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Posts Tagged ‘ayn rand’

There should be a National Coming-Out Day for people whose favorite novel is _Atlas Shrugged_

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on January 24, 2012

Normally, when some person (or social network profile) asks me for my favorite books, I murmur something about how it’s impossible for me to choose a favorite, and then I rattle off five or ten books that I’ve enjoyed recently.

That’s because the ‘favorite book’ question is a trap! All serious bibliophiles know that it’s super uncool to have a favorite book. We know that if you have a favorite book, it’s probably because you don’t read very many books. Having a ‘favorite book’ not only betrays you as a non-reader, it also betrays what kind of non-reader you are. A down-to-earth non-reader will usually admit that their favorite book is the only book that they’ve read in the last few years– usually the Da Vinci Code or Twilight–while a snooty non-reader will say that their favorite book was Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby or whatever other book they sort of enjoyed when they were forced to read it for class.

Except, you know what? That’s all a load of hogwash. Because not only do I have a favorite book…it’s also the most titanically embarrassing favorite book ever. My favorite book not only disqualifies me from making fun of anyone else for having a favorite book…it also cannot help but raise serious concerns about my literary acumen and moral hygiene.

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            I first read Atlas Shrugged when I was an eighth-grader who was travelling with my mom through India. I completely fell in love with it. Since then, I’ve probably read it 10 times. I’ve owned several paperback copies of Atlas Shrugged that have literally fallen apart at the seams. Several times in my life, I have experienced moments of great psychic pain that I tried to salve by re-reading Atlas Shrugged.

If you know anything about the novel, I think you understand why I find it to be an intolerable ‘favorite novel’ candidate. Atlas Shrugged is a 1000-page novel about a group of leading industrialists who—fed up with being leeched upon by incompetent second-raters (i.e. you and me) and a redistributionist government—decide to withdraw the priceless fruits of their mental labor from the world. These industrialists and scientists go on “strike”. They disappear, and subsequently the world comes crashing down. The government finds that there is no more wealth to redistribute. America literally crumbles: factories shut down; railroad transportation becomes unreliable; starvation becomes endemic. At the end, America is reduced to medieval times: all industry has vanished; people are reduced to subsistence agriculture.

Atlas Shrugged is an extremely popular book. Sixty years after its publication, it continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year. And, as far as I can tell, the primary reason for its popularity is because most of its readers identify very strongly with its industrialist heroes. These readers also feel as if they contribute much more to society than they gain from it. They feel that their lives would be better off without government interference. They feel a terrible sense of oppression: a pervasive feeling that the machinery of society runs upon the fuel of their life’s blood. Most of the lovers of Atlas Shrugged tend to be misanthropes who believe in some flavor of libertarianism. This is unsurprising. The political philosophy of the book is completely undisguised. It contains numerous 1000+ word speeches that expound on its ideal political, philosophical, and moral system (which the book’s author called ‘Objectivism,’ since she believed it to be objectively true). Most famously, it ends with a 25,000 word radio broadcast about how the prevailing philosophy of the world (that the primary purpose of one’s life should be to help other people) is sick, irrational, and cowardly. The political system advocated by the author of Atlas Shrugged (a woman named Ayn Rand) is a laissez faire capitalism in which the government’s powers are limited to defense, policing, and enforcing contracts. In her philosophical system, the highest aim of a man should be to achieve some super awesome goal (usually building something, like a railroad, or skyscraper; but her heroes also include composers, actors, judges, financiers, etc.). Basically, her heroes include anyone who might get profiled by Forbes or Fortune magazine.

I think it’s possible that when I was thirteen, for maybe a month or so, I flirted with the notion of myself as a Randian superhero (In addition to being geniuses, the heroes of her novels are always beautiful, athletic, rigorously honest, totally free of jealousy, and wonderful at all the incidentals, like fashion, sports, music, etc.) However, I don’t think Rand’s political or philosophical beliefs have strongly influenced my own thinking.

If anything, I am very suspicious of the whole notion of heroism. My bias is that people’s lives are strongly determined by their economic and social circumstances. If anyone is ‘heroic’ it is only because society has put them in a space where heroism is expected of them.

Furthermore, I am extremely skeptical of Rand’s notion that economic and intellectual progress is the product of heroic effort. For instance, in the field of scientific progress, it seems like it’s more common than not for things to be invented multiple times, independently (e.g., the television; the airplane; differential calculus; the laws of genetic inheritance; and the theory of evolution by natural selection).

