The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination

The Outsider Cycle #4

by Colin Wilson

Book by Colin Wilson

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Literary Criticism

277 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

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

[وائل المنعم · Rating 3 out of 5]

من الكتب النادرة التي اختلف مع كاتبها في كل فكرة يعرضها ومع ذلك لا أستطيع أن أنكر أنني استمتعت بقراءته.

عنوان الكتاب بالعربية ليس له علاقة بمضمونه، والعنوان الأصلي "القدرة على الحلم: الأدب والخيال" أدق. أيضاً تدخل المترجم الوحيد بالتعليق على تحامل ولسون كان عند إشارته لبيكيت على الرغم من أنها الأكثر موضوعية.

الكتاب إجمالاً يحاول أن يتتيع العلاقة بين الخيال والواقع بالتطبيق على أعمال عدد من أشهر الكتاب، ويعيبه بالأساس التركيز على ما يعتقده نهاية للأدب دون أن يقدم نماذج لما يراه أدب حقيقي. ولكني بعد قراءة الكتاب - بعد تفهم منظوره - لم أفهم العلاقة ما بين وايلد وسترندبرغ مثلاً أو بين زولا وفوكنر.

مشكلة ويلسون الرئيسية أنه غير قادر على تذوق الأدب كما هو، فيلقي عليه أبعاد فلسفية ونفسية من عنده تصبح هي معايير تقييمه ومن هذا القبيل جمعه ما بين هيمنجواي وروب غرييه في فصل واحد رغم تباعد تجربتهما الروائية من الناحية الفنية التي تلقى القليل من اهتمامه.

وللأمانة فقد اتفقت معه في إشارته القصيرة لسخافة رواية أورويل 1984، ولرفضه لموجة الرواية الفرنسية الحديثة رغم إختلاف أسبابي.

المضحك في الأمر هو أن هجومه على كتاب مفضلين لدي مثل فوكنر وسترندبرغ أثار حماسي لقراءة باقي من هاجمهم من الكتاب والذين لم أكن مهتم من قبل أن أقرأ لهم.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise is excellent: find out what constitutes imagination. It starts as presenting a number of avenues from where this faculty arises from and places the work alongside the author in an attempt to see what makes them do as they do - what their modus-operandi is. The execution is less where it falls down, for in canvassing such a wide berth of authors as he does, Wilson falls into becoming a subjective critic (his profession) increasingly as the book progresses rather than continuing his initial work in presenting a philosophical and psychological examination. It's regrettable that I found myself fighting his subjective and at times flippant assessment of the author's psychology more than the work in question.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lovecraft an anti-materialist? Who had most in common with serial killer Peter Kurten?

These are the kick-off thoughts that killed my desire to give this book an open-minded hearing.

Other reading notes:


Here is a comprehensive summary of the main points in each chapter and sub-chapter based on the provided text.

Introduction: The Crisis in Modern Literature
The Blueprint of Modern Fiction: The author notes a striking similarity in early first novels, which typically feature a dissatisfied young hero drifting through London cafes, entangled in casual sex, and brooding on futility. Parodying Jean-Paul Sartre or following James Joyce, these writers attempt to catalog a "panorama of futility and anarchy".
The Evolutionary Shift of the Novelist:
The Shakespearean/Homeric Fish: Detached, impersonal storytelling with no visible personal opinion from the author.
The Romantics & Nineteenth-Century Moralists: The writer becomes a social chronicler, scientist, or priest (e.g., Balzac, Zola, Flaubert) scrambling for the pulpit.
The Twentieth-Century "Absolute Artist": Originating with Flaubert and peaking with Joyce's Ulysses, the author claims no opinions but subtly asserts that their personal vision of reality is superior to all others.

The Problem of Form: Modern writers want to "say something" rather than tell a story. This creates a reliance on loose narrative threads like autobiography (Proust, Lawrence, Joyce) or intellectual discussions (Mann's Magic Mountain).
The Fallacy of the Experimental Novel: The author asserts that Ulysses and À la recherche du temps perdu are as readable as telephone directories. They are fortunate exceptions based on reputation, not templates for a sustainable new literary genre.

