RITUAL IN THE DARK
A Critical Assessment
Paul
Newman
From 'Murder As An Antidote to Boredom' (Paupers Press £8.95)
This
was Colin Wilson's first novel, eagerly awaited after the brouhaha
attending the publication of The
Outsider. Described by Nicolas
Tredell as a metaphysical thriller, it is cast in an urgent
pared-to-the-bone style, evolved during the refining of previous versions
in which the language was richer and more descriptive and the structure
intended to parallel the Egyptian
Book of the Dead. The
sentences have a deliberate and distinct monotonous beat, two or three
shortish statements, usually cast in the transitive mode and beginning
with the personal pronoun, followed by an even shorter one. The effect is
like a succession of dramatic pauses, tense and tight-lipped, but hypnotic
if one succumbs to the rhythm:
“He
was suddenly struck by the thought that the place might be under
observation by the police. He turned and stared at the clump of trees he
had just left, at the bare hedges, and the haystack covered with tarpaulin
in the other corner of the field. As he looked, he heard a movement inside
the door. He looked round, and found Nunne's eyes looking at him from the
letter slit under the knocker. He stared back, too startled for a moment
to speak. The flap closed and a chain rattled; several bolts moved back.
The door opened, and Nunne stood there in his shirtsleeves. His face
looked unshaven and exhausted. Sorme
said: Hello Austin.”
There
is a feeling of arc lights and clinical distance about the method, as if
the author is looking at his characters like actors on a film set. Direct
dialogue and open debate is preferred to interiorised thought. No speech
marks are used, presumably in order to maintain this surface flatness.
Victor
Gollancz said that Ritual was
"in some respects, a foul book" but acknowledged that it
contained a perverted kind of truth, in the idea that even a sex murderer
was trying to enhance his existence. Set in London of the 1950s, a pall of
darkness hangs over the novel; the narrative broods and twists across
bomb-sites, night-clubs, seedy bedsits, mortuaries and slum dwellings. The
writing is sociologically aware, notating the class and status of the
characters, but its central interest lies beyond personae and façades -
in the exploration of the mystical, the ecstatic, the orgasmic. The plot
hinges on the relationship between scholarly, bookish Gerard Sorme and
Austin Nunne, a ballet historian of suspect sexual tendencies. Sorme is an
odd sort of fellow, capable of expressing fury at the sight of bustling
crowd in the rain but maintaining his charm and equability in the presence
of a vocational disemboweller. When the story opens, London is reeling
under a series of brutal sexual attacks, and as Sorme learns more about
Nunne, it becomes increasingly obvious that he might well be the killer.
Instead
of confiding his suspicions to the police, he lingers over the question as
over a profound moral dilemma, discussing it with Father Carruthers, a
crippled Catholic priest. "I don't know Austin as a sadist," he
remarks to the latter. "I know him rather as a generous dilettante
who likes ballet and music and philosophy. I think it's the same with him
as me. You know, father, Shaw said we judge an artist by his highest
moments and a criminal by his lowest. But what happens when a man's a
mixture of the two? You can't
sentence the criminal to death and let the artist go free, can you?
Especially when you know he wouldn't be a criminal if he wasn't an
artist."
Later
Sorme analyses the mind of a certain type of man who stands in danger of
becoming a sex criminal. "They oppose the instinct that ties them to
a particular woman. Their sexual desire isn't directed at a particular
woman, but at all women. Individual women excite such men less than the
idea of women in general. And that's the dangerous point where he could
become the sexual criminal. His sense of purpose is higher than that of
most men, but his instincts are still an animal's. It can become
sublimated in a need to become an artist, a philosopher, a social
reformer. But until that happens he's caught between two stools. His sense
of purpose makes a fanatic about him, and his appetites can't soar above
sex."
Such
statements baffle those who simply cannot see an overmastering biological
drive in terms of a higher sense of purpose. Rape is largely achieved by
de-personalisation of the victim and Wilson is correct in his impersonal
presentation of 'women' through the eyes of such offenders. Viewed
subjectively, most negative aspects of behaviour have a motive of
gratification which theoretically might be constructively channelled, but
the point is the nature of the blockage - which need not be sexual (unless
one believes Freud wholeheartedly, in which case nothing can escape that
designation). For instance, Hitler possessed a higher sense of purpose,
yet he believed the existence of several million Jews was a major obstacle
to the establishment of the Third Reich, so he set about removing them,
the beneficiaries of his policy being the Aryan race of the future. Wilson
portrays such men as having locked into the idea of living at a greater
intensity - but for entirely the wrong reason. Rather than accepting their
conventional designations as tyrants, fanatics or criminal lunatics, they
are re-cast as perverters of the life force - a view some might see as
excessively charitable or even misleading. But Wilson is not interested in
delivering conventional castigations but in understanding the mechanics of
motivation. Gerard Sorme does not see Nunne as evil even after he has
established that he is the murderer. Like a true existentialist, before
accepting traditional humanitarian values, he has to conduct an intense
philosophical dialogue, both with himself and others, after which he
concludes that Nunne's actions were fundamentally mindless and vicious.
