Throw Out Everything But the Kitschin' Sink

For what it's worth, Ayn Rand was a better philosopher than novelist. Rather than dress up her ideas in literary drag, her essays allowed her to drop the pretense of telling a story and instead tell the reader exactly what to think, no John Galt Potemkin middleman necessary. The Romantic Manifesto, a collection of essays laying out Rand's views on art and aesthetics, is perhaps her most interesting non-fiction writing, dealing as it does with these very distinctions (and thus highlighting her comical failure to adhere to them). It is of little use for evaluating art in general, but tremendously useful in evaluating Rand's art, a very particular breed indeed.

The first couple essays are devoted to the question of what art is. Rand defines it as "a selective recreation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments." It is man's way of making concrete abstract concepts that could not be fully articulated in words alone. For instance, The Fountainhead's Howard Roark communicates more clearly Rand's ideals than any discursive treatise could hope to. Art is a product of one's "psycho-epistemology," one of Rand's obnoxious coinages, which has to do with the interaction of conscious thought and unconscious, automatic functions. Art to Rand is a deliberate expression of an artist's "sense of life," his view of man's place in the universe. Thus, an ancient Greek sculptor depicts man as a god, while a medievalist depicts him as a deformed monster (never mind that Greek gods were merely anthropomorphic and far from virtuous, and their human heroes were racked with tragic flaws--these elisions are Rand's, not mine).

Rand hastens to add that while art is an expression and culmination of values, it is "not the means to any didactic end," which is pretty rich coming from the author who shoehorned into her magnum opus a 60-page speech describing in detail her unified theory of existence. Still, Rand's definition in itself is superficially agreeable. Most people consider their writing and art to be self-expression, and while few would call it a concretized abstraction in so many words, I'll grant it a fitting shoe.

But in Objectivist aesthetics, this general classification is not nearly enough. For there are meanings and implications, good and "malevolent," that derive from the various "senses of life," and woe unto those whose interests fall outside of Rand's acceptable and narrow artistic parameters. For her, art must be representative, uplifting, deliberate. Any departures are more or less morally treasonous. This is not an exaggeration:

If one saw, in real life, a beautiful woman wearing an exquisite evening gown, with a cold sore on her lips, the blemish would mean nothing but a minor affliction, and one would ignore it. 

But a painting of such a woman would be a corrupt, obscenely vicious attack on man, on beauty, on all values--and one would experience a feeling of immense disgust and indignation at the artist. (There are also those would feel something like approval and who would belong to the same moral category of the artist.)

The great dichotomy in Rand's aesthetics is Romanticism versus Naturalism, which she takes to be "the world as it should be" versus "the world as it is." The latter she considers mere journalism, and a concession to mediocrity and the belief of a "malevolent universe," as opposed with her own conception of man as a rational being in total command of and responsibility for his destiny. (She attacks the real Romantics of the 19th century for having ceded reason to the classicists they reacted against and looking to emotion for their celebration of man).

A very black-and-white conception it is, with austere limits on what qualifies as art, let alone good art. She is willing to concede some talent to a handful of Naturalists, such as Sinclair Lewis and John O'Hara, but otherwise most art and literature after Dostoevsky and Hugo is a wasteland. Anna Karenina is "the most evil book in serious literature." The "dots and dashes" Impressionists were silly barbarians who "attempted to disintegrate perception into sense data." Modernism is completely alien to her conception of art, and so she dismisses it as so much noise and scribbling. She blames it all on Immanuel Kant and his Critique of Judgment.

Rand hates easy, and much of the rest of the The Romantic Manifesto, including an introduction she wrote for Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three, functions as a screed against nearly all the art of her day. This includes the "Hindu dance"--which, she notes with unreconstructed racist scorn, "presents a man of flesh without skeleton...distort[ing] man's body, imparting to it the motions of a reptile"--and also includes collage: "Blades of grass glued on a sheet of paper to represent grass might be good occupational therapy for retarded children--though I doubt it--but it is not art."

Tell us how you really feel, Ayn:

The composite picture of man that emerges from the art of our time is the gigantic figure of an aborted embryo whose limbs suggest a vaguely anthropoid shape, who twists his upper extremity in a frantic quest for a light that cannot penetrate its empty sockets, who emits inarticulate sounds resembling snarls and moans, who crawls through a bloody muck, red froth dripping from his jaws, and struggles to throw the froth at his own non-existent face, who pauses periodically and, lifting the stumps of his arms, screams in abysmal terror at the universe at large.

It's worth pausing to note that this isn't an entirely inaccurate representation of certain specimens of modern art. Consider Francis Bacon's Painting:

It's certainly not beautiful or exalted, but neither was Britain in 1946. Art should engage the world, which was a very different place than it had been in the 19th century; to pretend otherwise would be grotesquery of an entirely worse and different sort. (Again, you see, the clashing emphases on "is" and "ought.") Rand never uses the phrase "degenerate art," but it's hard to imagine her disagreeing with the National Socialists' attacks on the modernists.

But I digress: if Romanticism is dead and everything is terrible, what is good? Among Rand's eclectic list of acceptable artists and works are Fritz Lang's Siegfried, Mickey Spillane novels, and Buck Rogers. Tap-dancing is her favorite style of dance, for its pure joyousness and absence of tragic gloom.

