I am, therefore I’ll think
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Samizdata quote of the dayFebruary 11th, 2011 |
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The Atlas Shrugged movie (part one) will come out on April 15th . The actress who plays Dagny is hot.
Did I mention that the actress who plays Dagny is hot.
It depends what you mean by ‘I’.
A lot of people seem to call themselves that, but it certainly doesn’t apply to me.
“I yam, therefore I yam” – Popeye
No vegetable porn on Samizdata, Henderson 😛
And yes, the actress who plays Dagny is hot, Taylor. That is always worth mentioning.
Atlas at last!
I’d long since given up on this being made, looks good too, as far as the trailer goes anyway 🙂
(I’d seen that Angeline Jolie wanted the Dagney Taggart part, was she too expensive?).
No, she was too…Angelina.
Or too Jolie…
Peter Czerna: it certainly does apply to you, no?:-)
@Alisa
No. ‘I’ is me – that’s what I’ve always called myself. I suppose I must be just one of those sensitive people who are distressed to find so many other people calling themselves ‘I’. Over the years I’ve learned to just go along with it, but it can be quite distressing.
Back on topic:
This post requires too much suspension of disbelief: Has anyone ever READ ‘Atlas Shrugged’? (If so: why?)
I’ve opened the book several times but never got beyond the first page of that stodge. No train journey is so boring that reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’ would be better than staring out of the window.
Although, that said, the same thing applied to the first (and for me the last) ‘Harry Potter’.
It makes a good doorstop though…
Then I can safely ignore your opinion and read Atlas Shrugged as I loved all the Harry Potter books 🙂
Presumably, Atlas Shrugged Part 2 is just John Galt’s speech
I keed…I keed
Them were fighting words there. Truth is though, it only really begins to be interesting at Book 3, but you need to go through the first two for the background info.
Haven’t read Atlas myself – that’s what movies with hot actors are for.
Nick: that would be even worse:-)
@Alisa
HP or Atlas? Whatever: QED!
Your other points are spot on.
Peter: 🙂
No, she was too…Angelina.
Posted by Alisa at February 12, 2011 01:23 PM
A? O I C OK NBD
Paul: ?
Peter – I read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ from cover to cover. It must be the most turgid novel ever written. John Galt’s speech was later published in ‘For the New Intellectual’. Galt’s philosophy is that Great Men (and Women) spring up out of nowhere. They owe nothing to anybody else. Their ideas are all, magically, from within. The solipsistic novel sacrifices plot, story and believability for dogma. It has the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Worth reading as an example of how not to write.
Taylor, you mentioned that the actress who will play Dagny is hot.
That’s me sorted for tickets then.
Radex, since you seem to be the new resident troll – I give you about a few weeks before you are removed – we might as well have some fun and game with you while the editorial indulgence lasts. First of all, if the novel was so “turgid” (it isn’t) how come did you read it cover-to-cover? I usually find that if a novel is moving slowly, like War and Peace, I tend to stop reading at some stage. But with Atlas Shrugged, I just could not put the book down.
It is also absurd to suggest that Rand says that ideas come magically from within. She did not believe in magic; she was, after all, an advocate of reason. She believed that people perceive the external world, and use their rational faculties to make sense of it, and given freedom and respect for the fruits of their labours, great things happen. Nor did she argue, as you claim, that people are not indebted to others for their ideas.
We can argue about whether the novel has its faults; I personally find its style too didactic at times; but it gripped me from start to finish.
Atlas Shrugged does indeed suffer from some turgidity. And, despite having read it several times (!) I have yet to make it all the way through Galt’s speech, and inviably skip past much of it. (100+ pages in my edition; it would have benefitted from some severe editing, as indeed would much of the rest of the book.) But with all that said, I don’t understand how anyone who considers himself a libertarian not to have read it. Even if it doesn’t convert you to Objectivism, it certainly provides a foundation* for some of our core ideas.
I knew there were plans for a movie (finally!), but I hadn’t realized that it was so close to release. (Good choice of release date, by the way.) Here’s the trailer, for anyone interested. Apparently it made its debut at the CPAC meeting just last night. (CPAC is a group of hard-core conservative movers and shakers in the US.) And some of the above commenters are correct: the actress playing Dagny is quite attractive. (Would it hurt for anyone to have included a link to her photo? Here’s one.) Frankly, she’s prettier (and a little younger) than my mental image of Dagny; I would have preferred someone less beautiful. Hank Reardon seems well cast, though. I’m looking forward to it; I hope they don’t do too much violence to the story and its theme.
* I almost wrote “literary foundation”, since obviously Hayek, Bastiat, and lots of others provided philosophical and economic foundations for libertarianism, but I suspect that lots of people here would object to its characterization as “literature”!
Sorry Laird, but that is just silly (not that I consider myself a libertarian – or any other particular label, for that matter).
@Laird, you’re among friends here.
You can tell us. When did this need to read impenetrably turgid books repetitively take hold of you?
Your case may not be completely hopeless: your writing that Atlas Shrugged has ‘some turgidity’ in it shows at least some self-awareness, and your admission that the 100+ page speech would have benefitted from some severe editing (hardly Sydney Carton, though) also gives grounds for hope, as does the exclamation mark in ‘having read it several times (!)’.
You have been lucky; others weren’t so lucky. Radex read it from cover to cover and look what it did to him/her – mind completely blown and all powers of logical reasoning gone, poor thing. Glenn Beck read it and now just keeps bursting into tears. Laird, destroy this devil’s spawn now, before it takes possession of the faculties that still remain – ‘cerebral hygiene’ must be your motto.
Thank God – thank God – that I said ‘no’ to this book on the first page. Alisa, too. Are we the only sane ones left here?
@Alisa 07:09: Hear, hear!
PS: I’ve been smitten! That’s libertarians for you…
Um, Peter (and Laird), just for the record, my comment was regarding any book in general, not necessarily Atlas (on which I have no opinion, having not read it).
Peter: the smiter is a machine, so it cannot be expected to have a philosophical or moral outlook. Although a machine can read a book, or maybe even write one…:-)
@Alisa
So my comment on Laird’s piece is now languishing on someone’s laptop, splattered with wine stains and Tuna fish crumbs from Prêt Á Manger.
Thank you for your explanation, but it is no comfort that a machine rejected me. I’m not typing it all out again. How I hate this world!
Well, Alisa, since you don’t consider yourself to be a libertarian the comment doesn’t apply to you, does it? (And anyhow, what I said is that I “don’t understand” it, not that it’s impossible.) But as AS is one of the seminal books in the libertarian canon, I stand by the observation.
If you have yet to read Atlas Shrugged then now would be a good time to start – before the movie comes out.
I think it is essential reading for anyone seriously committed to the principle of liberty but there will always be differing opinions.(Link)
Laird, I don’t have to be a libertarian to have an opinion on a comment that concerns libertarians (unless it is a members-only club?). Also, if everyone here only commented on issues that only apply to them directly, then…well, it would be a very different forum.
Anyway, to the actual point: I think that it is very much possible to be sympathetic to an ideology without reading any related literature – especially when the ideology in question is based on a principle as simple as the ‘leave me the hell alone and mind your own business’ one. That is not to say that reading such literature can not enhance one’s understanding of the principles involved and their practical implications – in fact, I am positive that it can. If that is what you meant, then we are in no argument. I am just saying that it is not necessary, and I fail to see how somone may find it difficult to understand.
