Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)

József Hruby: Two "Last Men in Europe": A. Koestler's Darkness at Noon and G. Ornwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

67 Vassilij is only afraid of his daughter, in Nineteen Eighty-Four the Parson kids denounce their own father to the Thought Police. Rubashov is desperate to stick to his faith, Winston on the other hand is desperate to find something to stick to before his final destruction. His tragedy is that he only finds O'Brien, the priest of power, servant of the new religion. Winston rejects the traditional God, his God is humaneness, the spirit of Man. It is this God that fails him at the end of the book after the "sophisticated" phsychological treatment. In Darkness at Noon Rubashov's belief in the Party is eroded but his God does not ultimately fail. It is the author, Koestler, whose belief in the God of Communism ultimately failed. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, just as in Darkness at Noon, the Party would have had enough power to create "high noon" for the people, but they chose to create darkness. (In Oceania the only purpose of war is to burn off the surplus products, which for the first time in history would make it possible to end "hierarchy" and reach "equality"'.) Instead, the abnormal has become the rule. Darkness at Noon and Nineteen Eighty-Four seek to show what happens when ideas are taken to their logical conclusion. The real horror of the books is formal reason, having its measure outside man, taken to its extreme and showing rational contempt for moral tradition. The stage is reached when the world is only on intellectual construct. When O'Brien kills Winston's human self, he buries the murder in dehumanized intellectual rhetoric. Once the priests of power step on the way of action, they cannot stop. The logic of their position demands that the next step should logically follow from the previous one. All that remains is politics, stripped bare of morality (Darkness at Noon) and the inordinate desire for power (Nineteen Eighty-Four). "We should not have sailed without ethical ballast"^ - says Rubashov. In Nineteen Eighty-Four only the proles can preserve human qualities. "They were not loyal to any party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another... The proles had stayed human".^ That is why for Winston hope lies in the proles. However, "he soon discovers that they are not aware of their own potential. It is a problem that Rubashov also ponders: there can be no revolution without the people's consciousness of their condition, and they cannot acquire this consciousness with revolution".^ * Towards the and of his life Orwell drew consolation from two sources: from the hope that some day, perhaps a thousand years hence, things might be better, (Koestler was a short time pessimist and a long time optimist); and from the reflection that revolutionary activity always fails but always continues.