Colin Wilson (1) (1931–2013)

Colin WIlson knows nothing about psychology, psychiatry, child develoment, trauma, or dialectical materialism, and he puts all his knowledge to use in writing this book. This is full of stupid conclusions, outright factual errors, discredited (or never credited) science, and sheer flights of fantasy. Basically this book is prurient true crime masquerading as high minded study of criminology. It is nonsense on stilts. It starts badly with a comment about male dominance in gerbils (gerbils are show more matriarchal and the males tend to be more timid), continues at about one ridiculous statement a page until finally flung down. Avoid. show less

This is like a time capsule of a more credulous age back when ESP and poltergeists were legitimate scientific phenomena, and humanity was just on the verge of unlocking psychic powers. A lot of hokum is presented as fact, from simple magic tricks like Uri Geller's spoon bending (spoiler: he bends them with his hands not his mind) to just plain wrong parapsychological research. Arguments recur. A lot. I hope you like the bit about Maslow and peak experience because you'll get to hear it again show more from 12 different angles, Proust's Madeleine recurs so much you can taste it.
Despite all this there's something compelling about Wilson's existentialist takes and mystical hopefulness. Akin to Robert Anton Wilson spinning you a tale, the fact that he's a kook and what he's saying is mostly wrong falls by the wayside to the good story or interesting idea. show less

The Craft Of the Novel is an odd little book. The literary fame of its author, Colin Wilson, has not lasted the thirty odd years since his "The Outsider" (not to be confused with Camus' existential masterpiece) was an overnight success, and I suppose that on its publication around that time, and with such a tail wind, this book might have carried more gravitas than it does now. As it is, Colin Wilson currently resides in the "Where Are They Now?" file, whereas the dozens of authors from the show more last three hundred years of literature whose novelistic failings he savagely decries, decidedly do not.

It is Wilson's considered view, you see, that Joyce, Hemingway and Balzac were muddled thinkers; Maupassant didn't think at all, Hesse was unsatisfactory, Balzac unsatisfying, Beckett saddled with faulty artistic logic, Huxley and Lawrence were experimental novelists who have really added nothing new. And that's just scratching the surface. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Camus, Proust, HG Wells, Dickens all come in for similar treatment, and poor old James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway in particular, get pages and pages of it.

Part of the problem is that Wilson has arbitrarily defined the purpose of a novel in a way that suits him, but that doesn't seem to bear any relation to any generally understood view. So either he's setting up a straw man, or his definitions are intended to be interpreted so loosely that they don't really say anything at all. I suspect the latter: his various formulations seems like so much pseudo-intellectual hog-wash to me:

"The novel is the embodiment of what Kierkegaard meant by existential philosophy. It is an attempt to demonstrate clearly the outcome of certain attitudes to life."

"The aim of the novelist to produce wide-angle consciousness"

"The novel is a thought experiment, which aims to explore human freedom"

"The writer's sense of meaning - the things he loves and values - must be *exactly* counterbalanced by the things he hates or rejects.

"The basic law of the novel is Newton's third law of motion: that every action should have an equal and opposite reaction"

This is all either wrong, or meaningless. Yet without irony, he accuses his elders and betters of crimes he's guilty of himself: Of Ulysses, he remarks "...unfortunately this also involved a biased and highly personal view of the purpose of art".

Hmmm. Pot, Kettle?

As this treatise progresses is gets ever more bizarre. At one point we're told that all works of literature can be judged according to a scale how far they share the "communal life-world", which marks the bottom of a scale, a "Highly Individual Life-world" marking the middle of the scale and "Purely Objective Vision" marking the top.

What does this mean? Search me.

His broad assertions become more and more weird: "language falsifies reality" he tells us (but not Wittgenstein, I suspect); "the Language of mathematics allows us to explore the mathematical truths of our universe"; and the Ancient Greeks who preserved the oral tradition of Homer (yes, them - the ones behind algebra, geometry, mathematics, politics, philosophy, sculpture etc etc) were "savage, scarcely literate people".

It is truly difficult to know what on earth to make of this.

