The Outsider (Colin Wilson)
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The Outsider is a non-fiction book by Colin Wilson first published in 1956; dealing with the social alienation of the outsider in 19th and 20th centuries arts and literature. The book was very successful and was a serious contribution to the popularization of existentialism in Britain.
Through the works and lives of various artists - including H. G. Wells (Mind at the End of its Tether), Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Harley Granville-Barker (The Secret Life), Hermann Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent Van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky - Wilson explores the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society, and society's effect on him.
The book is still published with enthusiastic comments from the likes of Edith Sitwell and Cyril Connolly adorning its cover. This reception - of his first book at the age of 24 - was a high critical watermark for Wilson, a reputation that sank as fast as it had rocketed. It is still, however, an insightful work of literary and philosophical criticism - a timeless preoccupation which perhaps garners more mainstream attention than his subsequent writings on the occult and crime. The book is structured in such a way as to mirror the outsider's experience: a sense of dislocation, or of being at odds with society. These are figures like Dostoevsky's "Insect-Man" who seem to be lost to despair and non-transcendence with no way out.
More successful - or at least hopeful - characters are then brought to the fore. These include Steppenwolf and even the hero of Camus' The Stranger - and these are presented as examples of those who have insightful moments of lucidity in which they feel as though things are worthwhile/meaningful amidst their shared, usual, experience of nihilism and gloom. Sartre's Nausea is herein the key text - and the moment when the hero listens to a song in a cafe which momentarily lifts his spirits is the outlook on life to be normalized. Wilson then engages in some detailed case studies of artists who failed in this task and tries to understand their weakness - which is either intellectual, of the body or of the emotions. The final chapter is Wilson's attempt at a "great synthesis" which he justifies his belief that western philosophy is afflicted with a needless "pessimistic fallacy" - a narrative he continues throughout his oeuvre under various names (St. Neot Margin for example) and illustrated in several metaphors ("everyday is Christmas day").