The Cul-de-Sac of Literary Pessimism: Turning away from the comprehensive "universe maps" of the medieval church, twentieth-century literature has devolved into systemic rejections and dead ends. Thinkers like Bertrand Russell embrace a comfortable but paralyzing scepticism.
The Purpose of This Book: Creative imagination naturally attempts to map out meaning over the terra incognita (the unknown). By studying the "inaccuracies" and "diseases" of different writers' imaginations, we can allow their biases to cancel one another out, eventually revealing the underlying order of true reality.

1 The Assault on Rationality
H. P. Lovecraft
Guerrilla Warfare Against Materialism: Lovecraft used horror fiction to aggressively undermine scientific rationality and materialism, operating out of a pathological, lifelong introversion.
The Evolution of His Horror: He moved away from cliché Mrs. Radcliffe-style ghost stories ("The Lurking Fear") toward a highly consistent, pseudo-scientific framework known as the Cthulhu Mythos.
The Cthulhu Mythos: Predicated on the idea that the human mind's inability to correlate its contents is a mercy, Lovecraft invented ancient, non-terrestrial entities who once ruled the earth and actively seek to reclaim it.
Psychological Case History: Though a flawed, adjective-heavy writer, Lovecraft acts as an important case study of the "escapist imagination". Oppressed by a monotonous civilization, his hypochondriac spite led him to project a "symbolically true" subconscious world of horror to shatter human complacency.
W. B. Yeats
The Anti-Science Blueprint: Like Lovecraft, Yeats actively rejected the Age of Science, preferring ancient myths and fairylands as a refuge from a corrupt, materialistic world.
A Vision and Automatic Writing: Yeats attempted to codify his own mystical psychology in A Vision, claiming it was dictated by supernatural entities via his wife’s automatic writing. The author notes this was almost certainly a deliberate hoax used by Yeats to establish poetic metaphors and personal authority.
Underlying Manichaean Pessimism: Yeats operated on the nineteenth-century assumption that the world of matter and the world of spirit are irreconcilable. He viewed art as a form of beautiful escapism springing from the "foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart".


Oscar Wilde
Defiance Through Pleasure and Tragedy: Wilde took world-rejection further than Yeats or Lovecraft by actively applying it to his life. He wore a mask of effeminacy and superficiality to express total contempt for ordinary society.
The Pursuit of Self-Punishment: Driven by a violent will-to-power that generated a deep sense of guilt, Wilde intentionally sought out a tragic, self-mortifying end (such as his refusal to flee his trials) to validate his fatalistic belief that only pleasure or total destruction matter.

August Strindberg
Insanity Written to Sanity: Strindberg's deep-seated neuroses, persecution mania, and severe anti-feminist biases (born of a volatile marriage to Siri von Essen) culminated in his mid-life mental crisis recorded in Inferno.
The Alchemical and Paranoid Phase: Living in Paris, Strindberg abandoned Darwinism and spent his time attempting to prove that sulphur was not an element, reading everyday coincidences and sights under a microscope as supernatural plots against him.
The Swedenborg Cure: He successfully processed his madness by filtering it through Swedenborg's concept of "devastation"—the painful spiritual awakening required before achieving salvation.
Conclusion
These four writers represent different degrees of romantic rejection of the real world, stretching from Lovecraft's hysterical hostility to Strindberg's resistant, painful capitulation to a supernatural order.