I was going to leave the following nonchalant reply to Peter: Peter, would you rather be rejected by a human?:-) But now that my own comment to Laird has been rejected by that same machine, I feel the pain. I really do. Damn you, machine.
Some people may not consider Atlas Shrugged to be “literature” but Penguin – one of the world’s most renowned publishers – market EVERY novel by Ayn Rand as a Modern Classic(Link).
I have also read it (once) cover to cover. I only managed it because I was an underused summer intern at a bank in London, with no friends (I didn’t read at my desk; I just left at five on the dot then read the book until I fell asleep). I have to say I enjoyed the book, and it did a lot to convert me to libertarianism. I was an unsufferable little Randroid for a couple of year after before I grasped some of the nuances of libertarianism. (Hm, me should probably have used ‘I’ less in that paragraph)
I do now, however, have some sympathy for those voices that see something fascistic in her writing (such as the famous National Review, er, review). The heroes in her books are very strong and perfect people. Short thrift is given to the weak. At best they are pitied. The book is a puritan piece of work and it isn’t difficult to envisage Rand as the uptight person that she was. Her followers have been described as cultists and I think this is spot on. Having said that, an Objectivist state would be a libertarian state – even though those of us who consider ourselves Rothbardian libertines would have to put up with the scorn and condecension of the objectivists.
I must say the trailer does not look very promising. The book is not very filmable since there is so much exposition in it. Maybe if the director took lots of liberties with the plot it would work out ok, but then again he might receive death threats from the faithful if he did.
And yes, she is pretty but I would have preferred Angelina
While we await the release of Alisa’s killing riposte*, I’d like to return to the actual SQOTD. What I find interesting about Galt’s play on Descartes is his use of the word “I’ll” rather than “I”. Adding the (contraction of the) word “will” shows that the action of thinking is entirely voluntary. Galt considered himself one of the “men of the mind”, which is what distinguished him (and his compatriots) from the majority of people who choose not to think, but instead to rely upon those who do. It’s an important line, not merely a clever bon mot.
* “The pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at [her] reproof.”
The pillars of the heavens quake, aghast at his rebuke. I am not worthy:-)
Laird, that’s an interesting point – do you have the rest of the passage? (I googled, but found nothing).
I think I have just managed to snatch my comment from the jaws of the smiting monster:
Laird, I don’t have to be a libertarian to have an opinion on a comment that concerns libertarians (unless it is some kind of an exclusive organization?). Also, if everyone here only commented on issues that only apply to them directly, then…well, it would be a very different forum.
Anyway, to the actual point: I think that it is very much possible to be sympathetic to an ideology without reading any related literature – especially when the ideology in question is based on a principle as simple as the ‘leave me the hell alone and mind your own business’ one. That is not to say that reading such literature can not enhance one’s understanding of the principles involved and their practical implications – in fact, I am positive that it can. If that is what you meant, then we are in no argument. I am just saying that it is not necessary, and I fail to see how somone may find it difficult to understand.
This is a case where I was hoping they had changed the plot a lot when they adapted it for film. The train was a good metaphor back when the book was written, but it seems like a very poor metaphor for conveying the ideas of the book, today. Something in software would probably have been much better. Alternatively, they could have made it a period film and set it in the time when the book was written.
But then I’m not really a fan, so my opinion probably doesn’t mean much. Although I read the book all the way through, Galt’s speech was the only part I really liked. It’s been so long now I’m not sure I’d even still like that!
Job 26:11.
How can one be “sympathetic to an ideology” without an understanding of, or at least a basic familiarity with, its seminal texts? At best, you can be “sympathetic” to what you think (based one dribs and drabs you’ve picked up over time) it probably means, but that’s the closest you’re ever going to come. But that’s fine, since (as you say) you’re not a libertarian.
Laird, you’re making a strange assumption that Shrugged is a “seminal text” of libertarianism. Since Objectivism isn’t Libertarianism, or even particularly libertarian with a small “L”, the assertion is bizarre.
There are seminal texts and writers of classical liberalism and libertarianism if you like; Locke, Smith, Bastiat, Von Mises, Menger, Rothbard. There are lots of other philosophical texts that may or may not be useful also for a broad perspective; JS Mill, Hume, Bentham perhaps.
But I find the idea that one must read a lousy novel by Ayn Rand to be a libertarian just plain weird. Most obviously, if Rand were a libertarian, she wouldn’t have needed a different name- “objectivism”- for her cultic woo.
True enough, Ian B, but there are very few libertarians who aren’t familiar with her works, and there is a strong libertarian streak running through them. You’ve read Atlas Shrugged, right?
I tried. Then I switched to stabbing my balls repeatedly with a fork, because that was less painful.
Sarcasm aside, I don’t see the need, certainly these days, for anyone to read it; except as a novel for entertainment like any other I mean. The philosophy of Objectivism isn’t complex and can be more easily picked up from a direct description of it- available on all good internets- rather than from the indirect fictional form.
But if I had to recommend a “must read” for libertarians anyway, I think it would be Bastiat. If every schoolchild were required to study his works, I honestly believe that socialism would be dead in a generation. His straightforward, clear examples of socialist fallacies- the broken window, the railway, the petition against sunlight by candlemakers- get ideas across in a much more persuasive way than 100 pages of Galt’s Speech, I think.
@Laird, @PeterT
You are forgetting the ‘opportunity cost’ of reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’. Just think of all the other wonderful stuff you could have read instead of plugging through that dreadful stodge (multiple times, in Laird’s case).
If, Laird, you elevate ‘Atlas Shrugged’ to required reading within the libertarian canon, you may find that there will be even fewer libertarians than there are now.
While it is too long, Atlas shrugged was good for its’ day and age. Having a female character would have been heretical in the fifties. She is a strong female character.
However, many of her ideas are wrong in this day and age. For instance, quantum entanglement means that everyone is ‘mystically’connected to everyone else- this is physics here, an objective science. Galt, and Rand, would have been shocked. New evidence keeps coming in that prayer works (look up ‘Distant Mental Influence’, a book by William Braud).
So, Atlas Shrugged is dated, but it still has some good points, and makes for some good arguments and discussions.
I never really understood the view that somehow Atlas Shrugged is bad literature. You could say that it is not literature at all since so much of it is diatribe. But I don’t particularly feel that it is badly written.
Peter Czena – I don’t think that Atlas Shrugged should be required reading – being a libertarian and all – but it is a very important book. When surveys of the American populace have asked what book influenced them the most, apparently Atlas Shrugged came second, with the Bible first (presumably some respondents listed both, although obviously this is not necessarily the case; not sure what this would tell us about the American mind set).
The link I have put below contains an interesting discussion of the pros and cons of Rand’s work. Its pretty readable. Its written by her one time number one acolyte.
http://www.nathanielbranden.com/catalog/pdf/benefits_and_hazards.pdf
I agree with Ian B that Rand is not really a libertarian at all (and she did not consider herself libertarian). Her ideology is more appropriate for those who, like socialists, have a psychological need for the world to be subject to reason. The main differences between her and the socialists is that where the socialists have a committee of great men working as the brain of society, she has great men working by themselves and with together only if it is in their self interest to do so. The great men are still great men.
This thread surely would not be complete without a chance to watch Rothbard’s
Mozart Was A Red!
