Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand

I know; I know! You guys have been coming up to me in droves, asking when my next thrilling appraisal of the Yukio Mishima tetralogy 'Sea of Fertility' is going to air. All I can do is ask for your continued patience, direct those of you who have not been lucky enough to read the first article here, and to confess that my novel-reading temporarily digressed, albeit edifyingly, into another area.

Nigh on 1200 pages of tight text by an author whose philosophy I believed tended away from my own seemed a tall order among a never-depleting pile of books that I simply must read, but I'd promised my Libertarian friend-on-Facebook Jim Peron (who is probably the finest Rand scholar I'm never likely to converse with again after this review) that I would give Atlas Shrugged (Rand, 1957) a go; the effort was rewarding; it's a real 'page-turner'.

Ayn Rand (an alias) (1905-82) developed an existentialist philosophy discrete from, for example, the Kirkegaardean mystical or Sartrean Left-leaning varieties, which she dubbed Objectivism, a comprehensive exhortation to the thinking person on how to take life by the horns and seek one's own happiness. Atlas Shrugged (AS) is her work of fiction that expounds her philosophy most emphatically. 

So what's the novel about? Well, I'm not going to give out spoilers because I would recommend that you might approach this engaging text with as little foreknowledge as did I. Suffice to say that the stage is set in a productive, industr[y]ous, progressive and Modern USA, in which the luxuries of the manufacturing age have become commonplace. Regrettably, in Rand's opinion, the creators of that wealth are stymied in their ambitions. At best defamed, they are at worst taxed and expropriated, "looted" by legislators. The captains of industry are a 'meal ticket' for most of the rest in a society living under a socialistic state that displays outwardly noble aspirations to egalitarianism, with a collectivist approach to employment and welfare schemes. In pursuit of such ends, the government maintains a level playing-field for its nation's industries upon which the mediocrities of manufacture might, through political "pull" and, for instance, the "Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog" legislation, enjoy the same chances of 'success' as those who excel, those men of ideas and innovation stultified in what would otherwise be their peerless pursuit of profit and property. 

Imagine now, if that excellent elite were to go on strike, if they were to say "enough is enough!" and step into the shadows of society, abdicating their 'responsibilities' toward the greater good. Herein lies the work's central metaphor: the catastrophe that might ensue were that great, unseen and un-thanked Titanic deity of the ancients, Atlas (who supported the world on his shoulders), to forsake his onerous task and, effectively, shrug. This is the premise upon which Rand builds her entertaining plot, creates her Boys' Own heroes and gives depth and energy to the rest of the dramatis personae, who are each cleverly positioned and flagged throughout the linear narrative such that we remember with ease the many players (without too much flicking back and forth through the pages of this chunky 'triple-decker'). With few enough sub-plots and intrigues, Rand consummately facilitates her readers' educative journey from out of the dark forest of Romance and into the open vistas of Reality.

One is tempted to look to Rand's personal life to see how her childhood years, lived before and during the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, may have moulded her views, but for at least two reasons I shall refrain from doing so: first, there have been greater minds than mine that argue that there is little point in studying the author to aid in one's critical analysis of their oeuvre; also, I am currently reading a biography of Ayn Rand, my conclusions from which this blog will not await (Branden, 1986 (available here)). We are not dealing in a Rand novel with Dostoyevsky-style polyphony; there is no uncertainty in the narrative voice (Bakhtin, 1981). This is an epic novel but not in epic style because Rand heroes are simply heroic, singleminded, not open to corruption or even flawed with the sulks of an Achilles or the mischief-making of an Odysseus of the Homeric epics. Rand heroes' machinations are forthright and rational. Branden's biography will be the least of my research into a life of which I know little other than that, like Margaret Thatcher, Rand was the offspring of a petit-bourgeois chemist of means. Her father was self-made, circumspect, but lacking perhaps the sort of developed social conscience that might have helped him and his family to better cope with societal developments. 

