Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: From Romantic Fallacy to Holocaustic Imagination
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Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:
From Romantic Fallacy to
Holocaustic Imagination
Thomas F. Bertonneau
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged—
“The only authentic epochê is ... victory
over desire, victory over Promethean pride.” the latter more than 1,000 pages long.”5
—René Girard1 Delving into the former, Wilson found
himself “immediately put off by the rhe-
torical tone of the opening,” which he
“When the SS torturer becomes the villain of
the war film, he is turned into a sacrificial quotes: “Howard Roark laughed.... He
figure, a scapegoat, [he becomes the] struc- stood naked at the edge of a cliff,” and so
tural equivalent of the Jud Süss in Nazi forth.6 Turning to Atlas, Wilson writes, “I
cinema.” —Eric Gans2 remembered that I had seen some of this
book before...an immensely long speech,
made over the radio by a man called John
I
Galt...to justify individualism.”7 Rand’s
NO ACCOUNT OF Ayn Rand’s (1905-1982) prose struck Wilson as “too wordy” and
sprawling, morally incoherent end-of-the- he had, on that former occasion, “given it
world story Atlas Shrugged (1957)3 can up.”8
begin elsewhere than in an acknowledg- When students now would ask what
ment of the way in which the novel’s Wilson thought of Rand, he described her
fascinating spectacle can draw a reader as “a typical female writer, a kind of mod-
in despite himself. This spectacle is the ern Marie Corelli, much given to preach-
book’s secret, which the present essay ing and grandiose language.”9 In the au-
aims to investigate. tumn of 1962, however, confined to bed
The British writer Colin Wilson gives a by a severe case of influenza, Wilson revis-
typical account.4 He first became con- ited Atlas, “determined to give it a fair
scious of Rand’s work while lecturing in trial.” Pushing himself through the first
America in the autumn of 1961; univer- twenty pages, Wilson at last finished the
sity students would ask him his opinion book, finding that he “had done Miss Rand
about her. He responded that he had a considerable injustice” insofar as she
never heard of Rand, whereupon, as he possessed “the ability to tell a story... with
writes, “somebody presented me with pa- a minimum of clichés.”10
perback copies of her two major novels, In Wilson’s judgment, Atlas “has a great
deal in common with Aldous Huxley’s
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU teaches English litera- Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen
ture at SUNY, Oswego, and is a regular contribu- Eighty Four.”11 Like those, “it is a tirade
tor to Modern Age: A Quarterly Review. against collectivism and government in-
296 Fall 2004terference with individual freedom.”12 the sense of…indifference to other Pace Wilson, while one might acknowl- people but in the sense of intelligent self- edge a few similarities, Atlas shows little interest.”14 Yet while Rand might lay claim of the political or psychological acumen to “a considerable intellect…it is… nar- of Orwell or Huxley, and none at all of row and incurious” so that, “having estab- their individual stylistic felicity—but this lished to her own satisfaction that all that stands as a parenthesis to the criticism. is wrong with the world is lack of faith in No subtlety kept Wilson riveted for two reason and its muddled ideas on self- days and a thousand pages but rather interest and altruism, she seems to take Rand’s broad-stroke depiction of a grand no further interest in the history of ideas.”15 industrial Götterdämmerung across the Wilson makes this pronouncement on three parts of the novelistic tapestry. the story of Galt’s strike against a corrupt Rand has the technological infrastruc- world: “Collectivism has been established ture of North America collapsing in ruin, as the scapegoat that explains the deca- often with incendiary effects, while a gang- dence of our civilization” and having ster regime that has superseded the fed- found her miscreant, “rather as Hitler eral government systematically loots the found the Jews,” Rand “then begins her national economy. Moral invertebrates crusade.”16 like James Taggart, who oversees the de- Wilson’s encounter with Rand evoked struction of the Taggart Transcontinen- an equally telling sequel. Convinced that tal Railway, or the Al Capone-like Cuffy his own critique of “the fallacy of insignifi- Meigs, the gang-leader just before the cance”—in books like The Outsider (1956) final catastrophe, exercise a kind of mor- and Religion and the Rebel (1957)—had bid glamor as Rand demonstrates the dras- points in common with Rand’s “Objectiv- tic consequences of their larceny-dis- ism,” Wilson wrote to her, outlining the simulated-as-altruism. The protagonists, similarities as he saw them, with the hope Dagny Taggart (James’s sister) and Henry of opening communications. No reply “Hank” Rearden (metallurgist-entrepre- came from Rand. Instead, Rand’s