I suppose it's just as well I am writing this on Thanksgiving because I am going to delve into a work that many would consider a genuine turkey: 'The Fountainhead', by Ayn Rand
My God, this is a troll diary for sure:
But hang with me a minute, please. We can all learn something from everyone, no matter how boorish.
Oh good, you're still here with me under the fold. Well, it is not exactly news that the works of Ms Rand are not viewed with reverence here. And indeed, there is much in her political philosophy that is repellant, dated or just plain crazy. And also, yes it is true that our political enemies have adopted her as their own lodestar which I can't resist saying has been a decidedly mixed blessing. That they have adopted her without really understanding what she was saying. . .because, you know, that would mean lots of reading and stuff . . .deserves mention, but explaining her to conservative trolls is not really what I want to do with my life.
No instead, I thought I would want to dissect her novel to a progressive audience. Primarily as a service: 'The Fountainhead' can be best thought of as a modern gold mine: there is an awful lot of ore to sift through to get a nugget of something valuable. So call me BHP Billiton; I'll do it for you. Because I do think that any thinking person can get something from her work; it is very hard to write 690 pages and not say something worthwhile. And I'm not the only progressive to think so
(that's Hunter Thomson, by the way). Don't believe me? Read his letters
Furthermore, I suspect I am not alone in saying that I first read the Rand canon when I was young (nineteen, I think) and my changing attitudes toward what she had to say as well as the literary quality - or lack thereof - reflect my own development, maturity, and - I choose this word deliberately - progress as a thinker. Not everyone comes to the enlightened state of mind in which one wishes genuine progress for the society around us exactly this way, but I did. In short, I am not afraid to say that an ardent reading of the works of Ayn Rand was a milestone in the evolution of my current passionate progressive-libertarian political and philosophical viewpoint and it is one of the ironies of life that this is often the case.
OK, so lets crank up the excavators and start with this doorstop, all 695 pages of it. It is divided into four parts, each of which is titled after a different one of the four main characters: The main character, the hero, as it were, Howard Roark: the brilliant architect who follows his own standards and who is perhaps loosely based on the real architect Frank Lloyd Wright; Peter Keating: a fellow architect and classmate of Roark who follows the standards laid out by others; Gail Wynand, a ruthlessly successful newspaper publisher who thinks he follows his own standards; and Ellsworth Toohey, the villain of the novel, an architect critic and intellectual who is out to destroy every valid standard that society holds dear (and who Rand based, loosely on the English socialist Harold Laski). There is also a strong female character: Dominique Francon, Roark's love interest, the daughter of a prominent architect, and in some ways the most nihilistic major character I have read in a novel, outside of the character of Naphta in Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain".
The novel is certainly ambitious in scope; it follows the career of our intrepid architect hero over 18 years, from 1922 when he is expelled from his undergraduate architect school, to roughly the start of World War 2, when he is conned into designing a massive housing project for Peter Keating, who will pass the work off as his own. Roark then blows up the half finished building in disgust as architectually pointless modifications are made to it; and gives this 8 page ringing monologue at his subsequent trial that sort of lays out the Randian philosophy of 'rational selfishness' which she was later to expand into a distinctive body of thought termed 'Objectivism' (and I am not here to explicate or rebut its gross oversimplifications. Many others have done that). The novel ends as it begins, focused on the person of the hero, Howard Roark.
For a flavor of the novel, we will look at the ending, quoting as I am from Anne Heller's "Ayn Rand and the World she Made"
On the novel's closing page, Roark's almost completed skyscraper rises as an emblem of the independent mind in action. To both Rand and her heroine Dominique, who stands at the building's base, the sight is as thrilling as the male principle itself. The tower springs and thrusts. It "breaks through clay, the iron, the granite" of the earth and, carrying the earth's fire to the surface "Shoots out to freedom". As Dominique boards a construction elevator and rides skywards to join her new husband [she has previously been married to both Keating and Wynand] at the pinnacle, she floats above the world's greatest city. . .until "there was only the ocean, the sky and the figure of Howard Roark" and so ends 'The Fountainhead"
Presumably one can imagine the good sweaty passion-fuck that will await the heroine at the end of her elevator ride. I know I would.
