Jerusalem’ Blake avowed his intention:

  To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes

  Of man Inwards, into the worlds of thought, into Eternity.36

  Imagination is the instrument of self-knowledge.

  But what must be grasped about Blake’s conception is that imagination is not purely emotional or intellectual; for Blake, knowledge involved the whole being, body, emotions, intellect.

  Los is only a half of Blake’s picture of man’s inner states. The other half is the strange being called ‘the Spectre’:

  Each man is in his spectre’s power

  Until the arrival of that hour

  When his humanity awakes

  And casts his spectre into the lake... 37

  The Spectre is the dead form. He is static consciousness.

  Los is kinetic, always pushing, expanding. When life recedes, the limits of its activities seem to be alive, just as the dead body looks like the living one. The Spectre is the dead, conscious part of man that he mistakes for himself, the personality, the habits, the identity. ‘Man is not of fixed or enduring form’ Steppenwolf realized, in a moment of insight. But when man is in ‘the Spectre’s power’ (and most of us are, every day) he sees himself and the whole world as of ‘fixed and enduring form’.

  Blake has defined the two worlds of Hanno Buddenbrooks and Steppenwolf: one is the world of Los; the other of the Spectre. The Spectre is invisible, like a shadow, but when he has the ascendancy in man, everything is solid, unchangeable, stagnant, unreal.

  And now we can begin to see how far Blake has solved the Outsider’s problems. His system with its terminology is the only one we have considered so far that provides a skeleton key to every Outsider in this book. Roquentin, Meursault, Lawrence, Krebs, Strowde and Oliver Gauntlett: all are men in ‘the Spectre’s power’, in the stranglehold of their own identity, and they mistake their own stagnation for the world’s. The Spectre’s mark is Unreality.

  Consider the root cause of the Vastation experience in these men; Tolstoy’s madman admitting that he could not escape ‘the horror’ because he carried its source about with him, and that source was himself; Lawrence confessing that ‘I did not like the myself I could see and hear’, William James’s ‘panic fear of his own existence’. All point to the accuracy of Blake’s diagnosis.

  The cause, as T. E. Lawrence realized, lies in the ‘thought-riddled nature’, in the intellect dominating the other two faculties. Blake symbolized the intellect as Urizen, the ‘king of light’. It is Urizen who tries to play dictator over the other two. But man was never intended to be a dictator-state; it makes him lopsided, and if he goes on too long in that condition, something is bound to happen. It is bound to happen even if the dictator happens to be one of those far more genial characters, Luvah and Tharmas, the emotions and the body (and Tharmas is ‘the mildest son of Heaven5), for the simple reason that the crises of living demand the active co-operation of intellect, emotions, body, on equal terms.

  And now we are back again in the heart of Blake’s myth. His longest and most confused epic, ‘Vala, or the Four Zoas^ is Blake’s own way of writing The Brothers Karamazov. It is a psychological novel that takes place in the human brain. The hero, the Giant Alvion, dreams the whole poem. It begins at the point where Urizen has tried to seize dictatorship. Tharmas laments:

  Lost, lost, lost are my emanations ...

  i.e. self-expression is now denied to him. (‘Emanation’ in Blake means a form of self-expression.) In the course of the poem, we watch the confusion that results when one or the other of the faculties takes over completely; symbolically we watch the mutations of the hero Albion—T. E. Lawrence, Nijinsky and Van Gogh, Ivan, Mitya and Alyosha. Urizen is the chief villain always, because Urizen is not merely intellect; he is also personality, identity, the Spectre. As soon as man begins to think, he forms a notion of who he is. If man were entirely body or emotions, he would have no conception of his identity, consequently he could never become unbalanced like Nijinsky, Lawrence, Van Gogh. It is Urizen who starts the trouble. The Bible recounts the same legend when it ascribes the first discord in the universe to Lucifer and his pride. Lucifer is light; consciousness, Urizen.

  Yet it is the Outsider’s belief that life aims at more life, at higher forms of life, something for which the Superman is an inexact poetic symbol (as Dante’s description of the beatific vision is expressed in terms of a poetic symbol); so that, in a sense, Urizen is the most important of the three functions. The fall was necessary, as Hesse realized. Urizen must go forward alone. The other two must follow him. And as soon as Urizen has gone forward, the Fall has taken place. Evolution towards God is impossible without a Fall. And it is only by this recognition that the poet can ever come to ‘praise in spite of; for if evil is ultimately discord, unresolvable, then the idea of dennoch preisen is a self-contradiction. And yet it must be clearly recognized and underlined that this is not the Hegelian ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world’. Even if the evil is necessary, it remains evil, discord, pain. It remains an Existential fact, not something that proves to be something else when you hold it in the right light. It is as if there were two opposing armies: the Hegelian view holds that peace can be secured by proving that there is really no ground for opposition; in short, they are really friends. The Blakeian view says that the discord is necessary, but it can never be resolved until one army has. completely exterminated the other. This is the Existential view, first expressed by S0ren Kierkegaard, the Outsider’s view and, incidentally, the religious view. The whole difference between the Existentialist and the Hegelian viewpoint is implicit in the comparison between the title of Hegel’s book, The Philosophy of History, and James Joyce’s phrase, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ (Ulysses, p. 31). Blake provided the Existentialist view with a symbolism and mythology. In Blake’s view, harmony is an ultimate aim, but not the primary aim, of life; the primary aim is to live more abundantly at any cost. Harmony can come later.

