The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  Admittedly, for us, reading the novel half a century after it was written, there is not so much to choose between the novelist’s truth and the hero’s. The ‘dramas’ enacted in the next room remind us sometimes of Sardou, sometimes of Dostoevsky when he is more concerned to expound an idea than to give it body in people and events. Yet Barbusse is sincere, and this ideal, to ‘stand for truth’, is the one discernible current that flows through all twentieth-century literature.

  Barbusse’s Outsider has all of the characteristics of the type. Is he an Outsider because he’s frustrated and neurotic ? Or is he neurotic because of some deeper instinct that pushes him into solitude ? He is preoccupied with sex, with crime, with disease. Early in the novel he recounts the after-dinner conversation of a barrister; he is speaking of the trial of a man who has raped and strangled a little girl. All other conversation stops, and the Outsider observes his neighbours closely as they listen to the revolting details:

  A young mother, with her daughter at her side, has half got up to leave, but cannot drag herself away....

  And the men; one of them, simple, placid, I heard distinctly panting. Another, with the neutral appearance of a bourgeois, talks commonplaces with difficulty to his young neighbour. But he looks at her as if he would pierce deeply into her, and deeper yet. His piercing glance is stronger than himself, and he is ashamed of it...7

  The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretence, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.

  That is his case. But it is weakened by his obvious abnormality, his introversion. It looks, in fact, like an attempt at self-justification by a man who knows himself to be degenerate, diseased, self-divided. There is certainly self-division. The man who watches a woman undressing has the red eyes of an ape; yet the man who sees two young lovers, really alone for the first time, who brings out all the pathos, the tenderness and uncertainty when he tells about it, is no brute; he is very much human. And the ape and the man exist in one body; and when the ape’s desires are about to be fulfilled, he disappears and is succeeded by the man, who is disgusted with the ape’s appetites.

  This is the problem of the Outsider. We shall encounter it under many different forms in the course of this book: on a metaphysical level, with Sartre and Camus (where it is called Existentialism), on a religious level, with Boehme and Kierkegaard; even on a criminal level, with Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin (who also raped a small girl and was responsible for her death). The problem remains essentially the same; it is merely a question of discounting more or less as irrelevant.

  Barbusse has suggested that it is the fact that his hero sees deeper that makes him an Outsider; at the same time, he states that he has ‘no special genius, no message to bestow’, etc., and from his history during the remainder of the book, we have no reason to doubt his word. Indubitably, the hero is mediocre; he can’t write for toffee, and the whole book is full of clichés. It is necessary to emphasize this in order to rid ourselves of the temptation to identify the Outsider with the artist, and so to oversimplify the question: disease or insight? Many great artists have none of the characteristics of the Outsider. Shakespeare, Dante, Keats were all apparently normal and socially well-adjusted, lacking anything that could be pitched on as disease or nervous disability. Keats, who always makes a very clear and romantic distinction between the poet and the ordinary man, seems to have had no shades of inferiority complexes or sexual neuroses lurking in the background of his mind; no D. H. Lawrence-ish sense of social-level, no James Joycian need to assert his intellectual superiority; above all, no sympathy whatever with the attitude of Villiers De Lisle Adam’s Axel (so much admired by Yeats): ‘As for living, our servants can do that for us.’ If any man intended to do his own living for himself, it was Keats. And he is undoubtedly the rule rather than the exception among great poets. The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider. What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, of unreality. Even Keats could write, in a letter to Browne just before he died: 1 feel as if I had died already and am now living a posthumous existence.’ This is the sense of unreality, that can strike out of a perfectly clear sky. Good health and strong nerves can make it unlikely; but that may be only because the man in good health is thinking about other things and doesn’t look in the direction where the uncertainty lies. And once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place. Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. ‘He sees too deep and too much’, and what he sees is essentially chaos. For the bourgeois, the world is fundamentally an orderly place, with a disturbing element of the irrational, the terrifying, which his preoccupation with the present usually permits him to ignore. For the Outsider, the world is not rational, not orderly. When he asserts his sense of anarchy in the face of the bourgeois’ complacent acceptance, it is not simply the need to cock a snook at respectability that provokes him; it is a distressing sense that truth must be told at all costs, otherwise there can be no hope for an ultimate restoration of order. Even if there seems no room for hope, truth must be told. (The example we are turning to now is a curious instance of this.) The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos. He may have no reason to believe that chaos is positive, the germ of life (in the Kabbala, chaos— tohu bohu—is simply a state in which order is latent; the egg is the ‘chaos’ of the bird); in spite of this, truth must be told, chaos must be faced.

  The last published work of H. G. Wells gives us an insight into such an awakening. Mind at the End of Its Tether seems to have been written to record some revelation:

  The writer finds very considerable reason for believing that within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by aeons, there has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life—and not simply human life but all self-conscious existence—has been going on since its beginning. If his thinking has been sound ... the end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded. He is telling you the conclusions to which reality has driven his own mind, and he thinks you may be interested enough to consider them, but he is not attempting to impose them on you.8

  This last sentence is noteworthy for its curious logic. Wells’s conviction that life is at an end is, as he says, a ‘stupendous proposition’. If it is true, then it negates the whole pamphlet; obviously, since it negates all life and its phenomena. Vaguely aware of the contradiction, Wells explains that he is writing ‘under the urgency of a scientific training that obliged him to clarify the world and his ideas to the limits of his capacity’.

