The Zero and the Infinite one

the Zero and Infinite the ( Darkness At noon ) is a Romance of Arthur Koestler. Written between 1938 and 1940, it is published for the first time in England in 1941, then in France in 1945.

Synopsis

Shown to be itself opposite with the government, the Roubachof citizen is stopped and thrown in prison. Old Apparatchik, it will be confronted with a repressive system in which itself collaborated during its political career.

The novel recalls by means of analepses the course of this former dignitary until his arrest. Its own reflections on its past and the interrogations to which it is subjected in particular will lead it to become aware of the " fiction grammaticale" , the " je" , forsaken with the profit of the " nous" in a totalitarian company where the individual is regarded as infinitesimal quantity compared to the community, infinite quantity.

Stalinism

Behind the relative blur of the narration bores obviously a particular historical reality: the Stalinist USSR of the Thirties: public purgings, lawsuits, a party changing into totalitarian machine, a revolution diverted… as well as a more general historical reality: the installation of the totalitarianism and its inhuman vision of the individual. Arthur Koestler, itself former Communist and remained deeply socialist throughout its life, appears among the first intellectuals to denounce the diversion of the socialist revolution at one time when the USSR is set up in terrestrial paradise by many thinkers and intellectuals (Western) of left, where very critical is denounced like an operation reactionary. Among French, rare are those which, as Francine Bloch, take the defense of the novel.

Rééd. 2005: ED.: Calmann-Levy, ISBN 2702135625

Internal bond

anti-totalitarian Literary works

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