For me, the entire structure of Atlas Shrugged is founded on a rotten edifice. I consider its political and philosophical theories to be nonsense. If that wasn’t bad enough, most of its biggest fans are people whom I find to be frightening and incomprehensible, and many of its detractors–people who say that the book has no artistic merit–are people whose literary judgment I respect. And that’s why I’d slowly been moving away from considering it to be my favorite book. Over the last three years, I’ve significantly expanded my reading, and I have purposefully steered clear of re-reading Atlas Shrugged. I had hoped to expand my tastes and eventually reach the point where I perceived (and was disgusted by) all the qualities that have landed the book in such disrepute amongst literary circles.

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            Which brings us to four days ago.

Sometimes I get a very visceral sense of the likely odds that my life is going to be a failure. I suddenly realize that it’s more likely than not that I will never produce a worthwhile novel or story. I start to imagine myself as a 35 or 40 year old who has wasted his most productive years: a future Rahul who will be considered a failure by all his friends and family. Once, when I had a similar feeling in college, I combated this feeling by reading Atlas Shrugged.

That’s what I decided to do four days ago.

First of all, it worked. That sick dread disappeared.

Second of all, I was able to see flaws that I hadn’t seen before. The most egregious one is that the final third of the book is superfluous. The character’s arcs are not furthered by the action of the last third of the novel. The only fun of this section is in getting to see the U.S. collapse in a rather long and drawn out (albeit very exciting) fashion.  Furthermore, the ending feels…wrong. The book has a really taut, stirring first third, where the heroine (the Operations Vice President of a railroad) and the hero (the owner of a steel company and the inventor of a new, lighter, totes-better form of steel) fight–against government interference and public opprobrium–to build a desperately-needed rail-line out of the new steel. This first third seems to give the book the traditional structure of a naturalistic novel; one in which the heroes almost achieve success in the first act, and then are slowly crushed into paste by society during the second and third act. In this case, the set-up for the crushing is clear. The hero and heroine are struggling to avoid joining the ‘strike’. They’re unable to let their companies collapse, even though their success in running those companies is fuelling the government’s expropriatory greed. In the end of the novel, they ought to be defeated…sucked dry and discarded by the government. Instead, they eventually decide to join the strike, and then the book sort of totters onwards for another hundred and fifty thousand words.

Also, although the book’s prose isn’t without a certain elegance, it can be sloppy. People act in a rather melodramatic fashion and they make bodily motions that it’s hard to imagine them  making in real life. There’s rather a lot of people collapsing to their knees and lying prostrate and  making the kinds of gestures that, if you try to block them out in your mind, look fairly silly. Furthermore, most of the dialogue (although it works okay on the page) would sound abominable if spoken out loud (which the recent Atlas Shrugged movie proved pretty comprehensively). There’s a lot of people intuiting very complex emotions from another person’s eyes and there are a lot of visuals that don’t actually look like anything. As in, if you try to imagine them, you come up with a blank. But, none of that is really unforgiveable. The book has a clipped yet overwrought style, like each sentence is a rivet being pounded into the novel by a jackhammer, that I found to be very engaging.

And, oh yeah, the book is definitely still my favorite novel.

I don’t know. It’s unaccountable. I guess the only thing I can say is that when I was a few hundred pages into the book, I realized that Atlas Shrugged is not a realist novel; it’s not even a polemic; it’s a myth.

And myths play by different rules.

I mean, there never was a king who was as good as King Arthur. 90% of Kings—even (especially!) the ‘Good’s and ‘Great’s—were ruthless bastards. Almost every king was a sly crook who lived by extracting backbreaking rents from his subjects. The whole monarchical institution was, from top to bottom, extremely corrupt, and it was a wonderful day for the world when it finally disappeared. But…that doesn’t stop us from enjoying the legend of King Arthur.

You can say the same thing about any myth. They’re all full of grotesque lessons. The Lord of the Rings (as many commentators have pointed out) is pretty much a war of racial genocide: orcs deserve to die simply because they’re orcs. And, yet, we love LotR not in spite of that, but because of it. We love LotR because of the moral clarity provided by its slanted set-up. There never was a war in the real world that was quite so perfectly justified as the war of Gondor against Mordor….and that’s why there was never a real-world war that felt quite as heroic as LotR’s.

In the same way, the real world does not contain capitalist superheroes. But it should. Wouldn’t we rather live in a world where our corporations were run by beautiful inventor-geniuses?

