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PRAISE_RAND
December 22, 2014
Rev: March 19, 2021
From a version originally
Original Title: published at the dailykos.
Added to the doomfiles just
In Praise of Ayn Rand. No, really. because.
Tags:
Yeah, she was a crazy lady who wrote some pretty
crazy books, but crazy is not necessarily a bad Ayn Rand
attribute for a book. This woman wrote some novels novel of ideas
that became some of the critical, enduring works of didactic fiction
our times-- novels of ideas that people continue to purpose of fiction
react to or against a half-century or more after they Upton Sinclair
were written. It's often seemed to me that Ayn Rand War and Peace
wins the prize for contemporary Novel of Ideas H.G. Wells
because no one else was really trying-- all the heavy Michelle Dean
literary intellectuals dropped out of the race, Joanna Scott
focusing on existential detail and personal character Richard Poirier
studies and so on. Henry James
Paul Krugman
By the latter-half of the 20th century, the liberal/left Sam Anderson
had all but abandoned fiction as a vehicle for political Nietzsche
ideas, in fact I think it's only a small exaggeration to Jack Kerouac
say that everyone abandoned it... except for the likes of Robert M. Pirsig
Ayn Rand. Lucas Rhinehardt
Umberto Eco
In the first half of the 20th century, there were writers Gore Vidal
like like Upton Sinclair who wrote novels about large James Baldwin
social issues and which actually succeeded in affecting
those issues-- most famously with "The Jungle" that
exposed conditions in the meat-packing industry. RAND
In the later half of the 20th Century, there was Ayn
Rand... and who else?
The Novel of Ideas
There's an ambitious project that the novel is capable
of: it can try to fit together a grand scheme of ideas
with the texture of existence; the novel can try to
portray the relation of individuals to social
structures, it can become a laboratory for working
through political ideas and ideals using fiction as
thought experiments. I would argue that most of the
candidates you hear put forward for The Greatest Novel
Ever Written fit this profile very well-- personally, (Well, fairly well.)
I'd go with Tolstoy's "War and Peace", but "Les
Miserables", "Huckleberry Finn", "Moby Dick", "Don
Quixote" and so on all have this aspect to them. WAR_AND_PEACE
Ayn Rand did not have too many competitors in these HAWKING_FINN
realms by the time she was writing. The proper domain MOBY_DICK
of the Serious Modern Novel when not just word games QUIXAND
was character study, prose poems, perhaps a reach for
the ineffable-- using the novel as a vehicle for Big
Ideas was regarded as hopelessly juvenile, and no
greater insult existed than the label "didactic DISCH
fiction".
DIDACTICS
If you look around you can find some remarkable
double-think on display where it's acknowledged that WILDONE
the greatest novels were the ones written in the 19th
century, but no one of course would write novels like
that in the oh so sophisticated latter-half of the 20th.
In my 20s I can't remember too many other "novels of ideas"
besides Rand's that I was really engaged with-- there are
some exceptions, like novels from an earlier era, such as
Sartre's "Nausea", and one large, broad class of exceptions, NAUSEA
from the world of science fiction.
Few works of SF are entirely serious-- and that's both a
virtue and a vice of the medium-- but many do get near to
being the kind of work I'm talking about here. If you ask
yourself what will the world be like, your speculations are
necessarily rooted in your understanding of the world, and
that understanding becomes a big part of the focus of the
novel.
Notably the kind of people who are impressed with Ayn Rand
are often also fans of Robert Heinlein-- though while his
opinions had some overlap with Rand, though he was far
less consistent at hammering away at a single doctrine.
(Oh, and if you think Ayn Rand was a weak writer, you should
take a look at the products from some of her successors-- or
wannabe successors-- the libertarian SF writers L. Neil
Smith and J. Neil Shulman.)
There was a time when I was very interested in free market
doctrine, but I can't say I was ever an Ayn Rand worshiper.
I don't really understand people who can read her books and
ignore all the gaps and contradictions... I respect the
fact that Rand tried to come up with a complete theory of
existence, but there's no obligation on us to assume she
succeeded. The real craziness was Rand's assertions that
she'd really done it, and the personality cult she created
that took her word for it.