then neur), search an obliterated landscape secretary, Nathaniel Branden, wrote Wil- for signs of the elusive Galt, who might be son, rebuking him: “It is possible that you either the evil agency behind all of the do not realize the singular inappropriate- massive decay (“the destroyer”) or the ness of your letter to the author of Atlas genius-inventor whose deus ex machina Shrugged. Perhaps [a study of Objectiv- of a free-energy motor will save civiliza- ism] will give you a new perspective on tion. the full context in which your letter was Wilson goes on to say that Rand’s epos received and appraised—and might sug- inspired him with a double response. As gest to you a new approach.”17 Wilson had “always detested the ‘fallacy Wilson had mentioned in his letter his of insignificance’ in modern literature, initial dislike of Rand’s work, his change the cult of smallness and meanness, the of mind, and his intention to devote an atmosphere of defeat that broods over essay to Atlas. He then cites Branden’s the twentieth-century novel,” he “was final sentence: “Miss Rand would be very delighted by the sheer health of Ayn pleased to hear of your interest in her Rand’s view.”13 He can even understand, work—when and if you correct your of- he writes, what Rand means when she fense against it in the same terms that the extols that virtue of selfishness for which offense was committed.”18 As Wilson says, so many applaud or revile her, depending “I was somewhat staggered by this messi- on their perspective: “Selfishness has al- anic tone.”19 ways been man’s vital principle—not in But the “messianic tone,” a strenuous Modern Age 297
pontification, operates everywhere in object of blackmail to the same end per-
Rand, as in her followers. So too does a petrated by the repellent Dr. Floyd Ferris
naïve attitude towards history and phi- of the fraudulent “National Science Insti-
losophy that at times can only be de- tute.” The blackmailer threatens to make
scribed as sophomoric. Consider the fol- public Rearden’s affair with Taggart soeur.
lowing excessively rhetorical question- Protectively, Rearden decides to cede
cum-asseveration from Rand’s Introduc- the patent for his miracle alloy (“Rearden
tion to a paperback edition of Victor Metal”) to the government gang. Numb
Hugo’s Ninety-Three: “Have you ever won- from fighting his hopeless action against
dered what they felt, those first men of the the “looters,” Rearden imagines, as Rand
Renaissance, when—emerging from the puts it, “a long line of men [who] stretched
long nightmare of the Middle Ages, hav- through the centuries from Plato onward,
ing seen nothing but the deformed mon- whose heir and final product was an in-
strosities and gargoyles of medieval art as competent little professor with the ap-
the only reflection of man’s soul—they pearance of a gigolo and the soul of a
took a new, free, unobstructed look at the thug.”21 She means Ferris, who, however,
world and rediscovered the statues of the is now tied to his looming precursor, the
Greek gods, forgotten under the piles of student of Socrates and the author of The
rubble?”20 Republic, Phaedrus, Symposium, and the
Where to begin sounding the seismic others. A specter, it would seem, haunts
fissures in Rand’s Weltanschauung, as re- Atlas Shrugged.
vealed in the mass of errors assumed by The passage is odd, not least in its
this verbal tit-bit? Gargoyles are part of specificity, since Rearden, although edu-
the Gothic sculptural repertory and have cated and intelligent, nowhere else in the
a specific meaning in context, but so are novel demonstrates any particular knowl-
radiant saints and Holy Mothers—often edge about the philosophical tradition
in the medium of translucent glass; so too or the history of ideas: to the contrary, he
are the burgesses of the cathedral-towns, has to be tutored in logic, ethics, and
the merchant-class on whose willing lar- epistemology by Francisco d’Anconia;
gesse the great lady-churches rose. The nor, elsewhere, does Rand mention any
cathedral itself represents an engineer- other figure in philosophy, except for the
ing marvel unequaled until the twentieth fictional Hugh Akston. Shortly after
century, but Rand, whose architect-hero Rearden experiences this curiously defi-
in The Fountainhead wants to build a mile- nite vision, he emerges from reverie to
high tower, sees only those imps and hear Ferris finish up his threatening speech
devils. Rand seems blind to the fact that with a naked admission: “We’re after power
what followed the centuries of Christen- and we mean to get it.”22 Rearden sud-
dom was the convulsion of the Reforma- denly grasps that Ferris and his gang re-
tion, culminating in the bloody mayhem quire what they so volubly despise, the
of the Thirty Years War. “Middle Ages” is, virtues namely of industry and productiv-
finally, a prejudicial coinage of the the- ity, and that his years of concession to
osophist-cum-socialist Auguste Comte, their parasitism constitute a moral lapse
which Rand adopts with uncritical insou- on his own part.
