If Koestler’s biography raises one barrier to his reception, a changed political climate raises another. Soviet Communism in its heyday served many people around the world as a secular religion. Today, although Marxist ideas and the label “socialist” have been resurgent on the left, the enormous influence once exerted by Communism now seems a distant phenomenon. To its adherents, Communism was not just a party identification but a complete theory of life and history, which dictated both personal and political morality. And it was the conflict between that morality and ordinary moral instincts—which condemned things like lying and killing, which the Party often demanded—that provided the dramatic focus of “Darkness at Noon.” The novel reminds us of a time when literature was felt to be urgently political—when the critic Lionel Trilling could speak of “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” This gave Koestler, like his contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, and Albert Camus, a kind of authority that no novelist approaches today.
“Darkness at Noon” is certainly dated, in the sense that an effort of imagination is needed to enter into its time and place. But its central theme will probably always seem timely, because every political creed must eventually face the question of whether noble ends can justify evil means. As Koestler saw, this problem reached its pure form in Communism because its avowed aim was the noblest of all: the permanent abolition of social injustice throughout the world. If this could be achieved, what price would be too high? Maybe a million or ten million people would die today, but if billions would be happy tomorrow wasn’t that worth it? A Communist revolutionary, Koestler writes, “is forever damned to do what he loathes the most: become a butcher in order to stamp out butchery, sacrifice lambs so lambs will no longer be sacrificed.”
Koestler’s protagonist, Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, is one such righteous butcher, now facing his turn on the chopping block. The figure Rubashov especially evokes is Nikolai Bukharin, a veteran theorist of revolution who was the most famous of the defendants in the Moscow Trials. Like all the other defendants, Bukharin ended up pleading guilty, and the new edition of “Darkness at Noon” usefully reproduces a speech that he gave at his trial. “I consider myself responsible for a grave and monstrous crime against the socialist fatherland and the whole international proletariat,” he said.
Yet there was ambiguity in that “consider myself responsible,” for Bukharin insisted that he was unaware of any of the specific plots of sabotage and assassination with which he had been charged. His crime, he seemed to be saying, was not actual but mental, even metaphysical. Perhaps he was pleading guilty only because he knew that it was the last service he could render to the Party, which he had served for so long. “For when you ask yourself, ‘If you must die, what are you dying for?,’ an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness,” Bukharin said in the courtroom. “There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die unrepented.” Repentance, even false repentance, could give propaganda value to what would otherwise be a meaningless death.
“What company do you see yourself starting when you leave this one in five years?”
Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen
In “Darkness at Noon,” Koestler inserts a version of these words into a speech that Rubashov gives at his trial. But although Rubashov dies as a loyal Party member, by the end of the book he has lost his certainty that the things he did in the Party’s service were justified. Indeed, Koestler suggests that the Moscow defendants may have pleaded guilty as a form of clandestine atonement for crimes they really did commit at the Party’s command. “They were all guilty, just not of those particular deeds to which they were confessing,” Koestler writes.
Much of the power of the book comes from its journalistic immediacy and the authenticity of its details. Rubashov’s jailers, for instance, work on his nerves by leading a prisoner who was his friend past his cell on the way to execution; Robert Conquest, in his groundbreaking history “The Great Terror” (1968), confirmed that this was a standard technique in Soviet prisons. Koestler explains the code that political prisoners developed in order to carry out conversations by tapping on the walls of their cells. And he knew that the most common way of executing prisoners was to shoot them in the back of the head when they weren’t expecting it—which is how Rubashov dies in the final pages of the novel.
But the real plot of “Darkness at Noon” is almost entirely internal. It lies in Rubashov’s evolving realization of his guilt, and his loss of belief in the infallible justice of Communism. Early in the book, a flashback shows Rubashov on a mission in Nazi Germany in 1933, just after Hitler seized power and banned the Communist Party. In a thrillerlike scene, Rubashov covertly meets with a German Communist named Richard, who pours out his grief to this representative of the socialist fatherland: his comrades have been murdered, he is living in hiding, and he is losing faith in the cause. Rather than sympathize with him or promise help, Rubashov tells Richard that he is being expelled from the Party because he dared to distribute pamphlets that, as he coldly says, “contained wordings that the party considers politically inadmissible.” By the end of the scene, it’s clear that Richard has been marked for death.
“The party cannot be wrong,” Rubashov says. “You and I can make mistakes—but not the party.” Anyone who disagrees with the Party’s dictates is on the wrong side of history, and so deserves to be eliminated. The Moscow Trials, Koestler suggests, were just the latest example of a tendency toward self-cannibalism that had been there from the start.
It is no accident—to use a phrase favored by Communist writers of the time—that Koestler found the Party’s treatment of foreign comrades to be the most conspicuous example of its injustice, since he had spent most of the thirties as one of those comrades. Born into a Jewish family in Hungary in 1905, Koestler had already lived several professional and ideological lives by the time he joined the Party, in 1931. As a teen-ager, he had been a committed Zionist who moved to Palestine to work on an agricultural settlement. Quickly realizing that this austere existence was not for him, Koestler transformed himself into a journalist, working as a stringer for German newspapers. After two years, he returned to Europe, and by the end of the twenties he had a precociously successful career in Berlin, working as an editor and writer for one of Germany’s biggest liberal dailies.