  His renascent intelligence finds itself confronted with strange, convincing realities so overwhelming that, were he indeed one of those logical, consistent people we incline to claim we are, he would think day and night in a passion of concentration, dismay and mental struggle upon the ultimate disaster that confronts our species. We are nothing of the sort. We live with reference to past experience, not to future events, however inevitable.9

  In commenting on an earlier book called The Conquest of Time, Wells comments: ‘Such conquest as that book admits is done by time rather than man.’

  Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away They fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.10

  This is the authentic Shakespearian pessimism, straight out of Macbeth or Timon. It is a surprising note from the man who had spent his life preaching the credo: If you don’t like your life you can change it: the optimist of Men Like Gods and A Modern Utopia. Wells declares that, if the reader will follow him closely, he will give the reason for this change of outlook:

  The reality glares c
oldly and harshly upon any of those who can wrench their minds free ... to face the unsparing question that has overwhelmed the writer. They discover that a frightful queerness has come into lifeThe habitual interest of the writer is his critical anticipation. Of everything he asks: To what will this lead? And it was natural for him to assume that there was a limit set to change, that new things and events would appear, but that they would appear consistently, preserving the natural sequence of life. So that in the present vast confusion of our world, there was always the assumption of an ultimate restoration of rationality.... It was merely the fascinating question of what forms the new rational phase would assume, what over-man, Erewhon or what not would break through the transitory clouds and turmoil. To this the writer set his mind.

  He did his utmost to pursue that upward spiral... towards their convergence in a new phase in the story of life, and the more he weighed the realities before him, the less he was able to detect any convergence whatever. Changes had ceased to be systematic, and the further he estimated the course they seemed to be taking, the greater the divergence. Hitherto, events had been held together by a certain logical consistency, as the heavenly bodies have been held together by gravitation. Now it is as if that cord had vanished, and everything was driving anyhow to anywhere at a steadily increasing velocityThe pattern of things to come faded away.11

  PAGE NOTE: Readers of Professor Whitehead will probably feel that Wells is a bad example of Whitehead’s old enemy, ‘the bifurcation of nature’, i.e. that as a man of science, he has gone to extremes of dividing nature into ‘things as they are’ (i.e. the things science is concerned with) and things as they are perceived by human beings (i.e. the things art and music are concerned with), and that Wells’s feeling that mind and nature have ceased to run parallel is only an extreme consequence of his attitude. Certainly Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of organism’ is concerned with making the same demands for a wholeness of conception of mind and nature that I am concerned with in this book; a parallel of the thought of Professor Whitehead with that of T. E. Hulme would probably shed a great deal of light on the problems of contemporary humanism.

  In the pages that follow, these ideas are enlarged on and repeated, without showing us how they were arrived at. ‘A harsh queerness is coming into things’, and a paragraph later: ‘We pass into the harsh glare of hitherto incredible novelty.... The more strenuous the analysis, the more inescapable the sense of mental defeat.’ The cinema sheet stares us in the face. That sheet is the actual fabric of our being. Our loves, our hates, our wars and battles, are no more than phantasmagoria dancing on that fabric, themselves as insubstantial as a dream.’

  There are obviously immense differences between the attitudes of Wells and Barbusse’s hero, but they have in common the Outsider’s fundamental attitude: non-acceptance of life, of human life lived by human beings in a human society. Both would say: Such a life is a dream; it is not real. Wells goes further than Barbusse in the direction of complete negation. He ends his first chapter with the words: There is no way out or round or through.’ There can be no doubt that as far as Wells is concerned, he certainly sees ‘too deep and too much’. Such knowledge is an impasse, the dead end of Eliot’s Gerontion: ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’

  Wells had promised to give his reasons for arriving at such a stupendous proposition. In the remainder of the pamphlet (nineteen pages) he does nothing of the sort; he repeats his assertion. ‘Our doomed formicary’, ‘harsh implacable hostility to our universe’, ‘no pattern of any kind’. He talks vaguely of Einstein’s paradox of the speed of light, of the ‘radium clock’ (a method geologists use to date the earth). He even contradicts his original statement that all life is at an end; it is only the species Homo sapiens that is played out. ‘The stars in their courses have turned against him and he has to give place to some other animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in on mankind.’ In the final pages of the pamphlet, his trump of the last judgement has changed into the question: Can civilization be saved?

  ‘But my own temperament makes it unavoidable for me to doubt that there will not be that small minority who will see life out to its inevitable end.’12

  All the same, the pamphlet must be considered the most pessimistic single utterance in modern literature, together with T. S. Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’. And Eliot’s despair was essentially religious; we should be tempted to assume that Wells’s despair is religious too, if it were not for his insistence that he is speaking of a scientific fact, an objective reality.