Told you I am not worthy, Laird:-)
And see what you’ve done now: I had my application ready to send and to eagerly await a positive reply, but seeing now that there is required reading*…Oh well, back to the dreary existence of non-affiliation.
*I just can’t be bothered, and that goes for the rest of the canon (excluding Bastiat, on whom I have to agree with Ian). I sincerely hope that this may change in the future, as not being well-read is nothing to be proud of. But even then, somehow I doubt that Rand will be anywhere near the top of my reading list.
Still, and regardless of my personal lack of interest in one particular author, the idea that one cannot understand the underlying principles of an ideology without reading a very specific work of fiction still strikes me as silly. I mean, true, it is possible, but then I think that such an ideology would not be worth the paper on which the book has been printed in the first place. I am happy to say that I don’t think that this describes libertarianism.
Well, since we’re doing quotes, let’s hear a word or two from Ezekiel.
I wonder what’s KJ’s take on that…or maybe I rather don’t:-)
I find Rand very hard to read even though I quite liked the story… she is just so heavy handed. For ‘Atlas Shrugged the Movie’ to succeed, they better be brutal editing down the Castro-like declamatory prose… which is why the ‘part one’ bit is a tad ominous.
As a story however I thought Atlas Shrugged was vastly preferable to The Fountainhead, which I really did not care for on any level.
OK, I surrender. Don’t read it; I don’t really care.
IanB, you’ve been waiting a long time to drop that in, haven’t you?
Now that you put it this way Laird, I just may read it – if only to remain consistently contrarian;-P
Not surprising, seeing that she was Russian. BTW and speaking of Galt’s speech, both W&P and Karamazovs each have an entire chapter of philosophical/historical exposition that is absolutely skippable as far as the plot and the characters are concerned.
Interesting article, PeterT. Thanks for the link.
I have read all of Bastiat’s works and they are excellent – Bastiat was a devout subscriber to the English press and his books represent a readily accessible condensation of many of the economic ideas that were widespread in England at that time.
However, it is preposterous to claim that Bastiat possessed anything like the intellectual depth and range of Rand(Link) – a large degree of the controversy that surrounds her reputation stems not from the alleged shortcomings her critics like to claim but is attributable, rather, to the profundity of her thought, which is why relying on internet reviews of Ayn Rand is ill-advised, witness, for example, this critique of Atlas Shrugged by Dan Hannan MEP [Con]:
‘Again and again, we come across absurd passages: “Francisco held his voice flat and steady, but he had the eyes of a man who had had an extra muffin at tea-time, knowing that he really shouldn’t have done, and was now resolved to go for a lengthy country walk, although he half suspected that he would end up pouring himself a generous cocktail when he got home, which would rather take the point out of the whole thing.”’
The only problem is – this passage does not appear anywhere in the book: it is one which Hannan himself has made up.
Do yourself a favour – read Atlas Shrugged and form your own opinion – you may be worth it.
That was precisely my first thought. I remember reading AS back in the early 1970s as a yoot, and not minding the story too much (although the love scenes were about as bad as anything ever written by Billy Graham).
And then I got to the John Galt speech. Dear God. At the second page, I got the point. By the fourth, I was ready to scream “Get on with it already!” and by the end, I was ready to meet my Maker, having endured the tortures of Purgatory.
And I was (and still am) an atheist.
When a piece of writing makes you cry out for comfort and succor from a being whom you know does not exist, then you know you have encountered Bad Writing.
Never was Dorothy Parker’s criticism more appropriate: “This is not a book to be put down lightly. This is a book to be thrown across the room with great force.“
John W is right; so many people criticise Rand in ways that makes it clear that they haven’t read her, or just read quotes taken out of context.
I also don’t get the idea that AS is not a key book for the libertarian/classical liberal tradition. Er, WTF? The book celebrates reason, individualism, trade, wealth creation, freedom. Sounds pretty libertarian to me.
It is not exactly hard to figure out that such a book might speak powerfully. Much of the libertarian movement in the US owes its energy to Rand; she got young people interested, and then of course they picked up on the likes of von Mises, etc. To deny Rand her place is simply churlish. In fact, a lot of her detractors sound a bit jealous. Get over it.
Johnathan – When I said that Ayn Rand’s heroes owe nothing to others, and that their ideas ‘magically’ come from inside I was referring to her belief that Great Men and Women, succesful Businessmen and women (“America’s persecuted minority”), entrepreneurs, great Scientists, and the like, owe virtually nothing to the intellectual groundwork on which they stand. No inventor, no innovator, generates entirely new concepts and ideas, they build on what is already there. No great scientist starts with a blank slate. They all owe at least part of their success to the work done by the society and milieu in to which they were born and educated.
@Johnathan Pearce
‘…so many people criticise Rand in ways that makes it clear that they haven’t read her, or just read quotes taken out of context.’
None of the criticism of Rand in the current comments has been from people pretending to have read her or taking quotes out of context. Speaking for myself alone, I am quite happy to say that I never got beyond the first page of AS and indeed, that I take to be a mark of my exalted literary discernment. Life’s too short to plug through this stodge, however worthy. Ian B would rather mutilate his manhood and Alisa would rather wait for a hot actor.
‘… AS is…a key book…’. Well, it may be ‘key’ in that the Randerasts big it up, but I still feel justified in wondering just how many people have yawned their way through that immense heap of stodge. I am not denying that some unspecified quantity of people think she’s brilliant and have read the book.
Don’t ignore the other categories, though. For example: those who
– think she’s brilliant and haven’t read the book;
– read the book and thought she wasn’t brilliant;
– couldn’t face reading the book because it was awful;
– haven’t read the book, couldn’t care less about Rand and just want the government out of their faces.
PeterT stated: ‘When surveys of the American populace have asked what book influenced them the most, apparently Atlas Shrugged came second, with the Bible first’. I’d be interested in the evidence, e.g. were the respondents asked whether they had actually read the book?
‘Much of the libertarian movement in the US owes its energy to Rand; she got young people interested’. Could you give us some evidence for that statement?
‘In fact, a lot of her detractors sound a bit jealous. Get over it.’ Well, if thinking that makes you feel better, so be it, but it implies you think they all secretly admire AS. This detractor doesn’t. It’s a lump of self-indulgent stodge – well page one is at least; as I said, I haven’t read the rest.
If you want to give everyone a hint that your arguments are weak use one of the two phrases ‘get over it’ and its sister ‘time to move on’.
All right, I’ve already said that I don’t care if anyone reads Atlas Shrugged or not. And I really don’t; it’s your choice. But I can’t let the idiocy of Peter Czerna’s last post pass unchallenged.
Peter is “quite happy to say that [he] never got beyond the first page of AS,” but he is also quite happy to label it as an “immense heap of stodge” and “self-indulgent stodge.” (“Stodge” seems a favorite word, as it’s used three times in one short post. Got a thesaurus, Peter?) Upon what is that characterization based? Obviously not on actual knowledge; I guess that would be asking too much. One can’t get a fair sense of an entire (and very long) novel from the first page, especially when it is obvious that even that one page was approached with a preconceived attitude of disdain. The combination of willful (indeed, prideful) ignorance, arrogance and condescension on display here is breathtaking.