To
call a talented sex criminal a frustrated higher type is to set his
problems apart from those of gifted people who husband their drives more
prudently. But Wilson is interested in men becoming like gods, in
achieving a mystic fission, and he appears to view certain criminal acts
as a kind of orgasmic barrier-breaking. Sex enables one to get a glimpse
of larger possibilities; furthermore it awakens the evolutionary drive
which Wilson sees as the beckoning candleflame. In a later passage,
describing the criminal Reginald Christie, he speaks of the small man's
sexual neurosis (he was called 'Can't-do-it Christie' in Leeds) and the
juncture when he becomes a murderer -
"And the point comes where the fantasies aren't enough. The
imagination fails. Then he kills, and suddenly he has everything he wanted
- a real woman lying at his feet. And for a moment, there's a supreme
freedom, a feeling of contact with eternity - he becomes a fragment of
eternity. Then the tragic return to earth - an unconscious woman lying at
his feet."
It
is this paradox - of mankind pinned between an elated certainty and
meaninglessness - which fascinates Wilson. This dual vision enables him to
discuss in a flat, emotionless way shocking aspects of human behaviour. At
the back of his mind lurks another concept where humans, no longer potent
embodiments of the will, are merely part of the tapestry of time and can
be viewed impersonally like moving particles under an electron microscope.
Sorme explains to Nunne a vision wherein he saw the forces behind the
world as being quite different from what he imagined. "Well, it
suddenly seemed to me that the forces behind the world weren't either good
or evil, but something quite incomprehensible to human beings. And the
only thing they want is movement, everlasting movement. That's the way I
saw it suddenly. Human beings want peace, and they build their
civilisations and make their laws to get peace. But the forces behind the
world don't want peace. So they send down certain men whose business it is
to keep the world in turmoil - the Napoleons, Hitlers, Genghis Khans. And
I call these men the enemies with a capital E. And I thought - I belong
among the enemies - that's why I detest this bloody civilisation."
Although
Sorme savours the impersonality of the larger vision, he allies himself
with Nunne in a preferential way, choosing not to get involved in the
lives of his victims. And it is this constant hovering, between affection
and glacial indifference, between commitment and detachment, between
defence of human values and a chilly, abstract sympathy for those who feel
the need to destroy them, that creates an uneasy effect in the mind of the
reader - yet draw one back to this unusual and provocative narrative if
only to re-contemplate the numerous paradoxes it contains - Paul Newman
A Reader’s Viewpoint
Amazing
that the premise of this book hasn't been discussed. Allegories contrast
the different types of man: thinking, no feeling or feeling, no thinking,
etc. The use of the Jack the Ripper case in a fictional setting made a
dramatic transposition for the time. This book jumped out at me with its
somewhat odd cover (though it seems just like a portrait of Wilson as a
young man). I quickly became a huge fan and tried my best (not being in
England) to gather the fiction and non-fiction of Colin Wilson, a
difficult task, requiring many visits to sprawling used book stores. This
is the first in a trio of
books and the second two are quite difficult to find but possible. With a
little determination one may obtain the second (also featuring Gerard
Sorme) called ‘Sex Diary of a Metaphysician’ (American title) which
takes forward some of the previous characters and absorbs us in a bizarre
world of sex and magic, providing us with a nice if occasionally
disconcerting image of the free wheeling 60's.
Strange
characters enter the books who possess outlandish ideas and insights. It
can easily be seen that Wilson is mainly a non-fiction writer, for he
tends to interleave long philosophical conversations in his fiction
concerning sexology, psychology, criminology, religion and the nature of
the human mind and condition. The third book in the trilogy ‘The God of
the Labyrinth’ is completely out of print but makes an interesting
companion to the first two. Whew! Here, Wilson does open his mind to all
sorts of things in a bizarre historical mystery which abandons the realism
of its predecessors. We really do enter a reality radically transformed
through perception.
For
anyone who liked ‘Ritual in the Dark’, I’d advise them to check out
‘Adrift in Soho’, a fictional story set at the same time in England.
For myself, I wish Wilson would write more fiction. The later ‘Mind
Parasites’ and ‘The Personality Surgeon’ have the thought-provoking
bits and I would love the US to discover Wilson and re-publish his books
for mass consumption.
Abraxas Secondhand list retains a first edition of this extremely valuable and collectable first novel.