History has, in the main, not looked kindly upon Rand; a guru of that kind of Libertarianism that tends to the Right (cf. Chomsky here to "set the cat amongst the pigeons"), she has been subject to critical attacks from the Left and from rivals who have, it seems to me (if not every balanced reader of her work), unfairly distorted her brand of selfish individualism. She may have been a sociopath (if you can trust the diagnoses of those authorised to diagnose mental pathologies); she was certainly no 'fascist; by any useful definition of the word (cf. Eatwell, 1995). It would not be the first time that philosophers have been yoked by their critics with movements that observe some of their views. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche, due not least to his forthright pronouncements, will interminably be linked with Nazism because, in aiming to be precise he becomes opaque and authoritarian, while his racial partiality and generalisations risk confusing the careless interpreter. Rand shares some common ground with Nietzsche's existentialism but she is less obfuscating; her philosophy she makes crystal clear. Certainly, the Prussian philosopher's observation of Christianity as a "slave religion" (cf. Nietzsche, 1968, p.69) is echoed in Rand's perception of altruism on mystical grounds as evil and depraved*. Rand sees humanity blighted by an unhealthily passive relationship with priesthoods; the notions of sin and guilt and propitiation are corrosive to the natural human impulses.

The protagonists who stride across her fictitious Americas in AS do so as Modernist demi-gods, bearing a stoicism beyond my ken. For instance, Rand would have us believe that young and successful industrialist Francisco d'Anconia might reasonably belie the vigour and passion of his greatness by remaining celibate for 12 years, while fabricating a public persona of playboy extraordinaire in order to disguise the 'strikers'' hidden agenda. Incredible as this may seen, such strength of character serves to excuse one aspect of Rand's philosophy dealing with sexual promiscuity versus fidelity. I have some sympathy with, but am not convinced by, her narratorial implications that whoring (presumably, both its practice and its pursuit) is worthless. This importantly, contradicts Rand's assertion that a negotiated price paid for a thing offered is a solid footing for a healthy society. It is, after all, the Capitalist way: use-value against exchange-value of a given commodity (Marx, 1867). When I think about Rand's disapproval of prostitution, I suspect that she affords it no moral "value". Indeed, is it for the typical Objectivist that sexual intensity or fulfilment is somehow related to value and reward? Is it that similar minds when clearly united by commonly held values, will attain the satiety expected from the perfect coupling of confederates-in-virtue? This is some sort of pure love that I would not ridicule nor disagree with (and, in a way, makes Rand seem less the harridan than she is often portrayed) but are not the Powerful also the Passionate, the very types unlikely to let such sensibilities thwart them in their pursuit of the not insignificant value of a "zipless fuck" (Jong, 1973)? It seems appropriate at this juncture to quote without explication from Rand's dialogue these words from a system-weary protagonist in AS who is refreshed to realise "[t]hat I was dealing, for once, with someone who doesn't pretend to give favours (p.83)."

While we are discussing aspects of sexuality, it is worth mentioning that this novel nowhere mentions homosexuality but, then, why should an Objectivist see the need to endorse, or discriminate between, one type of fucking or another? The interests that occupy Rand, I think, are idiocentric and, so, just as she does not acknowledge homosexuality as a force in the world, she has no capacity to write upon her characters the particular sense of being bound by maternal, filial or wider familial forces, either. It is as if her intra-relational rivalries are stronger than any affections. Attachments are handicaps or at least distractions.

Today's post-modern, academic forte-subject Gender might find much to occupy its hypothesising in AS, but for Rand its issues are not raised above the implicit; key actor Dagny Taggart is constrained by her femininity neither intellectually nor dynamically, but some observers might see in this character a psychologically repressed female after the manner of its creator. 