” ‘Much of the libertarian movement in the US owes its energy to Rand; she got young people interested’. Could you give us some evidence for that statement?” Obviously, along with the rest of the gaps in your knowledge you’ve never read Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism. It’s the only comprehensive treatment (to date) of the history of the libertarian movement in the US, and it devotes an entire chapter to Rand (and her two lesser-known cohorts, Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson; he calls them the “three furies”). No other single individual is mentioned as much as Rand in that book; no one else, not even Rothbard or Hayek, has a longer treatment in the Index. It is absolutely indisputable that Rand was a giant in the libertarian movement (even though she didn’t consider herself a libertarian). To even question the statement is to demonstrate ignorance.
Personally, I would have been embarassed to put such blatant ignorance on public display, and to have heaped such invective on a book I had never read. But I guess my standards are higher.
Ayn Rand was a good writer and an interesting thinker.
I will certainly see the film of Atlas Shrugged if it is distributed in the United Kingdom.
The rest has been said by Laird and the others.
I’d go easy on that thesaurus stuff if I were you, Laird. ‘…willful (indeed, prideful) ignorance, arrogance and condescension’. I’m with Hemingway on this: ‘He [Faulkner] thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use’. ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is stodge, Laird. I could rack my brains for another word if you would like some variety, but, when you get down to it ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is just a thousand pages of… stodge.
I did not approach ‘Atlas Shrugged’ with any preconceptions at all. That’s your assumption. I approached it with an open mind (several times over the last two decades, in fact) and found it, every time, a game not worth the candle – i.e. stodge.
I don’t care whether it is part of your blessed libertarian canon or whether I reveal my ignorance of the history and seminal works therein. I approach it as a novel, a piece of fiction, and find it to be… er… stodge!
And if you say to me, how do you know that it is s**d*e, when you have only read one page? Well, if it was OK for Comte to practise ‘cerebral hygiene’, it’s OK for me.
I’m sure you will find this deeply ignorant and arrogant on my part and that you will be able to find lots of ten-dollar words with which to castigate me, but I gave up reading books out of a sense of duty a long time ago. If the first page is… er… stodge, then the rest of it is… you know what.
Your outrage makes me think that I must have sinned against the libertarian orthodoxy in some way: ‘…to even question the statement is to demonstrate ignorance’, you write.
Read that back to yourself a few times.
What is wrong with wanting to see some primary source evidence (if it exists) for the readership of ‘Atlas Shrugged’? Anybody would think that I had questioned the fact that the Sun orbits the Earth. If you are going to require an induction course in libertarianism as a precondition for contributing to this blog then you and the other two? three? who have attained the elysium will be left to mutter amongst yourselves.
And ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is stodge.
@Paul Marks
‘Ayn Rand was a good writer’. I’m trying not to be as grumpy as Laird here, but could you give us some evidence for this statement?
@Johnathan Pearce ‘Much of the libertarian movement in the US owes its energy to Rand; she got young people interested’.
Indeed, but the same is true of the UK – as anyone who ever witnessed a Tame bomb(Link) would know.
I repeat my initial advice – read Atlas Shrugged and form your own opinion – do not be put off by the bitter invective of spiteful religionists.
@Peter Czerna “Well, if it was OK for Comte to practise ‘cerebral hygiene’, it’s OK for me.”
You have no idea how funny that is(Link).
I believe the modern expression is – epic fail.
Could this be just a matter of, you know, taste? How would the word ‘evidence’ even come into that?
Other than that, to me, as someone who has not read the book, Peter Czerna sounds much more convincing than Laird does (sorry, Laird).
Peter, you have no “duty” to read Atlas Shrugged or any other book. Read it or not; I don’t care. But to heap that kind of invective on a book you admittedly (and proudly) assert that you have never read is wholly irrational. One page isn’t enough to form such a judgment (whatever you may think Comte said), and in any event that particular page isn’t sufficiently bad to label it “stodge” (or any other term, good or bad, for that matter). You could only reach that conclusion on the basis of such flimsy evidence if you were predisposed toward it.
I don’t think you have “sinned against the libertarian orthodoxy”; I don’t think you even know what it is, and I wouldn’t care if you had. But the tone is which you demanded “some evidence for that statement” tells me that your sneer at Rand extends not merely to her literary merits but to the rest of her contribution to the development of libertarian thought. Well, you wanted a primary source and I gave you one (which itself contains a plethora of others); and even a link. So go educate yourself.
Ignorance I can forgive; we’re all guilty of it to some degree. It’s willful ignorance, and especially arrogance over very fact of such ignorance, which I find offensive. After your statement “I never got beyond the first page of AS” you should have had nothing more to say on the subject. Such ignorance might or might not be evidence of your “exalted literary discernment”, but under those circumstances your disparagement of the book is evidence of your emotional immaturity.
No-one has a “duty” to read anything!
Laird: very astute, as always.
“When I said that Ayn Rand’s heroes owe nothing to others, and that their ideas ‘magically’ come from inside I was referring to her belief that Great Men and Women, succesful Businessmen and women (“America’s persecuted minority”), entrepreneurs, great Scientists, and the like, owe virtually nothing to the intellectual groundwork on which they stand.”
Au contraire-
“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light.
Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world…” Roark’s Speech(Link), The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand.
That is a total misrepresentation. She never said, from what I read, that an inventor, businessman or whatever invents ex-nihilo; of course people learn from others, build on the work of others, etc. When Rand wrote the Fountainhead etc, she wrote about people whom she admired and therefore had existed before; she was not acting from a blank slate starting point. She learned from Aristotle, etc.
The key point is that she made it clear that people must still use their independent judgement when looking at the work of others, or learning from it. Rather than just following tradition blindly, they must engage critically, and think for themselves. That is the crucial thing. Innovation is not about rejecting everything that has gone before; and she did not say that.
Sorry, but you are completely misrepresenting Rand on this issue and it is therefore not possible to debate you properly.
It always amazes me how people want to project their own imagined version of what they think someone said and did rather than the less emotionally satisfying reality. One of the enduring mysteries, I suppose.
Poor criticism has a long history but there is no doubt that Rand gets more “wrong censure” than any other author I know.
“‘Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill,
But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss…” – An Essay on Criticism – Alexander Pope.
There are some very cross people on this blog. I never imagined that libertarians could be so intemperate.
Never mind – I’ve just poured out my second glass of Dalwhinnie and I am approaching a state of transcendental calm. I therefore apologise in advance, Laird, for any spelling mistakes or infelicities of style in what follows.
If I told a very devout Christian that the Bible was, as a literary work, let us say, a little uneven, I think I would probably get the same sort of reaction as I have had here for suggesting that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was more than somewhat indigestible for the Earthbound mind (i.e. ‘stodgy’).
Let us evaluate ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is as a work of fiction, as a work of imagination. Those who will can build a list in their minds of similar, memorable polemical works of fiction that they have read. Let me start you off, in no particular order:
– 1984 (of course)
– Animal Farm (natch)
– Grapes of Wrath
– Candide
– Gulliver’s Travels (Swift passim)
– Don Quixote
– Kurt Tucholsky, passim
– Heinrich Böll, passim
…etc, etc.
Having never got beyond the first page, I can’t really put ‘Atlas Shrugged’ anywhere in this list. But, be honest, where would it go on your list?
Please don’t force me to look at the thing and start quoting bits!
@Johnathan Pearce
‘…people must still use their independent judgement when looking at the work of others, or learning from it. Rather than just following tradition blindly, they must engage critically, and think for themselves.’
Oh, I like that!
