New book of essays on Atlas Shrugged

[Greybird]

[...] for literary reasons (especially if the novel is already too long, very sprawling) one often may wish to essentialize, strip things down, and create archetypes in a novel[. ... Atlas] shouldn't be read to imply that the author intended to say only Prime Movers and boat anchors exist in the real world. (For example, having him stranded would be heartless in the real world but makes literary and philosophical sense.)

[...] The problem that Eddie Willers posed for Ayn Rand is the status of an ordinary human being whose ethics are impeccable but who is not Prime Mover material. The challenge was heightened because Eddie is not a bit player, like Mike Donnigan in The Fountainhead; he is on the scene for much of the action in Atlas Shrugged. Superimposed on the division between Prime Movers and everyone else is a principle of hierarchy.

With these two points, I had a bit of an epiphany. Something became much clearer that had mystified me since 1978, when I looked up reviews of a then-twenty-year-old novel.

I always saw the famous, and frivolously stupid, review of Atlas by Whittaker Chambers in National Review ("Big Sister Is Watching You") as being more than a little mysterious. Why, apart from hopelessly confusing persuasion with coercion — which I wouldn't put past anyone who'd converted from communism to Christianity — would he say:

"From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To the gas chambers — go!'"

This not only was a smear, it made no sense. Rand used no such voice, passive or active. She used no such phrasing, even by implication, in either of the two volumes of Atlas — the philosophic discourse by Galt, or the novel that surrounded it. Making such a coinage of the brain on a book reviewer's part was both ungermane and stupid. Where was he purporting to see this?

Now I have a fairly good idea. He was seeing what Robert calls a "principle of hierarchy," but a ladder that, as Philip says, is "essentialized" to no more than two steps going up from the mass of those who are unthinking. Atlantis is at the top, with the Prime Movers, but one vague and crowded step exists in between, where the Eddie Willers types sit uneasily. Only one place exists for them "to go" in either direction.

Was Willers "a problem"? Rather than being of value? I fear that in terms of the novel, not Rand's explicit philosophy, he was.

The novel's plot couldn't be told without those like him, as the drama required that the Atlanteans — in or out of Galt's Gulch — be able to carry out their choices, or at least to try to do so until they realized that it was futile in a looting, murderous, statist world. Yet outside the Gulch, the sheer number of Prime Mover minds and their well-guided hands weren't enough to pull off any productive enterprise. Many like Willers had to be around to actually do the hands-on tasks of operating the railroad, and everything else.

Willers was dramatically necessary. He wasn't philosophically necessary. Chambers picked up on the disconnect, and decided that because characters like this had no essential role in the latter sense, they were only present by dramatic permission in the former sense — and therefore, according to Rand, had no real importance at all. Thus, he felt, they were a net burden. And from this viewpoint, why bother feeding them?

... Well, I didn't say it was a valid viewpoint. It's not, and it comes from his thinking that a moral hierarchy had to necessarily be expressed in a political one, and, by implication, an economic one. Including that of who would be allowed to survive in a society that was collapsing. Rand and many others made it clear that there was no such connection, that different and even contradictory moral agendas could exist so long as individuals did not aggress against one another.

Yet that all came in nonfiction, where matters didn't have to be essentialized. In fiction, those distinctions were sheared off, lest they interfere with the thrust of the storytelling. (As I fear is likely to happen even more in Randall Wallace's Atlas screenplay. More on that later and elsewhere, perhaps.)

Chambers, methinks, saw those such as Willers being turned into something disposable, in terms of the moral hierarchy, which is all he saw in Rand's writing. Given his misperception, and the nature of Christian ethics and its fuzzy notions of universal human value, his smear is more understandable, though still not excused from a rational perspective.

I end up blaming Rand, though, for at least contributing to the problem. She made Atlas into an uneasy fusion of a moral vision, elaborated through a fairly detailed philosophy — and a novel, which by her own esthetic had to concentrate on what was given metaphysical importance.

She made too much of her philosophy filter itself through the dynamics of her novel, apart from Galt's Speech, which is disconnected in any meaningful sense from the plot. That made a combination which was unstable and, heretofore, nearly unheard of in fiction. It glistened and it mystified.

Especially in the view of anyone steeped in an ethical viewpoint that sought rules instead of principles, such as Chambers. Rand's amalgam was not easily reducible to rules. The only way he could get a handle on it was to assume that it gave up on any standards, including those of human worth.