Like the proverbial horse and carriage, we cannot mention Gender without touching on Race, which, to all intents and purposes, is invisible in AS. Our characters' physiognomies vary little beyond northern Europeans or Latins and there are no obvious Black or Asiatic characters, which strikes me as incongruent to the North American experience and an oversight in a condition-of-the-nation novel. Rand, more than once, uses the term 'savages' without any concession to the post-colonial niceties that most of us have adopted since the time when her work saw its first publication. Romantic primitivism is not to be expected in a paean to Modernity; there are no noble savages, not even those who 'sold' Manhatten to the Europeans. This essentially anachronistic novel depicts an early 20th-century dystopian global enterprise peopled in the main by those she terms, worryingly, "sub-humans" (an unfortunate choice of term which I am willing to allow refers to these unfortunates' attitudes and motives rather than some fin de siècle idea of degradation, a kind of implied devolving of the state of Homo sapien). These masses of humanity typically have the misfortune of living in a number of discrete "People's States" of, for instance, "India" or "England". This novel would surely have fed its contemporary readers' fears of the domino-effect of supposedly rampant Communism (Maoism; Stalinism). Neither of the world wars gets a mention and, as a result of the general absence of historiography or specific dates, I was held within the horizons of an alternate reality or parallel universe, a counterfactual account of America losing her grip on her founders' energy and purpose, as Uncle Sam ushers her towards the homogenized dystopian bleakness of the Old World order-become-disorder.

As for Libertarianism, there is little that I wish to offer in opposition to its ideals (as with most paradigms it is lofty and worthy) other than to point out that unless those ideals be rehearsed in an Arcadian space and time, it is cruel. Of course, there are many Libertarians living their lives as close to their ideals as they might manage, but classic Libertarianism and classic Capitalism, if they are to enjoy their renascence, are dependent on a post-Apocalyptic Arcady. Indeed, the heroes of AS effectively precipitate an "armageddon" and, in this reader's opinion, they are as guilty as any current-day fundamentalist pastor who prays for the destruction of the "evil-doer" or acts as an agent of the Almighty to precipitate the Rapture, or a fanatical mullah calling for jihad against the Infidel in the name of an Islamic world order. For someone to either desire the violent intervention of a higher being or to hasten cataclysm by means of their own, or instigated, actions amounts to the same in my logic, because both endgames bring down evil upon their perceived adversaries. Take, for instance, one episode where fearfulness, engendered by the incompetencies and sanctions of a warped society, sends a trainful of incorrigible and misguided lefties to its ineluctable doom: a judgemental fate derived from the victims' poor judgement, perhaps? It is this passage that has the one depiction of maternal affection in the novel and which is cynically used to engender some pathos. 


Ayn Rand's ideal system comprises a sphere of operations unrealisable without – and in common with other groups seeking justice and freedom for the κόσμος – a global cataclysm or economic breakdown in which the wrong-doer gets their comeuppance and the virtuous class of earthly Apollos awakens to a new daybreak, boundless in its potential. I'm left wondering if Rand's concept isn't as far from Praxia as that Marx/Bakunin utopian, world-wide association of workers envisioned by the First International. Certainly, the violence, desperation, rapacious nature of the aftermath of Imperial Russia's disastrous entry into the Great War, which Ayn Rand witnessed as a girl, were no worse than that which she depicts in the aftermath of the great strike in AS. Rand's formative years in soviet Russia certainly impacted on her hatred for collectivism and/or State capitalism, which occupied the opposite pole to Objectivism's belief in the individual's freedom of action and interaction by means of pristine capitalism and property rights. It is in the denouement of AS that we have the prospect of an utopia as could only be imagined by a an ex-member of the petite-bourgeoisie and: 

"As with any petty bourgeois utopia its supporters are, in practice, faced with a choice between heroic but futile attempts to impose it in opposition to those who run existing society, or compromising with them, providing an ideological veneer to continuing oppression and exploitation (Harman, 2002, Concl.)." 

Rand's heroic characters are exclusively of the capitalist class, the magnates and the tycoons. Their imputed ideals (the ideals of a dispossessed Russian burgher girl) are a hard-pushed find among such types in the real world.

