"In the beginning..." (Christology and Randology)

[Brant Gaede]

As Reason magazine wasn't about reason, Objectivism has never been about critical thinking but so-called critical thinking having been done (by Rand). That's why it doesn't go anywhere. She and Branden were the only ones with wheels--her wheels. After the break in '68 he got another set. --Brant

That touches on a major myth about Rand - that she was an empirical thinker. "Objectivism through Induction," Peikoff titled a course he gave after Rand's death. More like, "Objectivism through Assertion," her assertion and partly Nathaniel Branden's.

Ellen

PS: I probably won't have time till Thursday to type in some more from the sketch.

I have never thought of her as an empirical thinker but as a thinker feeding on her thinking. I know it had to start somewhere; you don't start deducting out of nothing but once she got her something she pulled up the bridges and lit up her castle banners. If she wasn't locked into her adolescent sex-hero romantic fixations she'd have known enough about male sexuality not to have created male heroes who gave up sex for a decade--gave up Dagny--to save the world with passive-aggression. What did Galt do? "I did nothing." Here's real life, Galt to d'Anconia: "We gotta go on strike; save the world. You have to give up Dagny." "Yeah, right. Are you nuts?" "Think about it Frisco. The world is dying in a convulsion--orgy--of self-sacrifice." "Look, John, the only thing that makes sense is you want me to give her up so you can have either her or me, maybe both of us." "No, no, no! Ayn Rand's gotta write this great novel. We're major characters in it. Now do you understand? Sure I could sleep with you, but she thinks homosexuality is 'disgusting,' so that's out." "Well, I'm keeping Dagny and you can go on strike. By the way, do you know how to masturbate? It might help you--help you a lot."

--Brant

Galt was crazy, but no need for d'Anconia to be too, but there goes Atlas Shrugged, completely off the rails: it has to be looked on as great literary art, but a philosophy is not rationally built on art but on empirical investigation to the max

[Ellen Stuttle]

Re Rand's "adolescent sex-hero romantic fixations" (see Brant's post next above), it was the presentation of sexual relationships which I think more than anything else gave me a feeling of weird puzzlement as I read Atlas for the first time, a feeling of disparity between the accomplished brilliance and the naivety of the author - and I was all of eighteen and a half. (I include the "a half" because some important developments occurred in my Freshman year of college which had bearing on my reactions. I've many times wondered how I would have reacted if I'd read Atlas while I was still in high school.)

Ellen

[caroljane]

Ellen, I was that very age on first reading it too, Eventually I concluded that if there were any real Galts I was not likely to meet them and that Dagnys are born, not made. Even self-made.

[Ellen Stuttle]

I never had any desire to meet a Galt, and I felt sorry for Dagny. It didn't occur to me until a couple years later, when I found out that there was The Objectivist Newsletter and I subscribed to it, that anyone would want to emulate Dagny.

Ellen

[caroljane]

Yes, I never wanted to meet a Galt but I thought I should want to be a Dagny. Although I didn't want to, but I beat myself up about it for awhile.

[Ellen Stuttle]

Carol,

Why did you think you should want to be a Dagny?

If you can recapture the feeling and are willing to talk about it.

I think a lot of readers - the sort who had a positive response - didn't actually want to be like Dagny (or a male hero for the guys) but thought they should.

What in the book engenders that "should" feeling?

Ellen

[Brant Gaede]

I don't know about emulate, but the actor in me wanted to play James Taggart. One Objectivist reading that--I think on OL--almost barfed his lunch. I would have been great 20-30 years ago. I couldn't do Toohey. I looked too good and the guy who did play him was too good for me to match or top.

One character done wrong was Eddie Willers. As done he matched his name as did the other characters, but he would have been a lot more interesting buffed up though he would have pushed too hard on the James Taggart characterization and what would Dagny have done if he had made a pass at her? Everybody else who wanted her got her.

