I Am I

[Guyau]

 I am I 

 

Anthem is a story told entirely from the voice of its protagonist. It is his diary, made public manifesto. He lives in a time beyond our time. Ours is the age of electricity. His native community is descended from ours, though they have lost knowledge of electricity and all our modern technological marvels. They speak English. They all have moralistic, political names like Equality 7-2521 and Fraternity 2-5503. Such abstractions are not in the discourse of the characters and not in the private thoughts of our hero. Their thoughts and English, like their lives, are simple. 

 

Our hero seeks secrets of the earth, he seeks the earth’s highest meaning, and he seeks some word and concept he senses has been lost from his society. The reader of Anthem will notice that folk of that society are missing the personal pronouns I and me and the possessives my and mine. Each refers to himself or herself by proper name or as we and refers to another individual by proper name or as they. The word individual does not appear in Anthem, but the discovery of the nature and importance of man the individual, as against the collective, is contour and point of the story.

 

“Then they pointed to themselves, and they said: ‘This one, alone and only . . .’ then they pointed to us and finished ‘. . . love that one, alone, and only’” (A 115). The notions of I and the singular you are subterranean in their society, and because the notion I would become subversive of the organizing ideals of that society, speaking that word, were one to learn of it and grasp it, is there punishable by death.

 

Theirs is a society of agrarian communes, in which people reproduce without love relationships, without family, and in which mating, education, work, and consumption, indeed every aspect of life, is directed by the state. Advance of human knowledge is at a snail’s pace, accomplished through consensus among scholars state-selected to be scholars under the constraint that the boat not get rocked by any independent thought.

 

Equality 7-2521 makes secret individual investigations of nature, aided by ruins he has discovered from our own era. His actions are illegal. His assigned profession is street sweeper. Through the course of his story with nature and his fellows, he comes to realize that all love and joy and thought belong to individuals, only to individuals. With the help of books he finds left by us, he learns the missing word I.

 

The individual human ego is what Rand sets up as the highest meaning of the earth. Our hero discovers fully his individual self and aims to bring the individual self back to men. He learns the story of Prometheus, who brought men fire, and he takes the name Prometheus for himself. Rand’s Prometheus of Anthem is no overman, or superman. “Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen,” spoke Nietzsche. By contrast Rand 1938 is not teaching something beyond human, higher than human. Rather, she is teaching the human restored to wholeness.

 

In our own culture, unlike the mythical one of Anthem, one discovers one’s autonomous self in childhood. Like us, Equality is a thinker and investigator, and like us too, he is a meaning maker. His dark difference with us is from the difference of the fantasy society that was his cradle.

 

There were no mirrors in Equality’s native society. Were we to bring a mirror into that society, Equality and his fellows would spontaneously be able to look in the mirror and bring their hands to touch body parts they see, just as Equality does later in the story, seeing his face in water. That is an ability we have before age two. Further, Equality would be able to pass the rouge test by two years of age, just like you or I. When two we began to use the personal pronouns I, me, and mine.[1] Equality and his fellows are instead trained to deflect awareness from the self and direct attention to the group by saying we where we should say I.

 

Recognizing oneself in mirrors and knowing one’s proper name and knowing how to use first-person pronouns does not yet include realization of the deep fact I am I (or I am an I or I am me).[2] Similarly it is in the journey of Equality; he has not yet roundly and profoundly grasped I and I am I when first seeing his reflected face. 

 

At two one can construct scenarios with dolls or other figures representing individual persons. One can make up dialogues, not only participate in them. The ability to converse with oneself as if between two characters is a plausible step necessary for coming to the insight I am I, where the first I is self as patient, actor, and controller, and the second I is self as in contrast to any other self.[3] Thinking I am I importantly includes thinking the identity of those two characters. Rand’s Equality accomplishes the same recognition as part of the thought expressed by his newly found word I, whose meaning is explicated as his unique and uniquely possessed body, shrine of his unique spirit, and explicated by his triplet I am, I think, I will.