She also enjoys the TV show The Avengers, as detailed in the most revealing of the Manifesto's chapters, "Bootleg Romanticism." The essay seethes with indignation at the creators of the show, who intended it as a "tongue-in-cheek" spy thriller whose joke the audience didn't get. For Rand, this is intellectual malpractice. Thrillers are to her a kind of modern, commercial Romanticism that presents heroes who are willing to fight against an evil antagonist for a set of pre-determined values. They are to be inspirational--everybody wants to be James Bond, while nobody wants to be (say) Willy Loman. So when humor, a means of ridicule, is aimed at one's values, it is to make them ridiculous. To make James Bond self-deprecating would be "to destroy him" (it is for this reason she considers Dr. No to be superior to From Russia With Love).

The obvious point is that James Bond is simple escapism, but Rand has a rebuttal for that too. Romanticism and thrillers, she says, are escapes from the merely humdrum matters of "real-life," while Naturalism, in its 'surrender' to mediocrity and depravity, is the real escape, "from choice, from values, from responsibility."

Put aside for now the ugliness of Rand's anti-social value system--it is by now well-known and as such is less interesting than the scare quotes she throws around 'real-life.' She downplays to the point of irrelevance material issues like holding down a job, taking care of a family, or dealing with an illness in favor of abstract concerns like upholding values and principles. These are vital matters--people are rightly judged when they abdicate moral responsibility because it's the easy thing to do, such as Joe Paterno's tacit acceptance and shielding of Jerry Sandusky's child rape--but they are not the only concerns. Indeed, it's because practical matters are a person's first concern that moral dilemmas and compromise arise at all. Were we all purely ethical beings, there would be no dilemma, and no heroism.

More than anything, this is why Rand's prose rings so wooden and false. Because she sees humans as solely driven by their ideas and premises, even when they are abandoning them, she drains them of personality and attachment to material needs, and so they end up as speakers in a bland philosophical dialogue.

This she actually demonstrates at the end of the book with a short story, "The Simplest Thing in the World." It deals with a writer, Henry Dorn, who sits down with the intention of writing what he knows will be a crap commercial novel for the sole purpose of making money. Every scenario he tries out eventually spins itself off into something meaningful, and of course he can't have that. Eventually he puts his writing aside and opens up the Classifieds.

The artist selling his talent to the highest bidder is a familiar scenario to any pop culture observer, yet in Rand's hands it doesn't read plausibly at all:

Just be stupid, he said to himself. That's all. Just relax and be as stupid as you can be. Easy, isn't it? What are you scared of, you damn fool? You don't think you can be stupid, is that it? You're conceited, he said to himself angrily. That's the whole trouble with you. You're conceited as hell. So you can't be stupid, can you? You're just being stupid right now. You've been stupid about this thing all your life. Why can't you be stupid on order?

(The only way this doesn't sound stilted is if one imagines it being declaimed in a black-and-white movie, perhaps by an announcer or a New York gangster.)

The story is essentially Dorn trying to convince himself to write dreck, which gets things exactly backward. Hacks don't choose to be hacks--Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer are convinced of their own talent as much as Ayn Rand was--and those who do have talent to squander do so with considerations, usually financial, that trump artistic preciousness. Think of Nicholas Cage, who's acted in shitshows for over a decade to maintain his $30 million a year lifestyle, or Michael Caine, who famously said of Jaws: The Revenge, "I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” Artists compromise their talent as a consequence of their (crappy) commercial work, not as a means to it. A slight distinction, 'tis, but a crucial one.

Actions determine values at least as much as values determine actions. Rand makes Dorn's situation implausible first by putting all weight on the ethical side of this divide and making Dorn a paragon of absolute integrity, and then doubly implausible by having him try to imitate the conscious sellouts that don't actually exist. It's a parody of a caricature. (The story dates back to 1940, but this criticism is characteristic of most of her work; it's why the characters, especially the villains, of The Fountainhead and, most especially, Atlas Shrugged, are such cartoonish monstrosities.)

There is a term for this frankly neurotic compulsion to see the world in such stark terms and to banish all unpleasantry and paradox: kitsch. Here it is, as famously defined by Milan Kundera:

The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.

It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch… Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable to human existence.

Kundera was reacting to Communist Czechoslovakia. Hence his formulation that "The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch." Replace "brotherhood" with "individuality" and you have Objectivist aesthetics in a nutshell. Soviet Communism shaped Ayn Rand to such a degree that she would be unrecognizable without it, so it should it is only logical that her artistic aesthetic should follow a similar track. The Soviets' manifesto memorably opened with the declaration that the spectre of Communism was haunting Europe. The Romantic Manifesto makes clear that Rand, too, was unable to give up the ghost.

Galterdämmerung

Dagnyarok

So this might sound strange after all my complaints about how Atlas Shrugged is really a terrible crank novel, but after finishing it a few days ago, I have to say I actually sortakindasomewhat loved the shit out of its final section. The book is still bad, but awesomely so. Its wild-eyed third act shows Ayn Rand at her best, such as it is, and at her worst, which more often than not is so bad, its negativity so multiplied, that it cancels itself out and attains a masterful campiness. It is Alpha and Omega. It is some bitchin' kitschin'.

