The Outsider (30 page)

...
On the contrary, you say, science will in time show that man does not possess any will or initiative of his own— but that he is as the keyboard of the piano. Above all, science will show him that there exist certain laws of nature which cause everything to be done.
...
Consequently, you say, those laws will only have to be explained to man and at once he will become divested of all responsibility, and find life much easier to deal with. All human acts will then be mathematically computed according to nature
’
s laws and entered in tables of logarithms.
...

But who would care to exercise his will-power according to a table of logarithms?

And here we can pause to observe that this dialectic of the beetle-man, this anti-rationalist tirade, was published many years before the name Kierkegaard was heard outside Denmark, or Nietzsche outside Germany. Kierkegaard
’
s
Unscientific Postscript
,
which is the bettle-man
’
s case extended to several
hundred pages, had been published under the curious pseudonym
‘
Johannes Climacus
’
in the same year as
Poor Folk,
but it had made no impression comparable to Dostoevsky
’
s story. Neither was Kierkegaard the first exponent of
Existenzphilosophie:
half a century earlier, another unknown man of genius had written:
^1
4

All bibles and sacred codes have been the cause of the following errors:

That man has two really existing principles, viz., a body and a soul

That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the body, and Reason, called Good, is alone from the soul.

But the following contraries to these are true:

Man has no body distinct from his Soul—for what is called body is that portion of the soul discerned by the five senses....

Energy is the only life, and is from body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy.

Energy is eternal delight!

William Blake also had no love of philosophers and their
‘
logarithms
’
, and he detested systems as much as did Kierkegaard. Yet he had to labour at his own attempt at an existence-philosophy, for:

I must create my own System or be enslaved by another man
’
s

My business is not to reason and compare; my business is to create.
¹⁶

So we can see at a glance that we have here a strange group of men—Blake, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky: two violently unorthodox Christians, one pagan
‘
philosopher with a hammer
’
, and one tormented half-atheist-half-Christian, all beginning from the same impulse and driven by the same urges. Since we can see plainly, after our painstaking analysis, that this impulse is fundamental in the Outsider, it is not a bold step to assert that
these men held basically the same beliefs.
The differences that seem to separate them are only differences of temperament (imagine Blake
’
s reaction to Kierkegaard
’
s
Diary of the Seducer,
or Nietzsche
’
s to Dostoevsky
’
s
Life of Father
Zossima!
);
the
basic idea is the same in all four.

To recognize this conclusion is, in fact, to have made a great step towards conceding the contention of this book, that the Outsider
’
s values are religious ones, but elaboration of this point can wait until we have finished with Dostoevsky.

The beetle-man
’
s argument reaches a climax with this important statement:

If you say that everything—chaos, darkness, anathema— can be reduced to mathematical formulae—
then man will go insane on purpose
to have no judgement, and to behave as he likes. I believe this because it appears that man
’
s whole business is to prove that he is a man and not a cog-wheel... And perhaps, who knows, the striving of man on earth may consist in this uninterrupted striving for something ahead, that is,
in life itself
rather than some real end which obviously must be a static formula of the same kind as two and two make four—I am sure that man will never renounce the genuine suffering that comes of ruin and chaos. Why, suffering is the one and only source of knowledge.
¹⁶
[Italics mine.]

What I must stand for is my personal free-will, and what it can do for me when I am in the right mood to use it.
¹⁷

After these gigantic analyses, this beetle-man cannot resist Evan Strowde
’
s conclusion:
‘
So we have reached the belief that the best thing we can do is to do nothing at all—is to sink into a contemplative inertia.
’

But he knows, as well as Strowde, that this is not really what he wants; it is a second-best for something else,
‘
Something for which I am hungry, but which I shall never find
’
. So ends the beetle-man
’
s preamble to the reader.

The second part of his
‘
confession
’
is a tale of his own past, and of a glimpse of that
‘
something he can never find
’
. It is not a particularly good story. He tells how he forced his company on a party of old schoolfellows, who openly disliked him, and how, after some humiliations, he followed them to a brothel. In bed with a prostitute named Lisa he begins a conversation— about death. And as he talks his own imagination fires. He begins by speaking of lov
e and religion and God. When sh
mockingly accuses him of talking like a book, he grows more eloquent; and suddenly it is Dostoevsky, the great artist-psychologist of
Poor Folk)
who is creating a picture of human misery and redeeming love, who is speaking into the darkness to the young prostitute who lies by his side. This is the Outsider
’
s moment, his feeling of harmony, his glimpse of a
‘
power within him
’
. The girl suddenly begins to cry, and quietly, the Outsider slips out of bed and takes leave of her, after giving her his address.