 

The discovery of I by Equality is an episode of exhilarating liberation and profound fulfillment, though also overwhelming sorrow for mankind in its state of not knowing I. Each reader of Anthem had already come to know the full reality and concept I before reading the book. Anthem rings a bell. Any of its readers, however repressive their own native communities, had already discovered for themselves I am I. In American Amish communities, one is told that each is as a grain that must be ground up to make the whole loaf of bread that is their rigid community. But each Amish infant grows to child who knows I am I, notwithstanding lectures tying the goodness of bread to the goodness of self-abnegation.[4]

 

My husband has a memory of the moment he reached the insight of how the hands of a clock show the time. I do not remember such a moment, though I did get the knowledge somewhere along the way. There is another insight, sometimes won in an intense moment and retained in episodic memory, a moment in which individuals become conscious of themselves in a new way, a moment of realizing their being an individual person, a moment of realizing I am I or realizing some major aspect of that. Some people have memories of such moments. I do not. Dolph Kohnstamm’s I am I – Sudden Flashes of Self-Awareness in Childhood (2007), is a compilation of such recollections from our contemporaries. 

 

He quotes also such a recollection of the early Romantic German novelist Johann Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), who wrote under the name Jean Paul:

I shall never forget what I have never revealed to anyone, the phenomenon which accompanied the birth of my consciousness of self (Selbstbewussein) and of which I can specify both the place and the time. One morning, as a very young child, I was standing in our front door and was looking over to the wood pile on the left, when suddenly the inner vision I am a me (Ich bin ein Ich) shot down before me like a flash of lightning from the sky and ever since it has remained with me luminously: at that moment my ego (Ich) had seen itself for the first time, and for ever. One can hardly conceive of deceptions of memory in this case, since no one else’s reporting could mix additions with such an occurrence, which happened merely in the curtained holy of holies of man and whose novelty alone had lent permanence to such everyday concomitants. (29)

 

Kohnstamm is Dutch. In newspapers, radio, and the magazine Psychologie Heute, he related some of the few records he had found of persons who remembered their sudden realization I am I. He asked people who had such memories to share them with him. He received about 250 replies, mostly from Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. By far, most were from women, and the reason for that remains unknown. Ninety-two of the replies are contained in Kohnstamm’s book, and I want to share a few here.

 

A six-year old recalls realizing, while at the dinner table, that there had been a time when she had not existed.

We were sitting at the table: my father, my mother, my two brothers and I. My little sister, who was only six months old, was lying in her cradle. We ate and talked—about what, I don’t remember. Suddenly I became aware that I hadn’t always been alive. I hadn’t always been somebody with a father, a mother, and two brothers. This realization was a shock to me. Up to this moment, it had always just been a given. Suddenly, it was different. I must have had a beginning somewhere at some time, must have come from somewhere. (122–23)

One who wrote to Kohnstamm recalls a scene, at about age four, in which he learns from the adults that he too would die someday. He was pretty down about that (144–45).

 

Others recall:

I had celebrated my ninth birthday just a few days before and was in the playground where I would often hang out when all of a sudden I felt, I am I, entirely for myself, only for myself, separated from the others and ultimately without any connection to them. I wrote my name in the sand—a scene which is still clear in my mind—and I looked at it and felt myself as being entirely my own. I was looking at myself. It was like a brief, terrific high, an extremely intense feeling of independence, without any fear; rather I was filled with pride and security. At this moment, the other children didn’t matter at all. I was I, though I felt no animosity towards them. (152)

 

One summer morning, I was playing in my parent’s garden. I must have been four or five years old, because my three older siblings were in school. Before me there was a shoebox padded with fresh lettuce leaves where I had placed several small snails. As I observed the snails and wondered what they would do next, it became clear to me that in my life I would never be able to know what it’s like to be a snail. And at the same time, I had an amazing sense of my own self, my own body, of being alive, all the sensory impressions, my light dress on my body, the wind, the sand on my hands, the sun on my back. An astonishing feeling of happiness flowed through me: I am me; I feel, I make my own decisions, I am inside and outside, I am one. (80)

 

