BERNARD AVISHAI
229
indispensable to our seeing this-was also to a particular kind of inter–
nallandscape, to a cast of mind that is drawn to the order promised by
elaborate ideology itself and, indeed, may be most distinctive for the
way it denies internal landscapes altogether. Communism may be gone,
but the appeal of secular religions is not. Neither, for that matter, is the
appeal of orderly answers to sublime questions.
So now that we are in the next century, what makes Koestler worth
reading, if at all, is his self-conscious exposure of an exemplary self–
consciousness, something like what Koestler himself found in
Rousseau's
Confessions,
a book he tried to emulate when writing
Arrow
in the Blue.
With Koestler, we see the subordination of an outside to an
inside, see how powerfully what we see can be absorbed into what we
hope. These vexing connections are not easily teased out, except per–
haps by one's analyst on a good day (and indeed, Koestler at times com–
pared writing to the analyst's couch).
In
Koestler's case, the most
interesting connection may be between his confessed emotional fragility
and his romance with communist bosses-not a political dream, exactly,
but the dream of an authoritative scientific community, mastering his–
tory, who he hoped would exercise an engulfing political power. This
was, so he would later say (when the term was still fresh and a little
risque), a "neurotic" attraction. Becoming a communist had for him the
quality of a conversion to a religious orthodoxy, a positivist trance, a
love of "objectivity," which still claims many proselytes.
When we review how Koestler accounts for his becoming a commu–
nist, we do not find a person with (now quaint) visions of proletarian
revolutionary consciousness. Rather, we find one with both the training
to expose and the opportunity to oppose the scientific pretensions of
communism-and who nevertheless wholeheartedly supported it. For
we also find a lonely young man with an impulse to intellectual rigidi–
ties and pack-fellowship. Koestler's communism, in other words, was
the culmination of his hubris, a marker on his journey to what may be
called, in any century, faith.
I.
SHRINK TO INSIGNIFICANCE
REVIEW THE CASE 'NOTES as Koestler himself writes them in
Arrow in the
Blue.
A young Jewish intellectual, approaching his twenty-sixth birth–
day, often depressed, as accomplished as he is troubled, is living in
Berlin during Hitler's rise. His conversion, though imminent, is hardly a
foregone conclusion; indeed, reasonable people might think this the fur–
thest thing from his mind. As a child in Bela Kun's Budapest, then