ciance. In specifying Plato as the fountain-
There is a moment, in Atlas, relevant to head of the collectivist debacle that Atlas
the foregoing, when Rearden, having just describes, in singling him out as the ori-
subverted the kangaroo court designed gin of all that distorts the mob-ridden
to make an expropriation of his factory contemporary world, Rand invokes her
look legal, discovers himself to be the own prescient version of the “vast right-
298 Fall 2004wing conspiracy” that figures in recent “the capital of… the Second Renaissance left-liberal rhetoric. A type of sortilege has …of oil derricks, power plants, and mo- taken place: in naming the name, Rand tors made of Rearden Metal.”25 has put responsibility where, as she sees Rand’s notion of Plato—as the arch- things, it properly belongs. Those who offender against her own matter-oriented know Rand’s work can reproduce her ar- Neo-Romanticism—rests on a breathtak- gument: Plato, the grandfather of group- ing ignorance of what it would dismiss. As resentment, gratuitously and falsely di- acute as Rand’s personifications of mili- vides the world into the realm of becom- tant collectivism and unmitigated power- ing and the realm of being, stigmatizing seeking are, they cannot approach in ei- the former as a mere pale copy of the ther the acumen of their insight or the latter. Out of envy against men of practi- depth of their analysis the diagnosis of cal ability, Plato degrades material ac- the identical socio-pathologies in Plato’s complishment and insists that the philo- dialogues, where figures like Thrasy- sophic life—the cultivation of bodiless machus, Ion, Callicles, and the trio of spirit—is the highest value. In so doing, Socrates’s accusers at his trial embody the Hellene glorifies non-productive con- exactly the kinds of viciousness against templation and rancorous dialectic at which the Atlas-author, to adapt Wilson’s the expense of the pragmatists, the entre- phrase, launches her crusade. Rearden’s preneurs and investors, at whom the trial resembles Socrates’s trial in any num- pseudo-intellectuals superciliously sneer ber of ways, except that in Rand’s Roman- as coarse and vulgar, but on whom they tic conceit the hero must—eventually— depend for their security and leisure. As triumph over his persecutors, just as the Taggart in the white hat tells Rearden, Rearden and his associates triumph over the “mystics” have always preached that, the looters in the final, precipitate down- “the inferior animals who’re able to pro- fall of the ransacked world. Socrates, too, duce should serve those superior beings triumphs, but not pragmatically; only in whose superiority in the spirit consists of his metaphysical exemplum does he tran- incompetence in the flesh.”23 scend the assembly’s corrupt condemna- The millennial queue of reality-deniers tion and so guarantee forever its ill re- descending out of the past and stultifying pute. the present finds its contrast, in Atlas, in Rearden imitates Socrates when he another linear image: that of railroad confounds his accusers by the simple tracks on a straightaway reaching to the expedient of omitting to mount any de- distant vanishing point whose instrumen- fense. The difference is that Rand pre- tal abolition the rails portend. Rearden serves Rearden so that he (and she, and and Taggart soeur explicitly identify their we) can later gloat. Again, Rand’s misrep- own will with this image near the climax resentation of Plato will hardly pass for of Part I of Atlas (“Non-Contradiction”) original; it replicates, without acknowl- when they ride in the locomotive cabin edgment, a similar vehement misrepre- during the first run on the John Galt Line sentation in Nietzsche’s treatment of both in Colorado: “She saw that the track was Socratic and Judaeo-Christian morality, sweeping downward, that the earth flared the two of which he describes famously as open, as if the mountains were flung kindred versions of a slave-morality. Rand’s apart—and at the bottom, at the foot of term is the sanction of the victim, or “altru- Wyatt Hill, across the dark crack of a ism.” canyon, she saw the bridge of Rearden The mention of Plato, almost exactly Metal.”24 The Wyatt oil fields, which the the halfway point in the narrative, pos- line serves, will become, the pair hope, sesses an additional significance. It has Modern Age 299
as its context a long sequence, from the cluding one thing for the sake of another,
beginning of the book until the end, in thus characterizes Taggart essentially.
