Arthur Koestler's hope in the unseen

283 Pages·2017·0.82 MB·English

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LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School
2005
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Kirk Michael Steen
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
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Steen, Kirk Michael, "Arthur Koestler's hope in the unseen: twentieth-century efforts to retrieve the spirit of
liberalism" (2005). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1669.
https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1669
This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It
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ARTHUR KOESTLER’S HOPE IN THE UNSEEN:
TWENTIETH-CENTURY EFFORTS
TO RETRIEVE THE SPIRIT OF LIBERALISM

A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the
Louisiana State University and
Agricultural and Mechanical College
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

in

The Department of History

by
Kirk Steen
B. A., University of New Orleans, 1974
M. A., University of New Orleans, 1986
August 2005
©Copyright 2005
Kirk Michael Steen
All rights reserved

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Arthur Koestler at his desk during the 1930s

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Dedication

The efforts that produced this investigation of Arthur Koestler I offer to my wife,
Christel Katherine Roesch, for her patient support and for the value and respect she holds
for liberal education. The two of us share one fundamental belief that justifies the
changes in our lifestyle necessitated by my earning a terminal degree and completing the
narrative that follows. It is the conviction that among teachers, particularly among
humanities teachers, their own personal academic growth and the deepening appreciation
of the world that such growth engenders attaches to definite and positive consequences
for their students.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor David Lindenfeld for his willingness to work with
a non-traditional graduate student. Without his flexibility and his dedication to liberal
arts education my work at Louisiana State University would have been impossible. I
deeply appreciate the intelligence and care with which Professor Lindenfeld chose my
readings for the independent study I did with him as well as the leadership he offered as I
investigated Arthur Koestler and European history for this paper. The seriousness with
which he treated my individuality must be mentioned. His attitude in this regard enabled
me to follow my inclinations. One result of this attitude is the inquiry that follows.
Throughout my studies Professor Lindenfeld left the universe open for me. The
flexibility of Louisiana State University’s Graduate School with regard to my
circumstances as a working secondary schoolteacher is another reality without which I
could not have completed this dissertation.
I must also thank the other members of my examining committee. Professor
Suzanne Marchand’s willingness to be part of the committee and her plea for more
biographical narrative proved invaluable to the final draft of this paper. It is difficult to
thank Professor Steven Ross enough for his extremely close reading of the early draft of
this analysis of Arthur Koestler. His clarification of certain references in Koestler’s
fiction to realities of the ancient Mediterranean world saved me much embarrassment. I
feel quite fortunate to have had the benefit of Professor Bainard Cowan’s encouragement
both during his course on science and literature and during the committee’s critique of
this paper. Finally, Professor David Perlmutter’s insights into Koestler as a working
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journalist helped me rethink my subject as I wrote the final draft of this project. Again I
feel lucky, in this case to have had him appointed to my examining committee.
I have to give credit to my colleagues at Alfred Bonnabel High School for their
generous attitudes and the small daily gifts of time and energy they have given me.
Thanks are due to all three of my fellow teachers in the Gifted Department. I fondly
recall Ann Kent’s encouragement during the early stages of my doctoral coursework as
well as her offer to team teach the largest class of American literature students our
department has ever had. Ann’s purchase of some of Arthur Koestler’s books for me
during the early stages of my research typifies her good will. On numerous occasions
Ms. Catherine Cooke strove hard to make my teaching schedule accommodate the
writing phase of my dissertation. Gwen Leonhard, chair of the department, has always
been willing to find ways to make the bureaucratic aspects of our jobs less painful. Her
efforts in this regard were of no little consequence as I worked on this project.
Finally I owe a great debt to the person to whom I dedicate this work. Christy,
thank you for respecting my desire to study European history and for coping with my
days in Baton Rouge and hours in my library. I appreciate your generous attitude and
good nature that enabled you to accept the shift in our comfortable routine. Your
patience with my periodic absence even when I was near you was remarkable.

