Darkness at Noon
Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 @ 11:31
by Arthur Koestler (1940)
A fictional account of a show trial during Stalin’s 1930s purges, Rubashov, the protagonist, once a revolutionary disillusioned by the regime, is abducted, jailed, tortured (psychologically) and finally confessed to a series of “counter-revolutionary” crimes he didn’t commit, for the ideals of the Revolution.
The mirror image of Rubashov, Ivanov, proposed to Rubashov to capitulate “by the logical necessity and the objective rightness of capitulating”, posing the “elementary knowledge” of the question: “Should we sit with idle hands because the consequences of an act are never quite to be foreseen, and hence all action is evil?” Rubashov went along with the “absurd yet necessary comedy” of confession despite the many temptations of conscience and his “revulsion against experimenting”. We now have a hindsight of what happened with this “experiments on mankind”
Although the names are Russian, neither Soviet nor Stalin (whom the reader can easily imagine as the abstract image of “No. 1″ in the novel) are explicitly mentioned.
Both Darkness at Noon and 1984 often pop in the list of “canons” fictions on the danger of totalitarianism, yet I’d say that Koestler has more flair in his prose than Orwell (whose essays I consider much more highly than his two most famous works).
Gerhana Tengah Hari
translated from English to Indonesian by Gayus Siagian
published by Pustaka Jaya, 1982
The translation is sadly of low quality, with too many basic grammar and typographic mistakes.
