The Outsider (37 page)

The answer of a man like Kierkegaard to this vision that forced itself upon his over-sensitive perceptions, is the religious solution. For nothing is more natural than that the mind that has tired of its reasoning faculty should turn to the areas of the being that he below consciousness, to the instincts and intuitions. It may be a simple revolt, like D. H. Lawrence
’
s, but if it is too simple, it may fall into the error that S
teppenwolf
avoided, the
‘
back to the animal
’
attitude of Lawrence
’
s
‘
St. Mawr
⁵
or The Virgin and the Gipsy
’
. That is no solution. But Kierkegaard had the solution when he realized that the necessary intensity to fuse all his instincts and rational faculties lay in the religious attitude.

And at this point, a genuinely puzzled reader who can sympathize with the Outsider, but cannot quite understand how he can jump to the religious attitude, may ask:
‘
But is it
true?
Is it true in the same way that one and one make two?
’
And here an analogy might make things clearer. When Einstein introduced his special theory of relativity, he was careful to explain that his disagreement with the Newtonian formulae did not matter unless you were dealing with particles travelling at a very high speed, at a speed approaching 186,000 miles per second, in fact. Unless you were dealing with such high speeds, you need not worry about Time being different for different co-ordinate systems in relative motion, nor about simultaneousness having no meaning without many more definitions. But if you
are
dealing with high speeds, then there is nothing for it; you
must
discard Galilei
’
s equations and use Lorentz
’
s.

The same goes for the Outsider. If you are living a very ordinary dull life at low pressure, you can safely regard the Outsider as a crank who does not deserve serious consideration. But if you are interested in man in extreme states, or in man abnormally preoccupied by questions about the nature of life, then whatever answer the Outsider may propound should be worth your respectful attention. The Outsider is interested in high speeds and great pressures; he prefers to consider the man who sets out to be very good or very wicked rather than the good citizen who advocates moderation in all things.

And this brings us back to Ivan Karamazov. Ivan is such a man who is not contented with ordinary speeds. He feels great spiritual power in himself. Like Raskolnikov, he does not feel that he has been born to be a nonentity. Dostoevsky tells us that
‘
he began very early—almost in his infancy—to show a brilliant and unusual aptitude for learning
’
. Naturally, he feels that his way must be the way of intellect. And what is the business of intellect? It is to synthesize unendingly. The Outsider naturally sees most men as failures; in fact, he may feel that every man who has ever lived had been a failure

So the Ivan-type applies his intellectual powers to the question: How must I live my life so as not to have to consider myself a failure? And with a standard so high, the problem must gnaw at him day and night, make leisure impossible, shatter his nerves with an unending sense of tension, urgency, like the laceration of a spur being driven into the mind. He gropes for standards. He realizes intuitively
‘
If I can say: That man was a failure, then I must have an idea of what success means.
’

And the trouble has begun. If he had time to sit in a quiet spot, under pleasant circumstances, he might get to grips with it. But our life as human beings in a modern society seldom allows us those circumstances. It is a repetition of Van Gogh
’
s problem, the day by day struggle for intensity that disappears overnight, all interrupted by human trivialities and endless pettinesses. When Dostoevsky made Ivan on the eve of a brainstorm see the Devil, he was only symbolizing what can happen to such an Outsider. Ivan is aiming at complete synthesis, to see the world as a whole. Blake calls it
‘
fourfold vision
’
in one of his poems:

Now I a fourfold vision see

And a fourfold vision is given to me

It is fourfold in my supreme delight

And threefold in soft Beulah
’
s night

And twofold always. May God us keep

From single vision and Newton
’
s sleep.
⁹

Ivan
’
s Devil is an embodiment of the last line,
‘
single vision and Newton
’
s sleep
’
. He is a sort of version of Roquentin
’
s Nausea, William James
’
s
‘
stubborn unreduceable fact
’
, brute reality that negates spirit or, worse than that, embodies delusion. It is this Devil who drove Van Gogh insane, who stayed at T. E. Lawrence
’
s elbow whispering self-distrust; no nightmare monster of evil with three faces,
imperador del doloroso regno
, but a breaker of wings, poisoner of the Will to live.

* * *

In his
Doktor Faustus,
Thomas Mann is openly indebted to Ivan
’
s Devil scene, and has added some interesting observations on the psychology of the Outsider that clarify Dostoevsky
’
s
views. Mann
’
s Faustus (who is based on Frederick Nietzsche), argues:
¹⁰

... the contritio without hope, as complete disbelief in the possibility of mercy and forgiveness , . . only that is true contritio.
...
You will admit that the everyday sinner can be but moderately interesting to mercy. Mediocrity, in fact, has no theological status. A capacity for sin so healless, that it makes a man despair from his heart of redemption— that is the true theological way to salvation.

He (the Devil): You are a sly dog! And where would the likes of you get the single-mindedness, the naive recklessness of despair, which would be the premise for the sinful way of salvation ? Is it not plain to you that the conscious speculation on the charm that great guilt exercises on Goodness makes the act of mercy impossible to it ?

