Yeah, Ayn Rand was a crazy lady who wrote some pretty crazy books, but crazy is not necessarily a bad attribute for a book. This woman wrote some novels that became some of the critical, enduring works of our times-- novels of ideas that people continue to react to or against a half-century or more after they were written. It's often seemed to me that Ayn Rand wins the prize for contemporary Novel of Ideas because no one else was really trying-- all the heavy literary intellectuals dropped out of the race, focusing on existential detail and personal character studies and so on.
By the latter-half of the 20th century, the liberal/left had all but abandoned fiction as a vehicle for political ideas, in fact I think it's only a small exaggeration to say that everyone abandoned it... except for the likes of Ayn Rand.
In the first half of the 20th century, there were writers like like Upton Sinclair who wrote novels about large social issues and which actually succeeded in affecting those issues-- most famously with "The Jungle" that exposed conditions in the meat-packing industry.
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, 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.
Ayn Rand did not have too many competitors in these realms by the time she was writing. The proper domain of the Serious Modern Novel when not just word games 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 fiction".
If you look around you can find some remarkable double-think on display where it's acknowledged that 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, 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-- 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 shtick with "Ideal" is that a Greta Garbo-type actress feels the need to run from the police, so she goes on the run after first grabbing 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 heros 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 bit of 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:
... 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, 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 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. 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 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, though... 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 heros 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 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.
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.
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...)
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 spiritualism in general. Then there's Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" 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 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 writer's 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 try to put over a philosophy of living, a program for the future. Can you name such a book that's successfully become part of your bedrock understanding of the world?
some older notes of mine