4 The Vision of Science
H. G. Wells
The Craving for Subjective Leisure: Wells argued that modern economic surplus and foresight have finally emancipated human attention from daily survival urgencies, leaving "originative intellectual workers" free to seek pure mental evolutionary activity.
The Development of Science
An Aggressive Stance Against Chaos: True science is a profound gamble based on a faith in order. It rejects animal passivity and defeatism when facing the unknown, as demonstrated by monumental intellectual feats like Rawlinson's decipherment of cuneiform.
Utopias and Anti-Utopias
The Political Evolution of Fantasy: Early Utopias (More, Campanella, Bacon) evolved into the highly structured socialist Welfare States of Bellamy and Morris. These political daydreams eventually birthed a reactionary literary underground (beginning with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground) asserting that mankind values absolute, messy freedom over forced mathematical happiness.
Wells Again
The Failure of Mechanical Optimism: Wells’s later Utopian works like Men Like Gods fail artistically because they portray an authoritarian, sterile paradise. His characters lack the depth of mystery and power required of true "godlike" entities, resulting in an unconvincing, mechanical worldview.
Zamiatin
The Pinnacle of Anti-Utopia: Zamiatin’s novel We stands as a masterpiece of the genre, far superior to Orwell or Huxley. By inside-coding the narrative through an enthusiastic mathematical engineer (D-503), Zamiatin brilliantly illustrates the Grand Inquisitor's dilemma: that human beings will willingly surrender their imagination for the comfort of absolute order.
Science Fiction and Space Opera
A Classical Framework for Fantasy: Just as theology anchored Dante, science gives modern fantasy an internal coherence and an authority that prevents it from dissolving into arbitrary nonsense.
Lovecraft Again
The Shadow Out of Time: In this late novel, Lovecraft accidentally breaks away from his adolescent spooky clichés to write a genuine masterpiece of science fiction. By evoking massive vistas of time, space, and consciousness exchange, the story achieves an authentic, daylight effect of cosmic wonder.
Bells Before the Dawn
Realism in Prehistory: Writing under the pseudonym John Taine, mathematician E.T. Bell produced Before the Dawn, a classic of pure science fiction. It sidesteps the logical paradoxes of time travel by using electronic rock-recordings to paint a chillingly accurate picture of a brutal, prehistoric earth.
Popular Science Fiction
Jerking the Anthropocentric Imagination: Best exemplified by writers like A. E. van Voght, James Blish, and Brian Aldiss, high-quality pulp science fiction utilizes concepts of identity, alien morality, and immense space travel to forcefully drag the human reader out of their parochial, earthbound emotional prison.
Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein: While Heinlein brings a brilliant, Zola-esque realism to the future, Bradbury oscillates between epic mythmaking and highly pathological, sentimental shock-stories focused on destructive children.
Conclusion
The Metaphysical Stance of Imagination: Science fiction stands as the direct opposite of Samuel Beckett's static defeatism. It views imagination as the vital herald of change. As famously summarized by Bernard Shaw in Back to Methuselah, the creative intellect acts as a tool of the evolutionary life-force, capable of willing dreams into concrete reality.

5 The Power of Darkness
Evil as Stupidity vs. Evil as a Monster: Tolstoy viewed evil as a tragic miscalculation of the value of life, fundamentally rooted in social conditions and stupidity. Conversely, the "Power of Darkness" school requires a dualistic belief in an objective, externalized evil.

E. T. A. Hoffmann
Vibrant Daylight vs. Morbid Fatalism: Stunted, poor, and unfulfilled in love, Hoffmann's immense imagination revolted by creating highly energetic, colorful, and operatic opening scenes. However, his underlying sexual inadequacy and fatalism consistently infect his narratives, forcing his brilliant protagonists into traps of tragic destiny and mechanical illusions.

Gogol
The Asthma of Chaos: Gogol was a sexually maladjusted writer whose chaotic fantasy lacked any real anchor in the practical world. His stories frequently begin with masterful realism only to dissolve abruptly into arbitrary, feverish nightmares. When he tried to abandon caricature to address the real world of religion and politics later in life, his imagination collapsed into fatal religious mania.

Ghosts and the Supernatural
The Trap of Inauthentic Deceit: In a scientific age, supernatural stories are often a cheap form of emotional compensation. Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries and Evelyn Nesbit’s Man Size in Marble fail because they present flat, arbitrary lies that do nothing to genuinely expand human consciousness.

