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The two works of the political imagination named in my title could not seem further apart, and they could not be much closer. At one stage of the ripening of their love, Diotima tells Hyperion: "dein Nahmensbruder der herrliche Hyperion des Himmels ist in dir" ( 1.28; 670, 14-15);1 and she, the spiritual fruit, warmly welcomes the inner sunlight. In the two works we see the sun within versus the eclipse of the sun without; noon versus darkness at noon. Nothing could seem less inviting at first than to try to compare a lyrical eighteenth-century novel in letters with a cold-war best-seller, and yet this is precisely what I propose to do here. For the similarities between the two works are so compelling and in places so obvious that it is a surprise that no one has yet thought of a comparison. There are also less obvious resemblances, as well as some telling dissimilarities. I will concentrate on three areas: politics, human relationships, and parallels in word and image.
I. POLITICS
Hyperion and Darkness at Noon are both works of narrative of high poetic merit; yet applicable to both is Howard Gaskill's observation on Hyperion that "whatever else it is, [it] is also a political novel."2 Friedrich Holderlin's novel and Arthur Koestler's are shoot and branch of the same tree: they are poetic responses to the French Revolution. Hyperion is closer in time to the events of Thermidor3 than is Darkness at Noon, but chronological disparity only confirms our view. For encoded in the very character and composition of the two works is their response to distance in time from the historical events that shape them. Holderlin alludes to events and personalities of the French Revolution directly, in letters of his own that date from the time of composition of the novel; Hyperion itself, its action predating the events of 1789 by some twenty years, is an allegory of those events.4 Darkness at Noon, based on the Moscow Trials, held between 1936 and 1938, contains moralizing and literary allusion to such figures as Robespierre (3:3; 210) and Danton (4:2; 253)5 In addition to the events of Thermidor there are for Koestler the events of November 1917 and soon after, the latter as distant from the...