The Outsider (29 page)

These men are in prison: that is the Outsider
’
s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it
is
prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language;
but he knows it.
His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must
know
all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years
in tunnelling, like the Abbe in
The Count of Monte Cristo,
and only find yourself in the next cell.

And, of course, the final revelation comes when you look at these City-men on the train; for you realize that for them, the business of escaping is complicated by the fact that
they think they are the prison.
An astounding situation! Imagine a large castle on an island, with almost inescapable dungeons. The jailor has installed every device to prevent the prisoners escaping, and he has taken one final precaution: that of hypnotizing the prisoners, and then suggesting to them that
they and the prison are one.
When one of the prisoners awakes to the fact that he would like to be free, and suggests this to his fellow prisoners, they look at him with surprise and say: Tree from what? We
are
the castle.
’
What a situation!

And this is just what happens to the Outsider. There is only one solution. He personally must examine the castle, draw his inferences as to its weaker points, and plan to escape alone. And this
‘
knowing the castle
’
is what we referred to at the beginning of Chapter IV: The Outsider
’
s first business is to know himself.
’

Naturally, the first question of the prisoner who begins to recover from the hypnosis is: Who am I?

In Chapters II and III we spoke of Outsiders who awake to the fact that
they were not what they had always supposed themselves to be
when they
felt something
that opened up new possibilities: Krebs
’
s moments in the war when he did
‘
the one thing, the only thing
’
, Strowde
’
s
‘
glimpse of a power within him
’
, Steppe nwolf
’
s vision while listening to Mozart. And the recovery of that insight depends on finding a way back to the place where it was seen. And thought alone is no use, because it is thought that has been bound hand-and-foot by the hypnosis of the jailer: by habit, laziness, ways of
‘
seeing oneself, etc.
Action
is necessary. A man can change his mental habits by changing his way of life; sometimes one act alone can completely change the whole mental outlook. A libertine can become a faithful married man by the mere repetition of the words
‘
I will
’
, provided he is deeply enough impressed by their meaning. The main thing is that a man should feel an act of Will to be
unreversible.
These definitions, that have evolved logically from the last chapter, place us in a strange, half-lighted landscape, where the Outsider is half-hidden in an
intangible prison of angles and shadows. His purpose is clear— to himself: to find his way back into a daylight where he can know a single undivided Will, Nietzsche
’
s
‘
pure will without the troubles of intellect
’
. His first step is to repudiate the false daylight of the once-born bourgeois. His next problem is to find an
act,
a definite act that will give him power over his doubts and self-questionings.

At this point, we can pass the threads of the argument into the hands of another Russian writer, and leave him to unravel them further for us.

* * *

There were a number of events in Fyodor Dostoevsky
’
s life that were
‘
turning-points
’
, sudden, violent experiences that raked across his mental habits and placed him in the Outsider
’
s position of seeing himself as a stranger. This gives him a peculiar value in our study, as combining the characteristics of the Van Gogh Outsider and the Herman Hesse type: men who write about their problems, and the men who live them.

Dostoevsky
’
s father was murdered by his peasants; they attacked him one day when he was drunk, and killed him by the strange method of crushing his testicles. They succeeded so well in hiding the fact that he had died by violence that they were never brought to justice. Dostoevsky learned of the death of his father while he was an engineering student in Petersburg.

Fame broke on him suddenly when he was only twenty-four; his short novel
Poor Folk
was hailed by the foremost Russian critics as the most outstanding novel since
Dead Souls.
The unknown engineering student was acclaimed as a great writer. Three years later, the reversal came when he was arrested for being involved in a nihilistic plot. The story of the fake
‘
execution
⁵
in the Semyonovsky Square is well known (Dostoevsky makes Prince Myshkin retell it in
The Idiot).
By the time the
‘
pardon
’
arrived at the last moment, one of the condemned men had gone insane, and never recovered. Dostoevsky spent the next ten years in exile in Siberia.

His later life is equally a story of sudden brilliant successes, and catastrophes that fell on him without warning. In his dealings with people, especially women, he often showed revolting weakness and stupidity; in his recovery from disasters and in the writing of his books he revealed extraordinary
spiritual strength. It is the same with his books.
The Brothers Karamazov, The Devils, The Idiot arc
surely the sloppiest great novels ever written; this must be qualified by adding that they are also among the greatest novels ever written.

The Outsider theme is present in everything that Dostoevsky ever wrote; his five major novels represent an increasingly complex attack on it. Since the English edition of his works runs into fifteen volumes, it is obvious that our attention must be very strictly limited to his most important work. (The alternative would be to extend this section on Dostoevsky out of all proportion to the sections on other writers.) This means that certain works that would well repay our study must be ignored completely:
The Double, The House of the Dead, The Gamblers
and
A Raw Youth.