@Alisa
Thanks for your kind words. Much needed at the moment!
‘Ayn Rand was a good writer’ is a statement that calls for evidence. ‘I think that Ayn Rand was a good writer’ is a matter of taste, which I am very happy to accept. I hope I didn’t offend Paul with my grumpiness.
In my ever so humble opinion what made Ayn Rand a good, not great but good, writer was not her heroes but her villains. The bad guys. like Wesley Mouch and his cohorts were shown using the tools of government power to shut down anything and anyone who got in their way, She brilliantly showed how they masked their drive for unlimited power with words about fairness and compassion.
I’ve never been able to take her philosophy too seriously, but she did have a talent for showing how, in America, the statists and the ‘looters’ operated. In historical context she exposed FDR’s New Deal in much the same way that Orwell exposed Stalin’s USSR. She lacked Orwell’s skill with the English language, but on the whole she was on the side of the angels.
“But, be honest, where would it go on your list?”
I suppose that depends upon the basis for the evaluation. (And since I’ve not read anything by Kurt Tucholsky or Heinrich Böll I have nothing to say about either.) If one is evaluating pure literary merit, I wouldn’t put Rand on that list at all. If one is considering the magnitude of the writer’s impact on society, I would rank it very high indeed (certainly above “Grapes of Wrath”). (I’m not sure why “Candide” is even on that list.) But so what?
Look, I’m not arguing that Rand was a great writer of fiction. I agree that her style could be (as someone has already noted) somewhat turgid. I’m saying that someone who hasn’t read even a fair sample of her work (and one page is not a “fair sample”) has no business criticizing her literary merits. If you told a devout Christian (which I am not) that the Bible is uneven as a literary work I doubt that you’d get much argument (it is uneven, although there are some beautiful spots), unless you also told him that you had never read it and were just making the criticism up out of whole cloth. Then I think you’d get a argument, and legitimately so.
And that’s my complaint here. I have no issue with people who have read AS and didn’t like it; de gustibus non est disputandum. I do have an issue with the ignorant taking gratuitous shots on the basis of nothing more than prejudice. And it especially rankles when the person making the criticism boasts of his rank ignorance, and somehow sees that as a virtue.
“Other than that, to me, as someone who has not read the book, Peter Czerna sounds much more convincing than Laird does (sorry, Laird).”
Care to re-think that, Alisa? Are you really saying that you find the uninformed opinions of someone who admittedly is totally ignorant about the book “more convincing” that the thoughts of those who have actually read it? Sounds like you’ve been in the Dalwhinnie, too.
For me, Atlas Shrugged was the picture on a box of puzzle pieces. My own experiences and observations were the puzzle pieces but I couldn’t make them fit together. As I read the book over the course of almost a week, I spent far more time thinking about the plausibility and likelihood of her construct than I did actually reading. I was not looking to be entertained. Entertainment is cheap. I was looking for an explanation of things I knew but didn’t understand. Like Taylor, I found her villains much more enlightening than her heroes. I can understand what makes heroes tick but I couldn’t understand what drove the levelers.
Even with the literary shortfalls, it is the most influential book I have read. Most consequentially, it opened my mind to accept that people who reject and attack success really exist. The levelers dragging down the high achievers. They aren’t confused, they know exactly what they are doing. It took a few hundred of those pages fitting my own experiences so well for her to convince me of that.
While Rand and Palin have almost nothing in common, I think their detractors have a lot in common. They fall into two camps, the ones that can’t get past the communication style to hear the substance, and the ones that hear the substance but fear it. The first camp needs to have deep questions wrapped in small, neat inoffensive packages and are unable to process it otherwise. The second camp fears individual autonomy, whether others or their own.
I side with Laird in this debate. If you are looking for “literature” read the New York Times book reviews or I hear Oprah has a book club. If you want to explore political philosophy then expect to work a little bit. She wasn’t writing to entertain. If you are unable to read and understand her books, then you are purely a recreational reader and should adjust your expectations (and reading list) accordingly.
Don’t worry Peter, for some reason it only happens when Rand is the topic of discussion. Sigh. Oh, and on the matter of taste: I thought that there was no need to qualify our every statement with ‘I think that…’ – to the contrary, I thought we are rather expected to explicitly notify others when we purport to speak for someone else instead of ourselves?
No, but rather to explain that my comment was not meant to address the merit of the book itself (as you quite rightly pointed out I’d have to actually read it to do that), but rather the idea that one cannot decide that they don’t care for a book after reading one page – one can, no matter how many good, intelligent and well-informed people may think otherwise. That’s Peter’s opinion, he’s perfectly entitled to it. The book may in fact be great, and he (and I, for that matter) may be really missing a lot by not reading it – but so what, Laird? It’s just a book, for Pete’s sake. Seriously, if it was any other book by any other author, there is no way we would be having this…whatever it is, ‘discussion’ it isn’t. The only other book I can think of that could generate this kind of extreme reactions is the Bible – and are I you really ready to put AS up there at the same level of importance? Not that I care, mind, just curious.
Oh, and since we seem to get personal here, I’ll have you know that I’m a Jamison type myself;-P
Mid, I happen to be an (almost) purely recreational reader. I understand your experience with the book and good for you for being able to gain all those insights from it – I prefer getting such insights from conversations with other people. I even read SI mostly for the comment threads rather than for the posts themselves (not to diminish the importance of the posts: they are indispensable to the generation of comments, so please keep them coming). To each their own, which is what individualism is all about.
Rand’s writing is very empowering at a personal level. It is generally optimistic about a person’s ability to find happiness through productive work and other activities that are possible for most people to pursue. While works such as ‘animal farm’ and ‘1984’ are better literature, and do a very good job of warning about the dangers of socialism (with ‘animal farm’ being put in cartoon form for the kiddies), they do not offer a compelling positive vision of what society could be like. I think, generally speaking, libertarians (and especially perhaps; conservatives) are good at making the case against socialism, they are less good at pointing out the positive aspects of a free society.
That’s a very interesting point Peter. I am not sure though that it is in fact a bug rather than a feature. Personally, I’d rather such visions be left unspecified, otherwise they can very easily (or perhaps even inevitably) amount to false advertising, as such visions by their very nature are individual and thus highly subjective.
Well said, Midwesterner.
I have read most of Rand’s books, and I was unable to put Atlas Shrugged down, even though it was bloated in places. As has been said already, it is a matter of taste. But I think Atlas had a grip on me because it helped me to recognize people in my life at the time who were directly living off my labor, and yet doing everything they could to sabotage it. It was a revelation, and still informs my political opinion, even if I didnt adopt every concept Rand wrote about.
I am sure you all have definitions for ‘bad writer’, and it would largely have to do with your unwillingness to keep reading what they write. Fair enough. But try to write something (in your perhaps superior prose) which becomes as recognizable to as many people as the phrase ‘Who is John Galt?’ I would say that there are many many wonderfully gifted writers out there who live and die anonymously, but only one Ayn Rand.
Nothing succeeds like success. Another writer I happen to like but who is more turgid than Rand (hard to believe, isnt it?) is John Norman, he of the Gor series. The guy is just awful, but I like the world he paints so much that I am willing to read through all 26 books in the series. The reason I bring him up is that he has quite a sizable following, including people who are crazy enough to be ‘lifestylers’ of his fantasy world. The guy has sold millions of volumes and his world is the basis of at least two utterly terrible movies. I would call that, success.
