Literary History versus Rand Thereon

[Ellen Stuttle]

A question for Tony:

Do the drawings of Cyrus Paltons in post #22 exhibit "volitional consciousness"?

Ellen

[Reidy]

Hugo's short prolog to Notre Dame is worth reading in this connection. He says without expounding that the whole story grew out of his discovery in the cathedral of a Greek inscription for 'necessity' or 'fate.' One could argue that the whole story belies this and that an author's stated convictions needn't match his sense of life, but the fact remains that Hugo thought most un-Randianly that fate was a romantic notion.

[BaalChatzaf]

Cyrus Paltons

Ayn Rand's "Exclusive Love," Ages 9-12

Ellen

I am surprised the hero did not have a cape flying behind him.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Ellen Stuttle]

Heedless Valor

Paperback back cover copy for

The Mysterious Valley

1994 Atlantean Press English edition,

Translation by Bill Bucko

[The excerpt makes slight changes in, and shortens, the story's text.]

His rifle! It was his rifle!

With a cry of triumph he stood up, shouldered and fired.

But when he shot, the tiger was no longer in the line of fire, and with a formidable bound, as though the man it carried in its teeth weighed it down not at all, it disappeared among the tall grass.

Staggering like a madman, stumbling over roots, falling, getting up again, he threw himself after the beast, shouting desperately at the top of his voice.

And he went on running until, at the end of his strength, knees bloodied, hands torn, his forehead cut by a violent fall against the angle of a rock, he felt he couldn't go any further, couldn't take even one more step.

He fell to the ground, inert and senseless, while down there, somewhere in some hidden corner, the solitary monster tranquilly tore apart and devoured its victim.

The passage is indicative of the British behavioral tendency in the novel.

The advertising copy continues:

Men are disappearing mysteriously, on the wild frontier between northeast India and Sikkim. Sadly, among the missing men is Captain Cyrus Paltons, that intrepid man, brave to the point of temerity, so skillful and self-possessed.

The Mysterious Valley is a tale of mystery, intrigue, and high adventure, with deadly ambushes and secret passages, trained cobras and crocodile pits - and resolute men who defy all perils to discover the secret fate of their lost comrades.

Fear not: None of those whom the tigers have carried off have been eaten.

Ellen

[Jonathan]

She starts the talk by asking listeners "a hypothetical question. Suppose that you were born and are now growing up in some miserable little village, lost in some trackless prairies, miles away from civilization," and never seeing "anyone but a handful of dull, stagnant, brutalized people, who spend their lives in the meaningless drudgery of the same routine of labor, year after year, with no interest, no purpose, no ambition beyond the range of their immediate need." Further that "You are growing up with an incoherent, inarticulate sense of longing for something better [...]." She describes in detail the desperate desire for something better, then asks the listener to suppose that your only contact with the outside world is "a movie theater where a film is shown once a month."

"Ask yourself what will happen to you," she continues, "if that movie screen shows you New York City, or if it shows you ten variants of your own village. [....] What will either picture do to you? What will it do to your view of life, to your values, to your soul, to your future?" She says that "If you understand the difference that these two alternatives would make to you, you understand the nature and meaning of art in human existence."

I think it's very interesting that Rand gives an example of photographic images of actual existents rather than a work of art -- reality rather that a selective "re-creation" or simulation of reality.

I know that Rand actually lived the particular example that she gave of visiting theaters, but others lived other examples: I personally know people who were farming in Russia with hand tools and animal-powered implements who were as inspired by photos of modern Western agricultural technology as Rand was by photos of New York City.

So, the effects and affects that Rand was talking about aren't limited to art (the field of aesthetics is wider than "the study of art"). And art isn't limited to the media that Rand accepted as valid (her notion of the role of art can be experienced in more media and entities than she personally experienced).

J

[Ellen Stuttle]

I think it's very interesting that Rand gives an example of photographic images of actual existents rather than a work of art -- reality rather that a selective "re-creation" or simulation of reality.

I don't think it was simply photographic images she meant. Note that her example pertains to "a movie theater where a film is shown once a month" (emphasis added). I think that by "picture" she means the setting of a story.