The heroism of Atlas Shrugged is accessible to us. It’s composed of the same elements as our own lives. The heroes of Rand’s novels struggle to build things; they decide that it would be excellent and beautiful for something to exist, and then they make it exist. And the enemy that they struggle with is of the same type as the enemies we encounter in our lives. The typical Randian villain is a faceless, mindless bureaucrat or an indifferent, blankly-staring crowd. In the same way, we encounter very few concrete villains when we set out to do something; usually our obstacle is just a sort of global indifference…no one in the world really cares whether we succeed or not…the world is composed of actors who are pursuing their own aims and who, in the course of doing so, happen to erect obstacles against us.

When I am a 35 year old failure, it won’t be because Sauron invaded my kingdom and blackened my fields and destroyed my castles. It will be because I wrote stories that no one cared about. It will be because I released work into the world and received only silence. It will be because thousands of readers read the first few pages of my book and then put it back on the shelf.

To me, there’s something mythologically powerful in Rand’s rendering of these malevolent forces as a horde of thoughtless, cliché-spouted government buffoons.            There’s something that captures the imagination about beautiful business tycoons working with all their strength and intelligence and then being spit upon by an ungrateful public.

Not only that, she also creates such beautiful mirages. Her heroes and heroines are utterly self-contained. They might be thwarted, but they are never unhappy. They never feel shame. They never feel jealousy. They are perfectly secure in their own perfection.

There is something supercharged about them. They’re like airbrushed models: they’re more beautiful than anything that can exist in reality…but that doesn’t stop us from being susceptible to that beauty.

And they’re dangerous in the same way that airbrushed models are dangerous. Because her heroes and heroines act so powerfully on our senses—on our sense of the way that people should be—we can get too caught up in chasing after these mirages. The end result is blindness to the real conditions of the world.

But I don’t think it is a flaw in a work of art to be too successful at creating a fantastic illusion, and I don’t think it’s a flaw in myself that I am susceptible to that illusion.

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            Of course, it’s pretty clear that this is not the way Ayn Rand intended her book to be understood. In the last line of the version I read (in the Author Notes), she writes: “Let no one tell me that these men don’t exist. I have met them.”

She wanted her work to be taken literally. And she wanted it to touch off a movement for political reform. In fact, there’s a whole section of the book where the composer Richard Halley says that he only wants fans who appreciate his music in the way it was meant to be understood…that he’s tired of buffoons who have an emotional reaction to his work without appreciating it intellectually.

To Ayn Rand, people like me would be the fools. But, whatever, she’s dead. And the book is a lot better for her absence.

Atlas Shrugged is a tremendously powerful work that’s a victim of its own specificity. If she’d eliminated the speeches and allowed a little more room for nuance (in the way that, say, Tolstoy did in Anna Karenina), I think it would be seen as the great work of literature that it is. And I think there is a chance that someday the political situation in the U.S. will change in such a way that appreciation for Atlas Shrugged is not politically distasteful in the ways that I mentioned in the first third of this essay. If that happens, I think that there is a significant chance that there will be a critical reappraisal of the book’s literary merits. And, if I (through some miracle) am not a failure, then I will lead that reappraisal.

And after Ayn Rand takes her place in the canon (that she hated), I will go and dance on her grave.

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George Orwell’s Burmese Days

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on June 30, 2011

Considering his stature in 20th century letters, George Orwell is kind of a strange writer. He’s kind of free of distinctive quirkiness. His style and his content aren’t very heavily branded on his forehead the way they are for most writers. I guess the closest thing to a trademark for George Orwell would be his commitment to “socialism”. But Orwell is not even very specific in his politics. His socialism is about 20% vague commitment to redistribution of wealth, and 80% visceral horror of the evils he sees around him.

Orwell, seems (to me) to have three really great talents as a writer: i) the ability to make very confident assertions about the way categories of people (particularly English people) live and think; ii) a talent for aphorism (short, pithy sayings); and iii) a Dickensian ability to write archetypal characters that contain significant psychological complexity, but are vivid and broadly drawn enough to feel like they’re more representative of types than they are specific people.

These three abilities (and probably others which my categorizing impulse has missed) make Orwell one of the most intensely pleasurable writers of the 20th century. I’ve just finished reading Burmese Days, his first novel. I read it through in two sittings, over less than twelve hours. And it was real good.

You know, I am a huge fan of social protest novels. I like Zola. I like Sinclair Lewis. I like Willa Cather. But Orwell is somehow unlike them. His heroes are just not good enough. They’re too ineffectual and confused.

For instance, Burmese Days is about a military policeman (named Flory) in the British colony of Burma who has slowly (over the course of fifteen years) cultivated a kind of love for the colony and a kind of hatred of imperialism, and who finds himself in the grip of an inchoate resentment against the other Europeans in his tiny little outpost.

