The Outsider (11 page)
Authors: Colin Wilson
This prose, that echoes the rhythms of
Marius the Epicurean,
is deliberately hypnotic, intended to induce a dream state. It
contrasts sharply with the passages of observation:
The stout student who stood below them on the steps, farted briefly. Dixon turned towards him, saying in a soft voice:
‘
Did an angel speak?
’
Cranly turned also, and said vehemently, but without anger:
‘
Goggins, you
’
re the flamingest dirty devil I ever met, do you know?
’
4
The first two passages are the prose of
‘
an idle singer of an empty day
’
; the third has an aggressive desire to
‘
stand for truth instead of imagination
’
. It could not have been written before the second decade of the twentieth century. And the two are typical of the different approaches of the realist Outsider of the first two chapters, and the romantic Outsider.
The difference is considerable. The realist asks: Truth, what do they mean by it? The romantic wouldn
’
t dream of asking such a question; his cry is: Where can I find Truth? He has no doubt whatever that (in the words of another poet who began as a romantic Outsider
, [
W. B. Yeats: 'The Shadowy Waters']
) :
What the world
’
s million lips are searching for
Must be substantial somewhere...
The Existentialist attitude has been replaced by a Platonic Idealist approach; the search for the idea, the
‘
insubstantial image that his souls so constantly beheld
’
. The Sartre of
La
Nausée
would not countenance the Joyce of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
for a moment; Stephen
’
s urge to
‘
forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race
’
cannot exist at the side of the belief that
‘
there
’
s no adventure
’
. But if our approach is valid, the realist and the romantic Outsider have something fundamental in common; for we are assuming that a man becomes an Outsider when he becomes alive to certain questions which we have called, for convenience,
‘
the Outsider
’
s problems
’
. The purpose of the rest of this chapter is to decide what
are
the Outsider
’
s problems in the terms of the romantic Outsider. For this purpose, it would be sufficient to take any of the
‘
romantic
’
novelists or poets, and determine from his own works what he regards as his central theme. If we decided upon Shelley or Coleridge, their bias could be defined respectively in Platonic or Kantian terms. German literature can offer many examples whose metaphysics would be more difficult to label: Schiller, Novalis, Fichte, Lessing, Holderlin; or, coming down to modern times, Thomas Mann, R. M. Rilke, Hermann Hesse. In France there is Marcel Proust, whose
‘
Portrait of the Artist
’
extends through twelve volumes, or a whole earlier generation that includes Rimbaud and Mallarme, and even extends to curiously literary painters like Gauguin and Puvis de Ghavannes. Any of these men would fit into our Outsider plan, and all have in common an approach that can be called the romantic.
In this chapter, I intend to deal with the work of Hermann Hesse; not because it has any great advantages over the work of any of the other men I have mentioned in defining the Outsider
’
s problems, because the magnitude of Hesse
’
s achievement is hardly recognized in English-speaking countries, where translations of most of his works are difficult to come by.
[
NOTE:
At the time of writing, four out of five of the major novels have been out of print in England for several years, and none of the earlier novels has been translated into English.]
* * *
Hesse
’
s achievement divides clearly into two periods; there is that of the poetry and autobiographical novels published between 1902 and 1916, and the period of the five major novels, extending from 1919
(Demian)
to 1945
{The Bead Game).
The work of the earlier period makes use of the peculiarly German form, the
Bildungsroman,
the novel of education. The
Bildungsroman
sets out to describe the evolution of the
‘
hero
’
s soul
’
; it is fictional biography that is mainly concerned with its hero
’
s reaction to ideas, or the development of his ideas about
‘
life
’
from his experience. The
Bildungsroman
is a sort of laboratory in which the hero conducts an experiment in living. For this reason, it is a particularly useful medium for writers whose main concern is a philosophical answer to the practical question: What shall we do with our fives? Moreover, it is an interesting observation that as soon as a writer is seized with the need to treat a problem he feels seriously about in a novel, the novel automatically becomes a sort of
Bildungsroman.
The
Bildungsroman
is the natural form of serious fictional art, no
matter how short the period of its hero
’
s life that it treats. Shakespeare
’
s
Hamlet
is one of the earliest
Bildungsromans
in English, because it treats the evolution of Hamlet
’
s
‘
soul
’
, his realization that killing and revenge are not simple matters of the old
lex talionis,
but something that he
feels
to be unsatisfactory as a solution of his personal problems. It will be seen at once that, within this definition, most of the books we have considered are
Bildungsromans.