But when the girl calls on him a few days later, a complete change of attitude has occurred in him; the
‘
glimpse
⁵
has been completely lost; he is his old irritable, violent self again. He curses her, insults her. When, with the insight of a woman in love, she divines that he is desperately unhappy, and suddenly offers herself to him, his self-contempt turns to hatred for her. He takes her body, and then offers her payment for her
‘
services
’
. She leaves, and he is alone again, suddenly feeling lost and miserable, hating himself, and his inability to resolve the everlasting conflicts within him.

Notes from Underground
’
is an unpleasant story, so unnecessarily unpleasant as to be barely readable. What it does convey, more than any other work we have quoted, is the tortured, self-divided nature of the Outsider. The nasty taste it leaves in the mouth is due to its failure as a work of art, its obsessive caterwauling about the weakness of human nature, etc. A lot of Dostoevsky
’
s work leaves the same taste, his
‘
Eternal Husband
’
and many of the short-stories arouse a mixed feeling of boredom and disgust, the sort of irritation one feels in watching Mr. Aldous Huxley
’
s systematic butchery of all his characters. If we were to judge Dostoevsky by such work, the final verdict on him would be the same as Shaw
’
s on Shakespeare—that he understands human weakness without understanding human strength.

In point of fact, this is not true; Dostoevsky
’
s evolution as a novelist is a slow development of understanding of human strength. The heroes of the early books are in every sense
‘
Godless
’
; then little by little, they cease to be vain and trivial. Raskolnikov is followed by Prince Myshkin, then by Kirilov and Shatov, finally by the Karamazov Brothers, who are giants compared to the beetle-man.

Crime and Punishment
has suffered greatly at the hands of
critics who insist on treating it as a moral tract upon the wickedness of taking human life, in spite of Dostoevsky
’
s plain statements about its real purpose, which is far less obvious. Even Nicholas Berdyaev, whose book on Dostoevsky is the most stimulating ever written, adopts the Christian standpoint and condemns Raskolnikov as a
‘
cold monster
’
.

Having already seen what happens when the Outsider makes the
‘
attempt to gain control
⁵
, we can dismiss this interpretation without fear of finding ourselves in the position of condoning murder. In
Crime and Punishment,
Raskolnikov is in the same position as the beetle-man, living alone in his room, morose, too self-conscious, hating human wretchedness, and disliking the human weakness which he holds to be its cause. With his whole being, he wants to establish contact with the
‘
power within him
’
, and he knows that, to do this, he must arouse his will to some important purpose, to find
a definitive act.
In a later chapter of the book (after the murder) Dostoevsky describes Raskol-nikov
’
s awakening:
‘
His movements were precise and definite; a firm purpose was evident in him.
“
Today,
”
he muttered to himself. He understood that he was still weak,
but his intense spiritual concentration gave him strength and self-confidence
’
.
¹⁸
[Italics mine.]

And a little later:

…
a sort of savage energy gleamed suddenly in his feverish eyes and his wasted, yellow face. He did not know or think where he was going, but had one thought only:
‘
that all this must be ended today
...
that he would not return home without it, because he would not go on living like that.
^’

Now we can see that
Crime and Punishment
is actually simply a study in what we have spoken of in Chapter IV—the definitive act. Raskolnikov
’
s position has much in common with Nietzsche
’
s: he hates his own weakness, he hates human weakness and misery. His deepest instinct is towards strength and health,
‘
pure will
’
without the troubles and perplexities of intellect
’
. He does not believe that he is rotten to the core; he does not believe
‘
there is no health in us
’
. There
is
strength— he is certain of that—but a long way down, and it would take a great deal of will to blast one
’
s way down to it. Very well, show him a way, any way. Show him an enemy worth his strength.

And here is the difficulty. For Raskolnikov, like Barbusse
’
s hero, has
‘
no genius, no special talent
’
.

A writer, a thinker, a preacher, a soldier, all might find worth-while work to do in that environment of social misery and decay. But Raskolnikov has no faith in his mission. He sees Petrograd as Blake saw London, the Industrial Revolution:

I wander through each dirty street

Near where the dirty Thames does flow

And on each human face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

The misery that provoked young Russian students to become followers of Herzen and Bakunin aroused in Dostoevsky a deeper feeling than a desire for social revolution. And in
Crime and Punishment,
the suffering, fevered Raskolnikov is Dostoevsky
’
s spokesman. His reaction to it all is a fictionalized version of Dostoevsky
’
s feeing about it.

Now here the problem of interpretation becomes difficult. For Raskolnikov
’
s reaction to his perception of universal misery is to commit a crime, to kill an old pawnbroker, whose death will serve the double purpose of providing him with money to escape his binding poverty, and of being a gesture of defiance, a definitive act. The murder achieves neither of these purposes; he finds no money and solves no problems. The Reader asks, Why does he solve no problem? and it is only too easy to
‘
identify
’
his horror of the bloodshed with a moral intention on the part of the author. Berdyaev writes: