Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

Colin Wilson as novelist. A very intelligent discussion, from http://web.mac.com/philco1/iWeb/Colin%20Wilson/Fiction.html which is the Fiction subdivision of http://web.mac.com/philco1/iWeb/Colin%20Wilson/News.html

At the end of his unjustly neglected 1975 tome on literary criticism, Wilson describes his use of Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’ in his own novels. This famous theatrical idea is a suspension of the illusion of realism on stage: “The audience is told: ‘This is a play, an entertainment. It is not supposed to be real.’ After that, the author can do what he likes: introduce songs or dances, acrobatics, political lectures, even fragments of documentary film.” (The Craft of the Novel p. 238.)

With novels such as Necessary Doubt, The Glass Cage, The Mind Parasites, and The Black Room, Wilson describes how he was instinctively making use of Brecht’s principle in that he was using popular forms (detective, sci-fi and spy stories) as parody to disguise his philosophical message.

The Mind Parasites, for instance, was born from a passage in Introduction to the New Existentialism, and written at the request of August Derleth who thought that Wilson had been overtly harsh to Lovecraft in The Strength to Dream. The novel is a parody - and an improvement - on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. The Parasites are a form of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones (”Those who control the destiny of this planet” according to Kenneth Grant) who invaded the human mind during the Romantic Age.

“In the history of art and literature since 1780, we see the results of the battle with the mind vampires. The artists who refused to preach a gospel of pessimism and life devaluation were destroyed. The life-slanderers often lived to a ripe old age. It is interesting, for example, to contrast the fate of the life-slanderer Schopenhauer with that of the life-affirmer Nietzsche, or that of the sexual degenerate De Sade with that of the sexual mystic Lawrence.” (The Mind Parasites, p.66).

In The Necronomicon, Wilson states that all of three of his Mythos novels - the above, along with The Return of the Lloigor and The Philosopher’s Stone were his method of ‘criticizing’ Lovecraft. In Order of Assassins he maintains the psychological similarities between Lovecraft and mass murderers like Peter Kurten: that his racist loathing for ‘the scum’ is one source for his ‘blasphemous’ visions. So the Parasites are a metaphor for all forms of narrow, criminal consciousness.

Professor Christopher Frayling once said of Wilson that he couldn’t think of any other modern writer who suddenly went from writing for academic journals to writing the kind of paperback books that you would see at motorway service stations. Today, such a move would be seen as a postmodernist coup, and the idea of a phenomenological Cthulhu Mythos tale, or porno overkill in The God of the Labyrinth would be applauded as a nudge-nudge wink-wink po-mo success. When these were published they were merely taken at face value, and presumed to have no intellectual content. The best thing about Wilson’s fiction, however, is that rather than attempt to deconstruct the cliches that are often expressed in novels, he uses these cliches to reinforce the sense of ‘double reality’ or Faculty X , that strange aesthetic revelation of being aware of other times and other places. He describes the novel as a kind of new technology, a key that opens up the door to this new faculty.

For Wilson, writing novels is a way of philosophizing. “Philosophy may only be a shadow of the reality it tries to grasp, but the novel is altogether more satisfactory. I am also tempted to generalise and say that no philosopher is qualified to do his job unless he is also a novelist.” (Voyage to a Beginning, p. 160.) “It is easy to stumble into the pessimism of Kierkegaard, into feeling that philosophy is the intellectual’s favourite way of lying to himself. But then, Kierkegaard was a very bad novelist.” (ibid). For all of his bluster about writing nothing but fictions, Foucault never managed a short story, let alone the novel he once threatened to write. The anaemic legacy of all the post-who-cares-anyway cults is an endless stream of boring, navel-gazing fiction which is too timid to grapple with any important ideas at all.

Wilson builds his novels with material from his philosophical work. Ritual in the Dark and The Outsider, Man without a Shadow and Origins of the Sexual Impulse, The Glass Cage and Beyond the Outsider interplay with ideas in a fictional/factual manner. His novels are in the tradition of the bildungsroman or the novel of education, and he follows Shaw in seeing the novel as magic mirror which reflects our I back at ourselves. The extraordinary success of the first novels such as Richardson’s Pamela or Goethe’s teenage suicide Young Werther dramatically altered the mental landscape of Europe ; libraries lent out Rousseau’s New Heloise by the hour. But the retreat into camera-like subjectivity which has at it’s apex Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Musil’s Man without Qualities is described by Wilson as a kind of defeatism.

In volume four of his massive novel, Proust writes: “If I do not know a whole section of the memories that are behind me, if they are invisible to me, if I do not have the faculty of calling them to me, how do I know in the mass that is unknown to me that there may not be some that extend back much further than my human existence?” (Sodom and Gomorrah, p.444). Proust claims several times in that we cannot develop a faculty to see with the I, even though Marcel does just this in the famous Swann’s Way passage often quoted by Wilson in support of his Faculty X theory.

This state of double consciousness is at the heart of Wilson’s fiction. His ‘parodic’ novels go way beyond mere postmodern whimsy whose ‘deconstruction’ reveals not any social truth but merely the subjective prejudices of postmodernists. Reading Wilson’s fiction makes one aware of this doubling of experience where the fictional structure of rationality can be seen functioning aesthetically. Rather than telling us that there is nothing outside the text, he makes us aware that the text’s power is to change the world: the novel was responsible for tearing people away from the world of the witch trials and into the Romantic and industrial revolutions. (The Occult, p. 432, and Mysteries, p. 259.)

The legacy of postmodernism’s denial of genius and it’s myopic obsession with the “worm’s eye view” is now seen in a bureaucracy which favours the passive fallacy of fatalistic culture and politics, and an obsessive pettymindedness. Wilson knows that literature is a tool which can reassert our genius: in his biography of Ouspensky (p 41), he notes that the act of reading is analogous to Gurdjieff’s self remembering. This involves looking at an object and being aware that you are looking at it; Gurdjieff typically stressed how difficult this was, but Wilson writes: “if you concentrate your attention while reading this book, you will note that you become aware of yourself as well as of the book.”

Further reading:

Literary Criticism:

Eagle and Earwig: Essays on Books and Writers.
The Strange Genius of David Lindsay. Lavish reissue by Savoy Books
The Craft of the Novel. Remarkable and accessible slab of lit-crit
Science Fiction as Existentialism. Reprinted in Existentially Speaking
The Books in My Life. Very useful guide to the classics: no “death of the author” tedium

Fiction:

Ritual in the Dark.
Adrift in Soho.
The World of Violence. The rifle range and the ivory tower
Man without a Shadow. Do what thou wilt AND the Law
Necessary Doubt.
The Glass Cage. Blakean sleuth tale…
The Mind Parasites. William Burroughs gave this a great review
The Philosopher’s Stone.
Strindberg (play). Fond of noting the number of ‘telepathic embraces’ with the letter X
The God of the Labyrinth. Sorme discovers the Sect of the Phoenix
The Killer. Nic Roeg wanted to direct a celluloid version of this classic
The Black Room. Peter Hammill & Mark E. Smith took notes in the dark
The Return of the Lloigor. Short story, Arkham House mythos
The Schoolgirl Murder Case.
The Space Vampires. Filmed as Lifeforce ; “the worst film ever made” (C.W.)
The Janus Murder Case.
The Personality Surgeon. Shaw’s Pygmalion painted by the Quantell Digital Paintbox
Spider World (4 Vols.). Reissued by Hampton Roads
The Magician from Siberia. Download here
Mozart’s Journey to Prague: a playscript.