The novel genre is a sound literary form by which to convey ideas; Rand's is a sound novel of communication. Obviously, Rand's idiosyncratic prose and handle on novelistic form doesn't make for 'high literature' but, then, ask any Da Vinci Code fan whether Dan Brown writes a decent novel. I stumbled across this imperfect critique of her novelistic skills (from someone who to my knowledge has not actually written a novel). In opposition to Hitchens on this occasion, and in Rand's defence, I might point to the contrasting styles in the output of those two friends and renowned Victorian/Edwardian authors Henry James and H.G. Wells: their respective approaches to the novel form was a subject of correspondence and argument between them for years. If there is a salient, formal novelistic flaw in AS, it lies with the chapter "John Galt Speaks" in which we have to suspend our disbelief far too long to allow to take root in our minds Rand's trope of a radio broadcast to expound at length what might be every aphorism and thesis in the Objectivist manifesto. Rand is at liberty to utilise this expansive literary form howsoever she sees fit, but the Novel, as one writer once put it, "is not a theory, it is an exploration." Why assemble a novel that shows a rule when "the statement of the rule would suffice" (Robbe-Grillet, 1992)? I understand that Rand's philosophy is outlined in a discrete publication, yet that doctrine seems thoroughly delineated in AS. 

Jean-Paul Sartre made as effective, if subtler, an exposition of his existentialism in his trilogy 'Roads to Freedom', but then he is among my favourite novelists and even I am not without bias! That difficult choices must be taken; this is Rand's version of "authenticity" (Sartre, 1943). Indeed, the inauthentic act is a "despicable" act for Rand, the action of a "depraved" individual. Yes, even when that decision hurts a 'stiff-necked' kith and kin. Hank Rearden is the almost-authentic man, the puritanical, but not Puritan, pursuer of his goals, whose suffering in the corrupt world of AS is bound up with his immature sense of rectitude; he can only understand his mistaken approach by means of an epiphany that evokes the primitive-Christian Pentecost experience. Any convertee, filled with zeal, might well make sense of my putting these words into Rand's (Galt's) mouth: "I have come to divide a man against his father and a daughter against her mother and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law" (Matt. 10.35). Certainly, for all Rand's implicit disdain for the revelatory experience of religion, Objectivism (and Rand is Objectivism) needs its own Armageddon, its own dividing of the sheep from the goats, its time-to-get-off-the-fence decision-making process by the reasoning person. For Nietzsche, Pauline/Christian thought represented a negative response to the greatness that was Rome, a counter offensive of a conquered Jew (Saul of Tarsus/St. Paul) toward the genius of the victor (Rome). Rand, however, unwittingly requires of her adherents to accept that the Objectivist (as with the Pauline) conversion "is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart (cf. Heb. 4:12)." As it was for St. Paul, the messianic is never far away in AS: in the character John Galt we have at once an Angel of Death, a Prometheus, a Wizard of Oz and a Saviour, depending on your analysis of those figures' respective qualities within folkloric conventions (see Russian Formalism). 
Beyond folklore stylising, this is a gothic novel; it has central to its intrigue a 'casket in a castle', a mystery object housed within an edifice. Rand's gothic tropes include a marvellous motor ensconced in an Atlantean valley (of which I mustn't reveal too much) built by a modern-day Prometheus every bit as intense as Mary Shelley's eponymous overreacher (Shelley, 1818).

In common with Sartre's efforts, AS challenges, albeit half a generation later, the mores of sexual fidelity, but avoids promoting promiscuity. For such healthy, good-looking specimens, her protagonists are remarkably chaste but, then, theirs is a kind of stoicism that is able to patiently await the perfect sexual coupling, fired up by the mutually-held presupposition that they are each instrumental in co-ownership of the long-awaited climactic moment. There is an evocative passage in which Dagny, a paragon of libidinous control (considering that the object of her desire is now within her compass in the Holy of Holies at the heart of 'Atlantis'), might be fantasising herself participating in a "spit-roast", her hungry contortions, perhaps, caught between Rearden and d'Anconia, while 'Melchizadek' Galt looks on lasciviously, phallus in hand. That, however, is this reader's vivid imagination extrapolating unjustifiably from the well-drawn and attractive character of Dagny Taggart. It should be noted that my prurience does not remotely reflect any depiction by Rand in AS nor, I presume, in the recently released DVD of the film. I should maybe await the t-shirt.