Authentic Wonder: In contrast, Ryunosuke Akutagawa's The Dragon represents an authentic use of imagination, using the supernatural to create a profound commentary on human faith, psychology, and the expansion of awareness.

Sheridan Le Fanu and M. R. James
Le Fanu’s Clinical Mastery: Living as a Dublin recluse after his wife’s death, Le Fanu crafted highly disciplined ghost stories and mysteries. His hauntings function with a psychical realism, using sharp psychological terror and sudden bursts of physical violence to convey a genuine sense of cosmic mystery.

James’s Fragmented Bogies: M. R. James wrote antiquarian horror tales that lacked a central mythos. Relying on physical monstrosities with a weirdly tactile presence (like faces of crumpled linen or hair-covered beasts), his stories are saved from being merely juvenile by his delightful, pedantic academic style.

J. R. R. Tolkien
An Epic Structure of Dualistic Evil: The Lord of the Rings functions as a brilliant, highly vitalized adventure story modeled on Stevenson and Buchan. Its immense gripping power relies entirely on a simple, ancient dualistic framework: an all-powerful, externalized dark principle (Sauron) opposed to absolute good.

The Gothic Novel
Gender Variations in Cruelty: The Gothic tradition reveals a distinct split. Female writers like Radcliffe and Mary Shelley retain an underlying focus on human sympathy and domestic romance. Male recluses like Matthew Lewis (The Monk) and Bram Stoker (Dracula) lean heavily into explicitly sadistic, sexually charged nightmares of physical destruction.

De Sade's 120 Days
The Ultimate Bankruptcy of Sin: Written in the Bastille, The 120 Days of Sodom serves as a textbook example of a pathologically starved imagination trying to achieve a godlike status via calculated crime. Because De Sade is entirely trapped in a defensive reaction against bourgeois morality, his endless catalogs of murder and perversion fail to create literature, proving that attempting to "do evil" is an evolutionary dead end that merely results in sickness.

Conclusion
Objectifying the Oppression: The imagination is man's primary tool for increasing his personal freedom. Writers invoke the powers of darkness to externalize and process their own psychological or physical oppressions; once expressed, a baseline level of mental freedom is won.

6 Sex and the Imagination

The Fuel of the Godlike: De Sade, Zamiatin, and Nietzsche all recognized that human sexuality is intimately linked with energy and the concept of a boundless will.

Maupassant

Brutal Loveliness Without Intellect: Maupassant possessed an extraordinary, Impressionistic joy in physical life, sports, and nature. However, his absolute lack of analytical intellect led him to view sex as an amoral game of conquest and seduction.
The Arc of His Novels: His early works utilize a Flaubert-style detached irony to mask his obsessions (A Woman's Life). As his career advanced, his male conceit took full stage (Bel-Ami, Mont-Oriol), eventually devolving into deep-seated defeat, agonizing self-pity (Notre Coeur, As Strong as Death), and syphilitic insanity (The Horla).

[Issa · Rating 3 out of 5]

ثالث تجربة قرائية مع كولن ولسون، بعد فن الرواية واللامنتمي. وقد يشبه كل منهما من حيث قدرة المؤلف على الإحالة إلى العديد من الأعمال في الآداب الأوروبية، وتصنيف الأدباء ضمن نطاقات فكرية معينة، والمقارنة فيما بين أعمالهم جميعا، والمقارنة بين أعمال كل كاتب على حدة، واستخلاص نتائج وملاحظات، تظهر مدى قوة العمل من ضعفه، بالإضافة إلى مقارنة حياة الكاتب الشخصية، بأعماله، وتأثير هذه الجدلية على الأدب.