(For the irony collector, this is one of the best: Ayn Rand,
champion of individuality founded a cult that required it's
members to abandon their individuality and worship her as an
authoritarian figure...)
Ring Around Ayn
The thing that's prompted these (typically shilly-shalling
and uncommitted-- I mean nuanced) remarks on my part is
the continual, low-grade trickle of one-sided sneer pieces
against Rand. Ayn-punching is a great way to score points
in some circles, and over-zealousness in this field is never
taken as vice (I mean really, what is everyone going on
about? Just because she was a speed freak who's half-baked
rants have corrupted the morals of half of the United
States...).
One of the latest of these Ayn-sneers was on the occasion of
what sounds like the admittedly dubious publication of a
predecessor of one of Ayn Rand's plays (itself, not exactly a
polished piece of work) called "Ideal". The schtick with
"Ideal" is that a Greta Garbo-type actress feels the need to run
from the police, but before she does, she grabs a stack of a
half-dozen fan letters that she's put aside from the thousands
she's received. Each of these letters has claimed to see some
depth of meaning in her performance. She goes to each of them
one by one, and every one of them repudiates the ideal they've
expressed... except for the last (okay, here's a SPOILER
warning, for them that can be spoiled), who dies tragically
(albeit uselessly) in order to try to save her. This tragic
finish is in fact, astoundingly lame and unconvincing, one of
the weakest things Rand has written (and yes, that's saying
something), but along the way there are some bits that are
actually not bad. My personal favorite is the artist obsessed
with painting portraits of her, who doesn't recognize her when
she's standing at the door.
That's actually a pretty good job of putting over one of
Rand's recurrent themes-- she was always interested in
romantic ideals, but they were supposed to be achievable
ideals; her "romanticized" characters aren't supposed to be
just exaggerations or caricatures, her idea was that the
kind of heroes she featured were supposed to really exist (or
at least, it's supposed to be possible for them to exist,
if only we'd get out of the way). There may be a
contradiction here (not the worst in Ms. Non-Contradiction's
deck, I'm afraid), but there's a point to it that I think
makes some sense: what use would an ideal be that isn't
realizable? Are you just supposed to worship them from
afar with a sense of relief that no one can expect you to
achieve the impossible?
"Ideal" is essentially a non-political work, so Michelle
Dean, in her review in the Guardian UK has to go gunning
after it on other grounds:
[link]
"... expressing her own philosophy was her main
reason for writing fiction at all. There is no
great mystery to art in Rand: like concrete
buildings, her books are schematically
composed. They are structured as arguments, not
stories. You are meant to know exactly what they
are standing for."
"There is no effort at anything so mystical as
'transporting the reader' going on here. Ideal
marches along like a soldier high-stepping on a
gravel road. [...] By the time you get to the
end you are longing for just one moment of
indirectness, of subtlety. But then, Rand didn't
really believe in that."
No indirectness? No subtlety? Oh my, how low class.
Fiction with a message? No one does that any more.
What I'm complaining about here is the attitude of the
literati toward literature, and you can see it front and
center in the August 17/14, 2015 issue of _The Nation_, SNEERFEST
where Joanna Scott bemoans the lack of respect accorded
"difficult" fiction in today's world, and along the way
discusses remarks by Richard Poirier in 1982:
"... he points out that all probing inquiries
into life and language are necessarily difficult.
H.G. Wells may have raged at Henry James for his
confounding, complex style-- 'all for tales of
nothingness,' Wells moaned it is a 'leviathan
retrieving pebbles'-- but for a while, at least,
it seemed that those who found satisfaction in
the puzzles and paradoxes of modernism were
winning out over those ready to dismiss them as
irrelevant."
Joanna Scott only seems to be able to grasp half of what
H.G. Wells was saying: One part of the complaint is that
writers like Henry James are hard to follow, but the other
is that there's not much point in following them. Complex
language is all very well, but the case against James is
that he uses it as a substitute for complex thinking rather
than an expression of it.
Sure, difficult things can be difficult, but the accusation
against the literati is that they create difficulties just
for the sake of it.
And H.G.Wells is a really good person to complain about a
literature obsessed with small bore trivia: few writers have
done more to push the boundaries of fiction into really
difficult territory: the nature of humanity and the future
of the human race.