Me, sane? You must be crazy.
Sorry Radex, Atlas was never your kind of book anyway – there’s no pictures in it.
My problem, Alisa, was that I couldn’t find those conversations. Nobody in any of my circles of acquaintance could grasp, much less agree with (and forget about imagining and communicating) the things she was saying. The world wide web was far in the future. Darryl’s choice of words nails it. It was a revelation. And his experience matches mine. “People . . . who were directly living off my labor, and yet doing everything they could to sabotage it.”
There are very many philosophers that I avoid and for a more limited understanding I rely on listening in on others discussing them. We only have so much gray matter and it’s a simple matter of priorities. I can readily understand not reading Rand because there are easier ways to get an fairly good understanding of her construct. But what I have a problem with is those people who declare that she can’t have something important to say because they unable or unwilling to read her writing. That is clearly not what you are doing but it is the standard attack that many make on Rand. That says far more about them than her.
Alisa, there are far too many good, even great, books out there for anyone to read them all. If you choose to skip any particular one I have no problem with it. I don’t even care if the reason you choose to skip it is that people whose views you respect told you it wasn’t worth reading; we all rely to some extent on the recommendations of others. But if you choose not to read it I would hope that you have the sense to avoid making gratuitous and wholly ignorant criticisms of it. Peter apparently does not.
Here’s a link to Amazon’s edition of the book. They’ll let you read the beginning for free. I don’t want you to do that; I merely suggest that you click on “First Pages” and read just the first page of Chapter 1. That’s all; no more. Two minutes (if you’re slow). Deathless prose? No. But I defy you (or anyone) to tell me that the entire book is “stodge” based solely on that one page.
Peter is indeed entitled to his opinion. And I’m entitled to say that he’s full of cr*p.
Oh, and my preference is for Glenlivet. Never cared as much for the Irish stuff! ;-p
I am, therefore I’ll drink!
Oh I get it Mid, and I agree. Although I don’t think that anyone here said that Rand had nothing important to say. The most anyone seems to have said was that there is no need to read the book to understand these important things – which you yourself just conceded.
Laird, I just read about two and a half pages (not the first time, I now recall trying in the past). What can I say. The prose is very dry, uninviting and inelegant – but the plot still seems to break through it and may well have the ability to pull a reader in despite the prose. I seem to begin to see Perry’s point above. I don’t know if I could get through the whole book – it could well be that the plot is engrossing enough to overpower the, well, turgid prose. OTOH, I can well see why someone reading the first page would dismiss it as…you know what. Seriously, some readers tend to place a very high value on the quality of prose (RAB is one such reader, IIRC). I am not entirely in that camp myself, but I too have my limits. To sum up, I could probably give it another shot if I had nothing better on my new and wonderful Kindle:-)
Oh, and lechaim!
Lechaim to you, too! (So that’s how it’s spelled.)
Alisa @ 11:42 PM – enough with the Vulcan hand-signalling !
Given the recent topic of “The Heretic”, this would seem to be a good time to hypothesise that there may be another writer (and other writings) who (and which) will tend to encourage rational folk to tend towards libertarianism …
I speak, of course, of Monbiot (and the Grauniad) … after a bit of reading each (or both) a rational mind finds itself wanting omething more, something better, something less Moonbatty, less Grauniadiacal …
That may, of course, just have been me …
With that said – there are less than half a dozen books I have encountered throughout my Life, so far, that I just could not get into enough to read … Atlas Shrugged wasn’t one of ’em … the most recent was one of Anne Rice’s – and I find I greatly enjoy what and how she writes … (even if her “Sleeping Beauty” trilogy is not for the faint of heart, nor is it likely to be discussed on or by Oprah) …
And Mazel tov to you!
Whilst nobody has a duty to others about reading books, they have a duty to themselves to read a book before they criticise it. The only thing Peter can criticise is her dry style, since he never got to her ideas, but he can legimitaly criticise that style.
However, I think that she showed the way ahead- if you have a philosophy, novelise it!
These days, you could modernise the ideas by having NASA trying to shut down or take over all private enterprise attempts to get into space, and trying to stop Galt and his handy antigravity device.
Astute.
Peter Czerna says some of us are a bit intemperate. Do you honestly, I mean honestly, expect not to get your knuckles rapped, and hard, when you state that you think a work is “turgid” when you then state, with a sort of insouciant arrogance, that you only read one page of the book? Did you ever try this approach when you were in school and explaining your homework to a teacher?!!!!
To be blunt, you came across as a supercilious arse, and you were duly treated as such by Laird, who is actually one of the most measured commenters here. Now, on the other hand……
Fanboys are always easy to enrage and, inevitably, hilarity ensues.
Peter Czerna wrote:
Let us evaluate ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is as a work of fiction, as a work of imagination. Those who will can build a list in their minds of similar, memorable polemical works of fiction that they have read.
I’ll put mine in terms of impact on me.
Atlas Shrugged easily tops my list (for reasons I’ll explain in the time and manner of my choosing)
1984 and Animal Farm
Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land
Foundation x4 (after 20+ years, I’ve concluded Psycho-History is not calculable, but the math framework is useful)
This is necessarily a long riposte. Sorry, sometimes brevity won’t work. In fear of the Smiting Monster, I have split it into separate comments.
Part 1
So far on this thread no one has tried to say that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has literary merits, and for that I must be grateful I suppose. The book’s good points seem to be:
– It expounds a philosophy that ranges, depending on viewpoint, from seminal to life-enhancing.
– It has been very influential (at least in terms of copies printed). It must have stemmed the tide of socialist superstates sweeping acros the world for… oh, ten minutes.
– Er… it’s quite useful for raising the height of your computer monitor.
– When eventually Laird pops round to biff me on the nose the book will be my weapon of choice.
Even while granting that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is hardly literature of the first chop, Laird and others dispute that I can call it stodge without having read it through. When Herbert Spencer got a new book he used to read it for the duration of one circuit of his garden. If the book didn’t reach the Spencerian standard in that time it was straight on the compost heap with it. This is essentially what I do (not advisable for Kindle owners, though), but given the howls of ‘unfair’ from others on this blog, perhaps I ought to make an exception with ‘Atlas Shrugged’.
I didn’t throw it on the compost heap – wish I had, now, though – but it has seen useful service over the decades propping up stuff. It is the Signet paperback edition from the early sixties, the paper beige and musty. ‘0,50’ is pencilled on the flyleaf – it cost me 50 Rappen in a Swiss junkshop two decades ago. Le juste prix: What goes around, comes around, Ayn.
Part 2
Here’s the paragraph on page one where I think I usually give up:
Eddie Willers walked on, wondering why he always felt it at the time of day, this sense of dread without reason. No, he thought, not dread, there’s nothing to fear: just and immense, diffused apprehension with no source or object. He had become accustomed to the feeling, but he could find not explanation for it; yet the bum had spoken as if he knew that Eddie felt it, as if he thought that one should feel it, and more: as if he knew the reason.
Now, if Ayn had written a thousand page tract titled ‘Objectivism for Dummies’, I would be among the cheerleaders: ‘You go, girl’. She didn’t. She wrote a novel. A novel has to engross the reader with its use of language, its plot, characterisation. It has to pull all the registers of dramatic effect to make the reader forget that he or she may be sitting on some smelly commuter train on the way to work.