Here's the full text of the opening hypothetical, including the details I elided before:

Ladies and gentlemen, I shall begin by asking you a hypothetical question. Suppose that you were born and are now growing up in some miserable little village, lost in some trackless prairies, miles away from civilization. You have never seen anyone but a handful of dull, stagnant, brutalized people, who spend their lives in the meaningless drudgery of the same routine of labor, year after year, with no interest, no purpose, no ambition beyond the range of their immediate need. You are growing up with an incoherent, inarticulate sense of longing for something better, something beyond the meanness, the pettiness, the sordidness of the men around you. Whenever you are bewildered, disappointed, or hurt by people, whenever you encounter injustice and irrationality, you struggle to hold onto the formless hope that you will not surrender, that your life will have meaning, importance, and beauty, that you will reach something greater, somehow, somewhere, in some distant future. But you are not yet able to identify what that something is. You know it only in the form of a desperate emotion, and your torture comes from those moments when you wonder whether your undefined ideal can ever be achieved in reality, whether the men around you are right, whether a lethargic resignation to pain and ugliness is all that's possible to men on earth.

Now suppose that your only contact with the outside world is a movie theater where a film is shown once a month. It is your only chance to catch a glimpse of the world beyond your native village. Ask yourself what will happen to you if that movie screen shows you New York City, or if it shows you ten variants of your own village. Project the two alternatives. Either you see New York, with everything it implies, with the kind of intelligence, energy, courage, ambition that created it - or you see the meanness, the sordidness, the futility, the despair of your own village, staring at you from the vacant eyes and loose faces and senseless lives of the men in other villages. What will either picture do to you? What will it do to your view of life, to your values, to your soul, to your future? If you understand the difference that these two alternatives would make to you, you understand the nature and meaning of art in human existence.

I know that Rand actually lived the particular example that she gave of visiting theaters, but others lived other examples: I personally know people who were farming in Russia with hand tools and animal-powered implements who were as inspired by photos of modern Western agricultural technology as Rand was by photos of New York City.

The life link for Rand was especially Viennese operetta. I'll quote her own description in another post.

So, the effects and affects that Rand was talking about aren't limited to art (the field of aesthetics is wider than "the study of art"). And art isn't limited to the media that Rand accepted as valid (her notion of the role of art can be experienced in more media and entities than she personally experienced).

Agreed. Furthermore, "the nature and meaning of art in human existence" isn't limited to the role she assigned it - viz., expressing "man's deepest, most fundamental, most philosophical values."

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

"...like a glance straight through the snow and the flags"

I wrote in the post above that the primary artistic lifeline for Rand when she was living in Soviet Russia was Viennese operettas. She draws on her own experience in a passage from We the Living.

"The Music of We the Living"

by Michael S. Berliner

in Essays on Ayn Rand's We The Living

pg. 119

[bold emphasis added]

Shortly before Leo's departure for the sanitarium to treat his tuberculosis, he and Kira attended an operetta, Die Bajadere, by Emmerich Kálmán. It had been advertised, wrote Rand, as "the latest sensation of Vienna, Berlin and Paris." It was

the most wanton operetta from over there, from abroad. It was like a glance straight through the snow and the flags, through the border, into the heart of that other world. There were colored lights, and spangles, and crystal goblets, and a real foreign bar with a dull glass archway where a green light moved slowly upward, preceding every entrance - a real foreign elevator. There were women in shimmering satin from a place where fashions existed, and people dancing a funny foreign dance called "Shimmy," and a woman who did not sing, but barked words out, spitting them contemptuously at the audience, in a flat, hoarse voice that trailed suddenly into a husky moan - and a music that laughed defiantly, panting, gasping, hitting one's throat and breath, an impudent drunken music, like the "Song of Broken Glass," a promise that existed somewhere, that was, that could be (208).

This same operetta makes a later appearance, when Kira and Andrei dance to its fox-trots at the roof garden of the European Hotel (275-76).

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

"...a 'spiritual escape' from Soviet Russia"

The following passage from "The Music of We the Living" quotes from Rand's descriptions of her own experiences.