which the author develops a recurring One might note, too, the preference in
theme that lies at the heart of her fiery Taggart’s expostulation for the collec-
vision. I refer to the theme of sacrifice. tive (“the whole country”) over the indi-
vidual. To do business, to make money:
II
this, for Taggart, amounts to, and may be
In his study of The Ayn Rand Cult (1999), dismissed as, “greed.” Quite apart from
Jeff Walker offers an amusing tally of re- the scandalous Wyatt, any competitor
curring items in the Atlas vocabulary. can appear to Taggart and his associates
Writes Walker: “Destroy or destruction oc- as an intolerable obstacle to the fulfilment
curs 278 times,” “evil… is deployed a stag- of whatever wish they cherish in a given,
gering 220 times,” and “the evil of sacrifice disconnected moment. In one of their
or [of the] sacrificial requires 135 deploy- confabulations, at the end of which they
ments.”26 So it goes. Let us contemplate affirm again their principle that “people
some instances of the last. who are afraid to sacrifice somebody have
In Part I, quite early in the narrative, no business talking about a common
James Taggart is discussing with Eddie purpose,” Taggart rebukes Paul Larkin’s
Willers, one of the minor protagonists, regretful codicil—“I wish we didn’t have
the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad’s to hurt anybody”—with the scornful for-
chief current competition. The Phoenix- mula: “That is an anti-social attitude.”30
Durango Line has now “got most of the Earlier in the same consultation,
freight traffic of Arizona, New Mexico and Taggart has posed in the form of a ques-
Colorado.”27 In particular, due to disre- tion that, “when everybody agrees… when
pair on the Taggart Transcontinental, the people are unanimous, how does one
Phoenix-Durango’s Dan Conway has se- man dare to dissent?”31 The palaver con-
cured a contract with Ellis Wyatt of Wyatt cludes with a toast on a Marxist theme:
Oil, the biggest industrialist in the region. “Let’s drink to the sacrifices to historical
This rankles Taggart frère. He describes necessity.”32 In these bits of conversation
Wyatt to Willers as “a greedy bastard who’s and exposition, Rand adds to her usage of
after nothing but money,” a “destructive, the term sacrifice a linkage to the extreme
unscrupulous ruffian,” and “an irrespon- conformism of unanimity; and she makes
sible upstart who’s been grossly over- it clear that, within the mentality indi-
rated.”28 Taggart asks rhetorically: “What cated by the term, to flout unanimity is
does he expect? That we drop all our necessarily anathema—a case of “anti-
other shippers, sacrifice the interests of social” behavior.
the whole country to give him our Sacrifice of this sort, the annihilation
trains?”29 Willers replies in the negative, of the one for the welfare of the remain-
adding that Wyatt expects nothing; he der, stems from a distinctly unanimous, or
merely takes his trade to those who handle collective, rather than from any individual,
it competently. Rand emphasizes from type of resentment. The schemers invari-
the start the resentfulness in Taggart’s ably justify their schedule of persecution
character, by expression of which he com- and expulsion by invoking an imminent
pensates rhetorically for his lack of pro- crisis that the victim’s immolation will
ductive ability. avert. Even the harassed Conway, whose
Taggart, as his ire suggests, assumes railroad the gang dissolves in favor of
that existence is a zero-sum game in which Taggart’s Rio Norte Line, says to Taggart
wealth can only be redistributed but never la femme, “I suppose somebody’s got to
increased. The idea of a sacrifice, of ex- be sacrificed,” not excepting himself
300 Fall 2004should the lot so fall, for “men have got to tion. The collective murderers would get together.”33 never admit to harming a guiltless party. The Atlas protagonists, by contrast, Rearden’s judges respond to his candid rebel against the trend, even when they description of what they had planned for cannot fully articulate their reasons. On him with calming denials: “Why do you the occasion just cited, Miss Taggart ob- speak of human sacrifices?” and “you do jects to Conway: “Nothing can make self- not really believe...that we wish to treat immolation proper.... Nothing can make it you as a sacrificial victim.”39 In private, moral to destroy the best.”34 In Part II of however, the gang-leaders willingly allow the novel (“Either-Or”), at Rearden’s trial, how “sacrifice is the cement which unites the defendant tells his accusers, “If it is human bricks into the great edifice of now believed that my fellow men may society.”40 sacrifice me in any manner they please for Here we do see a resemblance to the the sake of whatever they deem to be their public pillorying—as in the regular “ten- own good, if they believe that they may minute hate”—in Orwell’s 1984. We might seize my property simply because they also think of the 1930s show-trials under need it—well, so does any burglar.”35 In Stalin, when one purported high-level defining the ideal of justice, which the saboteur after another was offered up in procedure against him so flagrantly vio- public to Marxism-Leninism. The sacrifi- lates, Rearden asserts that “no clash of cial character of the National Socialist interests” would ever divide “men who do Holocaust is self-evident; if the sacrificial not demand the unearned and who do character of the Soviet atrocities were not practice human sacrifices.”36 The less so, it should not be. Rand came to the charges against him qualify, therefore, United States as an escapee from Lenin’s not as juridical, but as sacrificial in some Russia. anthropologically primitive sense. It is the presence in Atlas of these genu- When Rearden declares, “were [I] asked ine, if not terribly original, insights that to immolate myself for the sake of crea- obscures something else. It is that some- tures who want to survive at the price of thing else that motivates me, as I have my blood... I would reject it as the most done, to call Rand’s magnum opus “mor- contemptible evil,”37 he earns a round of ally incoherent.” Let me return to that unexpected applause from part of the excessive adverb in Rand’s sketch of gallery. Yet, alongside those who cheer Rearden’s public detractors. The super- for his having enunciated the ethical prin- fluous “maliciously” belongs to another