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Título original/Original title: Sonnenfinsternis
Editorial:
   Macmillan Publishers (English version)
   Contemporánea de Bolsillo (versión en español)
Fecha de 1ª Edición/Date first published: 1940
ISBN 0-553-26595-4 (English)  9788499087436 (Spanish)

El cero y el infinito (Sonnenfinsternis <Eclipse solar, en alemán>; Darkness at Noon <Oscuridad al mediodía, en inglés>) es la principal novela del autor británico de origen húngaro Arthur Koestler. Publicado originalmente en 1940, narra la historia de Rubashov, un miembro de la vieja guardia de la Revolución rusa de 1917, quien es primeramente alejado del poder, para luego acabar encarcelado y juzgado por traición al Gobierno de la Unión Soviética que él mismo había ayudado a crear.

El cero y el infinito es un intento de excelente calidad literaria por encontrar la verdad entre la confusión, la desinformación y la mentira ideológica del totalitarismo comunista. Es una introspección en los mecanismos ideológicos, administrativos y psicológicos que llevaron a la autodelación y autorecriminación de decenas de intelectuales soviéticos, algunos de ellos destacados bolcheviques, en especial en el conocido como "Juicio de los Veintiuno". En efecto, como advierte Vargas Llosa en su introducción a una de las ediciones en español de esta obra, los hechos que narra no son especialmente terribles (sobre todo si los comparamos con lo que Solyenitzin describiría en Archipiélago Gulag, por ejemplo), sino que al protagonista le someten a una tortura psicológica de luces brillantes, privación de sueño, humillaciones (métodos que todavía se utilizan en países como China, Cuba o Corea del Norte), pero lo que sobre todo interesa y sobrecoge es mostrar la retorcida lógica y la monolítica retórica que sirvió para construir una maquinaria administrativa y punitiva implacable e inhumana.

Porque el protagonista, Rubachof, es él mismo un convencido del marxismo y su aplicación a la Unión Soviética; porque él mismo ha aplicado a otros los mismos castigos (detención, tortura, expulsión del Partido, destierro, ejecución...) que ahora se le aplican a él.

Es una obra apasionante.

In the world of literature, perhaps only Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did more to expose the lies and cruelty of 20th century totalitarianism. As a writer for Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine in the early 1940s, Koestler also was one of the first European journalists to alert the continent to the genocide committed by the Nazis, which earned him brickbats from such esteemed British writers as Osbert Sitwell. Koestler’s rejection of Communist principles likewise raised the public ire of such writers as George Orwell who, in short, thought the Hungarian was throwing out the proverbial socialist baby with Joe Stalin’s bathwater.

75 years after first published, Darkness at Noon continues to grab headlines. An original manuscript of the novel was discovered last year in the Zurich Central Library by a doctoral candidate. The published versions English readers know today is a hasty translation made during the early years of World War II. The original manuscript was written in German, and was thought to have been lost forever after Koestler abandoned his personal possessions while fleeing Paris in 1940 as the German army invaded. A new English translation and more in other languges are to be expected soon.

What makes Darkness at Noon such an enduring artistic work is Koestler’s firsthand knowledge of his source material. Indeed, Darkness at Noon is an imaginative effort documenting its author’s reasons for abandoning the Communist Party of which he had been a loyal adherent. Koestler explained his motives: "I was twenty-six when I joined the Communist Party, and thirty-three when I left it. The years between had been decisive years, both by the season of life which they filled, and the way they filled it with a single-minded purpose. Never before nor after had life been so brimful of meaning as during those seven years. They had the superiority of a beautiful error over a shabby truth."

Darkness at Noon is a fictionalized account of the persecution of Nikolai Bukharin, given the name Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov in the novel. Like Bukharin, Rubashov is a Bolshevik arrested by the regime of Josef Stalin during the Soviet Great Purges for alleged counterrevolutionary activities. Koestler brings to bear his familiarity with Stalinist dialectics learned in the Communist Party cell in which he participated during his time working as a science journalist in Germany. This knowledge lends credibility to the dialogue Rubashov conducts with his interrogators, Ivanov and Gletkin. Additionally, Rubashov’s solitary confinement is depicted in a fashion reminiscent of Koestler’s portrayal of his own harrowing internment in a Republican gaol during the Spanish Civil War, which he documented in his first memoir, Dialogue with Death (1938). 