  Blake, then, agrees with Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Hesse; the way forward leads to more life, more consciousness. Suicide is no answer, nor mind-suicide, nor the idea of ‘an allegorical abode where existence hath never come’. Heaven-after-death is irrelevant. The way lies forward, into more life. Van Gogh shot himself and Nietzsche went insane, but Raskolnikov and Mitya Karamazov went through with the terrifying crucifixion of the answer to the Outsider’s problems: to accept the ordeal; not death, but ‘ever further into guilt, ever deeper into human life’, into the ten years’ exile, the purgation. Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.

  It is unfortunate that lack of space prevents a longer examination of Blake’s work. But from the brief survey above, it should be clear that Blake’s philosophy began as an Outsider-philosophy, like Fox’s, Nietzsche’s, Dostoevsky’s. And the most important point to emerge from our analysis is the essentially religious nature of Blake’s solution. The ideas of original sin, salvation and damnation are the natural outcome of his attempt to face the world as an Outsider.

  We can summarize Blake’s argument briefly: All men should possess a Visionary faculty’. Men do not, because they live wrongly. They live too tensely, under too much strain, ‘getting and spending’. But this loss of the visionary faculty is not entirely man’s fault, it is partly the fault of the world he lives in, that demands that men should spend a certain amount of their time ‘getting and spending’ to stay alive.

  The visionary faculty comes naturally to all men. When they are relaxed enough, every leaf of every tree in the world, every speck of dust, is a separate world capable of producing infinite pleasure. If these fail to do so, it is man’s own fault for wasting his time and energy on trivialities. The ideal is the contemplative poet, the ‘sage’, who cares about having only enough money and food to keep him alive, and never ‘takes thought for the morrow’. This is a way of thought that com
es more easily to the Eastern than to the Western mind. Professor Whitehead has acutely observed:

  The more we know of Chinese art, Chinese literature, Chinese philosophy of life, the more we admire the heights to which that civilization attained.... And yet Chinese science is practically negligible. There is no reason to believe that China, if left to itself, would have ever produced any progress in science. The same may be said of India.... [Science and the Modern World, Chapter I]

  The reason for this should be obvious enough. The Eastern way of thought is essentially Blake’s way. It does not make for a mechanical civilization with atom bombs and electronic brains. Hence Blake’s detestation of Newton and the Industrial Revolution. It is difficult for the Western man to think of the word ‘contemplative’ without instantly thinking: ‘dreamy’ ‘unworldly’, ‘impractical’. He finds it hard to realize that whole civilizations have made contemplation the basis of their culture, and have, in most respects, been flourishing, prosperous and well-regulated. Blake is a good example of the contemplative temperament. There is nothing of the futile dreamer about him; all his values are clean and clear-cut:

  Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not .negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory. The fool shall not enter into heaven, be he ever so holy.38

  The culmination of the Western misunderstanding of the contemplative temperament can be seen in the Marxian viewpoint that states: ‘I have no use for religion because it’s not practical.’ It is a failure to grasp the mental attitude that sees religion as completely practical, completely commonsense.

  Our civilization has grown steadily closer, in its everyday life, to the Marxian attitude. That is why we are producing Outsiders. Because the Outsider is a man who feels in the Chinese way. His revolt against Western standards takes the form of a sense of their futility, the sense that is expressed in Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’. He asks questions about things that all his fellow Westerners take for granted, and his final question tends to be the cry of Bunyan’s Pilgrim: What must I do to be saved? It is a cry that springs out of bewilderment. He sees the world as a ‘devil-ridden chaos’ and he is not sure of his own identity in it. Steppenwolf expresses the sense of sin:

  Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. The way to innocence lies ever further into guilt, ever deeper into human life.89

  and this view is close to the orthodox Christian conception. Newman writes:

  I look out into the world of men, and see a sight that fills me with unspeakable distress. The world seems simply, to give the lie to the great truth, of which my being is so full. I look into this busy, living world, and see no reflection of its creator. To consider ... the defeat of good, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the dreary, hopeless irreligion... all this is a vision to dizzy and appal, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solutionAnd so I argue ... ‘If there be a God ... the human race is implicated in some terrible, aboriginal calamity.40

  Note the phrase ‘which is absolutely beyond human solution5. Humanism denies that there are problems that are beyond human solution. And in using the word ‘human’, let us also bear in mind SteppenwolPs: ‘Man is a bourgeois compromise.’