We left off with Dagny Taggart returning from Atlantis, John Galt's Colorado mountain hideaway. It doesn't take long for the book's numerous idiotic villains' scheming begins to fall apart. When they try to blackmail Dagny into supporting their policies, by threatening to expose her affair with Hank Rearden, she proudly announces it to the world. When they attempt to seize Francisco d'Anconia's mines, he goes Galt and blows them all up, leaving not a penny behind.

Just about every venal powerbroker receives his comeuppance, to which they all respond with a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Hank Rearden's harpy wife Lillian is an instructive case. Here she is, after Rearden has told his lousy family--who were apologizing to him in order to get a cut of his wealth before it's seized by the government--that they can starve for all he cares:

"I have something to tell you!" cried Lillian, with the sound of that impotent rage which wishes that words were brass knuckles. "You're so proud of yourself, aren't you? You're so proud of your name! Rearden Steel, Rearden metal, Rearden Wife! That's what I was, wasn't I? Mrs. Rearden! mrs. Henry Rearden!" The sounds she was making were now a string of cackling gasps, an unrecognizable corruption of laughter. "Well, I think you'd like to know that your wife's been laid by another man! I've been unfaithful to you, do you hear me? I've been unfaithful, not with some great, noble lover, but with the scummiest louse, with Jim Taggart! Three months ago! Before your divorce! While I was your wife! While I was still your wife!" 

He stood listening like a scientist studying a subject of no personal relevance whatever. There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, non-property, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another. 

"I've been unfaithful to you! Don't you hear me, you stainless Puritan? I've slept with Jim Taggart, you incorruptible hero! Don't you hear me?... Don't you hear me?... Don't you...?" 

He was looking at her as he would have looked if a strange woman had approached him on the street with a personal confession--a look like the quivalent of the word: Why tell it to me?

If you don't yet grasp the hilarity of this situation, watch this scene from Wayne's World, which plays the same dynamic a little less straight and which maps onto Atlas's "dude wants awesome hot chick but his old girl's a crazybitch" plot rather uncannily:

At this point some "good" characters die too, not just in spirit but in body, in as grandiose fashion as possible. Jim Taggart's wife Cheryl, having become herself smart and independent, finds out Taggart married her only because she was poor and her misguided hero-worship inflated his petty, shriveled ego. When she confronts him about this whole 'you're a vicious fraud' thing he can only respond by hitting her. She escapes into the streets, is stricken with panic and throws herself off a bridge.

This should be harrowing, but in Ayn Rand's hands it's simply hilarious. What finally pushes Cheryl over the edge, so to speak, is a social worker she comes across:

The social worker seized her arm. "It's a disgrace to come to such a state... if you society girls had something to do besides indulging your desire and chasing pleasures, you wouldn't be wandering, drunk as a tramp, at this hour of the night... if you stopped living for your own enjoyment, stopped thinking of yourself and found some higher--" 

Then the girl screamed--and the scream went beating against the blank walls of the street as in a chamber of torture, an animal scream of terror. She tore her arm loose and sprang back, then screamed in articulate sounds: 

"No! No! Not your kind of world!" 

Then she ran, ran by the propulsion of a burst of power, the power of a creature running for its life, she ran straight down the street that ended at the river--and in a single streak of speed, with no break, no moment of doubt, with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation, she kept running till the parapet barred her way and, not stopping, went over into space.

Another character, a boyish government inspector shot in a firefight, takes four Hamlet-like pages to die while delivering reams of exposition to Hank Rearden about the government's nefarious schemes to stage a riot at his mills in order to justify taking them over. For the boy's troubles, Rearden drops his derisive nickname "Non-Absolute" and tells him, "You're a full absolute now, and you know it." This is what passes for character development in Atlas Shrugged.

Even as the proceedings grow more hysterical, the book does on occasion manage to be good on its own terms. I speak specifically of the chapter depicting the collapse of the entire Taggart rail system, and with it America's agricultural distribution network, without which the country is doomed to mass starvation. It hinges all on a scarcity of copper wire, beginning in a train station in California, which is bailed out with half the supply in Montana, which in turn runs out and is bailed by Minnesota, which runs out in turn. The country is depending on Minnesota's wheat in order to survive the winter, and so they receive half of the wire of the Taggart Terminal, the central command of the entire railroad.

You see where this is leading:

On the night of October 15, a copper wire broke in New York City, in an underground control tower of the Taggart Terminal, extinguishing the lights of the signals. 

It was only the breach of one wire, but it produced a short circuit in the interlocking traffic system, and the signals of motion or danger disappeared from the panels of the control towers and from among the strands of rail. The red and green lenses remained red and green, not with the living radiance of sight, but with the dead stare of glass eyes. On the edge of the city, a cluster of trains gathered at the entrance to the Terminal tunnels and grew through the minutes of stillness, like blood damned by a clot inside a vein, unable to rush into the chambers of the heart.

(As it happens, Minnesota and the wheat crop were lost anyway--the freight cars they were supposed to receive were diverted towards a pet project of the mother of Kip Chalmers, the bureaucrat who died in the Taggart Tunnel disaster. Her plan was to grow and distribute soy beans in Louisiana to teach the country about the noble ways of the Orient. The soy beans, however, were harvested too early and all rot. Rioting ensues in Minnesota.)