The novels that are most important for our purpose are
Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment
and
The Brothers Karamazov.

Notes from Underground
is the first major treatment of the Outsider theme in modern literature. With Hesse
’
s
S
teppenwolf
it can be considered as one of the most important expositions of the Outsider
’
s problems that we shall deal with in this study, Written sixty-four years before Hesse
’
s and forty-six before Barbusse
’
s book, when no other
‘
Outsider
’
literature existed, it stands as a uniquely great monument of Existentialist thought.

Its title in Russian,
Notes from Under the Floorboards,
carries the suggestion that its hero is not a man, but a beetle. This is just what he makes himself out to be; his first words are:
‘
I am sick. I am full of spleen and repellent.
...
’

And the character-analysis that follows shows us why he considers himself a beetle. He has been like this, he says, for twenty years, living alone in his room, seldom going out, nursing his dyspepsia and ill-temper, and thinking, thinking.... For fifty pages he rambles on, expounding his ideas. He
‘
is neurotically over-sensitive:
‘
No hunchback, no dwarf, could be more prone to resentment and offence than I....
’

Yet all this rings false; we begin to grow impatient of the beetle-man
’
s word-spinning, when suddenly we become aware that, in spite of the longwindedness,
he is really trying to define something important. He is full of fantastic illustrations of his
‘
complicated state of mind
’
. Here is an example (greatly abridged):
‘
People who are able to wreak vengeance on an
assailant, and in general to stand up for themselves—how do they do it? It can only be supposed that
momentarily their whole being is possessed
by a desire for revenge, and no other element is ... in them. A man of that sort goes straight to his goal as a
mad bull charges I do not consider a man of that type to be
the
“
normal
”
, as his mother Nature—would have him be. Yet
I envy him with all the power of my spleen
‘
[Italics mine.]
¹¹

We are reminded of T. E. Lawrence
’
s envy of the soldier with a girl or a man caressing a dog. Yes, we know all about this aspect of the beetle-man. He thinks too much. Thinking has thinned his blood and made him incapable of spontaneous enjoyment. He envies simpler, stupider people because they are undivided. That is nothing new. What more has the beetle-man to tell us?

Well, there is the odd fact that he
likes
suffering.

... it is just in this same cold, loathesome semi-mania, this same half-belief in oneself.. . this same poison of unsatisfied wishes
...
that there lies the essence of the strange delight I have spoken of.
¹²

And this
“
strange delight
’
is the centre of the beetle-man
’
s dialectic. For upon it pivots the whole question
of freedom.
Is man really incapable of absolute evil, as Boethius (following Plato) asserts ? Does he always strive for what he instinctively apprehends as the Good? The arguments for it are strong. For the criminal, crime is a response to the complexities of his social life. In that case, is the soul, then, governed by natural laws like Einstein
’
s gravitational formulae?
‘
Tout est pour le mieux dans ce meilleur de mondespossible
⁹
;
and Hegel, with a grand sweep, completes the System begun by Leibiiz. (It was Leibniz, after all, who originated the conception of philosophy as glorified logic that has had such depressing results in modern philosophy.) So after Hegel, Reason governs all; men are cogs in a great machine that makes for ultimate Good.

And suddenly, Dostoevsky
’
s beetle-man starts up, with his bad teeth and beady eyes, and shouts:
‘
To hell with your System. I demand the right to behave as I like. I demand the right to regard myself as
utterly unique.
⁹

And now we can see what the beetle-man is really getting at, with his nasty leers and shrill giggles. His belligerence is a
reaction against something, and that
‘
something
’
is rational humanism. And before long we recognize the Nietzschean note:

To maintain theories of renovating the human race through Systems ... is about the same thing as to maintain that man grows milder with civilization. Logically, perhaps, this is so; yet he is so prone to Systems and abstract deductions that he is for ever ready to mutilate the truth, to be blind to what he sees or deaf to what he hears, so long as he
can succeed in vindicating his logic Civilization develops
in man nothing but an added capacity to receive impressions —that is all. And the growth of that capacity increases his tendency to seek pleasure in spilling blood. You may have noticed that the most enthusiastic blood-letters have always been the most civilised of men.
...
¹³

This is the essence of Nietzsche
’
s vision on the hilltop
...
unreason, the smell of blood, violence, and utter contempt for mere intellect. We can imagine how disgusted the beetle-man would have been with Freud
’
s psychology, which expounds the most picturesquely complicated accounts of the
‘
mechanisms
’
that produce
‘
irrational
’
human actions.