Talk:Darkness at Noon

message: My understanding is that this book was written in German. Apparently the Modern Library 100 list editors didn't realize this and accidentally included Darkness at Noon among their list of English-language novels. Is this true? Can anyone verify this and add this info to the article?
--Polynova 06:42, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Here's what he said about it (in the preface to my translation by Daphne Hardy): "...I was again arrested (by the French police) [March 1940] and the original German version of the book was lost.  But by that time the English translation had been completed.  It was dispatched to London ten days before the German invasion of France started, and the book had another narrow escape..."  So evidently it was written in German, but that version doesn't survive.  Antandrus 19:04, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: I added a comment on the title, (namely that 'Darkness at Noon' is what a prisoner would often see - ie the man has lost the light) which another user has deleted as erroneous (how?) and unhelpful . I agree it's trite, but it's no more wrong than the dialectical psycho-babble that precedes it (why these opposites? why does the title have immediate power in a way the french title does not?) I offer for reasonable debate!Linuxlad—Preceding undated comment added by Linuxlad (talk • contribs) 08:02, 28 June 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The reason I said it was erroneous is because it's incorrect to infer that prisons are often "dark at noon". I can't imagine why they would be. If the specific type of prison that Rubashov occupied was justifiably dark much of the day there wouldn't be a problem, but to just say "people who are imprisoned will often endure darkness at noon" is vague and overbroad. I appreciate your intention to interpret meaning in the title of the book, however I'm doubtful that that was the true intended meaning of the title. I think what is really needed to solve the issue would be to find some reliable references. I'm sure there are books out there on Koestler that would give better insight into this. As for the "psycho-babble", though I'm in no position to justify the other parts of the article, I think pointing out the paradox of darkness and daytime seems at least somewhat reasonable. - PullUpYourSocks 1 July 2005 18:56 (UTC)
there is a german article about the book called "sonnenfinsternis". i just wanted to say, myve someone can install a link— Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.63.113.25 (talk) 18:17, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Not Propaganda. Simply the truth. --80.98.80.131 (talk) 15:13, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Title

message: A likely source of the title was one of Milton's poems on his blindness.  It begins:
Total Eclipse!  No Sun!  No Moon! </p> 
All dark amidst the blaze of noon.
(Note that the German title could have come from the opening line).  Milton had worked for Oliver Cromwell and was accused of treason when Charles II took over; Koestler may have considered this a parallel to Rubashev's situation.  Also, metaphorically, Rubashev had been blind to the implications of what he was doing.
CharlesTheBold (talk) 03:57, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think these lines were by Milton himself. They are from the libretto for Handel's Samson, adapted from Milton's original "Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon" (Samson Agonists l.80). (An aria which drew tears from the audience once, when the blind Handel sat on the stage during a performance, or so I have read.) Seadowns (talk) 10:21, 11 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origin of the title 

message: In my Penguin edition, there is a character called Little Loewy, who is a German working in Belgium. Is there another edition in which he is a Dutchman called Little Loewie? The Lawless One (talk) 12:49, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Accuracy of plot summary

message: I've always been rather taken by the 4-line quote (is it a quatrain?) from Ferdinand Lasalle which heads up the final section ('The Grammatical Fiction') of the book:- 
'Show us not the aim without the way,
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the oher too;
Each different path brings other ends in view.
It's from Lasalle's work on Franz von Sickingen, which got a lot of stick from Marx and Engels for barking up the wrong tree.
Eduard Bernstein in his book on Lassale also picks out this passage for special comment (in this version:-
Show not the end and aim, but show the way,
For here so intermingle way and end
That one still changes with the other’s change,
And other ways lead still to other ends,
All this would have been meat and drink to a well-read left-leaning man like Koestler, and appears here to perhaps to be used as a sad summary on the failure of the (this bit of) socialist project...
Linuxlad (talk) 22:23, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quote from Lasalle

message: Ok. Hopefully these latest edits will be a compromise that we can agree on. Orwell's comments have been retained, but they've been relocated to a discussion on Orwell's reaction to Darkness At Noon. The derivation of Rubashov's character has been sourced from Koestler and from Jenni Calder (a literary scholar who wrote on this topic) instead of from Orwell. Carinae986 (talk) 06:52, 26 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Fine. Dahn (talk) 12:05, 26 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Sources should be other than Koestler commenting on his own work; it is useful for readers to learn what others have written about his work. Authors are not the only source of meaning and interpretation and RS are needed for the plot summary (which is too long) and interpretation. Parkwells (talk) 14:04, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Orwell Again 

message: Ok, I reset the page because I wanted to talk about any extensive revisions before the article is actually changed. Right now I'm the only person who seems to have a commitment to building this page, although if you'd like to work together that would be great. I'm sure we could make a better article together than with just me working on my own. 
The third and fourth sections aren't covered in the article because I haven't gotten to them yet. The page was basically just a stub when I first looked at it so I decided to undertake a major revision, one paragraph at a time, as I find the time to work on it. So yes it's incomplete. As far as the blue links, I think that blue linking Rip Van Winkle suggests to the readers that there is a connection between the Washington Irving character and the Koestler character, which is not the case. I added an edit to make the actual connection more clear, since it wasn't really explained in my original edit. Pieta was blue linked earlier in the article, so I don't think it should be blue linked again later on. I saw that dozens of edits had been made to the style of the article that you found. I think the style in the Characters and Plot section was fine, although I'm willing to discuss it. I don't have any investment in the style of the article outside of those sections, so I went back and reinserted your changes to those sections. Carinae986 (talk) 17:40, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Recent Edits

message: Articles, including about books, are supposed to be based on RS - what others have said about the topic, not editors' interpretations and selections.Parkwells (talk) 14:06, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Use RS

message: Generally in an article about a book or film, the characters are named and briefly identified. This article goes into great detail about each character, in the process getting deeply into the plot.  Then the plot is repeated in the next sections. I am going to reduce the content related to the characters in the section by that name.Parkwells (talk) 15:41, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Structure: Characters

message: This section seems more like trivia, to recount isolated instances of people reading or referring to this novel. It was much more influential than that, as can likely be found in reviews of the times or literary/political histories following that period. Other RS should be used.Parkwells (talk) 18:21, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Influence

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: There is no reason to consider Darkness At Noon a dystopian novel.  It is a work of fiction that imagines a historic situation (nearly contemporaneous with its composition) closely analogous to reality.  It is a dark view of an actual historical period, the Great Purge during the late 1930's in the Soviet Union.  It is a work of realism.  Are all fictional treatments of this period to be considered dystopian literature, because the society itself was so terrible for so many? Is Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a more Tolstoyan view of the same events, a dystopian novel?  Moving right along, how about Norman Mailer's first novel, The Naked and the Dead?  That also is a fictional treatment of a pretty bad situation in the US Army.
I think it's pretty clear that none of these have a prime characteristic of dystopian fiction, that the society itself is imaginary.  A fictional situation in a real society is not enough to put a story into the dystopian category.  Let us not risk hyperbole.  I have removed "dystopian" from the list of categories.  Larry Koenigsberg (talk) 03:11, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not a "dystopian novel"