Putting aside the characteristically preposterous behavior of the various characters, the series of cascading catastrophes does a fairly excellent job of generating tension and excitement. It's similar to the earlier Tunnel disaster sequence, but on a grander scale.

The success of the two scenes has to do with Rand's weird psychology. She and her heroes only value human beings insofar as they are creative and productive--they are judged by their discoveries, creations, and inventions, which she really does value more than 'lesser' human beings. What
else are we to make of how, on learning of the Taggart Tunnel's destruction, "Her scream sounded like the screams that had rung out in the one last moment in the darkness of the tunnel"? Or, for that matter, her insistence that it would be better for the majority of humanity to die of starvation, famine, and violence rather than for the best people in the world to accept some compromises? Rand's lack of interest in relationships and her outsized love of man's intellectual and material creations explain why these disaster scenes have the kind of tension the rest of the book so sorely lacks.

Nothing demonstrates the aforementioned misunderstanding of drama more than the 60-page speech John Galt gives to the American people at the book's climax. It regurgitates, at great length, everything Rand and her characters have been saying to this point, and ties it all together with the mantra of "A is A." This is Aristotle's Law of Identity, which is a simple premise of deductive reasoning, and which Rand mangles and elevates into a final truth that existence exists, what we see is real, and anyone who disagrees is therefore fooling themselves and wants to die and so they should. Basically.

I went into this project fairly certain I would devote a post to The Speech; it's the most famous piece Ayn Rand ever penned. But there isn't much to say that I haven't said already. It took Rand two years to write (and, so goes the joke, it takes two years to read), and shows in its slapdash quality. The climactic speech's of Randian heroes past were always long-winded, but there was always some sense of structure, some point they were building toward.

The Galt speech by contrast runs all over the place; just when it looks like he is wrapping it up and offering a choice, an ultimatum, he drifts back into more ranting about human parasites. Structure was one of the few things Rand did well in her writing--logical organization being something of an obsession for her--and the speech is, not unsurprisingly, the greatest grind. That Rand spent two years in writer's hell trying to make a 60 page speech sound less philosophical and more believable, is both ridiculous and a little sad.

So the speech is terrible, and yet the fevered, operatic excess of it all serves as an appropriate kick-off to Atlas Shrugged's deliriously gonzo endgame. The cabal of bureaucrats and lazy businessmen not-running the show kidnap John Galt and beg him to save the country. Then, after exposing their attempts to blackmail him into publically supporting their John Galt Plan--which with its promises of entitlements and no taxation sounds more like a modern day Republican party tax pitch--the whole leadership collapses into factions, two of which end fight over Project X, the government's secret soundwave weapon, and end up blowing a 100-mile-wide crater in Iowa. Galt is sent to a secret bunker to be tortured into leading the nation, and is rescued by our protagonists, now all badass and assembled like the Avengers, if the Avengers had four asshole Robert Downey Jr.s instead of just one. Once Galt is freed, they escape to Atlantis as panic-crazed New York City goes dark beneath them.

If the third part of Atlas Shrugged ever gets turned into a movie, it absolutely needs to be directed by Roland Emmerich to do justice to both its wide-scale destruction and its exuberant trashiness. The plot is high comedy, and so is the writing. Here's bureaucrat Chick Morrison begging Galt to save the world.

"...Deep down in my heart, I can't believe that you're a total egoist who feels no pity for the people." He pointed to a pile of papers he had spread on a table. "Here's a plea signed by ten thousand schoolchildren, begging you to join us and save them. Here's a plea from a home for the crippled. Here's a petition sent by the ministers of two hundred different faiths. Here's an appeal from the mothers of the country. Read them."

Here's evil scientist Dr. Ferris, being evil:

"Get this straight," said Dr. Ferris, addressing him for the first time. "We want you to take full power over the economy of the country. We want you to become a dictator. We want you to rule. Understand? We want you to give orders and to figure out the right orders to give. What we want, we mean to get. Speeches, logic, arguments or passive obedience won't save you now. We want ideas--or else. We won't let you out of here until you tell us the exact measures you'll take to save our system. Then we'll have you tell it to the country over the radio." He raised his wrist, displaying a stop-watch. "I'll give you thirty seconds to decide whether you want to start talking right now. If not, then we'll start. Do you understand?"

Here is Francisco d'Anconia, delivering, in Ayn Rand's version of dry cool action hero wit, my absolute favorite line in the entire book, which I've italicized for effect:

"Who are you?" he cried at the sight of Francisco entering as if he owned the place. "Nobody's supposed to come in here tonight!" 

"I did," said Francisco. 

"Why did Rusty let you in?" 

"He must have had his reasons." 

"He wasn't supposed to!" 

"Somebody has changed your suppositions."