The more I ponder it, the more I wish that Rand had separated her philosophic agenda from her literary one. Yet would such avoidance of a clash, which sparks set too many critics to flaming her, have left us with any memorable legacy, fifty years after Atlas? I really don't know.

[Philip Coates]

> She made Atlas into an uneasy fusion of a moral vision, elaborated through a fairly detailed philosophy — and a novel, which by her own esthetic had to concentrate on what was given metaphysical importance.

Steve, I don't think this is a problem for those who read a lot of novels. As someone teaching literature, every novelist has a heavily stylized, selective world and -must- exclude a great deal.

It's not a fault or a flaw but is part of the nature of a "literary" presentation. And should be.

You -have- to essentialize (unless you are Proust or any partiularly long winded naturalist) and the reader is expected to get that. Otherwise your writing is likely to be boring and lack focus.

[Greybird]

I'd have to agree with all that you say about fiction here, Philip, but I fear you misunderstood me. I said Atlas was an "uneasy fusion" of elaborated philosophy and essentialized fiction. Neither of these processes is a fault or a flaw for its subject matter. They are, however, at cross purposes as to how they're carried out.

What doesn't work, to me, is trying to do both tasks with the same material in the same presentation. It ended up that Rand couldn't do so. I'm wondering if anyone in the new book acknowledges this, which has seemed obvious to me for decades, but which I've rarely seen noted by others.

Halting the action for speeches worked, barely, at a party, for Francisco's colorful animadversions on the nature of money. Or for Rearden's defense of the productive, when called upon in court. Those, and many others, got across her philosophic takes with colorful, essentialized, potent metaphors, supporting a focus on a particular subject.

That didn't work, though, for outlining a new conception of ethics, with its implications for politics. This was a matter of framing all human action, not just that in one arena. She gave it a spirited try, taking two years to put her ideas and their connections into something approaching essentialized fiction.

Yet it didn't succeed. That level of abstraction couldn't be pulled back into being expressed in essentials. It sheared off too many inductive connections and too much deductive structure. It also had too many transparent attempts to tie Galt's reasoning to the broader plot.

I almost cringed to read, in Galt's Speech, "Do you hear me, Robert Stadler?" "... Ellis Wyatt?" "... my love?" Very little involved an awkward or belabored style in Rand's two main novels, but that device was one of the two blatant exceptions. (The other preceded the Taggart Tunnel disaster, where the omniscient narrator turned to the audience, breaking the "fourth wall" with "It is said that ...", making sardonic comments about moral responsibility.)

Rand never admitted this weakness directly. She half-acquiesced to the obvious by placing Galt's Speech as the bulk of For the New Intellectual, but made a further mistake by saying that "This is the philosophy of Objectivism." It wasn't well-argued philosophy. It was a slightly-dramatized, slightly-essentialized attempt at inserting broad, intense ethical reasoning into the setting of a fictional plot.

She spent decades fleshing out what that speech suggested, mostly at the Brandens' instigation, and never finished doing so. Not even Peikoff has finished doing so, with his idolatry in OPAR treating her work as being a tour de force against the whole history of philosophy.

Rand's conceptions of philosophy required elaboration, not essentializing, yet she didn't realize this until she finished Atlas. As a result, unless The Speech is seen as self-contained, the remainder, as a novel, suffers greatly.

[Philip Coates]

Steve,

You make many points on a number of issues. I will need to think about them some more...preferably with particular passages in Atlas in front of me.

[Jonathan]

Steve wrote:

(The other preceded the Taggart Tunnel disaster, where the omniscient narrator turned to the audience, breaking the "fourth wall" with "It is said that ...", making sardonic comments about moral responsibility.)

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

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

Perhaps these lines might have been a couple of the more conspicuous examples of the tone to which Whitaker Chambers was referring?

Also, I found this from Chambers' review interesting:

Something of this implication is fixed in the book's dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve...

...It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked...

It sounds as if Chambers is describing the dictatorial tone of Peikoff's recent decree on how true Objectivists must vote (among other decrees from Peikoff's past), or Hsieh's belief that a true Objectivist would not associate with David Kelley, Chris Sciabarra, and Barbara and Nathaniel Branden, or Perigo's view that one forfeits his right to confidentiality if he is privately critical of Perigo with someone other than Perigo, or Perigo's view that one is a disgustingly vile, subhuman scumbag if one enjoys a work of art which Perigo dislikes.