The
‘
novel of education
’
entered modern literature with Goethe
’
s
Wilhelm Meister
(although Johnson
’
s
Rasselas
preceded it by a quarter of a century).
Hesse admits his debt to Goethe, and the autobiographical sequence that begins with
Hermann Lauchers
in 1902 shows how great the debt was.
Unterwegs
(1916) is the last of the series. After that, there was a break of three years; in those three years great changes took place in Hesse
’
s outlook. The war, the mass-murder, the defeat of Germany, produced a mental cataclysm that made Hesse review all his early work and find it valueless. Details of this period are lacking, but when Hesse reappeared in literature with
Demian,
the results of the upheaval, and the uncertain attempts to rebuild, are apparent; the psychology is more penetrating, the questioning of values is deeper than ever before.
Demian
is an example of the artist
’
s miraculous power of surviving a mental earthquake that can only be compared to Strindberg
’
s tremendous
‘
come-back
’
after his period of insanity.
Demian
and the four novels that follow it require a full analysis here.
But before proceeding to this, there is another work of the immediate post-war years that calls for comment. This is the
‘
testament
’
that grew out of the breakdown, a slim book about the same size as
Mind at the End of Its Tether
called
Blick in Chaos.
PAGE NOTE:
We owe what is probably the first modern Outsider parable to Dr. Johnson, whose
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
was published in 1759. The Prince lives in a Social Utopia called the Happy Valley, where all life is controlled, ordered; where consequently everyone is condemned to an endless round of pleasure that devitalizes the few who have minds of their own and removes the last element of usefulness from the naturally worthless. The Prince is logically unable to account for his increasing boredom and irritation; he can only put his finger on it by musing:
‘
It has always seemed to me that man has some sixth sense, or some faculty apart from sense, that must be satisfied before he can be completely happy.
’
He has expressed the Outsider
’
s problem in a sentence. In company with the astronomer Imlac (Johnson himself), Rasselas escapes from the
‘
Happy Valley
’
and goes into the world to face
‘
stubborn, irreducible fact
’
. He reaches the same conclusion as Secondborn in Shaw
’
s
Buoyant Billions
’
,
‘
I dont want to be happy; I want to be alive and active.
’
Glimpse into Chaos
contains two essays on Dostoevsky, on
The Brothers Karamazov
and
The Idiot.
Hesse prophesies the collapse of belief and downfall of European morals that we have examined at close quarters in Sartre and Camus.
‘
It is the rejection of every strongly held moral or ethic in favour of a comprehensive
laissez-faire.
’’
Hesse predicted the coming of
‘
the Russian man
’
, a creature of nightmare who is no longer the
Homo sapiens,
but an Existentialist monster who rejects all thought, a Mitya Karamazov without an Ivan or Alyosha to counterbalance him:
He reaches forth beyond prohibitions, beyond natural instinct, beyond morality. He is the man who has grasped the idea of freeing himself, and on the other side, beyond the veil, beyond
principium individuations,
of turning back again. This ideal man of the Karamazovs loves nothing and everything, does nothing and everything. He is primeval matter, monstrous soul-stuff.
He cannot live in this form;
he can only pass on.
5
Demian
begins the attempt to construct a system of values that shall not be at the mercy of the Russian man.
With its subtitle,
‘
The Story of a Youth
’
,
Demian
can be thought of as Hesse
’
s
‘
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
’
. In his Introduction to this story of his youth, Emil Sinclair states:
‘
The life of everybody is a road to himself. ... No man has ever yet attained to self-realization, yet he strives after it, one ploddingly, another with less effort, as best he can. Each one carries the remains of his birth, slime and eggshells, with him to the end.
’
6
Chapter One begins with the statement of a dichotomy. In Emil Sinclair
’
s childhood, he knew two worlds. In the first world, his middle-class, well-ordered home,
‘
were straight lines and paths that led into the future. Here were duty and guilt, evil conscience and confession, pardon and good resolutions, love and adoration, Bible texts and wisdom. To this world our future had to belong; it had to be crystal clear, beautiful and well-ordered.