And at last we have the book's closing passages, in which the death of most of humanity (or its liberation, depending on how you want to look at it) is commemorated with a triumphant concerto from composer Richard Halley. In which banker Midas Mulligan makes an inventory of the now mass graveyards of U.S. cities which will be his new investments. In which pirate Ragnar Danneskjold returns to his old habit of reading Aristotle. In which wise Judge Narragansett crosses out the "contradictions in its statements that had once been the cause of its destruction" in the U.S. Constitution and adds a new amendment in which "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade." In which Francisco d'Anconia and Hank Rearden, who have both slept with Dagny Taggart and were in love with her until she met John Galt, have a jolly laugh about how "She will probably try to take the shirt off my [Rearden's] back with the freight rates she's going to charge, but--I'll be able to meet them." In which Dagny and Galt stand, looking out on the land they are going to reclaim:

"The road is cleared," said Galt. "We are going back to the world." 

He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.

Atlas Shrugged is frequently attacked for its idea that humanity owes everything to its greatest minds and deserves to starve for its monster ingratitude. In the real world, of course, things are much more complicated than that, and so this is a fairly repugnant worldview to hold...in the real world. In Ayn Rand's hermeneutically sealed universe, however, the people who don't agree with her really, really, really deserve to die, and it's very satisfying when they do. Straw men burn most bright.

Rand was wrong, egregiously wrong, about a great many things, but in this case her idea that evil prospers only by the sanction of the victim is only too appropriate. Liberals tend to respond any mention of her and Atlas Shrugged with snide dismissal if not disgust, which gives Rand, who set out to antagonize them and get under their skin, exactly what she wanted. Yes, the book is a travesty of philosophy and literature. But the saving grace of travesties is the humor they provide! And Atlas Shrugged, especially towards the end, is a very funny book. Ayn Rand never intended that (mostly; the idea of a Buddhist soy bean cult is too self-evidently funny to be accidental), and would cry and howl in despair to learn a bleeding-heart liberal managed to enjoy her self-described masterpiece. But so it goes. A good time is a good time. A is A.

I Spit on Your Train

The rude characterization of Ayn Rand's late work, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, befits nothing less than a trashy horror movie, particularly an 80s slasher film. Clear-cut heroes are surrounded by a noxiously awful cast whom we cannot wait to see dispatched with karmic aplomb. The Fountainhead even had a psychopath, who just happened to be obsessed with erecting buildings rather than gutting teenagers, which would have been infinitely more interesting. In Atlas Shrugged, we actually do get a little mayhem, in the form of a train wreck. Yet the scene in question--with its the sense of impending catastrophe prolonged with an extended demonstration of Murphy's Law in action--resembles less a slasher than it does the opening premonition of a Final Destination movie. It is probably going to end up being the best scene in the book.

"Best" is a relative term, and even here it comes with caveats, namely that the first two-fifths or so of the chapter are a bit of a wash. There's a section in which Eddie Willers, one of the rare characters who's neither a superman or social parasite but merely an unremarkable competent, speaks in a baldly expositional monologue to a low-ranking Taggart Transcontinental worker. Then there's a scene with Hank Rearden confronting and protecting Ragnar Danneskjöld, reverse-Robin Hood pirate who robs navy ships freighted with foreign aid.

(One could devote a whole post to rebutting Rand's position that Robin Hood "is remembered, not as a chamption of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor," but really, one need only point this out as another instance of Ayn Rand missing the bleeding point. That Robin Hood is a symbol of retributive justice, and not as a hookup for easy money, is something you either get or you don't.)

Anyway, the rest of the chapter is actually legitimately exciting. It concerns Washington bureaucrat Kip Chalmers, en route to San Francisco aboard the Taggart rail to give a speech the next day. The train breaks down because the government's regulations have reached such a fever pitch of incredible lunacy--with a Unification Board charged with making sure profits and payrolls across the board are frozen indefinitely (except for insider graft, naturally)--that the best workers have all walked away to save their dignity and have been replaced with less-than-capable scabs. Chalmers will not be delayed, however, so he demands that he be provided with a car that will get him to San Francisco on time. The problem, as the harried dispatcher tries to make clear to everyone, is that their train has to pass through an eight-mile tunnel that's only ventilated for a diesel engine. Because Taggart Transcontinental has so thoroughly gone to seed, the only engine available is an old coal-powered Comet, which will suffocate everyone onboard if they try to ride it through the tunnel. Everyone, from Colorado Division Superintendent Dave Mitchum to feeble CEO James Taggart to Dagny Taggart's replacement (she quit in protest of the Unifaction laws) Clifton Locey to all the various division leaders, is terrified of angering an all-powerful government hack, and so the responsibility for sending a train of passengers to their deaths is passed around like a hot potato before it is finally dropped in the lap of a nameless night dispatcher.

The episode culminates in a typically overlong (two-pages!) screed that details with increasing shrillness the background of various passengers, and why each one deserved his or her fate: (for context, the fire mentioned is Wyatt's Torch, an ever-burning flame in the mountains of Colorado left behind when industrialist Ellis Wyatt set fire to his oil fields in response to their nationalization.)

As the tunnel came closer, they saw, at the edge of the sky far to the south, in a void of space and rock, a spot of living fire twisting in the wind. They did not know what it was and did not care to learn.

It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it's masses that count, not men...

...The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.

The woman in Roomette 9, Car No. 12, was a housewife who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing, to control giant industries, of which she had no knowledge.

The man in Bedroom F, Car No.13, was a lawyer who had said, 'Me? I'll find a way to get along under any political system.'

