Colin Wilson’s work as a whole has had a significant influence upon me.
By happy accident I first came to Wilson’s work via his first book the Outsider. I suspect a friend recommended it to me. Not long before the world of literature had opened up to me with a great sense of excitement. Wilson’s book surveyed an interesting cross section of writers and he wrote with a sense of urgency and engagement. This book was warmly received upon it’s initial publication and shot Wilson to literary Superstardom for a short period, By the time his second book appeared “Religion and the Rebel” a critical reversal had taken place and from this time on he was critical unfashionable. But wilson did not fade away instead he became a literary workhorse producing an astonishing number of books on a variety of subjects but all with a pretty consistent world view.
The Outsider looks at the development of the Outsider figure in literature, a figure that is marginal to the general thrust of humanity, lurking in the margins, feeling a sense of independence and alienation and regarding themself as self invented.
A lot of the literature at the time Wilson wrote the Outsider was pretty pessimistic and Wilson dwelt on the rather romantic artist who had high hopes and expectations which the drab mundaneness of life would crush. The beautiful vision at night is followed by the dull reality of the despairing morning after. Such modern misanthropists as Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. All paint the absurd stupidity of human existence.
But Wilson was an optimist and instead of trusting the despairing morning after he trusted those moments where our spirit is lifted and we seem to see more, a birds eye view. From an information point of view we would trust a theory that is supported by greater information so likewise he trusts more those moments when we see more.
An artist like Herman Hesse whom Wilson played a part in introducing to the English public and William Blake both have a strong sense of vision and please Wilson more.
The Outsider was a good start to his career. It showed Wilson as a synthesiser of ideas, he read voluminously and he found the world of ideas his natural place of play. I haven’t read all of his books and don’t intend to but I am going to cover some books I consider important. I am uninterested however on his writings on crime and sexual deviance which may be of interest to others.
I should also mention that wilson was right from the start happy to declare himself a genius, some critics have made fun of this and while personally I don’t think he is, I do think he is probably less egotistical than many with ostensibly humbler views of their own talents, he was approachable and open and his views are generally pretty broad.
Significantly later than The Outsider Wilson wrote a best seller called “the Occult” it may have sealed his doom amongst the literary progressives. It was a considerable boost to his professional livelihood and also a significant development of his thought. I suspect it may have had a significant cultural impact, I certainly hope so.
With the Occult Wilson fearlessly sailed the seas of jeopardy. He happily, calmly, level heatedly surveyed ideas that were beyond the pale of polite academic discourse: ghosts, telepathy, magic, poltergeists, possession, telekensesis and fairies. For those who read the book though he showed that these subjects could be worthy of our interest and could say something about human capability. This was also a large book and the size reflects the scale of the reading that Wilson drew on.
With this book the reader who is carried by Wilson’s arguments comes away with a sense of the scope of the human mind or spirit that is usually only barely tapped, he gives a sense of spiritual growth through personal effort as though at this time in our culture human Beings have the opportunity to enter into evolution consciously.
What this book did for me was to give a wide survey of "the paranormal" and shows how it is in fact much more common and "normal" than we have been led to believe but also show how optimistic heightened states of awareness that every healthy person experiences can lead to much greater things. Wilson’s book Beyond the Occult is a very worthy sequel.
The Craft of the Novel
What I found interesting about this book is Wilson’s perspective on what he thought the creation of the novel did. He argues that the invention of the novel freed humanity from a lot of the Dullness of Human life, Wilson credits Samuel Richardson with his novel Pamela as the inventor of the Novel and he writes:
From the perspective of the twentieth century, we can see that even Richardson’s greatest admirers failed to grasp the extra-ordinary nature of his achievement. Dr Johnson had the warmest regard for Richardson, but if anyone had told him the retired printer was one of the greatest innovators in literary history, he would have dismissed it with one of his bear-like growls. (‘Your feeling does you more credit than your intelligence, sir.’) Today, we can see that what made Richardson so remarkable was not that he enlarged our knowledge of human nature-—he didn’t—but that he freed the human imagination.