Aside: More difficulties with Difficulty
Just as an aside, there are a few more points I might make
about Joanna Scott's lament about the unpopularity of
"difficult" fiction. (1) It's a suspiciously self-flattering
position: "ah, so few people qualify as an elite literati
such as myself, what a shame". (2) If the idea is to
encourage people to read some books, labeling them as
"difficult" is perhaps the worst marketing idea possible.
It could be Joanna Scott and the like are their own worst
enemies.
The stuff that gets considered as "difficult" fiction is
often just not that difficult. One of my favorite
novels, "War and Peace", appears to have a reputation as
one of the most difficult ever (e.g. see "The War and [link]
Peace Phenomenon").
But what's supposed to be so difficult about it? It's length?
The number of characters? Somehow I think the generation
raised on Harry Potter isn't likely to have much trouble
with either.
Rand's Context
There's one more thing that I think can be said in
(half-hearted, back-handed) defense of Ayn Rand, that you
need to appreciate the historical context she came out of
to get why she was saying the kind of stuff she was
saying... this is a theme I come back to frequently these
days: the left is going through a (relatively) sane phase
now, and many people have forgotten the kinds of crazy
that used to find a home on the left. Much (though not
all) of the derangement of the right looks to me like
overreaction to deranged positions on the left that
hardly anyone holds any more.
A while back someone at the dailykos linked to a
Mike Wallace interview with Ayn Rand from 1959. [link]
I'm pretty sure that someone listening to that interview
today is likely to think of Rand's sketch of altruism as
human sacrifice is a gross over-statement, a weirdly
delusional straw-man: no one demands the complete sacrifice
of one's ego "for the good of others".
But the destruction of the ego was actually on the table in the
60s, it's one of the more extreme philosophies floating around,
but still it was there, and seriously advanced by some well known
figures such as Tim Leary.
"You're just being selfish" was once upon a time an all
purpose attack that would shoot down anyone trying to act in
their own interests. Post-Rand "selfishness" no longer
seems like the all-purpose accusation it once was.
In fact, acting in your own interests isn't just allowed
these days, it's practically required. There's an [link]
observation Paul Krugman made in his blog back in 2011:
"If you remember the 2004 election, which
unfortunately I do, there were quite a few
journalists who basically accused John Kerry of
being 'inauthentic' because he was a rich man
advocating policies that would help the poor and
the middle class. Apparently you can only be
authentic if your politics reflect pure personal
self-interest-- Mitt Romney is Mr. Natural.
So to say what should be obvious but apparently
isn't: supporting policies that are to your
personal financial disadvantage isn't hypocrisy--
it's civic virtue!"
Michelle Dean's review of "Ideal" goes on to quote:
"'This is the comedy, the tragedy, and the power of
Rand,' the critic Sam Anderson once wrote. 'She built
a glorious imaginary empire on that nuclear-grade
temperament, then devoted every ounce of her will and
intelligence to proving it was all pure reason.'"
That's not a bad line, the thing I would add though is that
she was hardly the only such nuclear-grade temperament on
the scene in those days. You might call Rand a Maoist of
the right.
Rand looks pretty crazy today-- partly because she really
was pretty crazy-- but also, in part because we can no
longer see the kinds of crazy that she was reacting against,
we don't have the context that made her work seem useful (to
some) in it's own time...
Why there are people who still go to sleep with Atlas under
their pillow is still another question.
The Appeal of Rand
Rand's objectivism (and free market libertarianism, which
seems identical to anyone who isn't an objectivist)
appeals to a certain kind of mind looking for a simple set
of fundamental principles that can be applied to solve all
problems.
That may be it's appeal for the intelligent-- certainly it was
one of the reasons it appealed to me, though I've got an awkward
temperament that wants simple principles that actually work--
not that anyone would've accused Rand of "faking reality" (to
her face).
However, Rand clearly also has a strong appeal for the
not-so-intelligent, who display little in common with Rand's
parade of Superior Men and Woman. You might think
relatively mediocre people would realize that someone like
Rand is not exactly on their side-- consider the case of
Dagny Taggart's loyal flunky who is left abandoned in the
dark on a broken-down train, while Dagny ascends to
Atlantis.