Now, in the hands of most authors, this character would pretty much be Atticus Finch. He’d be intelligent, determined, and brave. I mean, there are a lot of different kinds of Atticus Finches in literature, and I love them all. There are naïve ones, like Carol Kennicott in Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street. There are grimly furious ones like in Jim Nolan in John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle. There are even conservative ones like Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

But what they all share is a kind of self-awareness. They are not just characters. They are a visible working-out of the novel’s attempt to figure out some idea or explain some process. They’re as smart and good as one can imagine a person being in that situation. They need to be that way because these novels are thinking about how things can change, and what the process of change will entail: the agent of potential change cannot just be some ordinary sap because we know that if an ordinary sap was capable of doing anything then there would be no need for change.

But I do not think Burmese Days really cares about these kinds of practicalities. Its main character, Flory, is not just ineffectual, he’s also kind of stupid. When he gets tired of the native-bashing at the English club, he goes to visit his friend Dr. Veraswami and engages in an equally repetitive, and tedious conversation on how awful the empire is. And his friend, the honest, noncorrupt, Indian Doctor who represents the best of the subjugated peoples, is not only a huge bumbler as well, he actually takes the British Raj’s side and argues with Flory that his people need to be subjugated

The two of them are a great pair. But they are not a heroic one. They are not Atticus Finch and Boo Radley. They’re not even Scout and Dill. There’s nothing free about them. They do not strive for any illumination. They’re already hemmed in.

In the end of the book, all that Flory has to do to prevent ruin from befalling Dr. Veraswami (the plot of the book is about another Burmese official waging a smear campaign against the Doctor) is speak up. Literally, all he has to do is want to do something. He does not need to persuade a hostile jury: he just needs to use the amazing power that being a white man gives him…but that is too much for him.

 

Conversely, the second plotline concerns a young woman, Elizabeth, whom Flory attempts to court. For awhile she is interested in him, but for reasons of her own she hates his highmindedness and his political opinions. She falls in with a handsome young officer who only cares about horses and clothes.

They’re two of the villains of the book, probably, but they also don’t fit the template. Usually the villains in books like this are somewhat torpid and blank. They don’t have active desires. They don’t have any beauty or vitality. The life has been sucked out of them a long time ago, and it is only their lifelessness that forms a barrier to change.

But these two don’t seem that way. They almost seem good together. Sometimes it seems like their lifestyle is a gracious, beautiful thing, and that they are more suited to this Empire than people like Flory. Take for instance the beautiful sympathy between them conveyed by the following passage:

Belinda was an Arab mare. Verrall had owned her two years, and till this moment he had never once allowed anyone else to mount her. It was the greatest favor that he could imagine. And so perfectly did Elizabeth appreciate Verrall’s point of view that she understood the greatness of the favor, and was thankful.

And there’s a kind of beauty and honesty to Verrall that is missing from any other character in the book, as the book makes clear:

If you were the right kind of man-that is, if you were a cavalry officer and a polo player-Verrall took you for granted and even treated you with a surly respect; if you were any other type of man whatever, he despised you so utterly that he could not have hidden it even if he would. It did not even make any difference whether you were rich or poor, for in the social sense he was not more than normally a snob. Of course, like all sons of rich families, he thought poverty disgusting and that poor people are poor because they prefer disgusting habits. But he despised soft living. Spending, or rather owing, fabulous sums on clothes, he yet lived almost as ascetically as a monk. He exercised himself ceaselessly and brutally, rationed his drink and his cigarettes, slept on a camp bed (in silk pyjamas) and bathed in cold water in the bitterest winter. Horsemanship and physical fitness were the only gods he knew. The stamp of hoofs on the maidan, the strong, poised feeling of his body, wedded centaur-like to the saddle, the polo-stick springy in his hand-these were his religion, the breath of his life. The Europeans in Burma-boozing, womanizing, yellow-faced loafers-made him physically sick when he thought of their habits.

When the book peers into the heads of these characters, one realizes that things are the way they are not because people want to be ugly and lifeless…but because people want things to be in a certain way. People sit around in the club talking about hunting and fishing and old stories because people like hunting and fishing and old stories…not just because they’re afraid to express all their resentment against the vast imperialist apparatus that has forced them into the wilderness. One realizes that, in other hands, this story could be a beautiful romance, and there’d be nothing sickening about it. It’s part of the genius of Orwell that this indictment of imperialism also contains the hints of that romance.

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