It happened one morning when I was in the fifth grade. My best friend was in the hospital, and it was feared that she would die. I went to a Catholic school, and on this morning, in class, I prayed for the first time. I never did this otherwise. In our home, we weren’t religious. In our classroom, a porcelain angel was hanging on the wall, and I directed my gaze at it. The teacher had already begun the lesson. Suddenly I was seized with a profound feeling. Little by little I sensed that I was going ever farther into myself and I thought, I am I, I am Liesbeth and this will always be. It was a bit frightening, because I had been determined for all time and would never be able to become somebody else. But it was also beautiful that I would be able to experience everything and that I would be able to perceive it. I was I. When I repeated this later to myself, I would have this feeling again of descending, layer by layer, deeper inside of myself; it is still like that today.

 

As a child, I was very closed in on myself and never spoke to my parents about this experience. Sometimes I also felt rather lonely, but from this moment on I had myself! (46)

 

Brushes with I am I in childhood occur also in noticing autonomy in one’s body. One woman recalls the moment, at age three, of stepping down a stairway noticing along the way that, inadvertently, she had not been holding onto the railing. “Then and there a feeling of unbelievable happiness flowed through me, because I had accomplished this, I could move freely without help from others, using my own strength” (50). At age twelve, with wider horizons, another woman recounts:

It had been a hot day. After a loud thunderstorm, I ran to a small park in the neighbourhood. It was nearly dark as I ran barefoot through the grass. Suddenly, I looked at my arms and legs and thought, These here are mine; this here is my body, I can do what I want with it. This was an astonishing thought that made me very happy. (54)

 

Kohnstamm’s chapter next to last is “Scientific Perspectives on the Development of Self-Awareness.” He includes past thought of psychologists concerning development of the grasp I am I, beginning early in the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. Contemporary work discussed includes that of Michael Lewis,* that of Katherine Nelson,* and that of William Damon and Daniel Hart.* He brings these models of the development of self-awareness into confrontation with the I-am-I remembered episodes he received. Supplementary to Kohnstamm’s book I Am I, I should mention the 2004 paper “Early Memory, Early Self, and the Emergence of Autobiographical Memory” by Mark L. Howe.*

 

How one reacts to realizing one is an individual person—separate, different, and autonomous—varies somewhat between individuals, according to the reports compiled by Kohnstamm. The accompanying mood may be matter-of-fact or defiant or exhilarating with a feeling of strength and pride or fearful with a feeling of vulnerability and isolation. The individual profile of those moods people recalled in their individual epiphany I am I was influenced occasionally by recent events with family members or friends. I suggest responses are contoured somewhat by individual temperament.[5] Not everyone is so like Equality, who finds always an inviting plenitude and completeness in solitude.

Given the spontaneous, untutored character of the I-am-I episodes in real persons displayed by Kohnstamm, one might wonder whether the absence of the pronoun I in the fictional native society of Equality really possible. Probably not, though it is a neat ploy to Rand’s purpose of showing the importance, the preciousness of man the individual, as against the collective. I suggest that, actually, we in the indoctrinated sense of a joint singular life and will and thought of the collective can only have meaning to one who has gotten I am I.

 

Notes

[1] Kagan 2013, 83.

[2] Kohnstamm 2007, 48, 58–62, 162; see also, Anscombe 1975, 158–59.

in other collectivist societies poorer and more ignorant than Amish communities; Kohnstamm 2007, 175–79.I am I[3] But consider

[4] Kohnstamm 2007, 164, 174.

[5] Kagan 2010.

[Guyau]

Well, that came out with such neat formatting, I better not touch it. One strange thing to be corrected: Note [3] should read "But consider I am I in other collectivist societies poorer and more ignorant than Amish communities; Kohnstamm 2007, 175–79." Also, I left off:

References

Anscombe, G. E. M. 1975. The First Person. In Cassam 1994.

Cassam, Q., editor, 1994. Self-Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kagan, J. 2010. The Temperamental Thread. New York: Dana Press.

——. 2013. The Human Spark – The Science of Human Development. New York: Basic Books.

Kohnstamm, D. 2007. I am I – Sudden Flashes of Self-Awareness in Childhood. T. Raleigh, translator. London: Athena Press.

