Darkness On Christmas Day: Notes on Arthur Koestler (Overrated Novelist, Parapsychologist, Alleged Rapist, etc.)

Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983)

Photographed by Ida Kar (1959)
National Portrait Gallery

 

Nobody can write guiltlessly ...

I. 

 

There are some books which I have read once and then never felt the need to return to: Darkness at Noon would be one such novel, for example ...

 

Although originally written in German, the first published edition of Koestler's dystopian masterpiece - and, to be honest, pretty much the only novel he is now remembered for - was the poetically titled English translation of 1940 [1]. 

 

In brief - as I imagine most readers will be familiar with the work - Darkness at Noon is the story of an old revolutionary (Rubashov) who is arrested and imprisoned by the Party he served so loyally and tried for treason by the State he helped to build. 

 

Although the novel doesn't say so, it's clearly set in the Soviet Union and Number One is obviously Uncle Joe. For by the end of the 1930s, Koestler, like his good friend George Orwell, was bitterly disillusioned with the communist ideology he had once passionately embraced [2]. 

 

Critically acclaimed at the time - and overranked ever since on lists of great English-language novels of the 20th-century - Darkness at Noon provides a grimly fascinating insight into the revolutionary politics of the period and the authoritarian mindset. But, I still think that - like the more allegorical Animal Farm (1945) - having read it once, there's no real reason to go back and read it again.  

 

I mean, we all get the central idea: it's not much fun living under totalitarian regimes; be they political or theocratic in character. Even D. H. Lawrence - who was certainly a long way from being a liberal - came to this conclusion having arrived at his own dead end in The Plumed Serpent (1926): click here.   

 

II.

 

I have, however, other reasons for not wanting to re-read this novel; reasons that are more to do with my dislike of Koestler the man, rather than disinterest in his fiction ...

For one thing, it was alleged in David Cesarani's 1998 biography [3] that he was a serial rapist [4]. And, for another, Koestler was also something of a crackpot or, if you prefer, a parapsychologist; i.e., the sort of person who believes (without evidence) that there is real evidence for phenomena such as extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, and telepathy; the sort of person who also insists that every coincidence is meaningful (or synchronistic). 

 

Koestler's fascination with the paranormal permeated much of his later writings; see, for example, The Roots of Coincidence (1972), in which he argues that certain (occult) phenomena will never be explained by orthodox science which, in his view, is essentially - and dangerously - reductionist [5]. 

 

After his suicide in 1983 [6], Koestler left the bulk of his estate to the promotion of research into all things spooky (and pseudo-scientific) through the founding of a chair in parapsychology at a British university. 

 

Unfortunately, the trustees of the estate had difficulty finding a university willing to establish such a chair: to their credit, Oxford, Cambridge, King's College London and UCL were all approached and all refused. However, to their shame, the University of Edinburgh decided to grab the money on offer and agreed to set up a chair in accordance with Koestler's request [7]. 

 

Notes

 

[1] Interestingly, the German manuscript was lost for 75 years after having been translated into English. Thus, all versions of the work prior to 2015 - including the 1944 German edition produced by Koestler himself - were based on the English translation published by Macmillan.

      As for the title, Darkness at Noon, this was chosen by the British sculptor Daphne Hardy - Koestler's girlfriend (and translator) at the time - after the publishers rejected his original title, 'The Vicious Circle'. The phrase is adapted from the Book of Job: "They meet with darkness in the day time, and grope in the noonday as in the night." (KJV 5:14)

 

[2] Just to be clear on the extent of Koestler's committment to Marxist-Leninist ideology, in the early 1930s he left Germany and moved to the USSR, living for a time in Ukraine, which was then enduring what is known as the Holodomor (1932-33); a man-made famine - most likely engineered at Stalin's behest for political reasons - that killed millions of people. 

      Despite witnessing terrible scenes, Koestler endorsed the official Soviet version of events and claimed that the starving were workshy enemies of the people. He only resigned his membership of the Communist Party in 1938.   

 

[3] David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (William Heinemann Ltd., 1998). 

 

[4] To be fair, this has been challenged by later authors, including Michael Scammell in his 2009 biography, although even he concedes that Koestler could be sexually aggressive towards women and held firmly to the troubling view that 'without an element of initial rape there is no delight' in sexual relations (a remark made by Koestler in a letter to the woman who was to become his second wife). 

      See Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual (Faber and Faber, 2010); first published in the US under the title Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (Random House, 2009).

      But see also David Cesarani's review of Scammell's biography in Prospect Magazine (24 Feb 2010), in which he continues to insist that Koestler was a voracious sexual predator with a penchant for using physical force to get his way: click here.

