The Outsider (23 page)
Authors: Colin Wilson
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, and 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?
The poet finds that he can answer this question with a
‘
yes
’
. His position is understandable. He begins with Reason, which, as it were, makes him self-sufficient (as it made the Victorians) and he subjects all to the test of reason. Ultimately, his reason informs him: you are
not
self-sufficient; you are futile, floating in a void. This is unanswerable. What is he to do? Demolish his own premises?
‘
Since I am futile, my reason must be futile too, in which case, its conclusions are lies anyway.
’
That is too much. He must commit himself to the idea: There may be something which is not futile, but it is completely beyond me,
incomprehensible to me. And what if there isn
’
t anything
‘
beyond
’
... no, he
cannot
say
‘
I believe
5
. Hence the question:
Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender?
With these lines, Eliot was over his stile, out of the Outsider
’
s position. It was not a long step to realizing that this experience of terror on the edge of nothingness was not an unfamiliar experience to many of the saints, Christian and otherwise, and that therefore religion need not be synonymous with a belief in fairy-stories. Admittedly, this is still a long way from actually
joining
a Church, for it is one thing to admit that some of the Church
’
s doctrines are intellectually tenable; quite another to offer full assent to the tremendous compromises which the Church is forced to accept in order to make a religion in which millions of Insiders will be comfortable, as well as the occasional Outsider.
In going on to speak of Eliot
’
s development in
‘
Ash Wednesday
’
, I have made a point which is not especially relevant in this chapter; I have done this for the convenience of not having to split up the story of Eliot
’
s development. Still, readers who feel dubious about the connexion of the last two paragraphs with what has gone before can dismiss them as unproved; we shall have to return to the subject later from a completely different angle, and for the moment it is not important.
For the moment, we are concerned with the question, Ultimate Yes or Ultimate No, and compelled to admit that most of our analyses so far point to the answer, Ultimate No. Vaslav Nijinsky would object that this is because we treat Reason as if it were capable of affording a key all on its own. Well, that is the philosopher
’
s business. But a philosopher who did not do so... he would be not quite
‘
a philosopher
’
, perhaps ? Would such a person be able to offer any helpful suggestions about the Outsider ? This is the question we are to keep in mind while examining the contribution of Friedrich Nietzsche.
* * *
Nietzsche was born at Roecken in Saxony in 1844. His father, like Van Gogh
’
s, was a Protestant clergyman. Recently
published documents show that Nietzsche was intensely religious as a child, and that during his adolescence he considered entering a monastery.
11
We shall attempt to show that the impulses that drove to his life
’
s work—his devaluation of all values—were at bottom, religious impulses. The later attack on Christendom, for instance, sprang from a feeling that Christendom was
not religious enough.
But unlike Kierkegaard, who attacked Christendom for the same reasons, Nietzsche did not support the idea of Christianity. His dislike of it went to the length of proclaiming its errors to be fundamental, worthy to be pitched-out lock, stock and barrel. Yet all his life Nietzsche preached his ideas with the fervour of a prophet, and a prophet cannot be an irreligious man. He asserted that Christians generally are intellectually dishonest and morally lazy, and that these grave deficiencies are partly accountable to what the Christian believes. Nietzsche had an alternative system of belief, which we must examine in due course. What is important is the fact that he began as a fervent Christian. In a letter written when he was twenty-one and militantly atheistic, he tells his friend Von Gersdorff:
‘
If Christianity means belief in a historical person or event, I have nothing to do with it. But if it means the need for salvation, then I can treasure it.
’
And this is the reason why Nietzsche must be recognized as a religious man; above everything else, he was aware of the need for what he called
‘
salvation
’
. We may disagree with him; we may even agree with a Jesuit theologian that his heresies were
‘
poisonous and detestable
’
, but we cannot doubt the sincerity of his need for
‘
salvation
’
.
Nietzsche was a romantic; he belongs to the same tradition as Schiller, Novalis, Hoffmann. As a boy and adolescent he read a great deal, took lonely walks, wrote poetry, thought about himself and his possible destiny; at thirteen he wrote an introspective autobiography; a year later he records his intention of dedicating his life to the service of God. Among his friends he was nicknamed
‘
the little pastor
’
. But his conception of religion was always elastic; a tradition tells how he and his sister once built a makeshift altar on the site of an old pagan sacrificial altar in a churchyard, and then paced gravely around it, intoning
‘
Odin hear us
’
into the rising smoke.
At fourteen Nietzsche was sent to the famous Landschule at
Pforta; this was the school that had produced Novalis, Fichte, the Schlegels. There, without his sister to share his thoughts, Nietzsche dramatized himself as the romantic hero. A later aphorism asserts:
‘
All great men are play actors of their own ideal.
5
Nietzsche
’
s ideal was compounded from Byron
’
s
Manfred,
Schiller
’
s
Robbers
and Noyalis
’
s
Heinrich.
He learned from Novalis that every man is potentially hero and genius; that only inertia keeps men mediocre. The lesson sank deep; when he read Emerson
’
s essays at sixteen he was elated to find Novalis and his own intuitions confirmed in the pronouncements on
‘
Self-reliance
’
and The OversouP. From Emerson he absorbed an element of Stoicism that never left him till the end. Once, listening to a conversation among schoolboys about Mucius Scaevola, Nietzsche set a heap of lighted matches on fire on the palm of his hand to demonstrate that it could be done. New influences on his mind were undermining his Lutheran training. He bought the piano score of Wagner
’
s
Tristan und Isolde
and learnt it by heart. He helped to found a society of intellectuals called
‘
Germania
’
, and wrote essays for its magazine. The essay on Tate and History
’
that he published in
Germania
stated:
‘
Vast upheavals will happen in the future, as soon as men realize that the structure of Christianity is only based on
assumptions.
...
I have tried to deny everything.
...
’
Certainly his innate religiousness became at this period (to quote his
Gaya Scienza)
‘
a will to truth at all costs, a youthful madness in the love of truth
’
. And what is equally certain from his own utterances is that he found himself close to the edge of William James
’
s condition of moral horror, complete negation, like looking into an abyss. James quotes an example which is worth requoting for the insight it gives us into Nietzsche
’
s mind at this time; it concerns the French philosopher Jouffroy, and it illustrates the way in which the questioning mind can systematically weed out all affections and beliefs that seem groundless, until it is left in a vacuum that terrifies the human soul. Jouffroy writes:
12
I shall never forget that night of September in which the veil that concealed from me my own incredulity was torn. I hear again my steps in the narrow, naked chamber where, long after the hour of sleep had come, I had the habit o
f
walking up and down Anxiously I followed my thoughts
as they descended from layer to layer towards the foundation of my consciousness, scattering one by one all the illusions that until then had screened its windings from my view, making them at every moment more clearly visible.
Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor clings to the fragments of his vessel, vainly, frightened at the unknown void into which I was about to float. I turned with them towards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was dear and sacred to me; the inflexible current of my thought was too strong—parents, family, memory, beliefs—it forced me to let go of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and more severe as it drew near its term, and it did not stop until the end was reached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind, nothing was left that stood erect. This moment was a frightful one, and when towards morning, I threw myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smiling and so full, go out like a fire, and before me another life opened, sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must live alone, alone with my fatal thought that had exiled me there, and which I was tempted to curse. The days that followed this were the saddest days of my life.