The Outsider

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In refusing to face evil, Sinclair has gained nothing and lost a great deal; the Buddhist scripture expenses it: those who refuse to discriminate might as well be dead. Indeed, Wilson toyed with the idea of doing just that in 1958, when he helped found a new literary-political movement, the Spartacans, to replace iniquitous democracy with the dictatorship of the "expert minority" of the spiritual elite. The Spartacan movement soon fizzled out, but not before attracting the eager support of Oswald Mosley. The history of the Romanovs is an Elizabethan tragedy that lasts for three centuries. Its keynote is cruelty, a barbaric, pointless kind of cruelty that has always been common in the East, but that came to Europe only recently, in the time of Hitler. Jung fiercely resented the implication that he was a hypocritical, self-seeking Judas, a 'rat'. Yet there was just enough truth in it to strike home. He was undoubtedly a man who liked his own way, no matter what the cost to others. The point I wish to make is that I became aware that we discipline our minds to see only certain aspects of the world; life is complicated, and we need all our wits about us to deal with its complexities. There would be no great point in having second sight or thaumaturgic powers for most of us. But it is worth observing that they can generally be developed where needed.

For me though, The Outsider’s real importance will always lie in its effect on my own evolution. In his 1978 introduction to a new edition, Wilson writes that the early success of the book gave him ‘a feeling like leaving harbour’, (1978, p. 19). And the book had a similar effect on me. It was like being given a code which allowed me to decipher my mental confusion and understand myself. It was a matter of self-esteem too – The Outsider told me that there wasn’t something wrong with me after all; on the contrary, it was a positive thing to be different. Together with the other books of the Outsider cycle which I devoured soon afterwards – particularly Beyond the Outsider and Introduction to the New Existentialism – it gave me a sense of identity and clarity, a notion of the path that I was meant to follow through life. I’m still following that path – and I will always be grateful for Wilson’s guidance. The everyday world demands our attention, and prevents us from sinking into ourselves. As a romantic, I have always resented this: I like to sink into myself. The problems and anxieties of living make it difficult. Well, now I had an anxiety that referred to something inside of me, and it reminded me that my inner world was just as real and important as the world around me.More recently, this new sense of connection to nature has given rise to the environmental and ecological movements, a return to the empathic and respectful stance towards nature of many of the world’s indigenous peoples. The old duality between the ego and the body – and the sexual repression this gave rise to – has begun to fade away too, resulting in a more open attitude to sex and the human body. And of course, over the last few decades we have also had the ‘Aquarian Conspiracy’ – a massive upsurge in interest in eastern spiritual traditions, and self-development. The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed. Once again, I experienced that overwhelming joy in the universe that I had felt in London outside the V and A. But this time, my consciousness of the world seemed larger, more complex. It was the mystic's sensation of oneness, of everything blending into everything else. Everything I looked at reminded me of something else, which also became present to my consciousness, as if I were simultaneously seeing a million worlds and smelling a million scents and hearing a million sounds-- not mixed up, but each separate and clear. I was overwhelmed with a sense of my smallness in the face of this vast, beautiful, objective universe, this universe whose chief miracle is that it exists, as well as myself. It is no dream, but a great garden in which life is trying to obtain a foothold. I experienced a desire to burst into tears of gratitude; then I controlled it, and the feeling subsided into a calm sense of immense, infinite beauty. Despite their highly positive tone, some initial reviewers complained that Wilson’s use of term ‘Outsider’ was so broad that it became virtually meaningless. As J.B. Priestley noted, for example, ‘[The Outsiders’] personalities are so widely various, they present so many different psychological types, that any discussion of them based on their common likeness does not takes us very far’ (1988, p.94). This is even truer of Wilson’s ‘sequel’, Religion and the Rebel, where figures such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and George Bernard Shaw sit uneasily next to Rimbaud and Wittgenstein. (In his introduction to the 1984 reprint of Religion and the Rebel, Wilson himself notes that ‘many people I discuss as Outsiders…could just as easily be labelled Insiders’ [Wilson, 1984, pp. viii-ix]).

We are now living in an age of literary exhaustion; we get used to the bleak landscape. Cyril Connolly said that the writer's business is to produce masterpieces; but what masterpieces have been produced in the past fifty years?For Jung, the 'psychic world' (i.e. the world of the mind) was an independent reality, and it was possible to travel there and make the acquaintance of its inhabitants. Wilson disagrees. "I suspect that I am probably the greatest writer of the 20th century," he says. "In 500 years time, they'll say, 'Wilson was a genius', because I'm a turning-point in intellectual history.' Characters are then brought to the fore (including the title character from Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf). These are presented as examples of those who have insightful moments of lucidity in which they feel as though things are worthwhile/meaningful amidst their shared, usual, experience of nihilism and gloom. Sartre's Nausea is herein the key text – and the moment when the hero listens to a song in a cafe which momentarily lifts his spirits is the outlook on life to be normalized.

As Wilson pointed out later, this struggle is essentially an evolutionary urge. From the inner point of view – as opposed to the outer, physical level – evolution is a process of living beings becoming progressively more conscious: more aware of their surroundings, of their own selves and their predicament as living beings in the world, with more autonomy and freedom to control their own actions and their environment. And so by intensifying and expanding his own consciousness, the Outsider is contributing to this process. He is effectively an agent of evolution, attempting to carry the evolutionary process further forward. His urge for self-transcendence is an individual manifestation of the evolutionary impulse to move forward to more complex and conscious life forms. As Wilson wrote in 1967, ‘Evolution has been trying [through the Outsider] to create a human being capably of travelling faster than sound. Capable, that is, of a seriousness, a mental intensity that is completely foreign to the average human animal’ (Wilson, 1978, p. 303). Significantly, Wilson's most prominent enthusiasts were all "Mandarins" - bellettrists who were younger members or descendants of the Bloomsbury group, upper-middle-class and upper-middle-aged, high priests of high art who worshipped at the altar of modernism and all things sophisticated and French. Wilson dropped all the right names - foreign, highbrow, impressively daunting on both counts - and, with his vague proclamations about the spiritual crisis in modern society and the alienation of his genius Outsiders, pressed all the right buttons. The main problem for the average reader -- particularly of The Great Beast -- is that Crowley seems such an intolerable show-off that it is hard to believe anything he says. I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.

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