So I guess the question is, did Peikoff, Hsieh and Perigo pick up any of their arrogance, shrillness and intolerance from their perception of the tone of Atlas Shrugged, or is it merely coincidence that their behavior matches Chambers' description of the novel's tone?

J

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Steve,

I am going to shock you (I think). I agree with you.

(There. I said it. )

I'm joking, but I mean it.

Here are some quotes from Rand (all from The Letters of Ayn Rand) that partially show the root: propaganda. Objectivism arose out of Rand trying to present propaganda within a story. A full philosophy oversteps drama (as does an overview of the full nature of man). By Objectivist definition, art is a selective recreation of reality, not a full one.

Letter to Gerald Loeb, June 3, 1944

(p. 138)

Now THIS is your $64 question: "What's the idea for your next novel? A bestseller? Or a propaganda story to please you?" Are you baiting me or is this serious? Do you really think anyone can sit down and say: "Now I'm going to write a bestseller?" Why, of course it's going to be "a propaganda story to please me." Just like The Fountainhead. And if it becomes a bestseller—that is what will make it sell—that it pleased me.

Letter to Gerald Loeb, August 5, 1944

(p. 157)

Now, once more on our pet subject—commercial writing. You ask me what is the difference between ads aimed at "classes and masses"—and stories written in the same way. In the first place, the difference in the purposes of the two things. An ad is aimed "primarily" at people—its purpose is to make people do something, buy something. So it has to consider the nature of the people to whom it is addressed. A story is not written to accomplish any purpose beyond itself. (Not even a propaganda story—and I'm the chief living writer of propaganda fiction, I think—at least I think I'm the only one who knows how to do it properly—and I still say that: the propaganda is not the purpose of the story.) A STORY IS AN END IN ITSELF. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born—an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity—an end in itself, not a means to an end.

. . .

(p. 158)

Now this leads us to the question of propaganda stories and to a point on which you are most terribly wrong about The Fountainhead. You say about it: "The sex is the ginger ale that gets the castor oil of individualism and architecture across." It is nothing of the kind. It is as much and as important a part of the story as the individualism and the architecture. And it is in the story because the story required it—not because it would make readers swallow the other passages. Do you realize that sex, as such, cannot sell a story any more than architecture can? As witness—the tons and tons of sexy novels that fail, and particularly Broadway shows, full of nothing but sex, that close after one performance. NOTHING SELLS A STORY BUT THE STORY. A story sense is the one and only and first and foremost and paramount requisite of any good writer. Everything else—style, description, characterization, propaganda—is secondary. Important, but secondary.

. . .

(pp. 159-160)

You may ask, why do I write "propaganda" stories if I say that the propaganda is not my purpose. Because I want to write stories that are real—and "propaganda" is the whole meaning of life and reality. That is, ideas are the meaning of life, the only things that make a human life, as distinguished from an animal one. I believe that man determines his own life, that he sets his own purpose—and that his ideas give it meaning. Consequently, if I want to write of men, I want to write of the meaning of their lives—the field of ideas. Just as a man's life is never purposeless (if he is a true man, not a conditioned beast), so a story about men must never be purposeless. That is why I have abstract themes in my stories.

Letter to DeWitt Emery, February 14, 1948

(pp. 385-386)

Thank you for the comic-strip booklet, "The Man from Mars," which you sent me. Since you ask for the frank opinions of your readers, I would like to give you a detailed review of it.

The basic fault of the strip is that it is simply political propaganda, which has not been dramatized at all. The politics are in almost every speech, and they are merely tacked on to the pictures. The characters talk about politics, they don't act. All that happens in the strip—as far as the story is concerned—is that a man from Mars arrives on Earth, takes an automobile ride and hears a lot of talk about politics from an Earthman. He does not get involved in any action that would illustrate the state of things which the Earthman describes.