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Preface

I believe that the key to understanding Arthur Koestler is the tenacity with which
he held certain nineteenth-century beliefs. Nineteenth-century bourgeois values formed
the context of his early life. They were the cultural forces that shaped his attitudes and
definitions of the world before he encountered that world during what became a turbulent
time for Europeans, the period between 1914 and the 1950s. Acculturation and
socialization are both channels of continuity which retain the flexibility that alone enables
humans to respond and adjust to the discontinuous developments in social life. In this
paper I have chosen to accentuate certain nineteenth-century continuities of values that
appear in Koestler’s writing as he responded to twentieth-century events. Chief among
these was his devotion to the nineteenth-century conception of the innate value of the
individual person in society. He was not alone during his lifetime in this plea for what
have come to be called human rights. However, what distinguishes Koestler’s writing is
the connections he made between the nightmarish aspects of Stalinism and fascism and
other, more mundane, aspects of human existence. He could create expository prose that
revealed the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War as well as he could create psychological
fiction that revealed how the ideals that gripped the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution
were transformed into the surrealistic deformations of the Moscow Purge Trials. He
could also write pieces that possessed broader relevance. During a campaign against the
death penalty in Britain, his writing revealed the contradictions of determinism and free
will in justifications of capital punishment. The way Koestler put it, he could operate as a
writer on the tragic plane as well as on the trivial plane. Therefore, he could just as
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easily, and with just as much seriousness, write pieces that revealed the cruelties suffered
by dogs and their owners in Great Britain under the tyrannical fear of rabies that
maintained laws that required a six-month-long quarantine of canines entering or
reentering the kingdom.
Somewhere between the tragic and the trivial were Koestler’s science pieces.
Generally these explored the human aspects of the practice of science. Particularly in the
case of psychology and natural selection, his science pieces could expose deterministic
conceptions of behavior and evolution that were tied to his fear of determinism in
politics. Even his science writing could veer toward either end of the tragic-trivial
continuum, however. It investigated the tragic consequences of a particular scientist’s
work being rejected by his peers as well as the trivial and petty jealousies of scientists
who adhered to different schools of thought in academia. Koestler’s broad interests are
another characteristic of his life that held affinities for the nineteenth century. He was a
generalist who eschewed specialization. Koestler’s attraction to the possibilities that the
paranormal might be verified by science gave some of his writing yet another nineteenth-
century quality in that it approached the attitude of the romantic.
Koestler is remembered as a writer both about politics and science. He is recalled
chiefly for his investigation of the Moscow Trials in Darkness at Noon and for his look at
the creation of the heliocentric theory of the universe in The Sleepwalkers. Recently
several writers have acknowledged the connections between his political and scientific
writing, but Koestler is rarely viewed as addressing these subjects from the perspective of
the nineteenth century. The latter is precisely what I will attempt in this narrative.

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Arrival and Departure, Koestler’s fictionalized account of his escape from
fascism and his decision not to immigrate to the United States in 1940, discovers the root
cause of middle-class devotion to radical political movements to be psychological
displacement of motives. Koestler has one of this book’s characters, psychiatrist Sonia
Bolgar, announce to the novel’s protagonist who is on the verge of a spiritual epiphany
characterized by optimism, that “there is a geometry of fate which sees to it that a straight
line cuts parallels always at the same angle.” Bolgar’s point is that even in an open
universe one appears to be fated or destined at times for certain choices and behaviors,
and no matter which road one chooses, they seem to all lead to the same terminus.
Halfway through the present investigation of Arthur Koestler and the first half of the
twentieth century in Europe, I realized that similar metaphorical tangents had cut
equivalent angles between Koestler’s universe and my own. Through my work I learned
that the essence of Koestler’s political and philosophical responses to the world in which
he lived was his distaste for a shrunken, determined universe. I came to realize that the
query which led to my discovery of Koestler, a desire to understand why by the early
twenty-first century much of the world seemed incapable of treating socialism seriously,
possessed a solution tied to the notion of a shrunken universe. My investigation of
Arthur Koestler taught me that in this instance I was seeking an explanation of why the
political universe in which I lived had shrunken after the 1980s. I had never
conceptualized the problem that way, but after digesting Koestler’s life and attaining an
appreciation of his intellectual efforts as a yearning for an open universe, I found an
explanation for a reality of my own time that had perplexed me. The days of the open
political universe in which human imagination had allowed social democracy and market
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