We know from this paragraph alone that Ayn Rand cannot do that. It is just not in her. There is no point reading this author further – 10 pages I might risk, but 1000+ pages, no.
In contrast, here is our yardstick:
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
Hemingway, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, Chapter 1
Or, if you prefer something more polemical, this would do:
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.
Steinbeck, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, Chapter 1
These are examples of the beginnings of novels written by people who could write. They draw you in. You enter a world; you are focussed, alive.
Barely a word can be added, changed or left out without ruining these paragraphs. Contrast this with ‘Atlas Shrugged’, where you could add, change or delete words without any appreciable effect. You could probably even swap the sentences around and no one would notice. I chose these two yardsticks not just because they are good models of the novelist’s craft but because they communicate an oppressive foreboding that we feel directly. When Ayn Rand wants to communicate foreboding she writes in her best coffee machine instruction manual style of a ‘sense of dread without reason’, an ‘immense, diffused apprehension’. A writer who writes this badly has to go straight on the compost heap or under the monitor.
Part 3
OK, you say, but I should have persevered with this seminal work. It is not fair to say it is stodge from just reading the first page. Was I right to give up so soon?
I stick my finger in the rear of Ayn Rand this time. It turns out to be in the crack between pages 760 and 761. Towards the bottom of 761 I read:
It seemed to him for an instant that he saw an incongruous look on the worn, cynical faces of the newsmen, a look that was not quite respect, expectation or hope, but more like an echo of these, like a faint reflection of the look they might have worn in their youth on hearing the name of Robert Stadler. In that instant he felt an impulse that he would not acknowledge: the impulse to tell them that he know nothing about today’s event, that his power counted for less than theirs, that he had been brought here as a pawn in some confidence game, almost as … as a prisoner.
It does not compute. At the most basic level of language, the communication of meaning, it does not compute. After having forced myself to type this rubbish in, I no longer have the energy to deconstruct it properly. Just read it: it’s rot.
Well, perhaps Laird might say that I was prejudiced or cherry picking, or that if I had read the preceding 760 pages attentively that paragraph would have been lambent to me. OK, Laird, I insert my finger once more into Ayn, this time further forward: page 399, this time, but down at the bottom again:
He stood at the window, looking down at the streaming roofs of automobiles, letting his eyes rest on something while his faculty of sight was disconnected. His mind was still focussed on the crowd in the balllroom downstairs and on two figures in that crowd. But as his living room remained on the edge of his vision, so the sense of some action he had to perform remained on the edge of his consciousness. He grasped it for a moment – it was the fact that he had to remove his evening clothes – but farther beyond the edge there was the feeling of reluctance to undress in the presence of a strange woman in the bedroom, and he forgot it again the next moment.
I nearly gave up typing in the middle of that, so dire it is. Is this the beginning of an Ayn Rand sex scene? Does our hero realize this? Is he perhaps too busy ‘grasping the sense of some action for a moment’, or perhaps he is just in early dementia.
Will this exegetical journey never end?
Part 4 (the end)
By looking for a sequence of quotation marks I found what I take to be the John Galt speech to which Laird referred. This starts on page 936 and ends on page 993 in my edition so it’s about 60 pages long (unless, of course – and I certainly wouldn’t put it past Rand – there is another 100 page speech somewhere else). This is supposed to be a radio broadcast, which in itself threatens all suspension of disbelief. When it – this seemingly crucial moment in the plot – finally ends, here’s how our Ayn handles the denouement:
“It wasn’t real, was it?” said Mr. Thompson.
They stood in front of the radio, as the last sound of Galt’s voice had left them. No one had moved through the span of silence: they had stood, looking at the radio, as if waiting. But the radio was now only a wooden box with some knobs and a circle of cloth stretched over an empty loud-speaker.
“We seem to have heard it,” said Tinky Holloway.
“We couldn’t help it,” said Chick Morrison.
Mr. Thompson was sitting on a crate. The pale, oblong smear at the level of his elbow was the face of Wesley Mouch, who was seated on the floor.
It is hardly the conclusion of Sydney Carton’s speech in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. At every level it is clunkily awful. Even at the most basic level of continuity, in one sentence they are standing round the radio, in the next sentence they (at least two of them) are sitting down.
I appeal to all readers of this post with any sanity left not to read this book. If you are interested in Objectivism get the executive summary – it’s all you will need – from Wikipedia. (Wikipedia, ‘Ayn Rand’: ‘After completing the novel of more than one thousand pages, however, Rand fell into a severe depression’. Why am I not surprised – she had just had to proof read it all.)
Enough. Laird, I hope you will agree that I have gone the extra mile in justifying my arrogant presumption that on the evidence of the first page, the remaining 1084 are not worth the candle. It’s stodge, in anyone’s thesaurus.
SMITTEN!
Part 4 (the end)
By looking for a sequence of quotation marks I found what I take to be the John Galt speech to which Laird referred. This starts on page 936 and ends on page 993 in my edition so it’s about 60 pages long (unless, of course – and I certainly wouldn’t put it past Rand – there is another 100 page speech somewhere else). This is supposed to be a radio broadcast, which in itself threatens all suspension of disbelief. When it – this seemingly crucial moment in the plot – finally ends, here’s how our Ayn handles the denouement:
“It wasn’t real, was it?” said Mr. Thompson.
They stood in front of the radio, as the last sound of Galt’s voice had left them. No one had moved through the span of silence: they had stood, looking at the radio, as if waiting. But the radio was now only a wooden box with some knobs and a circle of cloth stretched over an empty loud-speaker.
“We seem to have heard it,” said Tinky Holloway.
“We couldn’t help it,” said Chick Morrison.
Mr. Thompson was sitting on a crate. The pale, oblong smear at the level of his elbow was the face of Wesley Mouch, who was seated on the floor.
It is hardly the conclusion of Sydney Carton’s speech in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. At every level it is clunkily awful. Even at the most basic level of continuity, in one sentence they are standing round the radio, in the next sentence they (at least two of them) are sitting down.
I appeal to all readers of this post with any sanity left not to read this book. If you are interested in Objectivism get the executive summary – it’s all you will need – from Wikipedia. (Wikipedia, ‘Ayn Rand’: ‘After completing the novel of more than one thousand pages, however, Rand fell into a severe depression’. Why am I not surprised – she had just had to proof read it all.)
Enough. Laird, I hope you will agree that I have gone the extra mile in justifying my arrogant presumption that on the evidence of the first page, the remaining 1084 are not worth the candle. It’s stodge, in anyone’s thesaurus.
Part 4 was smitten…
See if I care.
@Johnathan Pearce
I told everyone here that I hadn’t read the book and that on the evidence of the first page I thought it stodge. ‘Insouciant arrogance’? You’ve been playing with Laird’s thesaurus again, haven’t you? Come on, admit it!
@Ian B: Yo!
Part 4 (one last try)
By looking for a sequence of quotation marks I found what I take to be the John Galt speech to which Laird referred. This starts on page 936 and ends on page 993 in my edition so it’s about 60 pages long (unless, of course – and I certainly wouldn’t put it past Rand – there is another 100 page speech somewhere else). This is supposed to be a radio broadcast, which in itself threatens all suspension of disbelief. When it – this seemingly crucial moment in the plot – finally ends, here’s how our Ayn handles the denouement:
“It wasn’t real, was it?” said Mr. Thompson.