I think part of why I find this so interesting is the idea that human consciousness changes over time, the works of Homer and Virgil do not have the individual interiority of Richardson’s novel. Although personally I think Shakespeare is the beginning of this sense of individual interiority, Harold Bloom writes about this in his book Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human.
The other reason that this book had such a big effect on me is that he gave this amazing introduction to a very neglected novelist John Cowper Powys which led me on to reading Powys’ monumental works and i still think wilson’s summary is one of the best appreciations of Powys’ over looked novel a Glastonbury Romance:
Powys is a mystic, and the first thing to note about the book is that it appeared when he was sixty. This kind of vision could not have been achieved by a young man; the young tend to be trapped in immediacy. In the course of his six decades, much of which had been spent lecturing in America, Powys had developed an increasing sense of the oneness of man and nature. He would not have been in the least surprised by the discovery made by the experimenter Cleve Backster that plants can apparently read our minds; in Powys, trees, grass, even rocks, possess their own strange, dim consciousness. Human beings alone are cut off from this universal consciousness by their narrow, intense perceptions, although Powys prophesies that this will cease to be so, that there will soon be a ‘catastrophic change in human psychology itself’ which will cause certain human beings to experience a sense of oneness with the ‘subhuman organisms in nature’. Powys fills his enormous canvas——the book is nearly twelve hundred pages long——with an almost Shakespearian panorama of humanity. But no matter how absorbed we become in these human beings, we remain aware of the vast, overarching nature above them.
It is sometime since I have read Wilson’s Craft of the Novel and I am sure there is much more that others could find in it.
So far all the books I have mentioned have been non fiction or critical works even though they sit outside the usual framework of literary criticism. But Wilson has also written a large number of Novels it is mainly his science fiction or Lovecraftian inspired works that i want to talk about, but all his novels have something of value in them. They are all novels of ideas and Wilson is able to dramatise ideas in a really engaging way.
The Novels I mean are the SpiderWorld tetralogy, The Mind parasite , The Philosopher’s Stone and The Space Vampires. All of these novels have an amazing sense of people being challenged to rise to new heights drawing upon powers that are latent in all of us and moving towards a better world where we can access this rich inner world. The spider world novels also have a great outward invention and take place in a richly imagined environment.
That’s all I am going to say about them, but Wilson does manage to show that he thinks a good novel should be filled with optimism and expand the reader’s horizons and sense of possibility and that the the life of the mind is rewarding and challenging. I thoroughly enjoyed reading these works and have read most of them multiple times.
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
Wilson was writing this book as Graham Hancock was writing his important book Fingerprints of the Gods which Wilson book, drew upon he saw a draft i think prior to publication, the two became friends they are both iconoclasts. the idea central to these books is that there is a whole chapter of human civilisation that isn’t in our history books. There was a high human and globel culture that existed over 12,000 years ago. The Egyptian and Mayan cultures were child civilisations of the older one, this is the idea we know of Plato’s story of lost Atlantis. This civilisation was wiped out by a global cataclysmic along with a large number of species.
I think they are correct about this, it isn’t academically mainstream but more evidence is coming to support it. What Wilson’s book does more than Hancock’s, although it is actually one of Hancock’s interests, is to ask “What difference does it make if human cultural history is much longer?” his answer is that we can see a broader view of humanity, that culture isn’t just a linear projection but can include falls and set backs, things we once knew we may not know now there can be other and quite legitimate ways of seeing the world.