[Guyau]

Ayn Rand’s novella ANTHEM, published in 1938 and revised in a 1946 edition, is set in a fictitious collectivist community, one smaller and simpler than Kira’s historical setting in WE THE LIVING. Rand’s ANTHEM is presented as a journal kept by her protagonist whose name is Equality 7-2521. He records that he dares to choose, in the secrecy of his own mind, work he hopes to do when leaving the Home of the Students. He loves the Science of Things. He hopes he will be selected to be a scholar, but the authorities appoint him to be a street sweeper.

The technology of his isolated community is very primitive in comparison to an earlier lost civilization (ours). His people have candles, but not electricity. He discovers a subway tunnel from the ancient civilization, and he begins to experiment with electricity in secret at night. In his own community, each refers to himself as “we”. Of his secret work at night, he thinks: “We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it” (1946, 23). In his love of the science of things, he is similar to Kira, and to Howard Roark and to John Galt, the principal protagonists of Rand’s later fiction. He is similar to Kira also in her “wanting to learn a work I like only because I like it,” and he is similar to her in standing against society made collectivist.

Comes a moment to Equality 7-2521: “This moment is a sacrament which calls us and dedicates our body to the service of some unknown duty we shall know. Old laws are dead. Old tablets have been broken [by me]. A clean, unwritten slate is now lying before our hands [my hands]. Our fingers are to write” (1938, 125–26). The talk of breaking old tablets is an echo of Nietzsche’s  “On Old and New Tablets” (Z III). However, the moral principles Equality 7-2521 would replace are the ones he had known in his one and only society, not the ones of wider world and history. He is not on the brink of writing principles entirely different from ones known in the ancient times, the times of the reader. His task of moral philosophy is not the task of the God of Moses nor the task of radical and continual transvaluation and self-overcoming that Zarathustra gives to human creators.

Rand wrote ANTHEM (1938) in the summer of 1937. In her manuscript for ANTHEM, she continually tries to suit ideas of Nietzsche to her story, then scratches them out (Milgram 2005; Mayhew 2005). Naturally, I wonder if she was not also, in some of those same strokes of the pen, writing down ideas of Nietzsche that she had seen attractive as truth, or at least promising as truth, then rejecting them as inadequate to her own grasp of the truth. Writing one’s ideas down and reading them helps one think better.

Near the end of the fable ANTHEM, our true searcher Equality 7-2521 announces:

“And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men have come into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.

“This god, this one word: ‘I’.” (1946, 90)

In his community of origin, Equality 7-2521 had wanted to know the meaning of things, the meaning of existence. He had wanted to know the secrets of nature, and he had come to suspect there is some important secret of human existence unknown to all. After fleeing his collectivist society, he becomes alone the live-long day. He comes upon an uninhabited fine house and learns from its books many wonders of the advanced science of the ancient civilization. He discovers the word “I”. That is, he discovers that word and attains the concept “I” distinctly and firmly set.

He no longer writes “we” or “we alone” or “we alone only” in his journal to refer to himself. A new chapter begins. He writes: “I am. I think. I will” (1946, 86).

With this fundamental discovery, Equality 7-2521 has become a Prometheus, whose name he takes for his own. He continues:

“What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.

“I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning.” (1946, 86)

There is one word “which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. / The sacred word: EGO” (1946, 98).

That last quotation is the close of the story. At the time this story was written (1937), there were no atomic weapons, no nuclear arsenals, and I think it was an ordinary assumption among people not Christian that human kind would continue effectively forever on the earth. Consider too that ANTHEM is a poetic work, and in poetic expression, as in dreams, conjured images condense multiple associations. In the case of poetic expression, the suggested associations are set up by the wider text. To write that the word “ego” and that which it names cannot be eradicated from the earth might be playing on multiple meanings of “earth”. One meaning is the third planet from the sun; another is the dwelling place of mortal men, as distinct from mythological realms of immortal beings; another is the collection of human inhabitants on the planet. Rand’s uses of “earth” with talk of ego in ANTHEM can rightly carry those three meanings simultaneously. I think the most salient of these meanings in Rand’s use here is the second one. She is not only making a statement about the endurance of ego among all possible societies (the third meaning). She is most saliently making a statement about ego in relation to all the earth, to all the abode of human existence.