They stood in front of the radio, as the last sound of Galt’s voice had left them. No one had moved through the span of silence: they had stood, looking at the radio, as if waiting. But the radio was now only a wooden box with some knobs and a circle of cloth stretched over an empty loud-speaker.
“We seem to have heard it,” said Tinky Holloway.
“We couldn’t help it,” said Chick Morrison.
Mr. Thompson was sitting on a crate. The pale, oblong smear at the level of his elbow was the face of Wesley Mouch, who was seated on the floor.
It is hardly the conclusion of Sydney Carton’s speech in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. At every level it is clunkily awful. Even at the most basic level of continuity, in one sentence they are standing round the radio, in the next sentence they (at least two of them) are sitting down.
I appeal to all readers of this post with any sanity left not to read this book. If you are interested in Objectivism get the executive summary – it’s all you will need – from Wikipedia. (Wikipedia, ‘Ayn Rand’: ‘After completing the novel of more than one thousand pages, however, Rand fell into a severe depression’. Why am I not surprised – she had just had to proof read it all.)
Enough. Laird, I hope you will agree that I have gone the extra mile in justifying my arrogant presumption that on the evidence of the first page, the remaining 1084 are not worth the candle. It’s stodge, in anyone’s thesaurus.
@Alisa at February 14, 2011 11:40 PM
Don’t do it, Alisa! Do not put that ring on your finger, or in time you will become a mere wraith with all independent reason gone, of the sort we have spooking about in this thread.
If I may say so, you do protest a bit too loudly, Peter – which is the fault I find with Rand’s fans to begin with and the reason I like an occasional poke of fun at them:-) To quote myself quoting many, many others: it’s just a book, get over it – and that goes for anyone willing to listen.
I’ve read it. The whole damn thing.
I read it in hopes that it would have been a better book than The Fountainhead. Frak me, was I disappointed.
Had she wanted to write a thousand pages of non-fiction, then great. But whatever ideas or thoughts or wisdom she had in AS[1] were buried in some frakking awful writing. I mean, professional peers of mine whose education stopped with Good-Enough Diplomas can turn out better, easier-to-follow narrative than that.
To say nothing of, how best to put this…Rand wrote caricatures, not characters. They didn’t have dialogue, but made speeches at each other instead.
Maybe Anthem wasn’t much better, but at least the pain ended sooner.
[1] how beautiful rationalism is when blended with dogmatism being the main one that came through.
I’ve always thought The Fountainhead would be a great title for the first libertarian porn movie. In fact it could be a porn movie about a porn moviemaker who refuses to compromise his vision and at the end he’s on trial for making porn movies and he gives a big speech in the courtroom about how his spirit won’t be suppressed by lesser mortals, and then everybody has sex, or something.
For once, I think I agree with Ian B.
Although an Ayn Rand pr0n would probably feature a fifty-page speech about the lesbian scene that fully meets the criteria of the director’s value system, followed by no actual sex.
BTW Laird, I went over my comments, and I now see that ‘silly’ may have been a poor choice of a word on my part – ‘wrong’ should have been more appropriate.
That bolded bit had me raking my brain, until Sunfish came along…:-)
@Peter Smegma It does not compute. At the most basic level of language, the communication of meaning, it does not compute. After having forced myself to type this rubbish in, I no longer have the energy to deconstruct it properly. Just read it: it’s rot.
This is so funny – you remind me of the board of the Manhattan bank in The Fountainhead. Because you can’t see the literary merit, you assume that the fault lies with Rand.
First you quote Comte [oblivious to just how exquisitely stupid that is] and then you quote two of the most notorious naturalists Steinbeck(Link) who is known to have “borrowed” [to put it lightly] from Rand and then Hemingway(Link) – it is almost as if you were deliberately selecting references to convince everyone that you are a simpleton.
Well, if that is the case – congratulations, as far as I am concerned, you’ve succeeded.
The Ayn Rand porn idea may work.
One reason I like Rand is that she gave Florence King such wonderful material for satire. Especially her short piece “Hillarique Shrugged”
The image of Jocylyn Elders on CSPAN spending sixty three hours “examining her premises” is one of Miss King’s greatest blows against government controlled medicine.
@John W at February 15, 2011 07:02 PM
I thought we’d all moved on from this subject, but you seem to have been left here muttering to yourself. You clearly have some anger management issues, John. Have you considered seeking professional help?
1- ‘Because you can’t see the literary merit, you assume that the fault lies with Rand’. She’s the one who wrote it.
2- Memo to self: refrain from quoting Hemingway or Steinbeck, they are notorius naturalists. Hmm…
3- From the new name you gave me I gather you have been playing with Laird’s thesaurus, too. What is it with you Randophiliacs? – ten-dollar words and ten-dollar hate.
@Peter Czerna
3. This may be hard to believe but the new name was a genuine typo and not some lame attempt at a pun nor a Freudian slip.
2. You may like to cite Kant or Faulkner too – then you would have a full house.
1. She is not to everyone’s taste, but even those who dislike her literary style find merit in her non-fiction.
No, I’m amused rather than angered – you have merely confirmed, albeit it unwittingly, facts that I already knew.
Well, what a thread.
Perry, seriously? I enjoyed the fountainhead much more. Maybe because I identify with Roark (awkward bastard) much more than I do ANYONE in shrugged… not being a great industrialist or anything.
That said, I now feel alone as a recreational reader (I’ve never made it through Wealth of Nations despite several attempts) who actually enjoyed Shrugged as A Good Read regardless of message. But then, I like big, long books… I count Dune, the Wheel of Time (out-lived it’s author! And still not done) and and Hyperion among my favourites.
Oh and IanB- fanbois make fantastic fun. An ill-advised drunken post I did slagging off the off the iPhone still has the highest number of hits and comments I’ve managed to date 🙂
I see you’ve all been having fun in my absence (I was travelling).
Peter, I hereby bestow upon you the right to criticize Rand’s literary merit. At least you’ve now looked at a larger sample, and even if I don’t agree that the writing is as bad as you make it out to be (and without discounting the possibility that your judgment was, shall we say, clouded by the desire to defend the position you’ve staked out here), I certainly accept that opinions can differ. At least now you have indeed “gone the extra mile”. You still probably haven’t read as much as Herbert Spencer would have in his circuit of the garden, but it’s certainly better than one page. In the future I hope you’ll think twice about criticizing books where you’ve only read a few brief paragraphs. If you insist on doing that you should get a job as a reviewer for the New York Times.
IanB, why is it that nearly everything you write eventually returns to sex and (especially) porn? One might think you had an obsession or something. Still, you might be on to something here; a porn version of The Fountainhead sounds interesting. You should try it out in graphic novel format, and if that works develop a screenplay. Be sure to include the gay hobbits.
@Laird
‘New York Times’ 🙂
Wondered where you had got to – it’s been like throwing stones into an empty pond here recently.
However, Mrs Czerna stepped into the vacuum you had left, saying: ‘You always do this’ – i.e. booksniffing – and said that I deserved everything I got and would get on this thread.
I am unrepentent. I don’t think it is necessary to drink the whole bottle before you know a wine is corked. I merely passed the cork of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ beneath my nose… and thought better of drinking it. Enough of that.
You, Johnathan, John W et al. will have respite from me now for a few months probably – my turn to hit the road.
Cheers, Peter. Enjoy your sojourn. 🙂
SQOTD!