In the essay that he contributed to “The God That Failed” (1949), a collection of six memoirs by ex-Communist writers, Koestler recalled how conditions in Weimar Germany turned him into a Communist. “Germany lived in a state of latent civil war, and if one wasn’t prepared to be swept along as a passive victim by the approaching hurricane it became imperative to take sides,” he wrote. If the future was a struggle between Nazism and Communism, then Communism was the only possible choice. But Koestler emphasized that he did not become a Communist “by a process of elimination.” Rather, he compared the experience to a religious conversion. “The whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,” he wrote. “There is now an answer to every question.”
For the next seven years, Communism was at the center of Koestler’s life and work. “I served the Communist Party for seven years—the same length of time as Jacob tended Laban’s sheep to win Rachel his daughter,” he wrote, in “The God That Failed.” (In the Biblical story, Jacob finds out, at the end of that time, that he’s been tricked and given the wrong bride.) In 1932, after losing his highly paid job—because, he claimed, his employers learned that he had joined the Party—Koestler made a pilgrimage to the Soviet Union, where he spent eighteen months travelling around in order to write a propagandistic book praising the Soviet experiment. By the time he left Russia, in 1933, Hitler was in power and he couldn’t return to Germany. Instead, he went to France, where he worked for a series of Party-funded publications and agencies until 1938.
Throughout this period, Koestler later wrote, he was well aware of the gulf between Communist ideals and the reality they produced. He had seen the victims of famine in Ukraine, and he had gone along with the Party’s ruthless imposition of the official line. But he still felt that the only way to improve the Party was from within. Indeed, he was willing to risk his life for it: in 1937, Koestler went to report on the Spanish Civil War for the News Chronicle, a British daily, knowing that if he was captured by Franco’s Nationalists his life would be in danger. In February, he was caught in the city of Málaga, as it fell to Franco’s forces, and taken prisoner. For the next three months, he lived in a cell not unlike Rubashov’s, as his fellow-prisoners were executed and he waited for his turn. But, because he had been on assignment for an English newspaper, the British government and press took an interest. The public attention meant that Koestler was spared; in the end, he was released as part of a prisoner exchange.
This experience, which Koestler wrote about in his memoir “Dialogue with Death,” could have strengthened his Communist convictions—after all, he had been imprisoned as a rojo, a Red. Instead, his imprisonment awakened a new sense of the preciousness of freedom. “Strangely enough,” he wrote, “I feel that I have never been so free as I was then.” This was an existentialist kind of freedom, cold and clear, the last possession of someone with nothing left to lose.
Once he was released, Koestler found it impossible to retreat back into the intellectual orthodoxy of Party life. Events in Russia—including the news that three of his closest friends had been arrested in Stalin’s purge—only confirmed his disillusionment. In 1938, the year he resigned from the Party, Koestler gave a speech to an audience of refugee intellectuals in Paris, in which he affirmed that “a harmful truth is better than a useful lie,” and that “no movement, party or person can claim the privilege of infallibility.” His listeners, he remembered, were split in their reactions: “The non-Communist half of the audience applauded, the Communist half sat in heavy silence, most of them with folded arms.”
“Darkness at Noon,” which Koestler began writing the following year, in the South of France, was his attempt to work through the intellectual and emotional reasons for breaking with the Party. Rubashov is a better Communist than Koestler ever was, and the purity of Rubashov’s faith allows the novel to lay bare its contradictions. How did Communism, with its dream of a perfectly just society, result in Stalinism, with its paranoia, persecution, incompetence, and cruelty? “Our principles were all correct, but our results were all wrong,” Rubashov muses. “We brought you the truth, and in our mouths it sounded like a lie.”
Koestler’s reckoning with Communism is very different from Orwell’s vision in “1984,” which was published nine years later. In Orwell’s dystopia, “Ingsoc,” English socialism, is not really an ideology at all, just a tissue of lies and a tool for mass hypnosis. The Party’s leader, O’Brien, famously tells Winston Smith, after his arrest, that the core of its appeal is pure sadism, the pleasure of exercising total power over another: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Stalinism, for Orwell, dressed up this power worship in a lot of meaningless doctrine that people learned to repeat without thinking about it—what the novel calls “duckspeak.”
Orwell’s book, in other words, is relatively indifferent to the intellectual content of Communism, which may explain why it is now more popular than Koestler’s. Koestler takes dialectics seriously. Marx claimed to have shown that history was a process of continual conflict moving toward a final redemption, when the proletariat would cast off its chains and the exploitation of humanity would disappear. For Koestler, it was the belief in the historical inevitability of this outcome that enabled the Bolsheviks to act with such ruthlessness: acts that ordinary morality judged to be wrong would be justified as right and necessary once a classless society had been established. “Whoever proves right in the end must first be and do wrong,” Rubashov says. But, as he sits in his cell, he comes to realize the immensity of this moral gamble; for if the revolution fails, and a just society doesn’t come into being, then the revolutionaries’ crimes will remain merely that. “It is only after the fact that we learn who was right to begin with,” Rubashov says. “In the meantime we act on credit, in the hope of being absolved by history.”
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4