Book review: Darkness at Noon
Nov. 3rd, 2011 11:02![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiKoestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon. Trans. Daphne Hardy. New York: Scribner, 1941.
This is another book that I read in order to teach human rights, which I confess at first blush I found to be something of an…interesting choice for our class. Still, having now both read and taught it, it makes a lot of sense as a prime example of both what it is to live under a regime that is not just indifferent to, but outright anti-human rights, and an example of just how far off the rails the nightmare of the Enlightenment could get when it was given free rein under Stalinism. (The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, of course, remains the true limit case in that respect.)
Arthur Koestler, like many of the famous dissidents in the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s, was a former committed communist turned disillusioned excommunicant when he wrote this book with the Nazi advance across western Europe hot on his heels--the original German manuscript was lost in his flight from the continent, and the version that remains is the one that was translated by his then-lover Daphne Hardy into English en route.
The book follows one Rubashov, one of the last of the so-called "Old Bolsheviks" who is arrested during the Stalinist purges and show trials of the late 1930s, in which over a million people were either executed or disappeared into the gulag. The novel follows Rubashov's mental processes in the course of his imprisonment, interrogation, and eventual execution, as he comes to question his commitment to the Party and the vision of History it preaches, and eventually finds within himself a certain inner individualism, the 'grammatical fiction' that the Party had taught him to always deny.
In retrospect, the grammatical fiction and Rubashov's solace and strength in it are directly anticipatory of what Vaclav Havel talked about in "The Power of the Powerless," in which he wrote that in the face of a post-totalitarian state that controls everything so thoroughly that people don't even realize they are living a lie day in and day out (which has direct parallels to the Party's ability to turn even Rubashov's reluctant resistance towards its own propaganda goals), the only way to resist is to go inward and to start "living in truth," both within and without. Like Havel, Koestler spent time in prison himself, and that harrowing experience shows in his recounting of the details of prison life, of the strange fellowship among the inmates, the systems of communication and, if not resistance, at least not total compliance.
My students and I all noted that Darkness at Noon reads like the more plausible, and in some ways more terrifying, version of Orwell's 1984, which is both absolutely true and very telling. Both books remain trenchant critiques as well as warnings, and absolutely vital.
This is another book that I read in order to teach human rights, which I confess at first blush I found to be something of an…interesting choice for our class. Still, having now both read and taught it, it makes a lot of sense as a prime example of both what it is to live under a regime that is not just indifferent to, but outright anti-human rights, and an example of just how far off the rails the nightmare of the Enlightenment could get when it was given free rein under Stalinism. (The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, of course, remains the true limit case in that respect.)
Arthur Koestler, like many of the famous dissidents in the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s, was a former committed communist turned disillusioned excommunicant when he wrote this book with the Nazi advance across western Europe hot on his heels--the original German manuscript was lost in his flight from the continent, and the version that remains is the one that was translated by his then-lover Daphne Hardy into English en route.
The book follows one Rubashov, one of the last of the so-called "Old Bolsheviks" who is arrested during the Stalinist purges and show trials of the late 1930s, in which over a million people were either executed or disappeared into the gulag. The novel follows Rubashov's mental processes in the course of his imprisonment, interrogation, and eventual execution, as he comes to question his commitment to the Party and the vision of History it preaches, and eventually finds within himself a certain inner individualism, the 'grammatical fiction' that the Party had taught him to always deny.
In retrospect, the grammatical fiction and Rubashov's solace and strength in it are directly anticipatory of what Vaclav Havel talked about in "The Power of the Powerless," in which he wrote that in the face of a post-totalitarian state that controls everything so thoroughly that people don't even realize they are living a lie day in and day out (which has direct parallels to the Party's ability to turn even Rubashov's reluctant resistance towards its own propaganda goals), the only way to resist is to go inward and to start "living in truth," both within and without. Like Havel, Koestler spent time in prison himself, and that harrowing experience shows in his recounting of the details of prison life, of the strange fellowship among the inmates, the systems of communication and, if not resistance, at least not total compliance.
My students and I all noted that Darkness at Noon reads like the more plausible, and in some ways more terrifying, version of Orwell's 1984, which is both absolutely true and very telling. Both books remain trenchant critiques as well as warnings, and absolutely vital.