The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  The parallels between the cases of father and son are immediately striking; for both, the panic fear ‘came upon them’ without any warning; both of them felt themselves cut off from all appeal to other people by it. James Sr. always referred to his experience as his ‘vastation’—the word suggests the suddenness and inexplicable nature of the vision—but readers will recognize that the ‘vastation’, in one form or another, is an experience common to most Outsiders. The difference to be noted between the two experiences of father and son is this: that the father could only speak of a. feeling of collapse; the son was able to fix it in an object, the black-haired idiot, and explain it objectively. And it is from William James’s account that we can observe the reality and the authenticity of the causes of the ‘vastation’. ‘That shape am I, potentially’ is objectively true. Elsewhere in The Varieties of Religious Experience James cites the example of a tiger leaping out of the jungle and carrying off a man ‘in the twinkling of an eye’, and various other cases to enforce his point that evil, physical pain and death cannot be dismissed by neo-Platonists as ‘inessential’; the neo-Platonist, having explained his view that ‘all is for the best in this best of possible worlds’ is just as likely to be knocked down by a bus at Marble Arch as the deepest-dyed pessimist. It is this irrelevancy of a man’s beliefs to the fate that can overtake him that supplies the most primitive ground for Existentialism, and means that a belief in some sort of providence or destiny is the essential prerequisite of all religion and most philosophy. If William James had lived to see the two World Wars, he could have cited far more impressive examples that ‘life’s a single pilgrim’: nothing in ‘the Sick Soul’ chapter of The Varieties of Religious Experience equals in horror the account by John Hersey of the effect of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or the account by a young Armenian girl of the Turkish deportation and massacre of Armenians in the First World War: ‘. .. the deadly horror which the melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction to the situation’.

  Now the interesting fact that arises out of these considerations is that awareness of these unpleasant experiences usually leads to some sort of religious solution to the question they excite. In Buddhism, for instance, the legend tells how the young Gautama Sakyamuni saw the three signs—an old man, a sick man, a dead man—and how his reaction was the same as James’s: That shape am I, potentially’, and a frantic search for a way out that led him to renounce everything. The fundamental notion of religion is freedom. Such moments of horror as James describes are a feeling: ‘I have no freedom whatever’. In Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, the word ‘bondage’ is the equivalent of the word ‘sin’ in the Christian, or at least bondage is regarded as an absolute and inevitable consequence of sin. The necessary basis for religion is the belief that freedom can be attained. James’s vision, with its implication of absolute, final and irrevocable bondage can be called the essence of evil.

  We can have no difficulty in recognizing the fact that the Outsider and freedom are always associated together. The Outsider’s problem is the problem of freedom. His preoccupation with Ultimate Yes and Ultimate No is really a preoccupation with absolute freedom or absolute bondage. Furthermore, we have only to glance back over a few examples from earlier chapters, Roquentin, Steppenwolf, Van Gogh, to see that a man becomes an Outsider when he begins to chafe under the recognition that he is not free. While he is the ordinary, once-born human being, like Camus’s Meursault, he is not free but does not realize it. That is not to say his ignorance makes no difference; it does. Meursault’s life is unreal, and he is aware of this, vaguely and subconsciously, all the time. But when he has his glimpse of reality facing death, it is to know that all his past life has been unreal.

  The implications of this train of thought are so manifold that we had better pause and get them clear before pressing on with our survey of pessimism in literature. At the end of the last chapter, we stated our conclusion that the Outsider always aims at ceasing to be an Outsider, and we enumerated three distinct types of discipline towards that end. The question that then presents itself is: Towards what? If he doesn’t want to be an Outsider, and he doesn’t want to be an ordinary well-adjusted social being, what the devil does he want to become?

  Now we have complicated the question a little more by our analysis of freedom. The Outsider wants to be free; he doesn’t want to become a healthy-minded, once-born person because he declares such a person is not free. He is an Outsider because he wants to be free. And what characterizes the ‘bondage5 of the once-born? Unreality, the Outsider replies. So we can at least say that, whatever the Outsider wants to become, that new condition of being will be characterized by a perception of reality. And reality ?—what can the Outsider tell us about that? That is more difficult. We have got two distinct sets of answers. Let us try posing the question to various Outsiders, and compare their answers: So, our question: What is Reality?

  Barbusse: Knowledge of the depths of human nature.

  Wells: The Cinema sheet; man’s utter nothingness.

  Roquentin: Naked existence that paralyses and negates the human mind.

  Meursault: Glory. The Universe’s magnificent indifference. No matter what these stupid and half-real human beings do, the reality is serene and unchanging.

  This is a fuller answer than the other three; we can follow it up by asking Meursault: And what of the human soul?

  Meursault: Its ground is the same as that of the universe. Man escapes his triviality by approaching his own fundamental indifference to everyday life.

