I’ve been aware of Ayn Rand’s work for about ten years now; it amazes me that I went all the way through university without encountering her. I was compiling a list of the greatest novels of the 20th century, comparing and cross-referencing various versions to come up with ten I’d never read before. An attempt to try to keep current with the modern classics. One novel, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, I found singular because it would appear on the top of one list and then not even make the top one hundred of the next.
A brilliant artist I know then told me that reading that book had been a life-changing experience for him. Good enough for me, it made my list and I read it in the summer of 2006.
Since that time, I’ve read most of her literature, many of her philosophy texts, and quite a few of her essays. I have spent three and a half years reading her, thinking about her, and being challenged by her and I have settled on a verdict: this stuff isn’t for me.
Objectivism is tricky to nail down in a few words—Ms. Rand did nothing in a few words—but I will say that despite its appeal to capitalists and little C conservatives—neither of which I am—I went into my experiment with an open mind. I mean, you can’t pick up an 1100-page novel and say, “This is gonna suck the whole way.” No amount of bragging rights are worth that kind of masochism.
Objectivism is grey philosophy but it’s defined in definite terms; this makes it a a little slippery in the black and white world of liberals and conservatives that so many dummies insist on living in. She was pro-capitalism, yes, a conservative, yes, so then one would assume she was a supporter of the military and the religious right? No, she abhorred the use of force to get what you want (“Attila”) and saw religion as primitive nonsense (“The Witch Doctor”) barely given note in her fiction, as if it was below her to write about such mysticism.
She believed in progress, the ego, the individual, and though I view myself as someone who shifts between a little l liberal and a socialist, her interpretation of these three concepts had my interest and respect, at first. Progress, not as in being free of historical nostalgia, but as in advancing logically, not constantly looking back? Sounded good. Being confident and self-assured, happy with your role and life? An excellent lesson to learn. That it can be better to work on your own than in the slowness of a committee? Well, not always, but as I am a loner by reputation there are times this could suit me.
But when that progress means casting history to the floor, the city gobbling up more of nature, when one man by himself will always have better ideas than a group of minds together, that’s when I had a problem. To Rand, the intellectuals would become dictators because they had the self-love and vision needed to rule the rest of us.
My encounters with Rand’s work have been 75% literary, which is too bad because as a novelist, she made a hell of a philosopher. She chose novels as her vehicle because in the mid-20th she was still figuring her philosophy out. She’d moved from the Soviet Union to the United States (wonder where the hatred for collectivism comes from, eh?) and as a young woman dedicated herself to showing how her philosophy should work through her storytelling. After Atlas Shrugged, she abandoned the creative form; however, her decades-old novels, especially The Fountainhead and Atlas, continue to draw readers. They did me.
They’re impressive novels, packed with characters she’s diligently crafted and plots that never lose their focus, though the advancement is glacial in pace. They’re not great books in strictly literary terms. They’re stiff, extremely verbose—anything your average author would say in a line she says in a chapter—and while these crafted characters may seem clear to her, only a few of them can be easily differentiated. Even while in the middle of reading a book I’d have to flip back to remember who this character was or that character was and why she’s dropping his name in a twenty-page bit of completely inhuman dialogue between two of the principle characters. It’s ironic that someone who so praised the importance of the individual caused this problem. The main characters, the ones we do recognize, are not even attempts at humanity—they’re shadows on the cave wall.
The concepts she feels are drawn from reality are the most unbelievable. That society would fall into chaos if all the intellectuals left is arguably true, but that all the intellectuals have the same sets of values, and are driven and focused workaholics (c’mon, how many “brilliant but lazy” people do you know?) just ain’t so. When two of these super-people meet they must automatically have some sort of unspoken understanding—like intelligence is a pheromone geniuses give off for other geniuses to detect—and there’s nothing that some geniuses abhor more than other geniuses.
All of her books point to a growing threat of socialism (she’d left a country where it had become a reality) which would eventually destroy society, stifling the capitalists and individuals. Anthem explores a world set after the crisis, where accomplishing anything is Herculean because it must be done by committees. Anthem is my favourite of her works, because it’s science fiction and it’s mercifully short. I think the past ten years have shown we’re moving in a much more selfish and materialistic direction, but Ms. Rand would have deplored it anyway because it’s devoid of much intelligence.
Her heroes, John Galt and Howard Roark, are the ideal men because they live in her created world where everything suits them, even the crises that befall them. Placed in our reality I’m not sure these infallible gods would have such a cushy go of it. She’s so in love with these ideals that she can’t help but attack them with challenges that only make them look better in the end. They glimmer.
Her heroines, Dagny Taggert and Dominique Francon, are magnetically attracted to men of power, sleeping their way up through the great-but-flawed stereotypes until they reach the ideal, Galt and Roark, respectively, to the applause of the past lovers who adore these men as much as the woman do. In what world would a guy get dumped, look at his replacement and say, “Yeah, he’s way better than me. In fact, I love him too, in a man’s way.” Women are possessions in these books, sex is a celebration of the Promethean nature of these men, and the men in turn show no tenderness to the women. They rape them, the command them, they ignore them, and the women trip all over themselves to please these men. It’s disgusting to think that in the 20th century a female writer would write such derogatory female characters. I don’t mean to get Freudian, but it’s not far to stretch and say she’s basing these women loosely on herself, and that’s not saying too much about her.
When the right topic is broached, a character will lecture any unfortunate trapped in the scene with him for pages and pages as Rand pulls a thinly-veiled essay into the plot. The believability and literary quality dip here. I mean, they’re great essays, but as literature goes, even Shakespeare would roll his eyes and mutter, “Get to the point already.”
I’m a lover of fiction first, and I also enjoy philosophy. I was fascinated enough to read much of Rand’s work, but that’s because I like to feel challenged. There’s not enough literary quality to her novels, and that doesn’t do much for a philosophy I can’t buy into anyway. I think those who love her fiction must love her philosophy first. I believe that only when faced with adversity can humans (Rand would write only “men”) really grow. If you run away from ideas that make you question yourself then you are incapable of knowing yourself. I have gained that much from reading her, but little else.