  The passage from Newman is a classic exposition of the doctrine of Original Sin, ‘some terrible, aboriginal calamity’. Newman’s way of seeing the world is pessimistic. It is Dos-toevsky’s way, Blake’s way, Kafka’s way; we can find the same vision in a modern novelist like Graham Greene (although Greene’s deliberately conceived ‘popular’ devices exclude him from serious consideration). It is the way of the Western Outsider.

  Yet Blake and Dostoevsky are pessimistic only up to a point. Then, it seems a ray of light enters from a direction we had forgotten, from the poetic genius, the faculty of Yea-saying:

  Ethinthus, queen of waters, how thou shinest in the sky

  My sister, how do I rejoice, for thy children flock around Like the gay fishes on the wave when the cold moon drinks the dew. .. 41

  It is the strange faculty that can see ‘a world in a grain of sand’ or in a leaf ‘just a leaf, slightly brown at the edges’. Newman lacked it, in common with Kafka and Greene.

  From this tentative definition of the idea of Original Sin, we can see the outline of the meaning of ‘salvation’ and ‘damnation’. Damnation is to belong hopelessly to the ‘devil-ridden chaos’, to be of it, in it, hopelessly lashed to it. From the Outsider’s viewpoint the world justifies complete pessimism. ‘We have not begun to live’, Yeats writes, ‘until we conceive life as a tragedy.’ Newman confessed that he considered most men to be irretrievably damned, although he spent his life ‘trying to make that truth less terrible to human reason’. Goethe could call his life ‘the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever’. Martin Luther told a woman who wished him a long life: ‘Madam, rather than live forty more years, I would give up my chance of paradise.’ No, the Outsider does not make light work of living; at the best, it is hard going; at the worst (to borrow a phrase from Eliot) ‘an intolerable shirt of flame’,

  It was this vision that made Axel declare: ‘As for living, our servants will do that for us.’ Axel was a mystic; at least, he had the makings of a mystic. For that is just what the mystic says: ‘I refuse to Uve.’ But he doesn’t intend to die. There is another way of living that involves a sort of death: ‘to die in order to Uve’. Axel would have locked himself up in his castle on the Rhine and read Hermetic philosophy. He saw men and the world as Newman saw them, as Eliot saw them in ‘Burnt Norton’:

  ... strained, time-ridden faces

  Distracted from distraction by distraction

  Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

  Tumid apathy with no concentration

  Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

  That blows before and after time 42

  But he was not willing to regard himself as hopelessly damned merely because the rest of the world seems to be. He set out to find his own salvation; and although he did it with a strong romantic bias for Gothic castles and golden-haired girls, he still set out in the right direction.

  And what are the clues in the search for self-expression? There are the moments of insight, the glimpses of harmony. Yeats records one such moment in his poem ‘Vacillation’:

  My fiftieth year had come and gone

  I sat, a solitary man

  In a crowded London shop

  An open book and empty cup

  On the marble table-top

  While on the shop and street I gazed

  My body of a sudden blazed

  And twenty minutes more or less

  It seemed, so great my happiness

  That I was blessed, and could bless 43

  It is an important experience, this moment of Yea-saying, of reconciliation with the ‘devil-ridden chaos’, for it gives the Outsider an important glimpse into the state of mind that the visionary wants to achieve permanently.

  It will be seen at once that ‘visionary’, in this context, does not mean literally ‘a seer of visions’, like the St. John who wrote the Apocalypse, but only someone who sees the world as positive. It might be objected that a drunken man conforms to this requirement; and this, in fact, is quite true. I have already quoted William James on the subject of drunkenness, and his point that alcohol stimulates the mystical faculties of mankind. There is obviously even a point to which ordinary physical well-being, the feeling after a good dinner, can be interpreted as ‘mystical affirmation5; but here we must walk carefully. The point about ordinary once-born affirmation, the attitude of the good-natured, eupeptic vulgarian who sees life through rose-tinted spectacles, is that it cannot be controlled. If it disappears, due to illness or some misfortune, then it h
as disappeared for good, unless it comes back of its own accord.

  The Outsider cannot regard such affirmation as meaningful or valid because it is beyond his control; he wants to say ‘I accept’, not because fate happens to be treating him rather well, but because it is his Will to accept. He believes that a ‘Yea-saying’ faculty can actually be built in to his vision, so that it is there permanently. There is a premonition of such a faculty in Van Gogh’s ‘Green Cornfield’ and ‘Road with Cypresses’; there is a premonition in the last movement of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerclavier’ Sonata, as well as certain canvases of Gauguin, and page after page of Also Sprach Zarathustra. The Outsider believes that he can establish such a way of seeing permanently in himself. But how?