  Hemingway too would give us some such answer. Ask him what he means by ‘reality’:

  Krebs: The moment when you do ‘the one thing, the only thing’, when you know you’re not merely a trivial, superficial counter on the social chessboard.

  Strowde: Ineffable. Unlivable. The man who has seen it is spoilt for everyday life.

  And now for the ‘practical Outsiders’.

  T. E. Lawrence: Unknowable. My glimpses of it caused me nothing but trouble because they ruined me for everyday triviality without telling me where I could find another way of living. After it, my life became a meaningless farce.

  Van Gogh: Promethean misery. Prometheus was the first Outsider.

  Nijinsky: God, at one extreme. Misery at the other. The universe is an eternal tension stretched between God and misery.

  We have two types of answer, two extremes of yes and no; Roquentin’s Existence that negates man; Nijinsky’s Existence that affirms man.

  Again, Roquentin’s answer began as a reaction to the salauds. A salaud is one who thinks his existence is necessary. And Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Lawrence? Van Gogh: No, not when he killed himself; but when he painted: Yes, most certainly. Lawrence: No, not when he committed mind suicide, but when he was driven by the idea of a mission: Yes, certainly. Nijinsky? The answer is in the Diary: I am God. Again, yes. So these three men were salauds in their highest moments! This is a hard conclusion, and we only have to think of Nijinsky, Lawrence, Van Gogh, in connexion with the town’s benefactors in the portrait gallery at Le Havre to know that such an idea is nonsense. There is a mistake somewhere, and we haven’t to look far to find it. There are two ways of solving the Outsider’s problems, the forward and the backward route. To believe your existence is necessary if you are one of these people in the portrait gallery is blasphemy; to believe it necessary after some immense spiritual labour like Lawrence’s or Van Gogh’s is only common sense. The Existentialist objects: That is mere sophistry. Van Gogh is greater than the Havre ex-Mayor only in degree, not in kind. Absolutely speaking, his existence is no more necessary.

  It is a difficult question. For what have we: that Van Gogh created great paintings when he believed his existence to have some raison d’itre, and shot himself when he ceased to have it ?

  Here it is Nijinsky who provides the answer. Could he ever have been overwhelmed by Roquentin’s nausea ? No, the idea is unthinkable; he lived too close to his instincts to wander into such a thinker
’s dilemma. He didn’t think his existence necessary with the complacent, conscious certainty of a public benefactor; he felt it—and sometimes didn’t feel it—with the inwardness of the saint. And the same applies to Van Gogh. As to Lawrence, his case history is Roquentin’s; he thought himself into disbelieving in the spiritual power that drove him. Nijinsky would never have been so foolish.

  Another curious parallel arises. Now we have contrasted Nijinsky’s instinctive self-belief with the town councillor’s conscious complacency, we are reminded of a similar distinction in certain Christian writers: in Bunyan, for instance, who writes of the life of the town councillor, the good citizen, etc., and calls him Mr. Badman; Bunyan’s Christian awakes with a jarring shock, like Roquentin, to the realization, My existence was Not Necessary.... What must I do to be saved? Sartre has explained that Camus is not really an Existentialist, but a descendant of the eighteenth-century moralists, but our parallel makes it appear as if Sartre is the real descendent of the moralists. And in fact Sartre would probably agree that some such revelation as Roquentin’s nausea lies at the bottom of Bunyan’s, What must I do to be saved? He would point out, however, that intellectual honesty prevents either himself or Roquentin from accepting the Blood of the Saviour as atonement for his own futility.

  This opens a new range of questions to us: If it is possible that Bunyan and Sartre have a common basis, where do their roads towards a solution diverge? Is it—is it thinkable that certain Christian saints were concerned about the same metaphysical problems that Sartre has produced, with the air of a conjurer flourishing a rabbit, as the latest development of twentieth-century thought? The idea is a long way ahead of the present stage of our examination, and it is time we returned to the thread of the argument. Later, we must come back to it.

  Before we digressed to consider the Outsiders’ different conceptions of reality, we were considering Camus’s Meursault, and the fact that he is not free, but does not know it. The Outsider wants freedom. He does not consider that the ordinary once-born human being is free. The fact remains that the Outsider is the rarity among human beings—which places him rather in the position of the soldier who claims he is the only one in step in the platoon. What about all the millions of men and women in our modern cities; are they really all the Outsider claims they are: futile, unreal, unutterably lost without knowing it?

  James asked himself the same question at the end of the lecture we have drawn on already in this chapter: once born or twice born? Healthy-minded or Outsider?

