The Outsider (22 page)

They follow the Strowde-Joan Westbury dilemma to its logical conclusion, and kill themselves. Strowde and Joan are
not so different from Axel and Sarah; they are only less tormented by
‘
lack of pattern and purpose in nature
’
; they commit mental suicide, like Lawrence.

But most of these poets of the late nineteenth century were
only
‘
half in love with easeful death
’
; the other half clung very
firmly to life and complained about its futility. None of them,
not even Thomson, goes as far as Wells in
Mind at the End of Its
Tether.
But follow their pessimism further, press it to the limits
of complete sincerity, and the result is a completely life-denying
nihilism that is actually a danger to life. When Van Gogh
’
s
‘
Misery will never end
’
is combined with Evan Strowde
’
s
‘
Nothing is worth doing
’
, the result is a kind of spiritual
syphilis that can hardly stop short of death or insanity. Conrad
’
s
story
Heart of Darkness
deals with a man who has brought him
self to this point; he dies murmuring:
‘
The horror, the horror
.’
Conrad
’
s narrator comments:
‘
...
I wasn
’
t arguing with a
lunatic either His intelligence was perfectly clear; concentrated ... upon himself with a horrible intensity, yet clear.
...
But his soul was mad. Being alone in the Wilderness, it had
looked within itself, and ... it had gone mad: he had summed
up; he had judged;
“
the Horror
”
. He was a remarkable man.
’
⁶

‘
The horror
’
was the constant theme of the Russian Leonid Andreyev; his story
‘
Lazarus
’
presses the theme of the fundamental horror of life to a point where it is difficult to imagine any other writer following him. Hawthorne
’
s
‘
Ethan Brand
’
might be mentioned as another treatment of the same theme that probably sprang out of Hawthorne
’
s own experiences of religious doubt. Hawthorne
’
s Outsider flings himself into a furnace to escape his vision of futility.

The subject is unpleasant to dwell on, and further enumeration of treatments of the theme will serve no purpose here, so we can conclude our survey of
‘
life-denial
’
by quoting an example taken from James
’
s
Varieties of Religious Experience.
James is writing of his own experience of nervous collapse (although he does not actually say so in the book):

Whilst in a state of philosophic pessimism, and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening
into a dressing-room in the twilight
...
when suddenly there came upon me, without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously, there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day
...
moving nothing but his black eyes, and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other.
That shape am I,
I felt, potentially. Nothing I possess can defend me from that fate if the hour should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid in my breast gave way, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this, the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before.
⁷

It is interesting to note that Henry James, Sr., the father of William and of Henry the novelist, had a similar experience, which he records in his book
Society, the Redeemed Form of Man:
⁸

One day towards the close of May, having eaten a comfortable dinner, I remained sitting at the table after the family had dispersed, idly gazing into the embers of the grate, thinking of nothing and feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion, when suddenly—in a lightning flash, as it were—Tear came upon me, and trembling made all my bones to shake
’
. To all appearances it was a perfectly insane and abject terror without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape, squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself a wreck, that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy. I felt the greatest desire to shout for help to my wife ... but by an immense effort I controlled these frenzied impulses and determined not to budge.
...
until I hadrecovered my self-possession. This purpose I held to for a good hour
...
beat upon meanwhile by an ever-growing tempest of doubt, anxiety and despair.
...

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 ato
mic
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
‘
bondage
⁵
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.