  It is not surprising that the work received scant attention from Wells’s contemporaries: to make its conclusions credible it would need the formidable dialectical apparatus of Schopenhauer’s Welt als Wille und Vorstellung or Spengler’s Decline of the West. I have heard it described by a writer-contemporary of Wells as ‘an outburst of peevishness at a world that refused to accept him as its Messiah’. Certainly, if we accept it on the level on which he wrote it—acquiescing to every sentence— we feel the stirring of problems that seem to return into themselves. Why did he write it if he can hold out no hope of salvation? If the conclusions he has reached negate his own past life, and the possible futures of all the human race, where do we go from there? Wells’s thesis is that we have never been going anywhere—we have been carried along by our delusions, believing that any movement is better than none. Whereas the truth is that the reverse, no movement, is the final answer, the answer to the question: What will men do when they see things as they are?

  It is a long way from Mr. Polly’s discovery (If you don’t like your life you can change it) to: There is no way out or round or through. Barbusse has gone half-way, with his, Truth, what do they mean by it?, which has as a corollary, Change, what difference does it make? Wells has gone the whole distance, and landed us on the doorstep of the Existentialist problem: Must thought negate life?

  Before we pass on to this new aspect of the Outsider’s problem, there is a further point of comparison between Barbusse and Wells that deserves comment. Barbusse’s hero is an Outsider when we meet him; probably he was always an Outsider. Wells was very definitely an Insider most of his life. Tirelessly he performed his duty to society, gave it good advice upon how to better itself. He was the scientific spirit incarnate: reviewing the history of the life and drawing conclusions, reviewing economics and social history, political and religious history; a descendant of the French Encyclopedists who never ceased to compile and summarize. From him: Truth, what do they mean by it? would have elicited a compendious review of all the ideas of truth in the history of the seven civilizations. There is something so shocking in such a man’s becoming an Outsider that we feel inclined to look for physical causes for the change: Wells was a sick, a tired man, when he wrote Mind at the End of Its Tether. May we not accept this as the whole cause and moving force behind the pamphlet?

  Unfortunately, no. Wells declared his conclusions to be objective; if that is so, then to say he was sick when he wrote them down means no more than to say he was wearing a dressing-gown and slippers. It is our business to judge whether the world can be seen in such a way that Wells’s conclusions are inevitable; if so, to decide whether such a way of looking at things is truer, more valid, more objective, than our usual way of seeing. Even if we decide in advance that the answer is No, there may be much to learn from the exercise of changing our viewpoint.

  ***

  The Outsider’s claim amounts to the same thing as Wells’s hero’s in The Country of the Blind: that he is the one man able to see. To the objection that he is unhealthy and neurotic, he replies: ‘In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’ His case, in fact, is that he is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn’t know it is sick. Certain Outsiders we shall consider later would go even further and declare that it is human nature that is sick, and the Outsider is the man who faces that unpleasant fact. These need not concern us yet; for the moment we have a negative position which the O
utsider declares to be the essence of the world as he sees it. ‘Truth/ what do they mean by it.’ ‘There is no way out, or round, or through.’ And it is to this we must turn our attention.

  When Barbusse made his hero ask the first question, he was almost certainly unaware that he was paraphrasing the central problem of a Danish philosopher who had died in 1855 in Copenhagen. Søren Kierkegaard had also decided that philosophic discussion was altogether meaningless, and his reason was Wells’s reason: Reality negates it. Or, as Kierkegaard put it, existence negates it. Kierkegaard’s attack was directed in particular against the German metaphysician Hegel, who had (rather like Wells) been trying to ‘justify the ways of God to man’ by talking about the goal of history and man’s place in space and time. Kierkegaard was a deeply religious soul for whom all this was unutterably shallow. He declared: Put me in a System and you negate me—I am not just a mathematical symbol—I am.

  Now obviously, such a denial that logic and scientific analysis can lead to truth has curious consequences. Our science is built on the assumption that a statement like ‘All bodies fall at thirty-two feet per second in the earth’s gravitational field’ has a definite meaning. But if you deny the ultimate validity of logic, it becomes nonsensical. And if you don’t deny logic, it is difficult, thinking along these lines, to pull up short of Wells and John Stuart Mill. That is why Kierkegaard phrases it: Is an Existentialist System possible; or, to put it in another way, Can one live a philosophy without negating either the life or the philosophy? Kierkegaard’s conclusion was No, but one can live a religion without negating life or religion. We need not pause here over the reasoning that led him to this conclusion (readers interested enough can consult the Unscientific Postscript). What is worth noticing at this point is that his affirmation of Christian values did not prevent him from violently attacking the Christian Church on the grounds that it had solved the problem of living its religion by cutting off its arms and legs to make it fit life. It is also an amusing point that the other great Existentialist philosopher of the nineteenth century, Frederick Nietzsche, attacked the Christian church on the opposite grounds of its having solved the problem by chopping down life to fit the Christian religion. Now, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were trained thinkers, and both took a certain pride in stating that they were Outsiders. It follows that we should find in their works a skilled defence of the Outsider and his position. And this in fact is what we do find.