ciple, he also notes “the faces of loose- thread in Rand’s grand narrative that mouthed young men and maliciously twines about her plausible analysis of the unkempt females, the kind who led the “mob” or “looter” psychology as collec- booing in newsreel theaters at any ap- tive in its nature and based on a need for pearance of a businessman on the victims. In her comments on fiction gen- screen.”38 Let us record the excessiveness erally and on her own work, Rand made of that adverb, “maliciously.” much of authorial omniscience, of the Like the naming of Plato, the adverbial artist as the creator of every detail of an excessiveness betrays a certain authorial imaginary universe. She makes the back- gratuity. A simple “unkempt” would have ground, she moves the characters this served. Nevertheless, Rand has discerned way or that, and she puts the words in something about sacrifice that those who their mouths; they are glorious or repel- study it among classicists and anthro- lent according to her plan. This is as it pologists have likewise noticed: that it must be. works most efficiently under dissimula- Homer, in the Odyssey, takes care from Modern Age 301
Book I forward, to heighten the boorish- the scene, I wish to state again that, in her ness and menace, the aggression and glut- divulgence of the “altruist” mentality, tony, of the suitors, the better that read- Rand seems to me accurately to have ers might participate vicariously in the gleaned much about late-twentieth cen- hero’s slaughter of them in the climax. A tury left-liberal piety, not least its addic- story without catharsis is hardly a story at tion to righteous display. But, to use one all. Rand knows this demand of fiction of her own favorite terms, her narrative and she draws her villains in broad strokes; builds on a borrowed premise. she does this to prepare us, her readers, to The soirée will therefore reveal a par- participate vicariously in something liament of scoundrels. Comes first Dr. like—yet also unalike—Odysseus’s kill- Pritchett, professor of philosophy at the ing of the freebooters who have, during a once venerable but now corrupt Patrick lustrum of his absence, pilfered his larder Henry College. He is a nihilist in the style and threatened his wife and son. of Jean-Paul Sartre or Jacques Derrida: To begin ratcheting up reader outrage, “Man? What is man? He’s just a collection Rand has the threat to Rearden come in of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.”46 part from his own family. Wife Lillian will According to Pritchett’s wisdom, “Man’s eventually sum herself up in the resentful metaphysical pretensions...are preposter- formula, “I can’t produce [Henry’s] metal, ous”; a man is “a miserable bit of proto- but I can take it away from him.”41 Rand plasm, full of ugly little concepts and admits Lillian’s feminine beauty, only mean little emotions–and it imagines it- adding that “the eyes were the flaw,” be- self important!”47 In the professor’s opin- ing “neither quite gray nor brown, life- ion, “reason...is the most naïve of all su- lessly empty of expression.”42 Rand has perstitions” and contradictions that be- Rearden’s mother chide him for his in- devil said superstition in fact resolve them- volvement in his business: “You think selves a priori in a Platonic “higher philo- that if you pay the bills, that’s enough, sophical sense.”48 Pritchett argues how don’t you?”43 Rand describes la mère’s “nothing is anything.”49 His precursor on voice on this occasion as “half-spitting, the faculty, Hugh Akston, taught by con- half-begging.”44 Brother Philip, a whining trast how “everything is something.”50 freeloader, begs money for “The Friends Comes next Balph [sic] Eubank, author of Global Progress” and claims it to be “a of the novel The Heart is a Milkman, who martyr’s task.”45 The preparation of our ire opines: “the literature of the past...was a gets under way in earnest, however, in a shallow fraud” that “whitewashed life in chapter (“The Non-Commercial”) in Part I order to please the money tycoons whom devoted to Lillian’s cocktail party on the it served.”51 Rand unveils the repellent tenth anniversary of her marriage to Henry. Bertram Scudder “slouched against the Rand employs a cinematic technique: the bar.”52 He makes radio propaganda for the authorial eye and ear, like the tracking gang on the order of “property rights are camera, travel among the partiers regis- a superstition” and “one holds property tering now this, now that conversation, only by the courtesy of those who do not acquainting the spectators with key indi- seize it.”53 Comes next Mort Liddy, a so- viduals among the predators-in-guise-of- called composer, who turns on the radio saints. so that everyone can hear a broadcast of Readers should interpret that what- his new composition. It is a mere jazzed ever later befalls these self-sanctifiers, or up version of a melody stolen from one of others like them, stems from their defec- Atlas’s minor protagonists, the real com- tive theory of men and the world. Ethos, as poser Richard Halley. Liddy’s score “was Heraclitus said, is fate. Before sampling Halley’s melody torn apart, its holes stuffed 302 Fall 2004
with hiccoughs.”54 I have italicized the murder as a means of appeasing a super-
phrase “torn apart” for its archly sacrifi- natural principle. It is also—it is prima-
cial connotation. Think of King Pentheus rily—a sacrificial narrative, as most of
in Euripides’ Bacchae. popular, as opposed to high, narrative
Later speeches and misdeeds by the ever has been and probably always will
“looters” constitute but variations on the be. It follows that the novel’s borrowed
basic motifs that Rand introduces during premise is sacrifice: Rand invites us to
the anniversary fête. In Part III, when the view with a satisfying awe the destruction
governmental and economic crisis has before our eyes of those who have mis-
just about reached its climax, Dagny treated the protagonists, with whom she
Taggart tries to survey the sum of disas- has invited us to identify. The standard
ters. The enormity defies full assessment, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Clint Eastwood
but Rand’s heroine knows the cause: “So thriller achieves its effect by no different
long as living flesh was prey to be de- means. Michael Moore’s movie Fahren-
voured, [it] did [not] matter whose stom- heit 9/11 works in the same way.
