The Haunted Man

by Colin Wilson, E.H. Visiak, J.B. Pick

s/t: The Strange Genius of David Lindsay
Wilson, one of modern literature's most provocative writers and original thinkers, here gives a personal tour of the life and works of one of the 20th century's most extraordinary writers of fantasy, whose books include A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, THE HAUNTED WOMAN, and others.

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Colin Henry Wilson was born and raised in Leicester, England, U.K. He left school at 16, worked in factories and various occupations, and read in his spare time. When Wilson was 24, Gollancz published The Outsider (1956) which examines the role of the social 'outsider' in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures. These include Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh and Wilson discusses his perception of Social alienation in their work. The book was a best seller and helped popularize existentialism in Britain. Critical praise though, was short-lived and Wilson was soon widely criticized.

Wilson's works after The Outsider focused on positive aspects of human psychology, such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. He admired the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow and corresponded with him. Wilson wrote The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff on the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff and an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic in 1980. He argues throughout his work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. Wilson views normal, everyday consciousness buffeted by the moment, as "blinkered" and argues that it should not be accepted as showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us from being completely immersed in wonder, or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. Wilson believes that our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness are as real as our experiences of angst and, since we are more fully alive at these moments, they are more real. These experiences can be cultivated through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work.

Reviews

[Muzzlehatch · Rating 4 out of 5]

An absolutely essential primer for those few individuals who have encountered, or are interested in the work of the great author of "A Voyage to Arcturus" and other even more obscure works of philosophy and fantasy. Wilson describes his own difficulties in reading Lindsay, the difficulties that he (and probably anyone) will find with the author's sometimes-torturous language, and a short thesis on Lindsay's philosophy -- the heart of what his novels are about -- and its relationship to earlier European philosophers, particularly Nietzsche. I particularly like Wilson's division of writers over the past century into "high flyers" (those concerned with a world beyond our own) and "low flyers" (those concerned very much with the mundane nature of man). A terrific intro both to Lindsay and to Wilson as a critic, this small paperback also appears as part of an anthology on Lindsay with longer pieces by JB Pick and EH Visiak that, like this little volume, is sadly long out of print and nearly impossible to find.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A succinct literary crticism of the work of 1920s gnostic visionary and philosophical fantasist David Lindsay. Despite it being Lindsay's most important work Wilson spends a disproportionate amount time (in what is already a very short work (63 pages)) discusing A Voyage to Arcturus (33 pages) givng over the remaining 30 pages to the author's remaining 5 works!
That said Wilson's workaday prose is a refreshing alternative to much literary crticism of the day bringing clarity to the densely complex theological and philosophical concepts and frameworks (gnosticism, Manicheanism, Nietschze, Schopenhauer, et al.) via which he reads and interprets some of the themes (and, Wilson argues, the supposed intentions) of this mind-blazingly original novel (and novelist)!
Literary elitists have always been down on Colin Wilson's 'populist' style and approach but here it forms the basis of an illuminating, if a little unbalanced, analysis of that original blazing talent.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very much a Colin Wilson work — manic and tied into the whole of existential philosophy. Not bad. I was left wanting more.