 

[5] That said, Koestler also argues that there are direct links between ancient forms of mysticism and modern physics - if only the physicists would open their eyes and look (and if only they would listen to what Jung has to say).  

 

[6] I've no issue with Koestler having the courage to top himself aged 77 in 1983; he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1976 and then, three years later, with terminal leukaemia. However, some worry that he may have unduly coerced his healthy and considerably younger wife, Cynthia, into killing herself so that he'd not have to face the end alone (and she'd not have to live without him). As the writer Julian Barnes says, even if Koestler didn't talk her into it, neither did he try to talk her out of it. This is another controversial topic amongst scholars who choose to study Koestler.      

 

[7] The Koestler Parapsychology Unit was established in 1985 at the University of Edinburgh. It aims to teach and conduct research concerning various aspects of parapsychology. The Chair is currently held by Professor Caroline Watt.

 

Every Woman Adores a Futurist: On the Manifestos of Valentine de Saint-Point

Valentine de Saint-Point by Rossana Borzelli (2016)

Acrylic and oil on metal (250 x 125 cm)

singulart.com

 

 

When one thinks of Futurism, one automatically thinks of machines and machismo. For Futurism is the technophallic art movement par excellence; an Italian boy's club obsessed with speed, dynamism, virility, and violence; one which prides itself on its anti-feminism and proto-fascism. 

 

Indeed, Marinetti even made contempt for women - along with worship of war - one of Futurism's founding principles in his Manifesto of 1909, describing them as a form of inert matter (i.e., passive lumps of flesh).  

 

Despite this, there were women attracted to and associated with Futurism; one of whom - Valentine de Saint-Point - even wrote two manifestos of her own ...

 

 

Manifesto della Donna futurista (1912) [1]

Responding directly to Marinetti's misogyny, Saint-Point published her Manifesto della Donna futurista in which she amusingly insists, amongst other things, that men and women are equal - but equally mediocre and thus equally deserving of contempt:

 

"Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn." 

 

Later in the text, she challenges the binary idea of two separate sexes; there are, rather, just exceptional individuals, born from within strong cultures, who possess both masculine and feminine traits:

 

"It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius, or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being." 

  

Unfortunately, Saint-Point doesn't show fidelity with her own argument; she repeatedly falls back into the language of men and women and it's pretty clear that what she values most are traits and values traditionally associated with the fomer, such as virility, for example, perhaps the key term of her manifesto: 

 

"What is most lacking in women as in men is virility. That is why Futurism, even with all its exaggerations, is right. To restore some virility to our races so benumbed in femininity, we have to train them in virility even to the point of brute animality."

 

Every woman, she insists, "ought to possess not only feminine virtues but virile ones, without which she is just a female". Once they've been made to man-up as it were - and perhaps even grow a pair - then woman are capable of waging war even more ferociously than men - remember the Amazons! 

 

Saint-Point wants warrior women; not wise or virtuous women, or women who value peace and dream of healing the world. She also wants women who surrender to lust - the second great term of her Futuristic vocabulary - and rediscover their instinctive cruelty. We should stop preaching spiritual justice to women in the name of a mistaken feminism; the latter is an error that undermines their instincts and fertility, falsifying their primordial fatality.

 

The new woman - the Futurist woman - the woman who recognises sentiment as a weakness, will be a sensual woman who understands that lust is the basis of her strength; a bit like the prostitute who incites her illicit lovers to express their darkest desires. 

 

Saint-Point ends her manifesto with the following rallying cry:

 

"Woman [...] go back to your sublime instinct, to violence, to cruelty [...] incite your sons and your men to surpass themselves. You are the ones who make them. You have all power over them. You owe humanity its heroes. Make them!" 

 

Saint-Point would develop her (cod-Nietzschean) philosophy in a second manifesto - the Futurist Manifesto of Lust - published a year later ...

 

 

Manifesto futurista della Lussuria (1913) [2]

 

Conceived as a reply to those critics who had laughed at her earlier manifesto, Saint-Point here expands upon her erotic theory of lust as an "essential part of life's dynamism" and, indeed, as a virtue that drives individuals towards self-overcoming. 

 

For lust is not just a desire for pleasure or to know the body of another. Lust, says Saint-Point, is also the "expression of a being projected beyond itself [...] the joyous pain of a flowering". And fucking - or the union of flesh, as she calls it - is the "sensory and sensual synthesis that leads to the greatest liberation of spirit". 

 

This being the case, if a strong man is to realise his full spiritual potential, then he must realise also his full carnal potential and deny himself nothing when it comes to the pleasures of the flesh: the warrior is fully justified in enjoying the spoils of war and to show moral restraint is a sign of weakness. In other words, rape is both a normal and natural part of warfare; the recreation of life after the slaughter of the battlefield.     

