Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: from romantic fallacy to holocaustic imagination

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by Thomas F. Bertonneau

  "The only authentic epoche is ... victory over desire, victory over
  Promethean pride."
  --Rene Girard (1)

  "When the SStorturer becomes the villain of the war film, he is
  turned into a sacrificial figure, a scapegoat, [he becomes the]
  structural equivalent of the Jud Suss in Nazi cinema."
  --Eric Gans (2)

I

NO ACCOUNT OF Ayn Rand's (1905-1982) sprawling, morally incoherent end-of-the-world story Atlas Shrugged (1957) (3) can begin elsewhere than in an acknowledgment of the way in which the novel's fascinating spectacle can draw a reader in despite himself. This spectacle is the book's secret, which the present essay aims to investigate.

The British writer Colin Wilson gives a typical account. (4) He first became conscious of Rand's work while lecturing in America in the autumn of 1961; university students would ask him his opinion about her. He responded that he had never heard of Rand, whereupon, as he writes," somebody presented me with paperback copies of her two major novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged--the latter more than 1,000 pages long." (5) Delving into the former, Wilson found himself "immediately put off by the rhetorical tone of the opening," which he quotes: "Howard Roark laughed.... He stood naked at the edge of a cliff," and so forth. (6) Turning to Atlas, Wilson writes, "I remembered that I had seen some of this book before ... an immensely long speech, made over the radio by a man called John Galt ... to justify individualism." (7) Rand's prose struck Wilson as "too wordy" and he had, on that former occasion, "given it up." (8)

When students now would ask what Wilson thought of Rand, he described her as "a typical female writer, a kind of modern Marie Corelli, much given to preaching and grandiose language." (9) In the autumn of 1962, however, confined to bed by a severe case of influenza, Wilson revisited Atlas, "determined to give it a fair trial." Pushing himself through the first twenty pages, Wilson at last finished the book, finding that he "had done Miss Rand a considerable injustice" insofar as she possessed "the ability to tell a story ... with a minimum of cliches." (10)

In Wilson's judgment, Atlas "has a great deal in common with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four." (11) Like those, "it is a tirade against collectivism and government interference with individual freedom." (12) Pace Wilson, while one might acknowledge a few similarities, Atlas shows little of the political or psychological acumen of Orwell or Huxley, and none at all of their individual stylistic felicity--but this stands as a parenthesis to the criticism. No subtlety kept Wilson riveted for two days and a thousand pages but rather Rand's broad-stroke depiction of a grand industrial Gotterdammerung across the three parts of the novelistic tapestry.

Rand has the technological infrastructure of North America collapsing in ruin, often with incendiary effects, while a gangster regime that has superseded the federal government systematically loots the national economy. Moral invertebrates like James Taggart, who oversees the destruction of the Taggart Transcontinental Railway, or the Al Capone-like Cuffy Meigs, the gang-leader just before the final catastrophe, exercise a kind of morbid glamor as Rand demonstrates the drastic consequences of their larceny-dissimulated-as-altruism. The protagonists, Dagny Taggart (James's sister) and Henry "Hank" Rearden (metallurgist-entrepreneur), search an obliterated landscape for signs of the elusive Galt, who might be either the evil agency behind all of the massive decay ("the destroyer") or the genius-inventor whose deus ex machina of a free-energy motor will save civilization.

Wilson goes on to say that Rand's epos inspired him with a double response. As Wilson had "always detested the 'fallacy of insignificance' in modern literature, the cult of smallness and meanness, the atmosphere of defeat that broods over the twentieth-century novel," he "was delighted by the sheer health of Ayn Rand's view." (13) He can even understand, he writes, what Rand means when she extols that virtue of selfishness for which so many applaud or revile her, depending on their perspective: "Selfishness has always been man's vital principle--not in the sense of ... indifference to other people but in the sense of intelligent self-interest." (14) Yet while Rand might lay claim to "a considerable intellect ... it is ... narrow and incurious" so that, "having established to her own satisfaction that all that is wrong with the world is lack of faith in reason and its muddled ideas on self-interest and altruism, she seems to take no further interest in the history of ideas." (15)

Wilson makes this pronouncement on the story of Galt's strike against a corrupt world: "Collectivism has been established as the scapegoat that explains the decadence of our civilization" and having found her miscreant, "rather as Hitler found the Jews," Rand "then begins her crusade." (16)