Everybody in the novel except The Wet Nurse is trapped by the plot. Well, even he got tossed when he was used up. I could emulate him because he was a real person as depicted, except I never had the need to. Not with anyone. The way I look at it emulate courage, integrity, etc.--good character attributes you can see in action in others--that sort of thing. You are the total package which is your responsibility so you try to sweep them up and take them in, not someone else's total package. I'm perpetually dissatisfied with what I am so I keep trying to add something. The wrongs of my past do weigh me down somewhat. That's life. That's living. Part of it, anyway.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

Carol,

Why did you think you should want to be a Dagny?

If you can recapture the feeling and are willing to talk about it.

I think a lot of readers - the sort who had a positive response - didn't actually want to be like Dagny (or a male hero for the guys) but thought they should.

What in the book engenders that "should" feeling?

Ellen

Not speaking to Carol, of course, but many students of Objectivism role played for appearance sake, to fit into where they were. I did some of that osmotically. I think there was fear involved, the fear of banishment, the fear of the wrath of Rand in any Q & A at NBI, so we wrote our questions down and I was less than a year away from actual combat. I once saw (1968) one poor guy get eaten alive for asking Nathaniel an ignorant question about psychology--by derision amplified by a mic: "Did you hear what this man said?" Ha, ha, ha.

At the time NB was nearing the end of his career role-playing John Galt. He was also under tremendous stress. It was the most unhappy time of his life he told me in 1976.

--Brant

[caroljane]

Ellen, I don't mind talking about it at all and remember the feeling well. At the time I accepted that Objectivism must be "right" (it was my first encounter with philosophy) and cherchez l'homme, my boyfriend certainly believed he could be his own version of Galt or whoever, and was happy in his pursuit.Another big factor, I was brought up to achieve a fine career in a straight line. To me it seemed total failure and weakness in myself to doubt my own choices and abilities, in any area of life. Either I was succeeding in life or failing, and increasingly I failed and spent most of my energy trying to conceal that.

[caroljane]

Actually Brant, the state I was in, if I had been American I might have joined the Army too.

[Ellen Stuttle]

Who Is Ayn Rand?

From Chapter III, The Literary Method of Ayn Rand

pg. 92

If every work of art is a psychological confession, so is every esthetic response. One responds esthetically to that which reflects and confirms one's own sense of life. (The pleasure one might happen to find in reading a novel because of the information it contains, is not an esthetic emotion.) That in which one finds enjoyment is the most eloquent indicator of one's fundamental values and philosophy. If one enjoys reading about men of integrity, ability and moral strength, and is bored by stories of men's helplessness and evil, one reveals one kind of soul; if one enjoys stories of men's helplessness and evil, and is bored by reading about men of integrity, ability and moral strength, one reveals another kind of soul. Artistic likes and dislikes are not "a matter of taste" - but a matter of metaphysics.

pp. 103-04

Since art necessarily is selective, to include an incident in a novel is to make it important. To include the unimportant is to magnify it and give it equal status with the important, thus undercutting the important. Those who wish that Galt had been given a few accidental or irrelevant touches have but one basic motive, whether they choose to identify it or not; to see Galt undercut, to see his stature diminished, to see his certainty and self-esteem breached. They believe that what they are objecting to is his characterization. In fact, what they are objecting to is his character.

"The esthetic response as a morals exam" (from my sketch).

There are many other examples of Branden's and of Rand's making assertions which could frighten - and frighten off from raising any reservations about Rand's literary work.

Ellen

[caroljane]

Oh,dear lord , so glad I never read this at the time, it would have finished me off.

[Ellen Stuttle]

I was looking for a passage where Branden talks about the characters serving as moral guides.

He says he's had many people tell him they would ask themselves "What would Roark do?" (I think it was Roark he cited, might have been Galt). Quick as a flash, so to speak, the answer would come and the person would know what to do.

