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PARTISAN REVIEW
acters. Indeed, the mmor characters are all ideological or social
types, neither interacting upon nor modifying each other's
characters: they break or bust each other, or some escape and others
remain unchanged. Reflective and revealing autobiography, then,
beyond telling a good public tale of important and exciting public
events, is not likely to be his strongest card as a writer. He may
simply be well aware of this-no skeletons to hide, simply an old
craftsman's dialectic awareness of his professional strengths and
weaknesses . The one clear thread in all the variety of his themes,
and linking closely his two periods, is that he has been a professional
reporter of mighty themes, but always using his pen for his career,
considering carefully his subject matter and his changing audiences.
This is perhaps why so many of us are still uneasy and
uncertain about Koestler. His themes are great themes, but he is not
a great writer, if in some sense great writing becomes, whether as
political or scientific writing, an end in itself. He always demands
our agreement or disagreement, not our appreciation - although we
should appreciate very greatly the skill and cultural role of such
writing, admitting that it is not great literature. I think of Koestler as
one might think of Orwell if he had never written
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The claim for literary greatness could not be
made, but he would still have been a figure -like Koestler- of extra–
ordinary interest and importance.
What, however, if the content, if the message, is the thing?
What emerges in his later, more difficult writings is both compelling
and tantalizing. What is compelling is his humanistic tone, even at
times when journalistic cadences slip in. He sees the humor as well
as the seriousness of life . Life is serious, not simply in how we react
to each other, a purely humanistic position, but in how we must, he
still believes, search for an overall synthesis or sense of purpose in
humanity. He is an individualist who has come utterly to reject
hedonism or utilitarianism in favor of a long-term responsibility for
improving the human species.
In
a paper of 1969, he identified "four outstanding, pathological
symptoms reflected in the disastrous history of our species." They
are (i) the "ubiquitous ritual" of human sacrifice; (ii) that
"homo
sapiens
is virtually unique in the animal kingdom in his lack of
instinctive safeguards of his own species"; (iii) "the chronic, quasi–
schizophrenic split between reason and emotion, between man's
rational faculty and his irrational, affect-bound beliefs"; and (iv) "the
striking disparity between the growth curves of science and
technology on the one hand and of ethical conduct on the other."
