Rereading Atlas Shrugged

I have started rereading Ayn Rand's magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, after having read it approximately 20 years ago.  With a confession that is risking a torrent of fury from Randophiles, I must say that I find it a little disappointing upon the revisit.  Since Atlas Shrugged is such a lodestone and flashpoint for lovers of personal responsibility, I plan to write a series of essays about my interpretation of her writing.  This is the first.

My dominant impression, so far, is that she makes her points in an almost cartoonish way -- unrelentingly, repetitively, and obviously.  Rand does NOT deal in subtlety or nuance.  At first, the style is powerful, as her lexicon vividly limns the characters.  After a while, however, its constancy becomes distracting -- you find yourself thinking, "Enough already!"

First, Ayn Rand is a superb writer; she can evoke images and scenes that the reader sees with perfect clarity.

"Far in the distance, beyond the mill structures, she saw a string of gondolas waiting on a siding.  The bridge of an overhead crane cut the sky above them.  The crane was moving.  Its huge magnet held a load of rails glued to a disk by the sole power of contact.  There was no trace of sun in the gray spread of clouds, yet the rails glistened, as if the metal caught light out of space.  The metal was a greenish-blue.  The great chain stopped over a car, descended, jerked in a brief spasm and left the rails in the car.  The crane moved back in majestic in difference; it looked like the giant drawing of a geometrical theorem moving above the men and the earth."

- Page 86

Not THAT is terrific writing.

I don't know how literature professors classify Atlas Shrugged, but reading it I feel the same way I felt about reading Frank Norris's The Octopus, a perfect representative of the naturalism movement in literature, which sought to describe things as they are, with repetitive language used to conjure a sense of realism.  (Of course, I read The Octopus in my early high-school years.  Even then, my classmates and I got fed up with the repetition.)

With Atlas Shrugged ... it is one thing to have the predominant themes/observations ringing in every chapter to keep your perspective front-of-mind, but when they occur every page ... it becomes distracting.  As a reader, you find yourself, literally, jolted back into reality -- death-knell for a novel -- where you say to yourself, "Okay, okay -- I get your point!  Your heroes are supermen and superwomen with intelligence, endurance, and grace beyond mortal understanding."  Some examples:

The reader's first introduction to oil magnate Ellis Wyatt:

"The man who entered was a stranger.  He was young, tall, and something about him suggested violence, though she could not say what it was, because the first trait one grasped about him was a quality of self-control that seemed almost arrogant.  He had dark eyes, disheveled hair, and his clothes were expensive, but worn as if he did not care or notice what he wore."

- Page 81

Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden watching "Rearden Metal" (an advanced metal alloy with unlimited possibilities) being produced:

"Rearden Metal..."

He noticed that, but said nothing.  He glanced at her, then turned back to the window.

"Hank, this is great."

"Yes."

He said it, simply, openly.  There was no flattered pleasure in his voice, and no modesty.  This, she knew, was a tribute to her, the rarest one person could pay another: the tribute of being free to acknowledge one's own greatness, knowing that it is understood.

- Page 86

Keep in mind that pronouncements of the characters' virtues such as these are not presented in every chapter -- they occur almost every paragraph.  Reading a Rand novel is a bit like being hit over the head with an Objectivist shovel.

As anyone who knows anything about Ayn Rand realizes, she does not deal in gray; everything is black and white.  That holds true for Atlas Shrugged (and The Fountainhead).  People are either good ("clean," "angular," "graceful," "reasoned") or bad/evil ("slack," "slow," "impulsive"), and good people make good decision, while evil people make evil decisions.

I recognize that Rand was writing the shining example of her Objectivist philosophy and, hence, wanted it to be her "purest" exemplar of how objectivists (and non-objectivists) are.  (Notably, she does not write about how objectivists should be.  As will be discussed below, it appears that you are either born an objectivist ... or you will never be one.)

Nevertheless, her fiction is not an accurate reflection of life -- who, after all, is 100 percent good?  (Even Ron Paul has his faults.)

The most irritating aspect of the book -- and, ultimately, its most limiting -- is that the heroes of the book are all born as objectivists.  Not a single person sees the error of his/her ways, and grows to correct any inherent flaws.  I am currently on page 135, and Rand has introduced three main characters (all business titans) who serve as model objectivists.  Unfortunately for us mortals, all three have known from their earliest days how truly special and gifted they are.

To wit, Hank Rearden:

"...[H]e owned [the mines] as of that morning.  He was thirty years old.  What had gone on in the years between did not matter, just as pain had not mattered.  He had worked in mines, in foundries, in the steel mills of the north, moving toward the purpose he had chosen.  All he remembered of those jobs was that the men around him had never seemed to know what to do, while he had always known."

- Page 30

Dagny Taggart:

"Dagny Taggart was nine years old when she decided that she would run the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad some day....She never tried to explain why she liked the railroad....She felt the same emotion in school, in classes of mathematics, the only lessons she liked.  She felt the excitement of solving problems, the insolent delight of taking up a challenge and disposing of it without effort, the eagerness to meet another, harder test.

"Studying mathematics, she felt, quite simply and all at once:  'How great that men have done this" and 'How wonderful that I'm so good at it.'"

- Pages 50-51

Franciso d'Anconia:

"When I run Taggart Transcontinental..." Dagny would say at times.  "When I run d'Anconia Copper..." said Francisco.  They never had to explain the rest to each other; they knew each other's goal and motive."

- Page 95

In addition to knowing one's life's pursuit at an absurdly early age, Rand's protagonists are superbly intelligent.  At 12 years old, Francisco d'Anconia is already impressing adults:

Francisco's notes of calculation were still scattered about on the ground; [Dagny's] father picked them up, looked at them, then asked, 'Francisco, how many years of algebra have you had?'  'Two years.'  'Who taught you to do this?'  'Oh, that's just something I figured out.'  [Dagny] did not know that what her father held on the crumpled sheets of paper was the crude version of a differential equation."

- Page 93

Well, since I did not instinctively "create" differential calculus when I was 12 years old, I humbly recognize that I do not fit the mold of Rand's "superperson."  Does that mean I should renounce my goals of grandeur?  According to the models that Ayn Rand present, I should -- especially if I do not have a clear vision of exactly what I want to do (with a burning, unquenchable yearning, of course).

I certainly welcome prodigies and geniuses -- they are the lifeblood of innovation and progress.  However, crucially, I have yet to see a single character born "average" (or, at least, not preternaturally brilliant) in an Ayn Rand book, and not blossom to greatness through education and/or hard work.  The clear implication -- that you are either born with cognitive gifts and a focused purpose in life, in which case your success is assured -- or you have a completely corrupted personal philosophy that dooms you to unhappiness and proceeding through your days in slack-jawed torpor.

This reverence for elitism is what is most infuriating, because -- like it or not -- the vast majority of people do not have the acumen or native ability to accomplish feats of greatness.  However, that does not mean that someone could not discover truths about the world and himself, and try disciplining his life according to a set of defined values.

Life is hard.  Trying to craft a life that reflects values true to oneself, and raising children to do the same:  now that is a hero.

For the reasons discussed, I think the best age group for reading her fiction is 15 to 24.  Anyone older, I believe, would like to see character development and growth, as well as seeing people make mistakes and learning from them.