والكتاب بوجه عام ممتع، ويستحث القارئ على مواصلة القراءة، بأسلوبه الجميل في النقد الأدبي. إلا أن قراءته شاقة، في حال كانت معرفة القارئ متواضعة في الأدب الأوروبي، وسوف يجد أنه التوقف للبحث عن أسماء الكتب والمؤلفين أمر لا بد، خاصة وأن المؤلف كثيراً ما يذكر بعض المصطلحات والأسماء عرضا، وكأن المتلقي ملم بها. لهذا السبب لا أنصح كثيراً بقراءته، إلا أن يتخذ مرجعا، أو أن يكون المتلقي متسلحا بمعرفة الكثير عن الآداب في أوروبا، لكيلا يشعر بالتيه، في حال استرسال المؤلف.

[Nick de Vera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lost this paperback many years ago, but Colin Wilson's The Strength to Dream had, uncredited, Nick Bantock's Kangaroo With a Red Hat as the cover.

[Original Thabit · Rating 2 out of 5]

لم أستطع إستساغة الأسلوب النقدي الذي إتبعه كولن ولسن عن المعقول و اللامعقول في الأدب الحديث ببساطة لأنني لم أجد رؤية موضوعية تكشف مواطن القوة الأسلوبية أو ضعفها ؛ كان ولسن مشغولاً بحشد معلومات عن ماضِ المؤلفين ثم تحليلهم سايكلوجياً -على هواه- و إطلاق الأحكام التي جاءت سابقة لعرض الأدلة بدلاً من تناول النص كما هو ، فماذا يعني إن عاش الكاتب طفولة صعبة أو كان له ميول جنسية معينه أو كان له نظرة دينيه محدده أو أن يكتب عملاً ما من أجل المال ؟ أليس هذا حكماً أخلاقياً لشخص المؤلف لا إنتاجه ؟ .. ماذا عن الجانب الإبداعي في أعمال أسماء كبيره مثل : ًو.ب ييتس ، أوسكار وايلد ، أميل زولا ، وليم فوكنر .. و غيرهم الكثير ، ماذا عن الجمال ؟ ماذا عن المتعة و الدهشة ؟ ماذا عن ثورية الفكرة و الأسلوب و تأثيره على الوعي الإجتماعي ؟ هل من المفترض أن نشعر بهذه العدائية مع اللامعقول و الخيال قائم عليه ؟

و هذا ما يجعلني أشكك مجدداً بولسن و ما يكتبه فكل الكتب التي قرأتها له مسبقاً لم تقنعني بإستثاء كتاب " اللامنتمي " ، يبدو أنني سأقفز على بعض الفصول التي يتحدث فيها عن كتاب لا أعرفهم و أنتقل للمقاطع التي يتحدث فيها عن أدباء قرأت لهم حتى أقتنع بإكمال الكتاب .

[Stuart Johnstone]

Read half of it. Did not enjoy it at all. Unfortunately, the authors he writes about are unread by me.

[Blue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed the book. But I did not feel that I came any closer to understanding the question the book set out to answer - what is imagination? - when I finished it.

[Rami Farhan · Rating 3 out of 5]

ثالث قراءة لويلسن بعد اللامنتمي ومابعد اللامنتمي.
كتاب موفق وبارع في إيصال فكرته. ولكن من خلال قراءتي له ليس بتوفيق اللامنتمي ومابعد اللامنتمي. شعرت في هذا الكتاب عكس سابقيه بأن مطرقة ويلسن النقدية أشد، وبعض من درسهم هذا الكتاب جلد نتاجهم وأفرغه من محتواه وأعتبره بلا قيمة وبالمزيد من الألفاظ النقدية القوية التي لم ارها في كتابيه السابقين.
عموما يظهر ويلسن جدير بهذا الموقف فهو في كل كتبه يظهر إنه شخص متعمق جداً في كل الشخصيات الكثيرة التي يدرسها، ويلسن في كل كتبه يجعلك تشعر بعبقريته.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant - Colin's unique take on world literature. If like me you are a fan, the book will set you off on various trails to find the books he discusses.