  In our own attitude, not yet abandoned, of impartial onlookers, what are we bound to say of this quarrel? It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid minded-ness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and simply living in the light of the good, is splendid as long as it will work.... But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy oneself, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine....9

  Inadequate, but not wholly wrong, James implies. The Outsider is more sweeping about it, and says without hesitation: shallow, stupid and short-sighted. The Outsiders we have listened to in the course of this book have been more articulate than the ‘morbid-minded’ souls James chose, and they have established their position with considerable dialectical skill. But this position is incomplete, and the Outsider would be the first to admit it. They have given adequate reasons for disliking the ‘once-born’ bourgeois and proving that such a creature is in no way superior to the Man Outside. But the bourgeois has every right to ask a sarcastic, What then? How much better off is your Outsider? Isn’t this act of showing us a row of morbid-minded degenerates (with all respect to Van Gogh, of course) and proving that they are types of the ‘higher man’, tantamount to asking us to throw out our dirty water before we get any clean?

  This is incontrovertible. The Outsider must make his position look more positive before we can seriously consider any claim as to his superiority over the man in the street. And at the present stage of our analysis, it is anything but positive. For what have we?—the assurance of several men that evil is universal and must be faced. Well, we don’t mind this; Hesse’s Emil Sinclair made a convincing case of it. But now we have a number of writers who inform us that evil is so universal, so unsusceptible to adaptation into a ‘higher scheme of good’, that the act of facing it honestly will bring the mind to the point of insanity. What are we to say to this ? What if the ‘brutal thunderclap of halt’ takes the form of the choice, Dishonesty or insanity ? What use is honesty to an insane mind ? Which of us would not choose dishonesty?

  But if we choose dishonesty, what happens to our philosophers’ desire to get at fact?

  This is a difficult question; we could not do better than leave it in the hands of an Outsider whose trained mind brought him to face precisely that problem: to the ‘pagan Existentialist* philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche.

  But before we pass on to speak of him, there are two other modern expressions of ‘literary pessimism’ that may broaden our grasp of the subject; we have, in fact, already referred to both in other connexions: Franz Kafka and T. S. Eliot. Kafka’s story ‘The Fasting Showman’ is the climax of his work,10 his clearest statement of the Outsider’s position. It deals with a professional ascetic, a man who starves himself on fairgrounds for money. In the days of the fasting showman’s popularity, it had always been his wish to go on fasting indefinitely, for he was never at the limit of hi* endurance when compelled to break his fast. When public interest in his feats of abstention wanes, he is finally assigned a cage in an unimportant corner of the fair-ground; there he sits amid his straw, forgotten, able at last to fast for as long as he likes. He is so completely forgotten that, one day, someone notices his cage and asks why a perfectly good cage is left empty; they look inside, and find the fasting showman dying, almost completely fleshless. As he dies, he whispers his secret in the ear of an overseer: it was not that he had any tremendous willpower to abstain from food; there was simply no food he ever liked.

  Here again, we have a perfect symbol for the Outsider, that would have served us as well as Barbusse for a starting-point. Lack of appetite for life, that is his problem. All human acts carry the same stigma of futility; what else should he do but sit in his straw and die?

  The development of T. S. Eliot brought him to expressing the same point; the most striking lines in his poetry are his symbols of futility; in his first volume, Prufrock (1917):

  I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

  In ‘Gerontion’ (1920):

  Vacant shuttles

  Weave the wind. I have no ghosts.

  An old man in a draughty house

  Under a windy knob.

  In the ‘Waste Land’ (1922):

  I see crowds of people walking around in a ring.

  and:

  On Margate sands I can connect

  Nothing with nothing

  The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

  Culminating in The Hollow Men’, with its vision of utter negation, a despair as complete as that of William James’s vastation: complete denial of freedom and even its possibility:

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  This being the point to which our analysis has brought us at present, it is interesting to note the way Eliot developed. He has left no stage in his religious evolution undocumented, and we can follow the process stage by stage in his poetry. ‘Ash Wednesday’ (1933) begins with a repetition of the position of The Hollow Men’:

  Because I do not hope to turn again

  Because I do not hope

  Because I do not hope to turn....

  Then follows a statement of the position we are already familiar with: middle-aging despair, loss of faith, an
d the inability to stop thinking:

  I pray that I may forget

  Those matters that with myself I too much discuss

  Too much explain....

  Endless thinking to no purpose, as with T. E. Lawrence, has brought the poet to a point where he prays:

  Teach us to care and not to care

  Teach us to sit still.

  But the metaphysical point upon which Eliot bases his movement of retreat from the impasse is stated in the fourth poem:

  Will the veiled sister pray

  For the children at the gate

  Who will not go away and cannot pray?

  Will the veiled sister between the slender

  Yew trees pray for those who offend her

  And are terrified and cannot surrender....

  This is the Outsider’s extremity. He does not prefer not to believe; he doesn’t like feeling that futility gets the last word in the universe; his human nature would like to find something it can answer to with complete assent. But his honesty prevents his accepting a solution that he cannot reason about. His next question is naturally: Supposing a solution does exist somewhere, undreamed of by me, inconceivable to me, can I yet hope that it might one day force itself upon me without my committing myself to a preliminary gesture of faith which (in point of fact) I cannot make?