I remember thinking when I first read that bit that Roark (or Galt) wouldn't ask what someone else would do.

==

About the characterization/character comment quoted in the post two above, I remember thinking, well, yes, I do object to the character, so what do you want to make of that?

Ellen

[caroljane]

Not that I wanted Galt undercut, which I realized by then was hardly likely to happen. I was just so disengaged from the characters that I didn't care what happened to them. Maybe that was worse. I remember estimating the remaining number of pages and skimming through the torture scene. Don't ask about the Speech.

[Ellen Stuttle]

Not that I wanted Galt undercut, which I realized by then was hardly likely to happen. I was just so disengaged from the characters that I didn't care what happened to them. Maybe that was worse. I remember estimating the remaining number of pages and skimming through the torture scene. Don't ask about the Speech.

Quite. It wasn't that you "wanted Galt undercut." Or, I bet, a desire for "unimportant" details being added. It was that you had some fiction-reading experience behind you and recognized "cardboard" characterization when you encountered it.

But you see how Branden's statement warns the budding O'ist off from daring to say anything about the characters lacking full-fleshedness - while simultaneously providing a ready-made come back to and moral evaluation of anyone who does express non-enthusiasm for the characterization.

Ellen

[caroljane]

Re literary qualities, Atlas was too cinematic for my tastes. I don't like to be told exactly what everything looks like and guided expertly from scene to scene with such overt authority in a novel. I like to be casually introduced and observe the action from my own angles.

[caroljane]

Ellen, like me you appear to have your own personal, individual relationship with novels that engage you.Maybe we are the last demographic that the marketers will ever find to target!

[Brant Gaede]

I was looking for a passage where Branden talks about the characters serving as moral guides.

He says he's had many people tell him they would ask themselves "What would Roark do?" (I think it was Roark he cited, might have been Galt). Quick as a flash, so to speak, the answer would come and the person would know what to do.

I remember thinking when I first read that bit that Roark (or Galt) wouldn't ask what someone else would do.

==

About the characterization/character comment quoted in the post two above, I remember thinking, well, yes, I do object to the character, so what do you want to make of that?

Ellen

Roark.

--Brant

Roark

[Ellen Stuttle]

Prefacing Letter - 1

This is from a letter I'd written to Allan before I got the book idea. I used the letter as a kind of Preface to the book material. I've left out (and not indicated by ellipses) a couple personal asides.

===

Further comments about Objectivism versus people: Your question, did I find Objectivism inimical to my needs? And a later question, did I feel I was justifying my needs to the philosophy? I know a lot of my friends felt that, or still feel it - the struggle of conscience between the real self and the ideas one has accepted and believes in as showing the right way to live. I think that that struggle is behind the guilt and unease I sensed in my friends when they lapsed from being "good Objectivists" and let some of their reality escape.

I've been thinking more about where the strains between Objectivism and selfhood come from and about why I didn't feel a requirement of justification.

For one thing, I wasn't looking for a blueprint to live by when I chanced upon Atlas. I already had my blueprint, which was very similar to hers but with the emphasis put squarely where it belongs, on my satisfaction from life. So, from the beginning, Objectivism had to justify itself to my needs, not vice versa.

Second, I never thought that she was "totally rational," because I thought there had to be something strange about the person who could write Atlas Shrugged. I love that book passionately. From my standpoint, long live Rand's oddities because she wouldn't have written Atlas without them. But do you realize how anomalous that book is? It's contrived and artificial. It may project life as she thinks it "could and should" be, but in point of fact life isn't and can't be as she projects it, and she had to do a lot of "selective (very selective) recreation" to get life looking the way she shows it.

Further, it's outright corny in some respects. Occasionally I pick up Atlas and just read a few pages at random, or sometimes looking for a particular scene. I find, with a number of scenes, I'm simultaneously embarrassed for her and captivated. God, can she write! Her dramatic sense, her ability to arouse tension and build to climactic resolutions - she gets to me, even when I'm convinced that what I'm reading could never happen, and is false to human nature.