 

And what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Or, in this case, the (male) artist, who has the same desires and same need for pleasure as the warrior; artists should feel no shame in raping their models once the latter have finished sitting for them. As Saint-Point writes - in capitals, just so we hear loud and clear what she's saying:

 

"ART AND WAR ARE THE GREAT MANIFESTATIONS OF SENSUALITY; LUST IS THEIR FLOWER [and] LUST EXCITES ENERGY AND RELEASES STRENGTH."

Lust, also, it seems, makes the world go round; including the world of business, finance, and media; "it drives the great men of business who run the banks, the press, and international trade to increase their wealth". 

 

Essentially, lust is Saint-Point's term for what Nietzsche calls the will to power and desires of all kinds - "whether they are considered normal or abnormal" - are always the supreme spur to action and the most magnificent expressions of our wellbeing.   

Again echoing Nietzsche, Saint-Point calls for the destruction of Christian morality, which considers lust a sin or vice; something shameful to be denied: "We must stop despising desire, disguising it in the pitiful clothes of old and sterile sentimentality" and we must, she says, reject everything associated with romantic love: "counting daisy petals, moonlight duets, heavy endearments, false hypocritical modesty". 

 

Whenever beings - of whatever sex - are drawn together by physical attraction, we should let them "dare to express their desires, the inclinations of their bodies" and transform lust into an erotic (albeit sometimes brutal) art form that allows us to bring sex to full conscious realisation. 

 

In other words, lust must be guided by will, not just instinct and intuition, so that in this way the joys of fucking will result in guaranteed orgasm for both parties. 

 

One can't help wondering if Saint-Point isn't directing her remarks here to a lover who has sadly failed to excite her in the way she hoped ...? And one also can't help wondering quite how seriously she expects us to take what she writes, either here or in her earlier manifesto; for just twelve months later she would declare: 

 

'I am not a Futurist and never have been. I do not belong to any school.'       

 

Notes

 

[1] Valentine de Saint Point, The Manifesto of [the] Futurist Woman (Response to F. T. Marinetti), trans. Bruce Sterling (2008): click here. 

      All quotes are taken from this translation available on italianfuturism.org (an excellent website established by Jessica Palmieri, in 2007, in order to encourage the exchange of ideas and disseinate information about Italian Futurism).

 

[2] Valentine de Saint-Point, Futurist Manifesto of Lust, trans. J. H. Higgit (1973): click here.

      Again, all quotes are taken from this translation available on italianfuturism.com

 

 

Readers interested in this topic might like to see a short essay by Adrien Sina and Sarah Wilson, 'Action féminine: Valentine de Saint-Point', in Tate Etc., issue 16 (Summer 2009): click here to read online.   

You Can Take the Girl Out of Sodom ... (Notes on the Story of Lot and His Daughters)

Jan Matsys: Lot and His Daughters (1565)

I.

I've said it before and I'll undoubtedly have opportunity to say it again: the Bible is the world's most transgressive work of literature; a mytho-historical novel that contains page after page of terrible events and wtf incidents.

And there are none more shocking than the story of Lot and his daughters ...

II.

Having escaped the destruction of their hometown of Sodom and witnessed their mother turned into a human condiment, the two young women and their elderly father find themselves seeking refuge in a mountain cave.

Here, according to the account in Genesis [19:30-38], they ply their old man with wine and then engage in drunken sex with him over consecutive nights. This is done not only without his consent, but, apparently, without even his knowledge or memory of what occurred. In this manner, each girl conceives a male child as hoped, thereby illicitly preserving patrilineality or their father's seed.       

Now, I'm no prude - but, really, this is a bit much, isn't it?


III.

Having said that, there is something perversely pleasing about the daughters initiating and perpetrating the incestuous rape of their father, after he previously offered them as sexual playthings to the Sodomites if the latter would but agree to leave his angelic guests unmolested. For it hints at the idea of what Baudrillard terms the revenge of the object. 

However, some commentators prefer to turn the biblical account on its head and insist that women can only ever be victims of patriarchal power. Thus, they argue that it was more likely that Lot raped his daughters and that the narrative we are given in Genesis is a perversion first and foremost of the truth concerning incest and sexual abuse.

Such a cover-up - if that's what it is - may have been done in order to exonerate Lot and preserve the family honour. For whilst he may have been something of a black sheep, Lot was still the nephew of Abraham, father of the Covenant and progenitor of the nation of Israel. It could well be that the familiar practice of victim-blaming and shifting responsibility for sexual abuse away from the male perpetrator is first given religious sanction in this tale.  