At the core of ANTHEM, her manifesto of individualism, Rand sets a foundational sequence of thoughts: “I am. I think. I will.” Although Rand lists “will” as third in her 1938 foundational sequence, third in sequence of philosophical reflection; she awards “I will” some preeminence over “I am,” which she characterizes as self of truth, and over “I think,” which she characterizes as protector of self (1938, 128–29). Of words, “only three are holy: ‘I will it’” (129). Further:

“Where I go, there does my will go before me. My will, which chooses, and orders, and creates. My will, the master which knows no masters. . . . My will, which is the thin flame, still and holy, in the shrine of my body, my body which is but the shrine of my will.” (129)

This opposes 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, which would have the body of a righteous individual be temple of the Holy Spirit and would deny self-ownership of one’s body, which has been bought by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Prometheus’ line “Where I go, there does my will go before me” says I go only where I will, but expresses it in echo and in substitution of various King James biblical passages saying God is with one and goes before one to subvert threats or create lights in one’s path. Moses says to Joshua: “And the Lord, he IT IS that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee” (Deut. 31:8). Additional parallels (anti-parallels) between ANTHEM and the Bible are observed in Simental 2013, 100–105.

I do not think that the preeminence of “will” in Rand 1938 is a tuning to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. It looks to be, rather, a bannering of liberty.

In her 1946 edit of ANTHEM, Rand posed ego as stay of the earth not because ego is earth’s heart, spirit, and glory, but because ego is the earth’s heart, meaning, and glory. In ATLAS SHRUGGED, Rand would leave off all talk of man or ego as stay, heart, or meaning of the earth. But in her 1946 rendition of ANTHEM, “meaning” opens a new possible interpretation of its closing line. Without a meaning maker, there is not meaning in the world. It is similar to the situation with truth and fact. Without holders of truth, there is fact in the world, but truth is absent. This is actually more than a parallel. Meaning could be taken as a blend of truth and value. With no holders of truth or value in the world, meaning is absent from the world. With no truth, value, or meaning in the world, the world as human abode does not exist.

That angle suggests an enhancement to the sense of “earth” as the human abode in the original proclamation. Ego brings heart and spirit to the character of the human abode. Ego brings spirit-life. Ego brings into the world what preciousness, what value, there is in the world. Without spirit-life that comes with human being, the world as human abode does not exist.

Earth in the sense of the dwelling place of mortal man is not the only sense of “earth” suggested in Rand’s statement that “ego” is “the word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the spirit [or meaning] and the glory.” Rand drew a picture in ANTHEM, and again in FOUNTAINHEAD, in which individual human being in his or her desiring, thinking, willing self is the final end of the earth in all its components, in all its minerals, seas, and forms of life. This teleological order of things is not portrayed as being there with the earth devoid of man, but as there with man upon the earth, making it his own. Beyond that, the further suggestion that the earth in the plain full sense depends on human ego is a discomfiting line of thought and one to be deflected. That problematic further suggestion in the closing line of ANTHEM points to an inadequacy of Rand’s philosophical foundation put forth in that work. However adequate for the internal context of that fiction, that foundation is inadequate to full philosophy for human life in the actual world, ours today, fully real. “I am” is not necessary to all fact even though it is necessary to all truth. A foundational philosophy aiming to uphold realism and objectivity must take its most basic truths from most basic facts, and “I am” does not fit that bill. “Existence exists,” Rand’s axiom for her mature philosophy (1957), is the better base and necessity.