(to be continued)

===

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Prefacing Letter - 2

===

Which is why I say, only someone strange could have written Atlas Shrugged. Technically, it's the work of a literary genius, a genius who has mastered the craft. But how could anyone old enough to be a Master believe some of what she says? The sophomoric aspects of the content - they should have been written by someone no older than, say, thirty. But the technical and intellectual feat - I don't think it could be done by a writer younger than, say, forty.

And she clearly does mean what she says; the forceful sincerity of it wouldn't be there if she didn't mean it. So I have to wonder, what's going on in her mind that with so great a gift she could see life so simplistically?

I have an hypothesis as to what the "something strange" is, the "missing piece" that explains the contradictions in her character: She simplifies and then rigidifies. It's all very well, going for the essence, seeing the fundamental pattern, the root drama. And it's all very well, "hold[ing] an unchanging youth [and] reach[ing] at the end the vision with which you started." But the thing about Rand is, once she's got the "essence," she wants to lock it into a cast-iron mold for all eternity. (But "Reality is a butterfly, a living butterfly that shifts and changes with the light. You can not pin it down, with one eternal thrust, upon a mounting board called Truth" - from an essay of mine.)

The psychological thing behind Rand's cast-iron view, I think, is a tremendous need to control. There is a need in her to bend the world to her will. And she has an indomitable will. Interesting combination - fear and so strong a force. It explains a lot, though: the inability of any change, growth, life to take place in her system, or within Objectivism as a psychosocial phenomenon; the incredible contradiction of a philosophy of independent thought which stultifies thought and destroys creativity; etc., etc., etc.

[NOTE: I have quarrels today with my own comments in the preceding two paragraphs. Up to there, I still think the same.]

===

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Prefacing Letter - 3

===

A third reason I didn't buy Objectivism whole - I never wanted to be like one of her characters. I thought I was like Dagny, in some ways. (I still think so.) But I was unlike her in other ways. I wasn't a dedicated saint of productivity, and had no intention of becoming one. I had hobbies I quite enjoyed, riding horses, driving my car, if you can call that a hobby, other things. I loved to read for hour upon hour, and get into misty-dreamy moods and write poetry to the moon, and such like fancies. I couldn't see myself growing up to live like Dagny, working day and night in intense devotion to Taggart Transcontinental, and listening to no other music but that of Richard Halley.

And consider how much Dagny suffered, how much torture and pain she had to endure. I didn't think one "should," or had to, go through all that to reach Galt's Gulch at the end. The grandeur, the glory, the immensity of the struggle, the clean heroism of Dagny's soul - oh, yes, it moved me. It moves me still.

But the precise details of Rand's vision were not mine, comparable, but not identical. And I didn't think that the spirit of it, the magnificence, was inextricably bound to the specifics of her vision. Rand to me seemed like an older sister, my naive heroine genius, telling me that following a star is the thing to do. But it was my star I was being told to follow, not hers.

I think where Objectivists have most messed themselves up is, first, through deifying her, so that they find it painfully difficult to see the inconsistencies in her and in her system; second, through trying to live so exactly her way, trying to be like her heroic characters, trying to remake their own psyches in her image.

(to be continued)

===

Ellen

[Jonathan]

Who Is Ayn Rand?

From Chapeter III, The Literary Method of Ayn Rand

pg. 92

If every work of art is a psychological confession, so is every esthetic response. One responds esthetically to that which reflects and confirms one's own sense of life. (The pleasure one might happen to find in reading a novel because of the information it contains, is not an esthetic emotion.) That in which one finds enjoyment is the most eloquent indicator of one's fundamental values and philosophy. If one enjoys reading about men of integrity, ability and moral strength, and is bored by stories of men's helplessness and evil, one reveals one kind of soul; if one enjoys stories of men's helplessness and evil, and is bored by reading about men of integrity, ability and moral strength, one reveals another kind of soul. Artistic likes and dislikes are not "a matter of taste" - but a matter of metaphysics.