Notes 

Readers interested in the idea that it was Lot who raped his daughters rather than vice versa, might like to see the following article by Ilan Kutz: 'Revisiting the lot of the first incestuous family: the biblical origins of shifting the blame on to female family members', in The BMJ, 331 (7531), pp. 1507-1508, (24 Dec 2005). Click here to read online. 

For a sister post to this one on strange flesh and sodomy, please click here.

  

Richard Dawkins on Rape: Good Logic, Bad Thinking

In an attempt to illustrate what philosophers know as a syllogism (i.e. a statement of comparison between two terms that does not necessarily endorse either), Richard Dawkins tweets: "Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse."

As a piece of logic, it's fine. But as an example, it's extremely unfortunate and one does wish he had simply stuck with the algebriac formula of x and y. For whilst clearly not sanctioning date rape, Dawkins nevertheless perpetuates the myth that it's a less serious crime because carried out by someone known to the victim in what are deemed to be less aggravating circumstances.

Such circumstances, however, remain external to what essentially constitutes the crime itself; i.e. fucking someone against their will. If consent is not fully and freely given to sexual penetration (or, in the case of minors, cannot legally be given) and you stick your dick where it isn't wanted and shouldn't be, then that's rape professor!

Indeed, the law is pretty clear on this. So critical opposition voiced on Twitter by those who were troubled by his choice of syllogism is not necessarily proof of their moral absolutism, or inability to think logically; rather, it might simply demonstrate their superior legal knowledge, their more sophisticated understanding of rape, and their rather more sympathetic sexual politics.

Ultimately, rape is rape, just as murder is murder. The story of someone killed with kindness - perhaps a lethal dose of diamorphine discreetly administered before bedtime thereby allowing the victim to slip away peacefully in their sleep - lacks the sensational horror (and thus newsworthiness) of someone hacked to death with a chainsaw, but either way a vile crime has been committed and there's a body lying dead at the end of it.

Now, whilst speaking about degrees of violence and mitigating circumstances doesn't make much difference to a corpse, for a prominent public figure to imply that if a woman happens to know her rapist (and chances are she will) - and that if he comes carrying flowers rather than a weapon - this somehow makes the crime less serious (i.e. hardly even worth reporting), well, that makes a lot of difference - both to women who have to deal with the reality (and existential threat) of rape and, indeed, to the men who refuse to accept their shameful behaviour for what it is.      

In the end, as my friend Zena rightly argues, it's not up to men - even very clever men like Professor Dawkins - to try and define women's experiences of sexual violence.

Sadly, even good logic can result in bad thinking ... 

On the Spectral Rape of the Virgin Mary

Astonishingly, some Christians continue to believe that if they lead modest, conventional lives unblemished by additional sin, then they'll avoid harm and receive God's blessing; or, at the very least, he'll leave them unmolested until they stand before him on the Day of Judgement. 

One might have thought that the shocking story of the girl-child Mary would have taught them differently. For here was a thirteen year old girl who, although born without sin due to her immaculate conception, was nevertheless leading a regular life of moral and social conformity, happily betrothed to a man, Joseph, according to the traditions of her people, and nervously awaiting her wedding night when they would be united as man and wife.

But, having already been selected by God as a broodmare (and doubtlessly groomed by him and his angelic servants throughout her childhood), Mary was never going to be allowed to live a happy, healthy, orthodox life as a Jewish wife and mother. Instead, she would be subject to spectral rape and divine impregnation and obliged to accept her role within a perversely insane religious melodrama:

"This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: his mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
      But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ...'
      When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus."

 - Matthew 1: 18-24.

What Matthew's account wishes to reassure its readers is that Joseph is placated and, effectively, made complicit in the rape of his young wife and the exploitation of her fertility. It says nothing of how Mary felt about events. For an account of this, we have to turn to Luke. He tells us how God also sent the angel Gabriel to visit the virgin Mary and that he greeted her as the special plaything of the Lord:

"Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, 'Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus ...'
      'How will this be,' Mary asked the angel, 'since I am a virgin?'
     The angel answered, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.'"

- Luke 1: 29-38

     
Recognizing that she has no choice in the matter, Mary gives what might be regarded as consent: 'I am the Lord's servant. Let it be as you have said.' Only then, having got her agreement to be fucked, does Gabriel depart. But her consent is clearly rendered null and void given her age and the situation of extreme duress or coercion under which it was given.

It surely doesn't take much to imagine how, despite her resignation, Mary remains distressed; she is clearly agreeing to act in a manner that she would not normally act were she genuinely free to choose. If it's difficult to say no to sexual predators in positions of power and authority, it's virtually impossible to say no to a god: ask Leda. But yes doesn't always mean yes and all the pure white lilies in the world don't make it so.