Since the Socialist/Marxist fantasy will never become realized, encouraging young people leaning toward socialism – “soft” or otherwise – to read Koestler might bring them to the realization that all utopian goals of egalitarianism result in the substantial sacrifice of liberties they may have taken for granted. And there’s no better Koestler book to begin with than Darkness at Noon.

Viking, 2016
Barnes & Noble: 
Hardcover $17.94 

Metaxas’ golden triangle of freedom

by Sam Webb

In If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty, author and public intellectual Eric Metaxas is concerned that the American people have forgotten the essence of our “more perfect union.” Metaxas is concerned that America today might not be worthy of future Memorial Day celebrations. He recalls in his Introduction the story of Benjamin Franklin — the story that serves as the inspiration of the name of this book — emerging from the Constitutional Convention one day when a woman asks him whether the young country is a republic or a monarchy. Franklin replied, “A republic, madam – if you can keep it.” This is the point of the book: the American experiment is exceptional and must be kept for future generations. He writes, “each of us who call ourselves Americans has a great duty to keep that promise [of America] – and if we don’t do our duty toward keeping that promise, our nation will soon cease to exist in any real sense.”

That main argument runs as a thread through the seven chapters of Metaxas’s book, which offer insight into the promise of America, a call to hold fast to the promise, while also casting a vision for a promising American future. Metaxas reminds the reader in Chapter One of the fundamental “idea of American liberty, which might also be called self-government.” This is the promise of America. In order to best keep the American promise, Metaxas prescribes that Americans “behold ourselves afresh” and perceive the strangeness of American liberty in political history.

Metaxas offers instructive insight in Chapter One when he contrasts the liberal and conservative misunderstandings of freedom. For the liberal, he writes, “American freedom is when freedom – or liberty – is confused with [moral] license.” For the conservative, however, the false hope is that an American understanding of liberty and self-government is the natural condition of mankind. Both of these are misunderstandings, Metaxas argues, because the liberal does not reckon with moral reality and the conservative understates the need for supporting structures of self-government.

Further, the inherited experiment of American liberty has “nothing to do with jingoism and nationalistic chest beating” — contra current political zeitgeist — but rather all to do with the goodness of the people called Americans. Metaxas persuasively argues that self-government – American liberty – is not only a civil government concept, but is primarily a matter of personal ethic. “True freedom must be an ‘ordered freedom’” and this ordered freedom grows from the bottom-up, a culture to a government, rather than from the top-down.

Metaxas offers a paradigm for thinking about the cultural milieu needed to sustain American liberty in Chapter Two. He borrows a concept from the Christian public intellectual Os Guiness: The Golden Triangle of Freedom, or freedom, virtue, and faith. This triad of cultural goods is mutually reinforcing. “Freedom requires virtue; virtue requires faith; faith requires freedom.”

In a secular age, the idea that freedom requires virtue and that virtue requires faith is not well-received. But, the liberal misunderstanding of freedom–freedom to moral license–disintegrates the virtuous anchor of the Golden Triangle. A lack of virtue leads to a greater need for masters. Metaxas fills the pages of this book with quotes from America’s founders making this point, a point lost on the majority of Americans today.

To poke the bear even more, Metaxas argues that virtue requires faith, or more explicitly, religion. The root of virtue in a man’s life is his religion. Metaxas writes, “[Today], everyone seems to know that helping the poor is important … or that slavery is wrong, or that being good stewards of the environment is important, but what we have completely forgotten is that these ideals all stemmed from the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. We seem to think that whatever virtues we do possess arose by themselves. History shows this to be false.” False, indeed. Humanity is incurably religious and the religious context that spawned American liberty was specifically a Judeo-Christian context filled with its moral imperatives.

So, then, we come full triangle to freedom. Virtue and faith result in a self-governed people, a civil government constrained in its power because the people are governed by higher ideals and authority. Metaxas reminds us that faith and freedom are not bitter enemies, as thought in the 18th century France and 21st century America. Central to American freedom is religious liberty.

Religious liberty, imperiled in various ways today, was the genius of the American founding. The founders recognized the federal government should not dictate dogma, but rather facilitate freedom of faith and practice. The civil government judges behavior, not beliefs. Religious liberty has facilitated a flurry of faith communities committed to their God which serve to reinforce the virtue and freedom necessary for our thriving republic all these years. Religious liberty is the American first freedom. “We the people” must resolve to protect this freedom for the good of our collective American soul.