achs it had gone to fill,” especially as The catharsis in Atlas comes not at the
“there wasn’t even any way to tell who end, however, but around two-thirds of
were the cannibals and who were the the way through the story. It is the su-
victims.”55 When people see life as the riot perbly stage-managed Winston Tunnel
of a zero-sum game, cannibalism is the disaster.
inevitable result.
III
The logic of the sacrificial theory of life
is thus the devolution of everything into Rand exerts her full ability as a storyteller
a vast crisis where “cannibal” and “vic- to endow the calamity in the railway tun-
tim” become indistinguishable. “Men had nel with the appearance of inevitability,
been pushed into a pit where, shouting to make it look like the entirely predict-
that man is his brother’s keeper, each was able outcome of the nihilism expressed
devouring his neighbor and was being by the “looters” at Lillian’s entertainment
devoured by his neighbor’s brother, each and elsewhere. Tom Clancy might well
was proclaiming the righteousness of the have learned something about the exege-
unearned and wondering who was strip- sis of catastrophe from Rand’s example,
ping the skin off his back, each was de- but earlier popular literature offers a num-
vouring himself, while screaming in ter- ber of precedents. Near the end of Part II
ror that some unknowable evil was de- of the novel, the industrial infrastructure
stroying the earth.”56 So might it have of the country has radically deteriorated.
been, had the Bolsheviks triumphed Trains cannot keep schedule; those that
worldwide, as they hoped. The Ukraine do run, run at the whim of gangsters whose
famine would have been a universal rather principle is that to want is to get. Diesels
than a local phenomenon. Why then do I have all but disappeared. One of the few
say that Rand’s story requires what it still rolling pulls the Taggart Comet. It has
pretends to reject? What is the borrowed broken down, stranding the Comet in the
premise in the saga of John Galt? Rocky Mountains.
Atlas Shrugged is, up to a limit, a true A coterie of gangsters begins to com-
revelation of redistributive rapacity, even plain, as though the inconvenience
of the old call to sacrifice in its twentieth- stemmed not directly from their own sus-
century ideological manifestation; the tained depredation on the economy and
novel is, up to a limit, a true revelation of circumvention of the law but from inimi-
ideology as a reversion to the most primi- cal powers. The chief miscreant, Kip
tive type of cultic religiosity, collective Chalmers, has come from the gang’s Wash-
Modern Age 303ington headquarters to take over a satrapy novel’s grand conflict of repeatedly and
in California. Like all the other villains in egregiously violating. Just as Rearden is
Atlas he talks as though his libido were a guilty of no particular demonstrable
divinity itself demanding instantaneous moral or legal infraction at his trial, ex-
appeasement on every occasion. With cept his competence, so are the passen-
the diesel out of commission, however, gers on the Comet—excluding, let us say,
and with only a coal-fired steam locomo- Kip Chalmers and his retinue—not guilty
tive available, the eight-mile-long Winston de jure of any proven legal transgression,
Tunnel stands as an insuperable material as none has enjoyed due process.
obstacle between Chalmers and his goal. Who are the unnamed “those” in Rand’s
The railroad people timidly explain this. sentence who “would have said,” absent a
Chalmers explodes: “Do you think I’ll let hearing by the rules, that, no legitimate
your miserable technological problems sentence could in the moment attach to
interfere with crucial social issues? Do the fated ones? We can name them as any
you know who I am? Tell that engineer to readers who at this point in the narrative
start moving if he values his job.”57 might feel uneasy about what Rand pro-
All competent personnel having long poses momentarily to execute in her role
since severed links with the Taggart Trans- as author, she who makes things happen.