The man in Bedroom A, Car No.14, was a professor of philosophy who taught that there is no mind - how do you know that the tunnel is dangerous? - no reality - how can you prove that the tunnel exists? - no logic - why do you claim that trains cannot move without motive power? - no principles - why should you be bound by the laws of cause and effect? - no rights - why shouldn't you attach men to their jobs by force? - no morality - what's moral about running a railroad? - no absolutes - what difference does it make to you whether you live or die anyway?. He taught that we know nothing - why oppose the orders of your superiors? - that we can never be certain of anything - how do you know you're right? - that we must act on the expediency of the moment - you don't want to risk your job do you?

The man in Drawing Room B, Car No.15, was an heir who had inherited his fortune, and who had kept repeating, 'Why should Rearden be the only one permitted to manufacture Rearden Metal?'

The man in Bedroom A, Car no. 16, was a humanitarian who had said, 'The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer. They must be penalized in order to support the incompetent. Frankly, I do not care whether this is just or not. I take pride in not caring to grant any justice to the able, where mercy to the needy is concerned.'

These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas. As the train went into the tunnel, the flame of Wyatt's Torch was the last thing they saw on earth.

The scene doesn't have the prurient thrill of disembowelment and severed heads, but its sense of righteousness carries a nice charge. That final sentence in particular has a pungent, hoist-by-their-own-petard quality. And while by any realistic standard the absoluteness of the company's managerial impotence and criminal irresponsibility is ludicrous, on its own terms it's deliriously engaging. I know how wrong it is to say all this, but bear in mind that my favorite genre of literature is Elizabethan revenge tragedy, in which brutal crimes are answered tit-for-tat with perversely inventive retribution (would that everyone would read The Revenger's Tragedy, in which a lecherous poisoner is tricked into kissing the poison-painted lips of the skull of his victim!). After 500 pages of plodding plot and abstraction, it's nice to see some actual action; it should go without saying that, by so strenuously arguing the inherent justice of suffocating three hundred train passengers, the scene is morally several degrees worse than a merely tawdry Final Destination flick. To continue the tortured horror movie metaphor, it's about on the same level as Saw, which combines its sadism with long-winded moralizing.

That the philosophical equivalent of the guy from The Princess Bride sawing off his leg for the benefit of a clown puppet is the best part of Atlas Shrugged is not incidental. Writing, from the structure of plot down to word choice, is a window into the workings of an author's mind, and the Tunnel Disaster episode, with its unvarnished hatred, meticulous construction, and complete earnestness, provides a morbidly fascinating look into Ayn Rand, whose adolescent lionization of criminality as individualism had by now blossomed into outright misanthropy. Greater and more scrupulous authors and artists have explored ugly sides of humanity, but on some level there's always been a literary sheen applied, an artistry to give the depiction maximum impact. Rand lacked the skill for such tact but makes up for it with a conviction that even the best writer couldn't fake.

To quote another horror movie, a great one, and a character that also had no regard for human feelings, "Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility....I admire its purity."

Dismember the Titan

So I'm about 130 pages into Atlas Shrugged. The scene is a party celebrating two characters' wedding anniversary. There's a brief exchange over philosophy and literature--because that's all these people ever talk about, in the blandest terms possible--between a "young girl in a white dress" and a gasbag novelist Balph "not Ralph" Eubank, who responds to the girl's insistence that books should have good plots by saying "Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature."

This a the photo negative snapshot of what's wrong with Atlas Shrugged. There is plenty of plot at work, but little else of substance, enough that for awhile I've been kind of at a loss at how to respond to it. Rand wasn't fooling around when she wrote that immortality means never changing. Fourteen years passed between the publication of The Fountainhead and that of its follow-up, yet everything about it feels like they could have been written in tandem. It's rather dispiriting, and not conducive to insightful, inspired criticism. Atlas Shrugged is repellent, most anyone could have told me this (and did!), but I'd like to figure out why it's so much worse than everything that came before. In the meantime, however, I badly need to vent.

The plot, I should think, does not need much introduction. In a world eerily like our own (cue the ominous violins), civilization is beginning to crumble. Train lines are deteriorating, industry is collapsing, several of the most industrious company heads are mysteriously withdrawing themselves, and people are asking "Who is John Galt?" with shrugs of resignation. Amid this Dagny Taggart, Vice President in Charge of Operations at Taggart Railroad who's GREAT at running a rail company, has to save said company from her INCOMPETENT and ALTRUISTIC brother James, who gives contracts to his INCOMPETENT friends and dines with WORTHLESS INCOMPETENT government bureaucrats. She starts by making a deal with Hank Rearden, who's GREAT at steelworks, to purchase rails made of his new "Rearden Steel" alloy. And and and....

Anyone who's heard of the Tea Party knows what's really going on, that the captains of industry have gone on strike at the behest of superman John Galt because society, with its taxes and regulations, is ungratefully leaching off their greatness. Knowing all this in advance feels like that, along with stopping the engine of the world, John Galt stopped the engine of the story. Maybe this would read better being completely in the dark about what's coming, but probably not.

The conflict basically boils down to, 'the greatest human beings alive are being held back by their helpless, parasitic inferiors--when will they say, 'enough!' and throw off their chains?' The book holds to this theme with a consistency that's almost fractal--the largest and smallest plot lines can be summarized thus, from John Galt vs. the world to Hank Rearden vs. his awful, awful family. And they are awful. My god, are they awful.