This is an extremely bad mistake which inexperienced writers who attempt to deal in propaganda usually make, and it is the reason why they fail. The artist who did the drawings for you is very good, but your writer is no dramatist and that is the crucial flaw in the whole scheme. As the strip stands now, it falls between two intentions: since its political ideas are presented only in speeches and not in the action of a story, the drawings are entirely wasted and irrelevant in relation to the message. The speeches are merely editorials which might as well be printed as an editorial. If your purpose is to convey political ideas in dramatic form, then it is the story that must illustrate and dramatize the points you wish to make. It is not a matter of just placing speeches into pictures.

. . .

(p. 387)

Believe me, I am a good propagandist as you know, and I know how propaganda works.

I think that the absolute treatise/fiction integration limit was reached with Atlas Shrugged, and at times it merely started coexisting—not integrating—in some parts of the speeches. And as you mentioned, this works from the philosophy to fiction end, also.

Michael

[Chris Grieb]

Michael,

Ayn Rand was trying to do something very difficult.

I must say I think she does this very well. Many of the passages where Frisco is talking to Hank make important philosophical points. The "money" speech is set in the context of a party where someone makes the usual dumb party comment and Franscisco repudiates the point.

Galt's speech occurs where the world has reached almost the end of its rope. Galt takes Mr. Thompson's time. The device almost works.

It occurs to me that Eddie is the average reader. Eddie is supposed to be us. I think this would reinforce the idea that being the lover of Dagny is an impossible task.

Edited May 14, 2007 by Chris Grieb

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

It occurs to me that Eddie is the average reader. Eddie is supposed to be us. I think this would reinforce the idea that being the lover of Dagny is an impossible task.

Chris,

Do you mean that it is impossible because Eddie (and we) doesn't make speeches after making love?

(Just joking...)

Michael

[Chris Grieb]

Michael,

You don't!

Maybe that explains why people are always telling me they're rearranging their sock drawer when I call for another date.

Edited May 14, 2007 by Chris Grieb

[Jonathan]

Is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion available anywhere yet?

J

[Chris Grieb]

Amazon show a publication date of May 2007. Is it not available?

[Selene]

The book's listing at Amazon.com for the paperback edition ($29.95) says that it hasn't yet been released. Is it, in fact, available? If so, at what other site?

Although the contributor list makes this truly intriguing, I have to register my surprise at two elements. Even though there's no such thing as a philosophically obscene price {rueful smile} ... $124.95 for the hardcover edition does come close.

And did they have to choose a chemical plant for the cover illustration? I know Rand's point very well about the importance of industrial civilization, and one element of the photo evokes Wyatt's Torch, but couldn't they afford some kind of art? Especially at these prices?

"And did they have to choose a chemical plant for the cover illustration?" Yes. Is your objection, [minus the absurd price] to the "art"?

[Jonathan]

Amazon show a publication date of May 2007. Is it not available?

Yeah, at Amazon it says: "Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock."

The last time I checked was back in mid August, I think, and it wasn't available then either. It seems that it hasn't yet been available, despite the "will be back in stock" comment at Amazon, which would imply that it once was.

J

[Selene]

Amazon show a publication date of May 2007. Is it not available?

Yeah, at Amazon it says: "Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock."

The last time I checked was back in mid August, I think, and it wasn't available then either. It seems that it hasn't yet been available, despite the "will be back in stock" comment at Amazon, which would imply that it once was.

J

That was not the question I asked.

[Jonathan]

Amazon show a publication date of May 2007. Is it not available?

Yeah, at Amazon it says: "Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock."

The last time I checked was back in mid August, I think, and it wasn't available then either. It seems that it hasn't yet been available, despite the "will be back in stock" comment at Amazon, which would imply that it once was.

J

That was not the question I asked.

I know. I answered Chris' question after he responded to mine. I figured I let Steve (Greybird) answer your question, since it's his post you were addressing.

J

[Robert Campbell]

The book has been reprinted, after the first printing turned out to have a lot of copyediting mistakes.

Ed Younkins told me on October 6 that it was already available in Britain, and would take a little longer to be made available in the US. However, Wheeling Jesuit has now officially announced the release of the book.

The somewhat controversial cover photo shows coke ovens. Topically appropriate, I would think.

Robert Campbell

[Chris Grieb]

Robert; It's too bad they weren't copies available at the 50th. A lot of copies would have been sold. If it is any consolation ARI's Atlas essay book is not going to be out until next year.

Edited October 27, 2007 by Chris Grieb

[Jonathan]

Thanks for the info, Robert.

J