continental, those still on the job are the Note how the passive inflection, “hap-
ones who have, in Rand’s recurrent and pened,” in the sentence, as though the
pejorative phrase, adapted themselves to event could boast of no agent, dissimu-
the prevailing conditions. None wants to lates a great deal: primarily it would dis-
thwart Chalmers because to do so would simulate the author herself, were she not,
put one at risk of becoming a “scapegoat.”58 in the writing of the utterance, betraying
They conform to the novel’s ambient, her manipulative and determining pres-
semi-voluntary, self-abnegating unanim- ence. The luckless ones must be made out
ity under coercion. Hitched to a coal-burner, as guilty. Rand must demonstrate that the
the Comet heads toward the Tunnel. random passengers have sinned suffi-
In earlier instances we have observed ciently to substitute for the known “loot-
how Rand’s sacrificial imagination can ers.”
betray itself by a stylistic discrepancy. So Thus “the man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1,
it is again with the Tunnel incident. Rand was a professor of sociology who taught
always editorializes, but she rarely edito- that individual ability is of no conse-
rializes in such a way as to arrest the quence, that individual effort is futile,
action of the story or to jolt readers out of and that an individual conscience is a
their suspended disbelief. Something useless luxury.”60 Thus “the woman in
important must be at stake to compel Roomette 10, Car No. 3, was an elderly
Rand to insert the authorial passage that school-teacher who had spent her life
interposes just before the Comet, flaring turning class after class of helpless school-
and smoking, enters the lethal bore: “It is children into miserable cowards, by teach-
said that catastrophes are a matter of ing them that the will of the majority is the
pure chance, and there were those who only standard of good and evil.”61 Thus
would have said that the passengers of “the man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a
the Comet were not guilty or responsible sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap
for the thing that happened to them.”59 plays in which, as a social message, he
Indeed they are not guilty—by the legally inserted cowardly little obscenities to
normative standard of justice which Rand the effect that all businessmen were
putatively upholds in Atlas Shrugged and scoundrels.”62
which she accuses her antagonists in the So it goes for sixteen instances—car by
304 Fall 2004car, and over a thousand words—before, us to suspect that in the Tunnel episode
in the Dantesque circumstance of the Rand composes a cataclysme à clef. And
Objectivist contrapasso, every Jack and what then does Atlas become but a grand
Jane of the mean-spirited wretches pain- fantasy of godlike revenge, a theater of
fully asphyxiates. Just to make sure that resentment assuaged, a daydream of lim-
the sentence achieves its goal, Rand has itless ego? In Part I of the novel, Hank
an Army munitions train enter the Tunnel Rearden says to Dagny Taggart when they
at high speed from the opposite end. The have concluded a contract by which the
resulting detonation buries the disaster former will supply Rearden-Metal rails for
under a mountainous tomb. the John Galt Line: “We haven’t any spiri-
A passage from her recently published tual goals or qualities. All we’re after is
Journals63 suggests that Rand must have material things. That’s all we care for.”68 In
had actual people in mind as models of the morally inverted context of Rand’s
those who die, with time enough to feel universe, the denial of a spiritual compo-
the pain of their deaths. Testifying before nent functions as the equivalent of a claim
the House Un-American Activities Com- to godhead. It is the “looters” who cease-
mittee in November 1947 on Communists lessly invoke “the spirit.” They neverthe-
in the film industry, Rand called attention less get interred under a rocky collapse
to William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our while the materialists fling aside moun-
Lives, for which screenwriter Robert E. tains with their rails of super-alloy.
Sherwood had earned Film Academy ac- That Taggart femme, Rearden,
colades in the previous year. Rand had d’Anconia, and Galt all qualify as Prome-
hovered in and around Hollywood for thean supermen à la the vulgate of
two decades but she had never achieved Nietzsche we can hardly doubt. The young
a significant screen-credit; Warner Stu- Rand confessed herself a Nietzschean,
dios even farmed out the screenplay for although later she elided the enthusiasm
The Fountainhead to someone else. and denounced the author of Zarathustra.