Wilson writes:
if we are talking about a different knowledge system, a system that is as valid as our own and yet unthinkably different in approach, then it could be of unimaginable importance. The kind of knowledge possessed by modern man is essentially fragmented. If some future visitors from outer space landed on earth, and found vast empty cities full of libraries and museums and planetariums, they would conclude that men of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries must have been intellectual giants. But as their scholars studied our encyclopaedias of science and philosophy and technology and every other conceivable subject, they would quickly recognise that no single mind could even begin to grasp what it was all about. We have no essential knowledge system - no way of seeing the universe as a whole and making sense of it.
once again Wilson has written a very enjoyable book, I think Hancock should be given the nod as the ground breaker, but wilson was there with him and offered a different and complimentary view.
Alien Dawn
I did feel some trepidation approaching this book, i thought wow has Wilson dived into the full kookiness of UFOs? But I was interested to see what he did with it. Wilson doesn’t investigate cases, what he does is asks a good friend who owns a bookstore that specialised in UFO books to load him up with good ones and he reads voluminously and synthesises what he reads.
Now for the most part what we have have is witnessed phenomena that can’t be reproduced in a laboratory, so we can’t do experiments about it as you can with telepathy for instances. There has been some analysis of physical effects but for the most part it is witnessed phenomena and so we need to evaluate the credibility of the witness, the number of witnesses the consistency of experience described and try to make some provisional observations.
Wilson Aligns himself more with Jacguee Valee and Carl Jung interpretation he thinks yes there is validity in these experiences.
Generally we tend to think of UFO phenomena as modern but Valee sees it as a continuation of a lot of phenomena that was regarded as fairie. And when we think of Fairie we tend to think of cute little things with wings but fairie phenomena was actually serious , interaction with Fairiecould have very serious experiences of time disjunctions, a short time with fairies and you find upon your return hundred’s of years have passed and everyone you knew is dead. Modern UFO phenomena the time disjunctions don’t appear as great & possibly it is due to an evolution in the phenomena.
Wilson is exploring UFOs from the standpoint that Consciousness is central. This follows the modern idea the the world looks more like a giant thought than a giant machine. We accept as reality what is actually only a small portion that our senses and limited consciousness allow us. The UFO phenomena is something from outside of that everyday limited reality that intersects with it and shows us a glimpse of a different vista. People may see this as ‘merely’ psychological but instead it is an acceptance that our consciousness is not somehow distinct and separate from reality.
In the chapter Alien powers Wilson writes:
For ten years or so after Arnold’s sighting in 1947, the main question was whether flying saucers came from our solar system or another galaxy. By the 1960s it was clear that this was the wrong question, and that the entities behind the UFO phenomenon did not appear to share our limitations in space and time. Vallee pointed out that they seem to behave like creatures out of folklore, Keel that the phenomena resemble those investigated by the Society for Psychical Research in the nineteenth century. Abductions and crop circles did nothing to clarify the issue, except to make us aware that we seemed to be dealing with beings whose powers were far greater than our own. Their ability to manipulate human beings, to take over our lives, control our minds and monitor our thoughts, seemed designed to make it clear that our notion that we are the most intelligent life form on Earth needs some serious revision.
Yet the work of Robert Monroe makes it clear that we are seeing only part of the picture. If his experiences are to be taken seriously, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we view ourselves. If we truly understood ourselves, we might have far less reason for feeling inferior to these beings. Monroe’s ability to leave his body strikes us as literally superhuman. The same is true of David Morehouse’s powers of remote viewing. Yet it seems that Morehouse is only one of a team who can all do it
Dreaming to Some Purpose
This book is a very candid overview of his life and work. It can be useful as a guide to which of his works will interest you. This book is a great testament to Wilson’s tenacity. Frustratingly I also discovered that there is an unpublished novel, Metamorphosis of a Vampire which i’d love to read.
I am aware that such a pithy summary of Wilson’s work will never give a proper impression of his work especially when he confronts so many controversial subjects, there is no substitute for actually reading him.
So once again thank you Mr Wilson your work has made a difference to me and I think there is much from your work that could still benefit humanity as a whole.
There are other worthy Wilson books you can read , these are the one’s that stand out for me.