I think there's a clue in the image of Hugh Akston, the
great philosopher who drops out and works running a diner.
Anyone who's unhappy with their lot in life can seize on
that: the world just doesn't recognize my greatness, and so
I have disengaged with the world. Rand used to claim that
her husband Frank-- a minor actor who did nothing much with
his life except get married to Rand-- was inactive because
he was "on strike".
This is a fine excuse for the mediocre to be mediocre
without surrendering any self-respect (though it does
require a slightly delusional streak): it's not your
fault, it's the world that's the problem.
The real Rand (I think)
Ayn Rand claimed to be sketching out a new morality, she claimed
that her heroes and heroines were actually the real good guys--
but it doesn't take a very close reading to realize that there's a
certain fascination with Evil at play in her works (a common
feature among teenage rebels of all ages).
I think much of the drive of Rand's work is the same as the
drive behind stories about romanticized jewel thieves,
pirates or revolutionaries. The flamboyant rogue, the noble
criminal. And much of the flaws arise from trying to
rationalize these impulses away, and make over all her
characters into goody-goodies consistent with her ideology.
In some of her early works (notably one of her better plays,
"The Night of January the 14th") there are very sympathetic
portraits of gangsters (Al Capone considered as a noble
businessman, struggling with unreasonable government
regulation), and the Ragnar Daneskjold character in Atlas
Shrugged is essentially a re-envisioning of The Pirate
(explicitly played up as an inverse-Robin Hood). Then
there's the much-discussed rape fantasizes to which I might
add some coy dialog in Atlas commenting approvingly on
trading sex for material gain.
The moral inversions in her philosophy (such as it is) aren't a
bug, they're a feature. The motivating force behind it all was a
justification for that (arguably juvenile) "I want to be bad"
impulse.
Originally, the Fountainhead was going to have chapter head
quotes from Nietzsche, the original bad-boy of philosophy,
but Rand gave up on that idea-- presumably after actually
reading some Nietzsche, who was a complicated fellow with
something to offend everyone. In Rand's case I think she
fell out with him over his rhapsodies about submersing
yourself in the Dionysian revels of the masses (cf. "The
Birth of Tragedy"). If you're looking for advocacy of pure
individualism, Nietzsche is not it.
TRAGEDY
Closing Challenge
Of course, making a sweeping claim like "post-WWII, no
one but Ayn Rand was doing novels of ideas" is
foolhardy-- I don't know about every published novel,
not even by reputation.
As I said, most of the possible exceptions I can think
of all come from the world of "science fiction", which
I think (he said with an outrageous wave of a hand) are
the exceptions that prove the rule. If the novel of
ideals was consigned to the reviled subculture of
Science Fiction, then that tells you a lot about the
status of the novel of ideas. (By the way, you guys do
know that Science Fiction was once a reviled
sub-culture, right? These days it's taken over the
mainstream culture, and it might be hard to envision
the strange mixture of shame and pride of the 20th
century science fiction fan...)
THE_SECRET_MASTERS_OF_DESTINY
But I can think of a few other possible exceptions, like
Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums", which contrasts a few
different takes on American Buddhism and spirituality in
general. Then there's Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance", which did not bill itself as a
novel, but might be regarded as an autobiographical one...
Oh, and Rhinehardt's "The Dice Man", which is a pretty
strange novel about a pretty strange set of ideas. Or DICE
perhaps Umberto Eco's "Name of the Rose" which I'm told is
about ideas, though I didn't personally notice any when I
read it.
And I can think of many places where I might look that I'm
not as familiar with as I'd like to be. There's Gore Vidal's
novels about the early history of the United States, for
example. And there are other writers like James Baldwin
who clearly have a lot going on that I'd like to know more
about.
Nevertheless, caveats aside, here's the challenge, if you
choose to accept it:
Name a late-20th Century author using the
form of the novel to elaborate on an entire
worldview, to put over a philosophy of
living, a program for the future. Can you
name a book that's successfully become part
of your bedrock understanding of the world?
Some older notes:
RAND
AVENGING_RAND
WAR_AND_PEACE
DICE
NAUSEA
IRONTHORN
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