Faustus: And yet only through this ne plus ultra can the high prick of dramatic theological existence be arrived at— I mean the most abandoned guilt, and the last and most irresistible challenge to everlasting goodness.

He: Not bad.
...
And now I will tell you that precisely heads of your sort comprise the population of Hell
...
your theologian in grain, your arrant wiley pie who speculates on speculation because he has speculation in his blood.
...

Mann makes the position even clearer. It is just that position in Eliot
’
s
‘
Ash Wednesday
’
that I analysed in Chapter V. St. Augustine
’
s solution was
Credo ut intelligam,
believe to understand. And what if a man has not a grain of faith in him, if he is a reasoner through and through ? By reasoner I do not mean simply a rationalist—like certain modern logicians who question the possibility of the synthetic
a priori,
but never doubt the utility of lecturing to students three times a week and publishing books on logical positivism; to these, the Outsider would apply Mann
’
s harsh judgement: Mediocrity has no theological status. But the man who, like Evan Strowde, sets out to
‘
get past all tricks to the heart of things
’
... is he inevitably damned? This is one of the Outsider
’
s worst dilemmas: to feel the whole being groaning for some emotional satisfaction, some solid reality to touch, and to feel the reasoning faculty standing apart, jeering at the possibility of satisfaction
and discouraging its approach. What should such an Outsider do? Should he deliberately repress his reasoning faculty, accept a faith and hope that his reason will be reconciled to it one day? Accept
Credo ut intelligam?

No. The Outsider cannot countenance such an idea. And, in fact, we have seen him solving the problem in this study. Man is not merely intellect and emotions; he is body too. This is easiest of all to forget. The life of the Outsider pivots around his intellect and emotions, and as often as not, he retreats into a cork-lined room as did Proust and forgets he has a body. It was Hemingway
’
s main achievement to restore the sense of the body into literature; he has done this even more successfully than D. H. Lawrence, who was always getting bogged down in his emotions. In Hemingway, especially in the early volumes, there is a sense of physical freshness, a direct, intense experience of natural things that makes the
‘
troubles and perplexities of intellect
⁵
seem nonsense. And this was also Zarathustra
’
s vision; in a passage that might be set as an epigraph to Lawrence
’
s
Man Who Died,
he declares:

While Jesus the Hebrew only knew the tears and the melancholy of the Hebrew, together with the hatred of Goodness and Righteousness, the longing for death overtook him.

Would that he had remained in the desert, far from the good and righteous! Perhaps he would have learned how to live and love the earth—and to laugh as well.
¹¹

And this judgement, apart from its implied criticism of the founder of the Christian religion, would be endorsed by many mystics, Christian and otherwise. In speaking of Blake and Traherne in the last chapters it will be seen just how important is the part that the mystic ascribes to
^‘
love of the earth
’
. This is where Mann
’
s
Doktor Faustus
fails (and it is a very bad portrait of Nietzsche in that it ignores the Whitmanesque aspect of Nietzsche
’
s message and concentrates on intellectual problems). And, it would seem, it is the point where Ivan fails too, in spite of his assurance that he loves
^‘
the blue sky and the sticky buds in spring
’
. And Dostoevsky makes his meaning
unequivocal by the
‘
vision
’
scenes of the other two brothers. Alyosha is overwhelmed with sheer physical love of the earth, like Van Gogh
’
s, and kisses it and weeps on it. And Mitya is made to realize that the earth is full of suffering human beings, and that no one can be whole and complete without a sense of kinship with the suffering of all other living beings.

In his
^‘
Snows of Kilimanjaro
’
, Hemingway writes of Scott Fitzgerald:

Poor Julian and his romantic awe of [the rich] ... he thought they were a special glamorous race, and when he found out they weren
’
t, it wrecked him just as much as anything had wrecked him.

He [the hero] had been contemptuous of those who
wrecked. ... He could beat anything
...
because nothing
could hurt him if he did not care
¹²

This book has been a study chiefly in men who
‘
wrecked
’
for different reasons, men who cared too much about something or other, and cracked under the strain.

Now Dostoevsky has brought us to the threshold of new developments, and he has helped to summarize most of the themes of previous chapters. What we cannot have failed to notice, as the analysis has taken us from Barbusse, Sartre, Hesse, towards Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, is that the greatest men have been those who were most intensely concerned about the Outsider
’
s problems, and the question of how
not
to wreck. The Outsider must keep asking the question: Why? Why are most men failures? Why do Outsiders tend to wreck?

We lack the
concept of an enemy:
that is the trouble. We talk vaguely of
‘
the Outsider
’
s problems
’
, and we even get around to defining them in terms of
‘
freedom
’
,
‘
personality
’
, but that only leads us into metaphysical discussions about meanings. What we haven
’
t yet got around to is a bare statement:
‘
This
is where the Outsider is going, and
this
is what he often falls over, breaking his neck.
’
That is what we need, to sort out some of the threads we have unravelled in previous chapters: a statement of destination and a concept of an enemy (or of an
‘
obstacle
’
, if the word fits the metaphor better).