A decade ago I saw the first Harry Potter film, having not read any of the books, and was tremendously annoyed by (among many other things) how cartoonishly evil Harry's adoptive family was, so much that it beggared belief. Well Harry's foster folk are Marine 1 helicopter parents next to Rearden's wretched relations. There's brother Phillip, sickly and shiftless but for his membership in various ineffectual charities; their mother, a harpy who he supports and lives with him seemingly out of pure spite; and Rearden's wife Lillian, a castrating bitch who hobnobs with vapid cultural elitists and doesn't care anything of what her husband does.

Here's how they respond to Rearden giving a gift to his wife:

"I brought you a present, Lillian."

He did not know that he stood straight and that the gesture of his arm was that of a returning crusader offering his trophy to his love, when he dropped a small chain of metal into her lap.

Lillian Rearden picked it up, hooked on the tips of two straight fingers, and raised it to the light. The links were heavy, crudely made, the shining metal had an odd tinge, it was greenish-blue.

"What's that?" she asked.

"The first thing made from the first heat of the first order of Rearden Metal."

"You mean," she said, "it's fully as valuable as a piece of railroad rails?"

He looked at her blankly.

She jingled the bracelet, making it sparkle under the light. "Henry, it's perfectly wonderful! What originality! I shall be the sensation of New York, wearing jewelry made of the same stuff as bridge girders, truck motors, kitchen stoves, typewriters, and--what was it you were saying about it the other day, darling?--soup kettles?"

"God, Henry, but you're conceited!" said Philip.

Lillian laughed. "He's a sentimentalist. All men are. But, darling, I do appreciate it. It isn't the gift, it's the intention, I know."

"The intention's plain selfishness, if you ask me," said Rearden's mother. "Another man would bring a diamond bracelet, if he wanted to give his wife a  present, because it's her pleasure he'd think of, not his own. But Henry thinks that just because he's made a new kind of tin, why, it's got to be more precious than diamonds to everybody, just because it's he that's made it. That's the way he's been since he was five years old--the most conceited brat you ever saw--and I knew he'd grow up to be the most selfish creature on God's earth."

Now Rearden's family's badness isn't in itself damaging to the book; hissable villains can make for terrific melodrama, but they need an actual heroic foil. The thing is, a lot of the nasty things his wife and mother says are true. He really doesn't care about them:

He had never had a desire to hurt them, but he had always felt their defensive, reproachful expectation; they seemed wounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or actions, it was almost... almost as if they were wounded by the mere fact of his being. Don't start imagining the insane--he told himself severely, struggling to face the riddle with the strictest of his ruthless sense of justice. He could not condemn them without understanding; and he coudl not understand. 

Did he like them? No, he thought; he had wanted to like them, which was not the same. he had wanted it in the name of some unstated potentiality which he had once expected to see in any human being. He felt nothing for them now, nothing but the merciless zero of indifference, not even the regret of a loss. Did he need any person as part of his life? Did he miss the feeling he had wanted to feel? No, he thought. Had he ever missed it? Yes, he thought, in his youth; not any longer.

So here's the problem, stated plain: Rand, in true cart-before-horse fashion, fundamentally mistakes plot as the driver of great literature, and modernism's abandonment of it as a literary heresy. She never understood that style and especially characters are what make a book, and that a good yarn will unspool itself thereof. Great literature forces its characters, or at least its readers, to grapple not just with external conflict, but conflicts within themselves. Its most memorable figures--Oedipus, Hamlet, Raskolnikov, Gatsby--are all deeply flawed. Their greatness is not in their virtuousness, which is often greatly lacking or else turned toward self-destructive ends, but in the dignity they maintain in trying to transcend their vices (or, barring that, the way they illuminate them).

Atlas Shrugged, in its scope and ambition, wants to be great literature. It is categorically not. Fourteen years after her last novel, Rand's has not matured in the least; her prose, once tolerably plain, now seems merely parched. Her dialogue remains atrocious, with people talking in ways no one actually speaks about ideas no one actually holds. Her jaundiced, barren view of humanity holds that great people are so because they really are better than everyone else, and their only problem is that they put up with their inferiors instead of just walking away and letting them starve. It's a rancid, shallow, petty worldview that amounts to a lot of preening peacocks waving their tail-feathers in everyone's faces. It's a temper tantrum dressed up as an argument, a scream for a song. It is, in Rand's own words, "primitive vulgarity."

Capitalist Realism

Strangely enough, for all of her fiction’s endless speechifying, Ayn Rand considered herself a novelist before a philosopher (she considered herself a great many other things, mostly narcissistic superlatives, but work with me here). It’s a fairly important distinction. Her fiction is much more than mere agitprop, which uses the confines of normal storytelling as a vehicle to preach a given message. For Rand’s whole approach to storytelling is marinated in her ideas on everything else, and so its bent approach makes reading it a decidedly different experience.

The Fountainhead shares the structural elements of a normal story: beginning, middle (more like two, really, the first punctuated, like the second, with a trial), climax, dénouement. A protagonist with a goal, and obstacles thrown in his path, an antagonist with goals athwart his own. So far so good. But it is the characters, colored by Rand’s singularly odd views on individuality, which drive the action, and give the book its hypnotically strange effect.

