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Ron Peters's Reviews > The Outsider
The Outsider
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“Dostoevsky always found crime absorbing; it is one of those limits of human character that can spring from the Outsider’s sense of exile. The great criminal is as distant from the average bourgeois as the great saint.” (p. 170)
I recently read Bill Buford’s (1993) Among the Thugs, about British football hooligans, which led me to Hunter S. Thompson’s (1966) Hell’s Angels, another tale of outlaw outsiders.
This, in turn, led me to Colin Wilson’s book which is about artist-outsiders, e.g.: Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, early Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent Van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, William James, T. S. Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, William Blake. One fellow went to the effort of compiling links to free versions of most of the texts Wilson references https://tinyurl.com/ywr9m2nx.
Wilson argues that the work of these artists illustrates the issues of existentialism. I enjoyed chapter seven best, on The Brothers Karamazov. Yet, as seems to be constantly the case in existential writings, there is no “so, how does it all turn out?” Dostoevsky was to have written a sequel to explain whether Ivan was driven mad by his encounter with the devil and what happens to Alyosha when he goes out into the world – but he died before doing so. So, we are left largely with analysis minus solution, although it is a good analysis.
Wilson says, “Behind man lies the abyss, nothingness; the Outsider knows this; it is his business to sink claws of iron into life, to grasp it tighter than the indifferent bourgeois, to build, to will, in spite of the abyss.” Build what, to what end? This comes under the heading of “not specified.” To build on the abyss you must have a firm foundation. Where is it? The best he offers is a scene out of Sartre’s Nausea in which the utterly disillusioned Roquetin listens to a song in a café that momentarily lifts his spirits. That’s it? Really?
Are we supposed to nod wisely and wink at this? Wilson concludes his book with an argument that we should all will ourselves to become visionaries, along the lines of Gurdijeff. This may well reflect mainly on me, but I remain unimpressed with existentialism.
I recently read Bill Buford’s (1993) Among the Thugs, about British football hooligans, which led me to Hunter S. Thompson’s (1966) Hell’s Angels, another tale of outlaw outsiders.
This, in turn, led me to Colin Wilson’s book which is about artist-outsiders, e.g.: Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, early Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent Van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, William James, T. S. Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, William Blake. One fellow went to the effort of compiling links to free versions of most of the texts Wilson references https://tinyurl.com/ywr9m2nx.
Wilson argues that the work of these artists illustrates the issues of existentialism. I enjoyed chapter seven best, on The Brothers Karamazov. Yet, as seems to be constantly the case in existential writings, there is no “so, how does it all turn out?” Dostoevsky was to have written a sequel to explain whether Ivan was driven mad by his encounter with the devil and what happens to Alyosha when he goes out into the world – but he died before doing so. So, we are left largely with analysis minus solution, although it is a good analysis.
Wilson says, “Behind man lies the abyss, nothingness; the Outsider knows this; it is his business to sink claws of iron into life, to grasp it tighter than the indifferent bourgeois, to build, to will, in spite of the abyss.” Build what, to what end? This comes under the heading of “not specified.” To build on the abyss you must have a firm foundation. Where is it? The best he offers is a scene out of Sartre’s Nausea in which the utterly disillusioned Roquetin listens to a song in a café that momentarily lifts his spirits. That’s it? Really?
Are we supposed to nod wisely and wink at this? Wilson concludes his book with an argument that we should all will ourselves to become visionaries, along the lines of Gurdijeff. This may well reflect mainly on me, but I remain unimpressed with existentialism.
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