Early Rand and her Kira stood solidly for objectivity, which is attacked in the Red student speech. Rand’s protagonist in ANTHEM is given these lines: “All things come to my judgment, and I weigh all things, and I seal upon them my ‘Yes’ or my ‘No’. Thus is truth born. Such is the root of all Truth and the leaf, such is the fount of all Truth and the ocean, such is the base of all Truth and the summit. I am the beginning of all Truth. I am its end.” (1938, 128)

This sounds subjectivist, like the ancient God-sayings it echoes and would replace. It might seem that Rand was climbing down, between 1936 and 1938, into the Nietzschean cavern of subjectivity or at least was stepping down into the Kantian ravine. I think, rather, she is only affirming in this passage that all judgment of truth is individual and that all truth we render from the world is for our own final value. Those lines in ANTHEM (in 1938; excised in ’46) are preceded by these: “It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world.” Something is seen, and with the subject, it is rendered beautiful. Something is heard, and with the subject, it is rendered song of existence. Something is given, and with its recognition, it is rendered truth.

Rand does not create a superhuman for the meaning of the earth. Does her Prometheus create a meaning of the earth? His namesake does not invent fire.

Rand’s protagonist unlocks a type of human that finds the meaning of human existence; not in super-terrestrial personages and their affairs, but in complete human individuals on earth. “I am a man. This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before!” (1946, 87).

ANTHEM does not teach humans to create (or to beget) the meaning of the earth, but to discover it. “This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give . . . . We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky” (1946, 84). I really do not see Rand setting up some sort of Fichtean or Nietzschean perspective on the relation of ego and world. She is saying that whatever goals there are in inanimate and animate earth, they reach their final end in their crowning glory: the individual human knower of joy and living; the individual judge of truth; the individual will free over his or her ends; in a word “ego”. Notice that at this stage of Rand’s development only sentient living processes, specifically, human ones, can be ends not for the sake of something else. And these final ends are human, not superhuman.

In actual development, we begin to use the personal pronouns “I, me” at age two. Knowing one’s proper name and knowing how to use first-person pronouns does not yet include realization of the deep fact “I am an I” or “I am me” or, as Dolf Kohnstamm 2007 puts it, “I am I”. At age two one can construct scenarios with dolls or other figures representing individual persons. One can make up dialogues, not only participate in them. The ability to converse with oneself as if between two characters is a plausible step necessary for coming to the insight “I am I”, where the first “I” is self as patient, actor, and controller, and the second “I” is self as in contrast to any other self (Kohnstamm 2007, 164, 174). Thinking “I am I” importantly includes thinking the identity of those two characters. Rand’s Prometheus accomplishes the same recognition as part of the thought expressed by his newly found word “I” whose meaning is explicated as his unique and uniquely possessed body, shrine of his unique spirit, and explicated by his triplet “I am, I think, I will.”

It will be recalled that Equality 7-2521 had been seeking some word and concept that had been excised from his society. People there are missing the personal pronouns “I” and “me” and the possessives “my” and “mine.” Each refers to himself or herself by proper name or as “we” and refers to another individual by proper name or as “they” (or as ”you” taken as plural).

The discovery of “I” by Equality 7-2521 is an episode of exhilarating liberation and profound fulfillment, though also overwhelming sorrow for mankind in its state of not knowing “I”. Given the spontaneous, untutored character of the “I am I” episodes in real persons displayed in Kohnstamm’s book, one might wonder whether the absence of the pronoun “I” in the fictional society that was Equality 7-2521’s cradle is really possible. Probably not, though it is a neat ploy to Rand’s purpose of showing the importance, the preciousness of man the individual, as against the collective. For thoughts of Kohnstamm on “I am I” in a couple of actual collectivist societies, see his pages 175–80.

Equality 7-2521’s native society is without mirrors. Were we to bring one into their village, they would soon comprehend themselves in it, just as Equality 7-2521 does later in the story, seeing his face in water, and just as each of us did before age two. Earliest comprehension of mirrors and one’s body in them does not entail the comprehension “I am I” (Kohnstamm 2007, chap. 4). Similarly it is in the journey of Equality 7-2521. He has not yet roundly and profoundly grasped “I” and “I am I” when first seeing his reflected face.