"The Music of We the Living"

by Michael S. Berliner

in Essays on Ayn Rand's We The Living

pp. 119-121

[bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks added;

ellipses in original]

Ayn Rand and her sister Nora attended operettas at the Mikhailovsky Theater on Nevsky Prospekt, but the references to Die Bajadere have a deeper biographical significance: they are Rand's homage to a genre and to a particular operetta whose importance to her cannot be overestimated. Operetta was, in fact, a psychological lifesaver.

At the age of sixteen, Ayn Rand found what she called a "spiritual escape" from Soviet Russia. That escape was the world of Viennese operettas. "Here is the way I discovered operettas," she recalled.

The theaters - some were private, some were semi-private - were enormously expensive that showed foreign operettas, and I couldn't even dream of attending them. But the three state theaters presented operas and ballet. One of the three [the Mikailovsky] put on lighter operas and some classical operettas. They had four balconies, and the back row of the fourth balcony, which was about ten seats, was very cheap and hard to get. They opened the box office for each week's performance on Saturday at ten o'clock.

I made it a point to get up at five in the morning to be at that theater at six, and I waited for three hours, first in the street for an hour and then in the unheated lobby - and you know what Russian winters are. By ten o'clock there would be lines around the block waiting for all the cheap seats. For my first two years of college [at Petrograd State University], I was there every Saturday, and every time I would be either first or second. The money for it came from what my parents gave me for tramway tickets for the university. I would walk the three miles to the university to save the money and spend it on operas and operettas.

Verdi was the first opera I saw. [*] And the whole spectacle of that sort of glamorous, medieval existence, the productions were still of the pre-Revolutionary days, so the sets and costumes were marvelous. And to see that after coming in from a Soviet reality, that was worse than anything. It's precisely for that sense of life that I worked so hard to get into that theater.

Then I discovered operettas. They began by doing certain classical operettas of the nineteenth century and ended up by doing some [Franz] Lehar, which was unprecedented in a serious, academic theater. That was my first great art passion. That really saved my life. It was the most marvelous, benevolent universe, a shot in the arm, practically narcotic. Only it wasn't narcotic in the sense of escape, because it was the one positive fuel that I could have. My sense of life was kept going on that. A life-saving transfusion. [**]

From one unnamed operetta she described a scene that epitomized the West:

There was one scene where they had some kind of ballroom and a huge window showing the lighted street. They do it with transparencies, black backdrop with the lights cut out so that the lights shine from behind. It was a very good imitation of a foreign city, which was all lights. That was more important to me than Nietzsche and the whole university. That set something in my sense of life. My love for city streets, city lights, skyscrapers, it was all that category. That category of value, and that's what I expected from abroad....What it all meant to me, I don't have to repeat. You can see it from We the Living....That was the world I had to reach. [***]

After she graduated from college in 1924, she could afford to attend the private theater, and it was here that she discovered the composer who was to become her favorite operetta composer; in fact, in a 1936 publicity questionnaire for Macmillan publishing company, she listed him as her favorite composer overall: Emmerich Kálmán (Kálmán Imre in his native Hungary). [****] Kálmán, along with Franz Lehar, were the preeminent composers of Viennese operetta.

~~~

[*] Probably Rigoletto. [i think that someone else, maybe Harry Binswanger, suggested Nabucco, but I'm not sure.]

[**] and [***] Biographical Interviews (Ayn Rand Archives). [The interviews were conducted by Barbara Branden in 1961-62 when she was gathering material for her biographical essay "Who Is Ayn Rand?"]

[****] Ayn Rand Archives

Ellen

[Francisco Ferrer]

From one unnamed operetta she described a scene that epitomized the West:

There was one scene where they had some kind of ballroom and a huge window showing the lighted street. They do it with transparencies, black backdrop with the lights cut out so that the lights shine from behind. It was a very good imitation of a foreign city, which was all lights. That was more important to me than Nietzsche and the whole university. That set something in my sense of life. My love for city streets, city lights, skyscrapers, it was all that category. That category of value, and that's what I expected from abroad....What it all meant to me, I don't have to repeat. You can see it from We the Living....That was the world I had to reach. [***]

Ellen

The operetta could be Lehar's popular The Merry Widow. Act III is set in a ballroom.