Wilson does have some good words to say on a couple of obscure fantasy writers from the 20th century (David Lindsay and John Cowper Powys, who respectively produced "the greatest imaginative work of the 20th century - possibly in all literature" and a prophetic novel that "surpasses Eliot, Melville or Dostoyevsky"), and Tolkien: presciently he intones: "It is conceivable then, that future generations will see The Lord Of The Rings as the cultural watershed of the 20th Century".

Curiously Herman Melville gets scarcely a mention, while Bram Stoker gets none at all.

Ultimately I suspect this is all just more evidence that "The Craft of the Novel" was an artefact of its time, and not one that bears reading thirty years down the line. That's another way of saying this book is, and was, unmitigated rubbish.

But for all that, in a strange way, I enjoyed it. It certainly has given me some fresh reading tips (I'm going to give Powys and Lindsay a try) and there was something curiously enjoyable about being so infuriated by the silly remarks!

An extra star for luck, therefore. show less

Books can be dangerous if they change the way you think about your life and this book would have been dangerous for me had I read it in the 1960's. It caused a bit of a sensation in the literary world when it was first published in 1956 and it's young author has spent the rest of his career suffering from something like a backlash. It is a critique on existentialist thought that slashed and burnt it's way across the art's world of the late 1950's. The existentialist outsider as hero was a show more message that some young people in the 50's and 60's desperately wanted to identify with and Wilson's study hit the sweet spot, because those people who felt that they were somehow 'out of step' at the start of the consumer boom would have found plenty of ammunition in this book to realise that other people were singing from the same hymn sheet.

Wilson starts with Henri Barbusse and moves on to H G Wells and Hemmingway as he searches for authors that asked the questions that set them aside from the majorities views, this leads him to Sartre, Camus and Kafka. A chapter on the Romantic Outsider is a walk through the works of Herman Hesse, before he gets to three men who he claims lived the lives of outsiders rather than merely writing about it; he portrays Van Gogh, T E Lawrence and Nijinsky as men who were driven to insanity and/or early deaths because of their vision that took them outside of the world of the bourgeoisie. They were men who could not control their restless spirits, who saw the world through different eyes and suffered for it. In 'The Pain Threshold the thoughts of Nietzsche are brought into the argument before Wilson launches into a brief critique of one of the ultimate outsiders Dostoevsky, with particular reference to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Wilson summarises his thoughts at the end of each chapter which gives the book a feeling of a logical argument. Here is what he says at the end of his chapter on Dostoevsky:

The Outsider wants to cease to be an outsider
He wants to be balanced
He would like to achieve a vividness of sense-perception (Lawrence, Van Gogh, Hemingway)
He would like to understand the human soul and its workings (Barbusse and Mitya Karamazov)
He would like to escape triviality forever, and be 'possessed' by a will to power. to more life
Above all he would like to know how to express himself, because that is the means by which he can get to know himself and his unknown possibilities.
Every Outsider tragedy we have studied so far has been a tragedy of self-expression
We have to guide us, two discoveries about the Outsider's 'way'
1) That his salvation 'lies in extremes'
2) That the idea of a way out often comes in 'visions' moments of intensity etc.

The following chapters take the argument into the realms of religious mysticism with studies of George Fox, William Blake and Gurdjieff and these I found less convincing, but this was perhaps because of my natural antipathy to religious thought.

The overriding message that this book brought home to me was that we should not lose sight of the thoughts and ideas of those people that dared to think outside the box, that asked the difficult questions and sought a meaning to life and their own existence. It is also a lesson to us all not to get caught up in the mechanical world of a continuous push to get more 'things' from life. The ability to stop and think is one that should be nurtured and we should be courageous enough to go wherever this takes us. Don't get caught up in the cow-like drifting of so many people in the Western World.

Wilson was considered to be one of the angry young men of the 1950's writing at a time when the majority of people were emerging from the vicissitudes of two world wars and facing the uncertainty of the atomic age. His book resonated then and can still be admired today for it's attempt to define the "Outsiders" and provide us with a critical study of the visionaries that did not shape the world, but more importantly raised questions that should make us all stop and think about how and why we live in that world. Books that make you think about your reasons for being can be dangerous and I wonder if anyone is writing any today. If not we will have to make do with such books as Wilson's [The Outsider]. A four star read. show less