Equality and his fellows had been trained to deflect awareness from the self and direct attention to the group by saying “we” where we should say “I”. Forbidding the word “I” with its meaning attained in the understanding “I am I” would be idle without currents of the forbidden within subjects under the law. Such currents are on show to the reader in the person of Equality 7-2521. I suggest, however, actually, “we” in the indoctrinated sense of a joint singular life and will and thought of the collective can only have meaning to one who has gotten “I am I.” The author of the fictional adventure knew the reader would come equipped with that grasp.

 

References

Kohnstamm, D. 2007. I AM I - SUDDEN FLASHES OF SELF-AWARENESS IN CHILDHOOD. Athena.

Mayhew, R. 2005. ANTHEM: ’38 & ’46. In Mayhew, ed., 2005.

Mayhew, R., editor, 2005. ESSAYS ON AYN RAND’S Anthem. Lexington.

Milgram, S. 2005. ANTHEM in Manuscript: Finding the Words. In Mayhew, ed., 2005.

Rand, A. 1938. ANTHEM. Cassell.

——. 1946. ANTHEM. Pamphleteers.

Simental, M.J. 2013. The Gospel According to Ayn Rand. THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES 13(2):96-106.

In this photo are the lights in Colorado Springs and Pueblo and in the mountains---a bit of our human world lost in the world inherited by Rand's Equality 7-2521. One very beautiful aspect of Rand's story I did not touch on was the love story developed all along the way. 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Stephen,

I love these kinds of riffs when looking from the lens of a work outward to the rest of the world.

You do this well.

I have a thought, though, that I want to challenge. And it comes from a mistake I myself have made.

Within O-land, it is habitual to talk about Anthem as "poetic." Even Barbara gushed about Anthem in that manner. As have I. 

However, now that I have studied a lot of writing, I don't see the poetry anymore. In fact, I have only seen a few things that look a poetry in Anthem, but not the lyricism and so on that people often talk about.

 

For example, I see some examples of what Rand herself called "gimmicks," like using numbers for the names of people, but that in itself is not poetry. Nowadays, the term "gimmick" might have a negative connotation, but I'm not so sure it did back during her early writing years. She was quite proud of her "gimmick" of taking the jury from the audience in Night of January 16th and openly said so in those terms.

Also, I see more-than-competent use of some literary techniques like suspense, setting up an expectation in the audience and frustrating it with a surprise, revelations, plot twists, and so on. But I don't see poetry.

 

We had a guy who once came to OL and bashed Anthem (see here). Although he sounded more like a Rand-basher than an honest critic, something in his approach kept tugging at me over the years. His main beef was that the writing was not realistic. But that's bullshit. I wonder if he would have had the same harsh words for fairy tales or myths or things like that. But still, I don't think he was lying about what he felt and I don't believe it was all due to Rand-bashing (although it was obvious to me that some was), so something kept nagging at me.

One comment back then stuck with me. It was from a member who hasn't posted in ages, Michelle (I miss her, by the way--she was wicked smart). She asked the guy what he didn't like and asked if it was Rand's "pseudo-archaic style."

And therein lies the rub with poetry. What a great characterization.

Today, when I read Anthem as poetry, I actually do feel it is stilted and stylistically awful. Sorry if this seems like I'm bashing Rand. I'm not. I'm talking about poetic things like alliteration, rhythm, anaphora and epistrophe, and things like that. 

If you have ever read The Book of Mormon and seen the constant repetition of the phrase, "and it came to pass," as a form of Smith trying to imitate King James English, you can get a feel of my stylistic impression of Anthem. Granted, some of the "poetic" markers are there, but there is way too much missing and way too many poetic-sounding things not used well to be actual poetry. Of course, I am using a high standard for poetry. I won't insult Rand by using the standards of modern poetry on her work to justify her style shortcomings.

Fortunately, there are other ways to read Anthem and I use them. I do love the work. Just not as poetry.

 

Oddly enough, I lay Rand's style issues at the feet of Theodor Dreiser and her growing pains in writing in English.

There is an interesting essay by Marylin Moore, Her Better Judgment: Ayn Rand, Theodore Dreiser, and the Shape of the American Novel. Here is a quote that stayed with me ever since I read it.