’
The other world is closer to the servants and workmen; there he encounters
‘
ghost stories and the breath of scandal. There was a gaily coloured flood of monstrous, tempting, terrible
enigmatical going-on, the slaughter-house and prison, drunken men and scolding women, cows in birth-throes, plunging horses, tales of burglaries, murders, suicides
…
It was wonderful that in our house there was peace, order and repose
...
and wonderful that there were other things
…
sinister and violent,
yet from which one could escape with one bound to mother
’
7
It is an unpleasant shock to Sinclair when he discovers that the dark world can overflow its boundaries into his home, and there can be no
‘
appeal to mother
5
. Through certain lies he invents to gain the applause of some friends, he finds himself in the power of Frank Kromer, a lout of the town, son of a drunkard. To appease Kromer he is forced to steal money and deceive his parents; he finds himself separated, by an act of his own will, from the world of peace and order.
My life at that time was a sort of insanity. I was shy, and lived in torment like a ghost in the midst of the well-ordered peace of our house.
8
The problem is stated: order versus chaos. In the second chapter, Hesse treats its solution. At Emil Sinclair
’
s school there is a boy called Max Demian, who seems in all respects to be more
‘
grown-up
’
than the other boys. One day he gets into conversation with Sinclair on the subject of the Bible story of Cain and Abel, symbols of the two worlds, and suggests to him that the Bible story is a travesty of the truth. Perhaps Cain was not simply an evil man who killed his brother out of envy; perhaps there was something about him, some boldness or intelligence in his face, that made men fear him, and invent the story of the mark of Cain to excuse their cowardice.
This version of the story troubles Sinclair; its implication is clear: the descent into the dark world is not necessarily evil; it may be the necessary expression of boldness and intelligence. Demian is bold and intelligent, and rumours circulate that he has carnal relations with girls, even with his mother. Yet it is this Demian who frees Sinclair from the evil domination of Frank Kromer, and who appeals to him as being above the petty viciousness and dirty-mindedness of schoolboys. Still, Sinclair has not enough courage to embrace the conclusions that Demian shows him. With Kromer
’
s domination over, he flings himself into the peace and order of his home, and
‘
sings
the dear old hymns with the blissful feeling of one converted
’
. Only much later he realizes that it was not to his parents that he should have made confession, but to Demian. By returning to his old notion of order, he has only turned his face away from chaos; the chaos still exists.
The remainder of the book describes Sinclair
’
s adolescence and sexual awakening. The question he has passed up repeats itself, drives home its point that you cannot escape chaos by refusing to look at it. Demian reappears on the scene while Sinclair flounders hopelessly; he introduces him to his mother, and Sinclair finds in her the answer to the question of the two worlds. She symbolizes nature, the life force, the mother figure, Lilith, in whom all opposites are resolved. The novel ends in a whirl of Shelleyan airy-fairy that is a disappointment to the unromantic reader whose attention has been held by the terseness and practical eye-to-business of Hesse
’
s analysis. This is a fault that recurs in most of Hesse
’
s novels, a legacy from his romantic ancestry.
In spite of this, the conclusions of
Demian
are clear. It is a question of self-realization. It is not enough to accept a concept of order and live by it; that is cowardice, and such cowardice cannot result in freedom. Chaos must be faced. Real order must be preceded by a descent into chaos. This is Hesse
’
s conclusion. In theological terms, the fall was necessary, man had to eat of the fruit of good and evil. (Later, dealing with Nietzsche and Blake, we shall touch upon similar views: the idea that good and evil are not ultimate antinomies, but expressions of a higher force that comprehends both.) In refusing to face evil, Sinclair has gained nothing and lost a great deal; the Buddhist scripture expresses it: Those who refuse to discriminate might as well be dead.
Hesse
’
s next novel has a delusive air of having solved great problems.
Siddhartha
was written on his return from India; it is the best written of the five novels and the most idyllic in tone. (We are reminded that it was through study of Hindu and Buddhist texts that Strindberg regained his sanity.) It suffers from the same defect as
Demian:
the reader feels that Hesse hadn
’
t foreseen the end when he wrote the beginning.
Siddhartha is the son of a Brahmin, born in the time of the Buddha (approximately 563 to 483 B.C.). He feels the attraction to the life of the wandering monk; he leaves home while still a
youth and practises rigorous disciplines that give him great control of body and mind.
Siddhartha is already beyond the problems of Barbusse
’
s Outsider.