All of the book’s principle figures were conceived as symbols, with Howard Roark as “a man who is what he should be,” Peter Keating “a man who never could be [man as he should be] and doesn’t know it,” Gail Wynand “a man who could have been,” and Ellsworth Toohey, “worst of all possible rats. A man who never could be—and knows it.” This schematic view of plotting has the dual effect of making the characters both larger-than-life and two-dimensional, as if they were fixtures on a billboard. They serve the same basic purpose, channeling Rand’s radical individualism. The peculiar effect of her ideas about rationality and will, however, makes the proceedings feel, paradoxically, pre-ordained.

Consider what was perhaps the biggest surprise I encountered, dealing with a secondary character, Catherine, Toohey’s niece and Keating’s sometime fiancé. Such a pitiful, clingy creature is she that I was fairly sure she would kill herself out of sheer helplessness, especially after Keating ditches their wedding to shotgun marry the ice queen Dominique Francon. She instead resurfaces near the end of the book years later, reborn as a Washington bureaucrat with a lack of personality remarkable even for an Ayn Rand character:

”It wouldn’t have worked, Peter. I’m temperamentally unsuited to domesticity. It’s too selfish and narrow. Of course, I understand what you feel just now and I appreciate it. It’s only human that you should feel something like remorse, since you did what is known as jilted me.” He winced. “You see how stupid those things sound. It’s natural for you to be a little contrite—a normal reflex—but we must look at it objectively, we’re grown-up, rational people, nothing is too serious, we can’t really help what we do, we’re conditioned that way, we just charge it off to experience and go on from there.”

I ended up being more right about her fate than I had guessed: rather than merely kill herself, she killed her self.

Catharine’s lack of identity is as much a constant as Roark’s unflappable confidence, Keating’s venality, and Toohey’s super-socialism. Their essential nature is fixed, and there is never any real chance that they will ever change, for better or worse. Their defining traits merely become more pronounced, and grotesque, as the stakes raise ever higher, but the there is no real tension, no possibility of redemption or betrayal or surprise that hasn’t been telegraphed from the start. As busy as The Fountainhead's scenario is, it’s all mellow, no drama.

Yet cardboard characters aren’t derived (only) from general hackishness, rather they proceed directly from Rand’s own ideals of what constitutes a proper human being. As said by Steven Mallory, Roark’s sculptor disciple:

I often think that [Roark]’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean that he won’t die some day. But he’s living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict—and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard—one can imagine him existing forever.

Rand, who claimed her beliefs had remained essentially the same since she was a teenager, is here essentially making a virtue of stubbornness and refusal to grow as a person, under the same usual banner of willpower: the real individual knows he’s right, so why should he change? Her characters are demonstrations of this idea, as are the very many things they do and say.

Along with melodramatic plotting, Rand’s fiction is infamous for its didactic speeches and dialogues that go on for pages and pages at a stretch. My favorite, if it can be called that, involves newspaper magnate Gail Wynand and Roark going on a month-long yacht cruise—without Dominique Francon, who they’re both in love with and to whom Wynand is married. Wynand can’t stop looking at Roark’s half-naked body, “at the threads of water running down the angular planes,” that makes him think “of the yacht’s engine, of skyscrapers, of transatlantic cables, of everything man had made.” The scene’s tone veers between unintentional 300-style homo-erotica and an After School Special with amazing gracelessness:

”What’s left then? Where does decency start? What begins where altruism ends? Do you see what I’m in love with?”

“Yes, Gail.” Wynand had noticed that Roark’s voice had a reluctance that sounded almost like sadness.

“What’s the matter with you? Why do you sound like that?”

“I’m sorry. Forgive me. It’s just something I thought. I’ve been thinking of this for a long time. And particularly all these days when you’ve made me lie on deck and loaf.”

“Thinking about me?”

“About you—among many other things.”

“What have you decided?”

“I’m not an altruist, Gail. I can’t decide for others.”

This weird fusion of belief and behavior follows through to the book’s very end, which involves, lest we forget, a manically idealistic dynamiter being found “Innocent” by a jury. Most polemicists would stop with putting speeches in their characters’ mouths, but Rand’s conception of humans being driven by reason and ideals permeates the story’s very blood and marrow.

By traditional—objective?—literary standards, The Fountainhead is a failure: its characters are bold but ultimately dull, its plot bizarre, and its message delivered with all the subtlety of a boot stamping on a human face forever. Yet, my snarky post title notwithstanding, it’s unfair to consider it mere propaganda--that it bears some resemblances to the blandest Soviet pablum is a function of a circular political spectrum in which at a certain point the far left and far right begin to look alike. Nor is it pop fiction, which never aspires to be more than merely mediocre entertainment.

Instead it is a frantically ambitious product of its creator’s very idiosyncratic sensibility, the kind that thinks turning thought experiments into hundreds-of-pages-long plots on which to hang philosophical dialogues is the pinnacle of storytelling. As a result the book is, like a Tyler Perry movie, freakishly compelling and almost always interesting. The normal standards cease to apply. It’s beyond good and awful.