Quote

Heller even points out that sometime between 1926 and 1936 Rand sent to her sister Nora, still in Russia, a copy of An American Tragedy, because it was a “proletarian novel” (Heller 58) that Nora could translate and sell to Russian audiences.

That would be around the time period when Rand would be thinking up and writing Anthem. Given the fact that An American Tragedy was made into a popular movie at the time (which I can see interesting her big-time), and given Rand's comments on the theme in The Romantic Manifesto, I have little doubt she studied this work in "learn how to write" mode like she often did with other works. (She went into this method a bit in The Art of Fiction.) Back then, she even thought Dreiser's novel was important enough to want her sister to translate it into Russian.

Now, here's the thing. Everybody, and that means everybody, thinks that Dreiser did not know how to write, that he was stylistically awful. (And they are right.  ) But everybody also agrees that he knew how to tell a story dramatically. 

 

That, to me, is a parallel with Anthem. It's a great story, there is plenty of drama in it, and the ideas are super-interesting and fresh, among other virtues. Those things are the reasons for its success.

I just don't see any poetry there. And the style is way below Rand's usual.

Good on her for taking the shot and trying something different, though. That, to me, is how she became such a great writer.

Michael

[Guyau]

Hi Michael,

I agree that Rand's writing continued to improve with each of her novels. 

"Consider too that ANTHEM is a poetic work, and in poetic expression, as in dreams, conjured images condense multiple associations. In the case of poetic expression, the suggested associations are set up by the wider text. To write that the word “ego” and that which it names cannot be eradicated from the earth might be playing on multiple meanings of “earth”. One meaning is the third planet from the sun; another is the dwelling place of mortal men, as distinct from mythological realms of immortal beings; another is the collection of human inhabitants on the planet. Rand’s uses of “earth” with talk of ego in ANTHEM can rightly carry those three meanings simultaneously. I think the most salient of these meanings in Rand’s use here is the second one."

By "poetic" here I didn't have in mind that it was a poem, such as Longfellow's Hiawatha, of course. Some of ANTHEM (1938 version perhaps more-so; I'd have to tally) is beautifully lyrical. There are lyrical passages like that in We the Living, not so much in Fountainhead, and then that element is more frequent again in Atlas, as I recall.

ANTHEM  has the mythic tone the most of the four, like the King James Bible or Zarathustra. Perhaps it is that constant mythic tone that tugs one away from literalness, rather than poetic expression, and allows one to go along, for a moment, with such a statement that "ego" is a word that cannot be eliminated from the earth. The only important thing for me referring to such a way of speaking as poetic (not lyrical though) was that in condensation-expressions, like in dreams, there can be multiple meanings in some simple expression, and if one is open to that possibility in the subject sentence, one might not slam the book at last right there, exclaiming "that's the most dumb-ass idea I ever heard" because one is taking it literally: All higher animal life could become extinct on the planet; then all egos are extinguished. (In my own poetry, I've found that although one might sit down with some philosophic idea you'd like to convey poetically, you better be willing to let the idea get clipped and diffused even to disappearing if you want to end with some poetry in which sound, rhythm, image, and new syntax are the right stuff [that is my kind of poetry, not everyone's]. Precision in philosophic expression is in prose, though "poetic" hammering of a conception can sometimes help additionally in getting it really into a reader's head.)

That said, I have an additional complaint against Rand's ANTHEM line not mentioned in my article. It is suspicious in its fit with the way that Howard Roark's struggles, as expressed by Cameron, for example, are cast as due only to a hostile social world. That is a false idea for any real life in this part of the world, including Rand's life or mine. Nature, your competition, and your own limitations are the really big things with which one is struggling, not some sinister minds out to get you or some organization of society rigged against you because you are good. That angle of Rand's is something ruinous to pick up, because it is a distraction from the main challenges. Yes, there have been and still are people out to get me, and it's good to know that and who they are (some right-wing religionists, in my case), but they are not the really big limitations, and THEY are not sensibly taken as big reason for any of my shortfall in success in chosen projects and no excuse for anyone to not undertake such projects, romantic, artistic, commercial, or intellectual.