In fact, I'll give one more brief example of the overwrought, bodice-ripping romance flavor of the novel, which you can like or not, according to taste. This is the first encounter between Roark and Dominique, when he is working as a workman in her father's quarry:
She fought like an animal. But she made no sound. She did not call for help. She heard the echoes of her blows in a gasp of his breath, and she knew it was a gasp of pleasure. She reached for the lamp on the dressing table. He knocked the lamp out of her hand. The crystal burst to pieces in the darkness.
He had thrown her down on the bed and she felt the blood beating in her throat, in her eyes, the hatred, the helpless terror in her blood. She felt the hatred and his hands; his hands moving over her body, the hands that broke granite. She fought in a last convulsion. Then the sudden pain shot up, through her body, to her throat, and she screamed. Then she lay still.
Tasty, eh? Rand doesn't do subtlety. In fact, you can already gather a soap-opera quality to the story, which will persist to the end, I promise you that.
So lets see how Rand sketches out her main characters; they're broad and crude, but you must admit, they're vivid. There are a host of minor ones in the novel, but life is short:
For Roark:
He did not laugh as his eyes stopped in awareness of the world around him. His face was like a law of nature - a thing one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; grey eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner, or a saint
Roark is clearly written to embody all that Rand found heroic. His youthfulness (and make no mistake, the novel is a hymn to youth; probably one of the reasons it would be so tough to like if you read it in middle age); the way he steadfastly refuses to compromise at all about his work, walking out of great jobs if they dare alter any lines of his masterpieces; his willingness to get expelled from his college for being too original (the only people I know of who got expelled did very little or no work at all, but never mind); and his arrogant certainty in being right at all times, so very characteristic of those who don't like being lectured on wider issues, and honestly something I related to as a youth where I took some pride in not giving a shit what other people thought, especially of me.
You know, I have to say here: For all that, I don't find Roark all that heroic. Maybe it's me, but I have a slightly different view of heroism, best expressed here.
And I didn't learn that from Rand; I learned it from thinking about what the implications of the Stanford Prison Experiment really are.
For Wynand:
People said that Gail Wynand's greatest deception, among many, was his appearance. He looked like the decadent, over-perfected end product of a long line of exquisite breeding - and everybody knew that he came from the gutter
He's the powerful newspaper magnate that befriends our hero and ultimately betrays him, because of course, he is not the ideal heroic man. He only thinks he is, until the end, when he realizes he has been living through the opinions of others, like everyone else.
For Toohey, Roark's antipode, a shrunken physically nondescript frail person (deliberately made that way of course) - here he is pontificating about destroying society
Don't you find it interesting to see a huge complicated piece of machinery, such as our society, all levers and belts and interlocking gears, the kind that looks as if one would need an army to operate it - and you find that by pressing your little finger against one spot, the one vital spot, the center of all its gravity, you can make the thing crumble into a worthless heap of scrap iron? It can be done, my dear.. . Oh well, scrap iron has its uses.
Naturally, Toohey tries to destroy our hero in a number of ways, on his way to assuming the absolute power of a dictator (this was written in the days of Hitler and Stalin, of course.) Does he succeed in the end? Well. . .
And, finally for Keating:
He sat well in front, trying to keep his eyes on the platform, because he knew that many people were looking at him and would look at him later. He did not glance back, but the consciousness of those centered glances never left him. His eyes were dark, alert, intelligent. His mouth, a small upturned crescent faultlessly traced, was gentle and generous, and warm, with the faint promise of a smile. His head had a certain classical perfection in the shape of the skull, in the natural wave of black ringlets about finely hollowed temples. He held his head in the manner of one who takes his beauty for granted, but knows that others do not. He was Peter Keating, star student of Stanton, president of the student body, captain of the track team, member of the most important fraternity, voted the most popular man on campus
This is not flattery; all this description does is set him up for the pages of descriptions about what a phony he is - in every way, letting whatever is popular influence him, and secretly consulting Roark on the design of his buildings of real importance. One of these buildings wins a major competition, and Keating gets to live with the notion he is secretly a fraud. Rand shows him no mercy; a little later on in the novel he has his first interview with Toohey, who pointedly asks him about the plan of that building, so different from the work he usually does:
"You know, I was greatly intrigued by its plan. It's a most ingenious plan. A brilliant plan. Very unusual. Quite different from what I have observed in your previous work. Isn't it?". . . Keating noticed that Toohey's eyes stood centered in the middle of the lenses of his glasses and the lenses stood focused straight on his pupils, and Keating knew suddenly that Toohey knew he had not designed the plan of that building. This did not frighten him. What frightened him was that he saw approval in Toohey's eyes
I also have to say that of all the characters/characatures in the novel, I find that of Peter Keating the most believable. We all know phonies, men of small conviction and great ambition, those who will bend every which way to seek the approval of others, even others they despise. Why here's a real life Peter Keating
So then, what is the point of wading through this morass and why am I doing this? The insights in the book for one.