Still feeling that this self-control is not ultimate self-realization, he goes to listen to the preaching of the saintly Gautama, Sakyamuni, called by his disciples the Buddha. Gautama reinforces the conclusion that Siddhartha had already reached, that extreme asceticism is not an essential of self-realization, for its purpose is only to
test
the will. The Buddha teaches the
‘
middle way
’
that depends on achieving a state of contemplation, of complete separation from all the human faculties. This state achieved, the monk, having extinguished every tendency to identify himself with his body, emotions, senses or intellect, knows himself to be beyond all, and achieves freedom from
‘
the wheel of rebirth
’
.
Siddhartha accepts this, but he doubts whether following the Buddha would bring him to self-realization. (In point of fact, Gautama said as much repeatedly:
‘
Let each man be unto himself an island
’
, etc.). His best friend remains as a disciple; Siddhartha goes on, still searching. He tells himself: No man can teach another to be a Buddha; you can only teach yourself. Then the question occurs: Can a man teach himself by narrowing his life and perceptions until all love of nature has been filtered off? This decides him. He puts off the robe of the holy man; in the first town he comes to he goes to court a beautiful courtesan. When she tells him that he cannot possibly become her lover unless he has some worldly success behind him, he sets his mind to make money with such acumen that he soon has a house, and the beautiful courtesan for a mistress. After a few years of this, it dawns on him that he is less near to self-realization than ever, and one day his basic misery forces itself on him so irresistibly that he tries to kill himself. He fails, but the honesty involved in facing his own unfulfilment gives him strength to renounce the house and success, and become a homeless wanderer again. This time he doesn
’
t wander far; he joins the local ferryman (another contemplative) and again spends his days in spiritual discipline. When the courtesan dies, Siddhartha discovers that he has a son as a result of the last night they spent together; he brings the boy up, and then has to suffer the final misery of realizing that there is no real
communication with other human beings, even those we love most. The son leaves home: Siddhartha accepts his loss and continues to contemplate the river. The novel draws to a close.
It must have struck the reader, even from this brief summary, that Hesse had not quite succeeded in pulling off the conjuring trick. Siddhartha leaves home full of hope; asceticism fails him, so he turns to the Buddha. The Buddha fails him, so he turns to the worldly life. That fails too, so he becomes a ferryman. The reader is waiting to be told of a successful solution, and as the novel comes towards the end, he realizes Hesse has nothing to offer. The river flows on; Siddhartha contemplates it. Hesse arrives at the conclusion that there is no ultimate success or failure; life is like the river; its attraction is the fact that it never stops flowing. There is nothing for it but to close the novel feeling rather let down.
The student of Eastern religion will object that the novel
’
s failure is Hesse
’
s inability to grasp the essence of Vedantism or Buddhism, that he should have tried reading Ramakrishna or the Tibetan saint Milarepa to get his facts straight before he began writing the novel. This is probably true; we can only accept what we have, a finished novel, and consider it as a part of Hesse
’
s attempt to define his own problems.
That Hesse himself was not satisfied is proved by his next book. In
Steppenwolf
he returns to the attack, sets out all his facts, and starts from the beginning again. From the point of view of this study of the Outsider,
Steppenwolf (i§2%)
is Hesse
’
s most important contribution. It is more than that; it is one of the most penetrating and exhaustive studies of the Outsider ever written.
Steppenwolf is
the story of a middle-aged man. This in itself is an important advance. The romantic usually finds himself committed to pessimism in opposition to life itself by his insistence on the importance of youth (Rupert Brooke is a typical example). Steppenwolf has recognized the irrelevancy of youth; there is a self-lacerating honesty about this journal of a middle-aged man.
In all externals, Steppenwolf (the self-conferred nickname of Harry Haller) is a Barbusse Outsider. He is more cultured perhaps, less of an animal; the swaying dresses of women in the street do not trouble him. Also he is less concerned to
‘
stand for truth
’
; he allows his imagination full play, and his journal is a
sort of wish-dream diary. But here again we have the man-on-his-own, living in rooms with his books and his gramophone; there is not even the necessity to go out and work, for he has a small private income. In his youth he considered himself a poet, a self-realizer. Now he is middle-aged, an ageing Emil Sinclair, and the moods of insight have stopped coming; there is only dissatisfaction, lukewarmness.