The pinnacle of Philosophy for Rand is Aristotle, who wrote the earliest of the extant texts separating out rationality from the unobservable. There is some formula or other of his followed among the chapter headings in AS. I searched around a while for something apposite to Rand's Objectivism in Aristotle and came up with: 

"For moral excellence is concerned with pleasures and pains; it is on account of the pleasure that we do bad things, and on account of the pain that we abstain from noble ones. Hence we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; for this is the right education." (Aristotle, 2004, 2:iii). 

In her novel we see her protagonists 'delighting' in the pain, or at least the challenge, of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It is telling that we find most sympathy for those who resist the siren call of Atlantis at the risk of being caught like Job's wife in a system doomed to destruction.

AS is a realistic rather than a naturalistic novel, in which, although science is at the forefront and rationality rules, the complexities are absent. A naturalistic approach, which might reflect better life's actualities and how individuals really behave, does not need to apply in AS because the protagonists are heroic and in Rand's logic the narrative arc plays out the inevitable (which is destiny, by some definitions); the terrain we travel might be Nature's but Rand is confident that the mind can conquer her obstacles. As we read, we absorb didactically the lessons of minor Everyman characters such as Cherryl Brooks and Wet Nurse Tony. We witness their political conversions as they come, ultimately, to understand the unwise, ill-advised routes they've hitherto travelled in their careers; sometimes, pitiably, they come to grief on the last legs of their respective Roads to Damascus.


Aside from these honourable victims of events, other actors, some of a Socialist bent, die pathetically in accidents, riots, through ignorance... but kind of deservedly! So, there, "but for the grace of God, might go we"; and well might we remember that the "sins of our fathers" are very often visited upon us, in the Bourdieuian sense, inasmuch as one's cultural capital, inherited from our parents and guardians, profoundly affects an individual's successes in adulthood (Bourdieu, 1973) - a sociological notion at which, I imagine, Rand might have scoffed. 


It would be at this point that I should compose a concluding paragraph, but, what the heck! This is a blog, not an essay.

*

As for poor old Yukio (I love that maddening bastard), I am on number three of the four novels. Of course you don't have to wait for little old me to read and recap. Read 'Sea of Fertility' and start to understand the Japanese 20th-century experience before it becomes part of the dim and dreary past. 

*

* Perhaps Christianity's detractors do not realise that its central tenet of loving others before oneself, demands a prerequisite, not entirely alien to Rand, which is to love ourselves before we are capable of loving others.

^ "The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving". No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one (Jong, 1973)."


References
Aristotle. (2004). Trans. W.D. Ross. Nicomachean Ethics. (350 BC). Available online here.

Bakhtin, M. (1981). Ed. & Trans. M. Holquist. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. (pdf available here.)

Bourdieu, P. (1973). (R. Brown (Ed.). ‘Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction.’ in Knowledge, Education and Social Change: Papers in the Sociology of Education. London: Tavistock)

Branden, B. (1986). The Passion of Ayn Rand: a Biography. (1987). New York: Anchor Books (Random House).

Eatwell, R. (1995). Fascism. London: Vintage.
Harman, C. (1994). The Prophet and the Proletariat.  available: http://www.lpi.org.uk/
Jong, E. (1973). Fear of Flying. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Marx, K. (1867). Capital. Volume 1. Widely available and here.

Nietzsche, F. (1968). Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ (1895). London: Penguin.

Rand, A. (2007). Atlas Shrugged. (1957). London: Penguin.
Robbe-Grillet, A. (1992). Trans. R. Howard. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. (1963). Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 

Sartre, J-P. (1943). Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Numerous editions available.

Shelley, M. (1818). Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Harding, Mavor, Jones. 

Zola, E. (2004). Le naturalisme au théâtre: les théories et les exemples. Project Gutenberg EBook. (I've read extracts of this in a collection of drama essays, but cannot now find the English translation. You can find the French version here).