Book Review

The Outsider by Colin Wilson

     A century or so after the Industrial Revolution started, Western societies set into a pattern where the masses of people appeared to be doing little more than working, sleeping, eating, and never fully developing as human beings. In response, those who were unhappy with this arrangement became more individualistic and socially isolated. Colin Wilson wrote The Outsider to address this situation. While this somewhat influential work of non-fiction begins with a departure into an interesting territory, it also never arrives at any kind of useful destination.

     A large portion of The Outsider is literary analysis. Wilson delves into the works of Sartre, Camus, Hesse, Nietzsche, Blake and others. He begins by defining the Outsider as someone who thinks and feels more deeply than other people; this causes them to break away from the herd to purse a life lived to the fullest. He describes this as existentialism and, although he does refer to some existentialist authors, this is not a standard definition of the term. Existentialism was a modern philosophical and literary movement that addressed the idea of humanity in the absence of God; without divine revelation or the dogmatic beliefs to be blindly accepted by religious leaders, truth is determined by empirical experience and meaning is created and chosen rather than received. Wilson does indirectly address these existentialist themes but he does so in a truncated and indirect way that makes this book only tenuously related to existentialism. In any case, The Outsider has problems with definitions throughout the whole book. His concept of the Outsider is incredibly narrow and actually addresses only a small category of alienated people; most of his examples come from fictional characters, not reality, and the details of those he does portray are cherry-picked. Besides, the real outsiders are those who are terminally alone for more mundane reasons like the awkward high school kid who gets bullied because he has zits, the schizophrenic man sitting at the bus stop having conversations with imaginary people, the forty year old guy who commits suicide because he has not lost virginity at the age of 40 or the prisoner who tries to kill himself by bashing his head against the wall after being kept in solitary confinement for four weeks. Colin Wilson is too superior to deal with those kinds of outsiders, though, isn’t he?

     His description of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as being a man who wants to start a new religion could easily be undercut by the fact that Nietzsche was a proponent of moral relativism and linguistic situationism, believing that definitions have fluid, malleable meanings that do not remain fixed but alter according to their circumstances. This idea is in direct contradiction to the concept of religion being about eternal, unchanging values. Nietzsche was an atheist and an anti-metaphysician; Zarathustra was on a quest to experimentally find a better way of life because religion is about controlling masses of people rather than making life a more profound experience. He had not intention of establishing a new religion. But these facts never get in the way of Wilson trying to make his case; he simply ignores the ideas of Nietzsche that contradict what he wants to say and extracts the ideas that he wants. Wilson’s literary analyses are like seeing a garden bush carved into the form of an elephant; the gardener cut away all the pieces he did not want in order to make the bush appear to be something that it is not. Wilson does, however, write some interesting literary criticism but it is sophomoric and inaccurate, kind of like an undergraduate student’s term paper for a course on modern novels.

     Wilson has other problems with definitions. He keeps referring to the Will, with a capital W, but never once explains what this will is supposed to be. He does not even use the word in a semantically consistent enough way to make it possible to deduce what he actually means by this. He also keeps referring to the need for religion but his ideas of religion are never defined and what he has to say about it sounds more like mysticism in response to the existential dilemma rather than orthodox concepts of religion as an institution. Without responsibly defining and explaining terms like these it is impossible to clearly understand what it is he advocates for or why it is even important or relevant to our lives.

     Getting worse from there, Wilson proclaims that systematic thought like science, logic, and mathematics, are what keep the masses of people enslaved to modernist mediocrity. He blames Hegel especially for this. Quite often people who who condemn such kinds of rationality are people who either do not understand them well enough to use them or people who reject them because they do not support belief in angels, fairies, gods, demons, ghosts and other forms of supernatural junk. Most likely this is true for Wilson, the occultist, who condemns Hegelian thought but can not see that he wrote a book that is a dumbed-down and overly-simplified version of Hegelian ideas. The inherent conflict between the individual and society, as well as the physical, mental, and spiritual conflicts within each individual are all rooted in Hegelian phenomenology; Wilson’s ideas about achieving wholeness through the synthesis of opposing forces is also entirely Hegelian. Wilson was not broad-minded enough to see the Hegelian themes in his own writing.

     Worse for Wilson is the fact that he depends on systematic thought all throughout The Outsider. It is a linear narrative the proceeds from point to point along an organizational shceme; that is what is known as systematic thought. Early in the book he mentions the Jewish kabbalah and refers to it a couple times afterwards. Familiarity with the kabbalah makes it clear that the outline of his work is based entirely on this mystical formula which he appropriated from Hebraic tradition. The Outsider begins with the chaos of Sartre’s existentialism, leads into the self-consciousness of Hesse, the mind-spirit-body conflict of T.E. Lawrence, Vincent Van Gogh, and Nijinsky. This hurdle is overcome with Nietzsche confronting the great void, Dostoevsky overcoming it, and William Blake emerging into the spiritual enlightenment that results in a brilliantly colored kaleidoscopic orgasm that hits you like a psychedelic cumshot in the face. This, ladies and gentleman, is the kabbalah in a nutshell and, believe it or not, it is a system of thinking, one that Wilson did not scheme up on his own but borrowed from another culture because he did not really have any ideas of his own. Wilson does not truly reject systematic thinking; he just does not like the systems of thought that do not justify his own spiritual prejudices. Wilson was too amateurish of a thinker to see his own contradictions. Besides, isn’t this just Plato’s “Allegory Of the Cave” dressed up in Modernist clothing?

     Colin Wilson’s concept of the Outside is one of a solitary genius who can not be understood because he experiences life too deeply. His solution to the problem of the Outsider is to become a saint, a prophet, a visionary, or the founder of a new religion. Almost all the literary figures, and others, described in this book are, in the end, regarded as failures. Like everything else in this tract, Wilson’s idea of failure is inherently problematic too. Just because some of these authors and artists, some of which were atheists, did not become mystic visionaries does not mean they failed in what they set out to do. It means they failed to do what Colin Wilson thinks they should have done. This is the hubris of a second or third-rate thinker. While condemning these people for failing to become prophets and visionaries, it also has to be pointed out that Wilson states in the last chapter that he does not know how to solve the problem of the Outsider either. So he fails to meet his own goals while criticizing others for failing too.

     Colin Wilson was a literary hack, a pseudo-intellectual, and a gullible dupe. After writing The Outsider he went on to write trashy novels about rapists and serial killers, dopey books about UFOs, spiritualism, parapsychology, and other forms of corny occultism. In all, his oeuvre totals over 100 volumes. Do not ever trust a writer who publishes too much; it is a sign of shallow thinking. The Outsider gained some notice because of the slight influence it had on the Beat Generation authors and the hippie movement of the 1960s. It has maintained a cult following over time. Filled with historical inaccuracies and weak reasoning, it possibly will only be remembered as a historical artifact from the middle of the Modernist era, if it gets remembered at all. But it is not popular enough to be overrated and not written well enough to be underrated.

Wilson, Colin. The Outsider. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York: 1982.