In Sherwood’s script, as Rand remarks, When the remaining gangsters torture
“a returning war hero is denied a seat on Galt to force him to tell them what to do in
a plane, to make room for an offensive order that they might save themselves late
businessman who is obviously rich.”64 in Part III, they treat him as though he were
Later, the same hero “takes a job in a a supernatural being. Rand describes the
drugstore owned by a national chain, tortured Galt in words suggesting an Ado-
where he is treated unfairly, offensively nis-Redeemer on the wheel. When the
and antagonistically.”65 Finally, “the pic- electroshock device fails, he calmly in-
ture denounces a banker for being unwill- structs his tormenter how to repair it.
ing to give a veteran a loan without collat- Rand could see that left-liberal envy
eral, a refusal which is treated as though falsely attributed to the business class—
it were an act of greedy selfishness.”66 or to anyone with one dollar more in his
Rand characterizes the last as “the all- account than someone else—a super-
time low in irresponsible demagoguery naturally scandalous blocking-power.
on the screen.”67 Rand could not see, however, that she
Readers of Modern Age probably react endowed the left-wing carpers of the twen-
to those scenes in Wyler’s film quite as tieth century with precisely the same in-
Rand does, but that is not the point. I flated status that they perceived in all
assert that Rand plausibly thought of their rivals and enemies; that they, the
Sherwood himself when she sent the ad- Left, had become for her what the reviled
enoidal, second-rate playwright to his “bourgeoisie” was for them. In their abso-
death in the Tunnel. The parallelism leads lute magnification, righteous ego and
Modern Age 305despicable alter achieve sublime propor- or make excuses for her. A wag once said
tion but lose their distinctness in a kind that Atlas Shrugged is the only book of
of cosmic anxiety. Eric Gans means just fiction guaranteed to have been read by
this when he refers, in Signs of Paradox every Republican senator, which I take
(1996), to “the descent of the absolute for a plausible statement. It is also often
into the empirical world” as its “undo- the only novel—or even the only book—
ing.”69 René Girard means just this when to have been read by the disaffected
he speaks about the overcoming of sophomore who shows up, glowering, in
Promethean desire as the real novelistic one’s Survey of Literature, whose semi-
achievement. literate mid-term essay denounces every-
If, artistically speaking, Atlas Shrugged thing except its writer’s own savage illu-
were merely an effective rather than a mination. All of which suggests that at the
literary novel, one would necessarily still beginning of the twenty first century, it is
need to remark that it remains enormously the universal vulgarization more than the
popular nearly fifty years after its publica- universal politicization of culture that
tion. Such is the case. It is also the case poses the genuine moral problem of the
that, despite her uncompromising rejec- age. Ayn Rand’s authorship constitutes
tion of them, some conservatives still try both an early symptom of, and a major
to find a place for Rand in their pantheon influence on, that defective state.
1. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, translated by Y. Shrugged, 9. 28. Ibid., 10. 29. Ibid., 10. 30. Ibid., 47-
Freccero (Baltimore, 1965), 300. 2. Signs of Para- 48. 31. Ibid., 46. 32. Ibid., 49. 33. Ibid., 78. 34. Ibid.,
dox (Stanford, 1996), 188. 3. Thirty-fifth anniver- 78. 35. Ibid., 477. 36. Ibid., 478. 37. Ibid., 481. 38.
sary edition, with an Introduction by Leonard Ibid., 481. 39. Ibid., 482. 40. Ibid., 498. 41. Ibid., 899.
Peikoff (New York, 1999). 4. “The Work of Ayn 42. Ibid., 33. 43. Ibid., 35. 44. Ibid., 35. 45. Ibid., 41.
Rand,” in Eagle and Earwig (London, 1965), 210- 46. Ibid., 131. 47. Ibid., 131. 48. Ibid., 132. 49. Ibid.,
224. 5. Ibid., 210. 6. Ibid., 210. 7. Ibid., 210. 8. Ibid., 141. 50. Ibid., 142. 51. Ibid., 133. 52. Ibid., 134. 53.
210. 9. Ibid., 210. 10. Ibid., 211. 11. Ibid., 211. 12. Ibid., 135. 54. Ibid., 155. 55. Ibid., 914. 56. Ibid., 914.
Ibid., 211. 13. Ibid., 212. 14. Ibid., 213. 15. Ibid., 213. 57. Ibid., 592. 58. Ibid., 596. 59. Ibid., 605. 60. Ibid.,
16. Ibid., 215. 17. Ibid., 223. 18. Ibid., 223. 19. Ibid., 605. 61. Ibid., 605. 62. Ibid., 606. 63. Journals of Ayn
223. 20. “Introduction to Ninety-Three,” in The Rand, edited by D. Harriman, Foreword by L.
Romantic Manifesto, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, 1975), Peikoff (New York, 1997). 64. Ibid., 367. 65. Ibid.,
153. 21. Atlas Shrugged, 559-60. 22. Ibid., 560. 23. 368. 66. Ibid., 368. 67. Ibid., 368. 68. Atlas, 87. 69.
Ibid., 858-59. 24. Ibid., 247. 25. Ibid., 249. 26. Page 188.
(Chicago and La Salle, 1999), 298. 27. Atlas
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