The Backsider

By LI ONEL HALE ' An inquiry into the stature of the mid-twentieth century nausea, in the manner of Mr. Colin Wilson. \A T first sight, the Backsider is more than a man, and even more than a type. He is a social problem. He is the back-to-front-man. In physical fact, he may (as both Kierkegaard and Bishop Colenso independently noted) wear his outward manifestations in reverse—the coat buttoned at the back, the shoes worn pointing in the direction opposite to that he is walking. These visible Retrexistentialist evidences of the Backsider's negation, so markedly in contrast with the Yea-saying of Nietzsche, we must examine coolly and dispassionately, and with a wealth of scholarly annotation.

The symbol of the parson with his 'dog collar' presents, however inadvertently, the clearest equation of workaday religion to our western Retrexistentialism. The parson harshly and positivistically, although mutely, asserts, or rather ques- tions: Where is truth? Which way lies freedom? Whither am I going? Where will it all end? What does it all mean?

Yet the Retrexistentialist position has been put with a more living force, and with more real sense of that unrealism which is the Backsider's pride and torment, in the fictional writing of Henri-Philippe Cauchemartin. This ill-fated but profoundly significant thinker walked to his death backwards, deep in nauseated meditation, across the railway lines of the goods siding in Le Mans, in late 1949.

Yet he left us the hard, indivisible core of Retrexistentialism in his one and only novel. Here is his quasi-hero, Georges Hyacinthe Thomson, speaking as he watches (without noticing) a fly crawl up a dead man's nostril in the bistro-brothel of the unidentified village in the Pas de Calais : I am taut as wire, yet suddenly flooded with joy. In myself I revive all the sensations of the child in the womb,. the ape in the tree, the martyr in the catacomb. With my left 'iand, I reach behind me to scratch my loins: which are my face. And these face-loins, hard and brilliant and dog- matic, assure me all at once that the remainder of my life is to be one of abstraction, of purity, of disgust. . . . It is life itself whfch poses the question, ineluctably—which way up? Which side round? . . . This afternoon (or perhaps last year : it is a matter of frigid indifference to me) I mounted, exhausted, a tramcar, which seemed to me to be even more exhausted than myself, but possessing greater dignity. . . . Later, I am lying face down, my back staring at the sky, in a heap of ordure, left on the cobblqs by a horse which has been conquered by man, but is yet the conqueror. Something tells me that this horse, he also, is exhausted; and I laugh for joy; and my laugh is that of the horse himself.

(Henri-Philippe Cauchemartin: L'Infection des Autres. Translated by Daphne du Maurier.) The Backsider, admittedly, is of no time or place in especial. He is implicit in the nihilism of the Vedic Upanishads, tacitly admitted in Hardy's The Return of the Native, and recognised as a retreat into Dionysiac intensity by the censure of many a Papal Bull, not to mention the Encyclical of Pius X, De Vestigiis Nullis Retrorsum.

Of the Victorian Retrexistentialists, Tennyson (1809-1892) stated the Backsider position with sonorous clarity :

Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good,

And. Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud. (Locksley Hall.) We may only imagine the metaphysical force lent to this rhyme by Tennyson's strong Lincolnshire accent.

It was in 'The Lady of Shalott,' however, that Tennyson painted his forcefullest picture of that most formidable of Nature's self-contradictions, the Female Backsider. Here, as foreshadowed by Plato's 'man in the cave,' is the reversal, the 'mirror-view,' of life :

And moving through a mirror clear That hangs before her all the year Shadows of the world appear.

If the poet receded later from this position—as he most certainly did in the 'Funeral Ode to the Duke of Wellington,' q.v.—then we may triumphantly claim' that retreat is the privilege of the Retrexistentialist. To him, it is advance.

But we must rapidly go on to consider whether this mirror- view of the Backsider can be said effectively to negate all doubt. The Talmud claims not. A view of equally determined opposi- tion is found running throughout Gogol and Mrs. Markham's History of England, as well as (more tentatively) raising its head in Also Sprach Zarathustra and the pantomimes of James Robinson Planche. I may here cite also the 'one-being' doctrine of Parmenides (c. 540 Bc) . . . But how in God's name I can drag in the psycho-physical parallelism of Paulsen, one way or the other, is more than, at the moment, Lean see.

A revolution implies some royalty against which to revolt.

There is, indeed, a curious correlation between spiritual royalty and temporal monarchical rule : cf. the story of Peter III, discussed between Dostoievsky and Turgenev at the latter's country estate at Spasskoye. '

The unhappy Peter III, holding court in St. Petersburg, burst suddenly into tears. When his wife Catherine asked the reason, Peter III sobbed out that the spectacle of the courtiers, retreat- ing backwards from his presence according to court ceremonial, distressed him immeasurably. 'it is they, and not we,' he cried, `who are going the right way.' This involuntary burst of self- critical illumination led to Peter III's immediate assassination.

Dostoievsky and Turgenev were brooding in tears over this story, when Turgenev suddenly broke out into song :

Le bon roi Dagobert Mit ses culottes en revers.

`At this,' recorded Dostoievsky, we both on the instant gave way to uncontrollable and joyous laughter—the laughter of enfranchised souls who had looked into the abyss and there, amid the sulphurous smoke, seen the holy truth. We embraced, wept, sang, danced. . . . When Pauline [Viardot] came into the library some hours later, she found us both silent, drained of speech and even of thought by rapture and ecstasy, and standing motionless, contemplating infinity, back to back. She thought that we were measuring our respective heights. Ali, Woman ! Trivial, torturing, uncomprehending Woman!'

, It is strange that other Backsiders, pre-occupied with their own inner tensions, have missed the significance of this—even Rilke (1875-1826), even Gurdjieff, and even H. W. Fowler.

Yet in the gigantic balance-pan of the Retrexistentialist brain, the Peter III-Dagobert reversion should weigh down heavily, to the following conclusion.

It is necessary to Will : and, if necessary, therefore obligatory. For belief (as Marcus Aurelius and Ferdinand de Lesseps and George III all substantially asserted) depends on faith, and faith on action, and action on chaos, and chaos (unless inhibited) on causation, and causation on Will : and Will (of course) on belief. The back-to-front man knows this. It is his future, his present, and his past—in that order. With this knowledge, and a good reference library, the Backsider can be self-motivated into freedom and salvation.

Without it, he is still on Hampstead Heath, wakeful but unconscious, with his sleeping bag buttoned up back to front, imprisoned.