I wouldn't call the above actual examples of "artistic likes" or "esthetic response," but of moral judgment of works of art. An actual aesthetic response would be the enjoyment of the artistry of the presentation of the characters and story, not the enjoyment of agreeing with or identifying with the morality of the characters' actions or their world view or sense of life.

pp. 103-04

Since art necessarily is selective, to include an incident in a novel is to make it important. To include the unimportant is to magnify it and give it equal status with the important, thus undercutting the important. Those who wish that Galt had been given a few accidental or irrelevant touches have but one basic motive, whether they choose to identify it or not; to see Galt undercut, to see his stature diminished, to see his certainty and self-esteem breached. They believe that what they are objecting to is his characterization. In fact, what they are objecting to is his character.

Yeah, that's bullshit. People didn't want to see Galt undercut, but artistically finished. He's like an unpainted cartoon outline among fully painted figures on a canvas.

And who ever said that they wanted Galt to have "accidental or irrelevant touches"? They want him to have a personality, an individual human identity. There's no reason jump to the conclusion that giving a character a personality would require "accidental or irrelevant touches."

"The esthetic response as a morals exam" (from my sketch).

There are many other examples of Branden's and of Rand's making assertions which could frighten - and frighten off from raising any reservations about Rand's literary work.

Ellen

The piece reads as if that was the goal: to frighten off aesthetic criticism of Rand's work.

J

[Jonathan]

I was looking for a passage where Branden talks about the characters serving as moral guides.

He says he's had many people tell him they would ask themselves "What would Roark do?" (I think it was Roark he cited, might have been Galt). Quick as a flash, so to speak, the answer would come and the person would know what to do.

I remember thinking when I first read that bit that Roark (or Galt) wouldn't ask what someone else would do.

==

About the characterization/character comment quoted in the post two above, I remember thinking, well, yes, I do object to the character, so what do you want to make of that?

Ellen

I think that Roark would recognize that Galt was a bit cardboard.

J

[Ellen Stuttle]

I wouldn't call the above actual examples of "artistic likes" or "esthetic response," but of moral judgment of works of art. An actual aesthetic response would be the enjoyment of the artistry of the presentation of the characters and story, not the enjoyment of agreeing with or identifying with the morality of the characters' actions or their world view or sense of life.

Who Is Ayn Rand? was published before the essay, "Art and Sense of Life," in which Rand distinguished esthetic from sense of life response and from moral judgment of art.

Also, I thought of Rand's liking for Dostoevsky while reading that passage.

pp. 103-04

Since art necessarily is selective, to include an incident in a novel is to make it important. To include the unimportant is to magnify it and give it equal status with the important, thus undercutting the important. Those who wish that Galt had been given a few accidental or irrelevant touches have but one basic motive, whether they choose to identify it or not; to see Galt undercut, to see his stature diminished, to see his certainty and self-esteem breached. They believe that what they are objecting to is his characterization. In fact, what they are objecting to is his character.

Yeah, that's bullshit. People didn't want to see Galt undercut, but artistically finished. He's like an unpainted cartoon outline among fully painted figures on a canvas.

Rand said something, reportedly (I think Branden is the source of this recollection), about Galt's being a god and one mustn't get too close to a god.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

I think that Roark would recognize that Galt was a bit cardboard.

J

That indirectly reverts to a point I'm making about parallels between Christology and Randology.

The Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels isn't the Jesus of John. In the latter, there's been an elevation of Jesus to being God.

One of the myths about Rand is the myth of the straight line. But actually, there's a change from the Rand who wrote The Fountainhead to the Rand who wrote Atlas Shrugged (and it was after she wrote Atlas Shrugged that she became God in the sense of Decreer of Truth).

Ellen