Take Toohey's observation of the power of appearance. There is a scene early on in the novel that takes place in a cocktail party of some hostess and Roark, Toohey and Dominique are all there. And of course, both Dominique and Toohey instantly recognize Roark and what he is by seeing him. Let's leave aside the notion that this illustrates a common failing of youth: taking things at face value. People commonly can read others and we often make decisions quickly by rapid assessments of any situation. Doubt that? go to any singles bar.
Rand had some notion of where power of public opinion comes from, and I think it is an insight as relevant today as it ever was. This, indeed is one of the subtexts of The Fountainhead. Naturally, The character of the newspaper magnate Wynand thinks it comes from him, just as I believe there are many in journalism arrogant enough to think they mold public opinion (see Rupert Murdick). While this is partially true, by virtue of being human they are just as much molded by it and I think newspapers are often the product of what society believes, not its source. It is those who craft ideas which catch on and get repeated, and repeated and repeated that shape what public opinion is. Like it or not, Rand was one of them - and she has her evil person Toohey, near the end of the novel disabuses Wynand of the notion he ever had any real influence, by leading a successful strike against Wynand's paper, and all his money can't break it. Does Fox 'news' tell those empty people who watch it what to think? Or does it validate it, which is why they watch it in the first place. And while I am at it, do I read kos diaries because I want to know how to approach various issues, or do I come here because I read what I want to hear in the first place.
Here's the heart of the argument: There are times when a fierce defense of the power of individuality is relevant to today's political issues, and Rand was certainly an advocate for individualism : "Kill the individual. Kill man's soul. The rest will follow automatically" says her arch villain. As my friends and acquaintances can tell you, I am fiercely - passionately if you will - pro-choice, and a vocal advocate of the empowerment of women, and this comes to me straight from Rand, who was also strongly pro-choice. I'll go further. It seems to me that an unapologetic moral defense of reproductive rights, based entirely on the nobility of a woman as a person with absolute rights that don't just vanish when she is pregnant, is the only ultimately effective arguments against the scum of the forced birthers, with their billboards, their megaphones, their unctuous hypocritical emotions for all the embryos out there, and their taste for the honorable murder.
Along with this, the book sort of codified my suspicion of organized religion as requiring a bit too much humility on the part of its subjects. No offense to people of faith reading this, but there is a line in there about the essence of religion is terrified abasement. While I don't think this is strictly accurate - indeed it is an arrogant certainty that they know they're right that most puts me off most modern incarnations of the world's major religions - It was certainly a step in what would be my ultimate rejection of anything deistic and a foundation for the moral imperative of helping one's fellow person's because of a profound conviction that we are alone in our humanity and that there is no justice in the world except that which we as humans put into it.
Finally, I would relate a word about passion; it is no coincidence that the best Ayn Rand movie out there is appropriately called "The Passion of Ayn Rand". Even the hostile reviewers of TF, and there were many, conceded the passion of the book - clearly this is someone who believes every word she writes, and it is significant that one of the formative events in the life of Wynand, the newspaper publisher, is when he reads an editorial in another newspaper that really inspires him; he goes to see this editor and starts talking about the integrity of the piece, and this editor replies "How do you expect me to remember every piece of swill I write"? A straw opponent maybe, and yet I really think - obviously - that if one ventures to show ones stuff in public, one should really believe what one writes. I do. Not only do I believe it, I believe it passionately. Judging by the writing I encounter on the site, I conclude that many others are passionate about their beliefs as well, which, in the final analysis is why I wrote this to begin with.