The Outsider by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online
Authors: Colin Wilson
breaking-down of all Roquen-tin ’ s values. Exhaustion limits him more and more to the present, the here-now. The work of memory, which gives events sequence and coherence, is failing, leaving him more and more dependent for meaning on what he can see and touch. It is Hume ’ s scepticism becoming instinctive, all-destroying. All he can see and touch is unrecognizable, unaided by memory; like a photograph of a familiar object taken from an unfamiliar angle. He looks at a seat, and fails to recognize it: ‘ I murmur: It ’ s a seat, but the word stays on my lips. It refuses to go and put itself on the thing. ... Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, stubborn, huge, and it seems ridiculous to call them seats, or to say anything at all about them. I am in the midst of things—nameless things. ’ 18
In the park, the full nature of the revelation comes to him as he stares at the roots of a chestnut tree:
I couldn ’ t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished, and with them, the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference men have traced on their surface. I was sitting ... before this knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. ... It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of existence. I was like the others.... I said with them: The ocean is green, that white speck up there is a seagull, but I didn ’ t feel that it existed. ... And then suddenly existence had unveiled itself. It had lost the look of an abstract category; it was the very paste of things; this root was kneaded into existence. ... These objects, they inconvenienced me; I would have liked them to exist less imposingly, more dryly, in a more abstract way ... 19
He has reached the rock bottom of self-contempt; even things negate him. We are all familiar enough with his experience in the face of other human beings; a personality or a conviction can impose itself in spite of resistance; even the city itself, the confusion of traffic and human beings in Regent Street, can overwhelm a weak personality and make it feel insignificant. Roquentin feels insignificant before things. Without the meaning his Will would normally impose on it, his existence is absurd. Causality—Hume ’ s bugbear—has collapsed; consequently there are no adventures. The biography of Rollebon would have been another venture of ‘ bad faith ’ , for it would have imposed a necessity on Rollebon ’ s life that was not really there; the events didn ’ t really cohere and follow one another like a story; only blindness to the fact of raw, naked existence could ever produce the illusion that they did.
What then? Is there no causality, no possible meaning? Sartre summarizes life: ‘ L ’ homme est un passion inutile. ’ There is no choice, in Roquentin ’ s reckoning; there is only being useless and knowing it and being useless and not knowing it.
Yet Roquentin had had his glimpse of meaning and order; in ‘ Some of These Days ’ . There was meaning, causation, one note following inevitably on another. Roquentin wonders: why shouldn ’ t he create something like that; something rhythmic, purposive—a novel, perhaps, that men could read later and feel: There was an attempt to bring order into chaos? He will leave Havre and the life of Rollebon; there must be another way of living that is not futile. The Journal comes to an end on this note.
***
Roquentin lives like Barbusse ’ s hero; his room is almost the limit of his consciousness. But he has gone further and deeper than the hole-in-the-wall man. His attitude has reached the dead-end of Wells; ‘ Man is a useless passion ’ : that could be taken as a summary of Mind at the End of Its Tether. Complete denial, as in Eliot ’ s ‘ Hollow Men ’ : We are the hollow men, we are the salauds. Roquentin is in the position of the hero of The Country of the Blind. He alone is aware of the truth, and
In the park, the full nature of the revelation comes to him as he stares at the roots of a chestnut tree:
I couldn ’ t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished, and with them, the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference men have traced on their surface. I was sitting ... before this knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. ... It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of existence. I was like the others.... I said with them: The ocean is green, that white speck up there is a seagull, but I didn ’ t feel that it existed. ... And then suddenly existence had unveiled itself. It had lost the look of an abstract category; it was the very paste of things; this root was kneaded into existence. ... These objects, they inconvenienced me; I would have liked them to exist less imposingly, more dryly, in a more abstract way ... 19
He has reached the rock bottom of self-contempt; even things negate him. We are all familiar enough with his experience in the face of other human beings; a personality or a conviction can impose itself in spite of resistance; even the city itself, the confusion of traffic and human beings in Regent Street, can overwhelm a weak personality and make it feel insignificant. Roquentin feels insignificant before things. Without the meaning his Will would normally impose on it, his existence is absurd. Causality—Hume ’ s bugbear—has collapsed; consequently there are no adventures. The biography of Rollebon would have been another venture of ‘ bad faith ’ , for it would have imposed a necessity on Rollebon ’ s life that was not really there; the events didn ’ t really cohere and follow one another like a story; only blindness to the fact of raw, naked existence could ever produce the illusion that they did.
What then? Is there no causality, no possible meaning? Sartre summarizes life: ‘ L ’ homme est un passion inutile. ’ There is no choice, in Roquentin ’ s reckoning; there is only being useless and knowing it and being useless and not knowing it.
Yet Roquentin had had his glimpse of meaning and order; in ‘ Some of These Days ’ . There was meaning, causation, one note following inevitably on another. Roquentin wonders: why shouldn ’ t he create something like that; something rhythmic, purposive—a novel, perhaps, that men could read later and feel: There was an attempt to bring order into chaos? He will leave Havre and the life of Rollebon; there must be another way of living that is not futile. The Journal comes to an end on this note.
***
Roquentin lives like Barbusse ’ s hero; his room is almost the limit of his consciousness. But he has gone further and deeper than the hole-in-the-wall man. His attitude has reached the dead-end of Wells; ‘ Man is a useless passion ’ : that could be taken as a summary of Mind at the End of Its Tether. Complete denial, as in Eliot ’ s ‘ Hollow Men ’ : We are the hollow men, we are the salauds. Roquentin is in the position of the hero of The Country of the Blind. He alone is aware of the truth, and