Romance and rejection

‘Outsider’ ought to be an important word. To attach it to someone, particularly a writer, is to suggest that their helpless circumstances have condemned them to struggle and neglect. It is up to us — posterity — to look beyond the writers who had social advantages in the year 1880, say, and find those who wrote best.

One group that has been rewardingly elevated in recent years has been women. Although Lyndall Gordon has not tried to unearth anyone very out of the way, she has written about five writers who showed unusual courage and boldness, often behaving unconventionally. The least familiar of her subjects, Olive Schreiner, was an admirable woman, who wanted to be a doctor, and wrote a bestselling and rather scandalous novel of South African life before devoting herself to pro-Republican Boer causes. Others were also independent-minded trailblazers. But were they ‘outsiders’?

In the field of art, ‘outsider’ means something specific. It is the usual translation since the early 1970s of Dubuffet’s notion of art brut or ‘raw art’: the art produced by figures outside the usual structures of training, indoctrination, production and distribution. The wonderful Collection de l’art brut in Lausanne shows the range: art produced by prisoners, mental patients, the impoverished and the isolated, from the East End seamstress Madge Gill to the reclusive Chicago caretaker Henry Darger.

But what is an outsider writer? There was no specific training to be a writer until very recently, and it would be absurd to regard anyone now who hasn’t got a creative writing degree as an outsider. In my view, given the implications for where attention by readers should be focussed, and where support and active inquiry might still be necessary, writers to be treated as outsiders should be demonstrably disadvantaged economically as well as culturally, through circumstances they can do nothing about.