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

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by Thomas F. Bertonneau

Later speeches and misdeeds by the "looters" constitute but variations on the basic motifs that Rand introduces during the anniversary fete. In Part III, when the governmental and economic crisis has just about reached its climax, Dagny Taggart tries to survey the sum of disasters. The enormity defies full assessment, but Rand's heroine knows the cause: "So long as living flesh was prey to be devoured, [it] did [not] matter whose stomachs it had gone to fill," especially as "there wasn't even any way to tell who were the cannibals and who were the victims." (55) When people see life as the riot of a zero-sum game, cannibalism is the inevitable result.

The logic of the sacrificial theory of life is thus the devolution of everything into a vast crisis where "cannibal" and "victim" become indistinguishable. "Men had been pushed into a pit where, shouting that man is his brother's keeper, each was devouring his neighbor and was being devoured by his neighbor's brother, each was proclaiming the righteousness of the unearned and wondering who was stripping the skin off his back, each was devouring himself, while screaming in terror that some unknowable evil was destroying the earth." (56) So might it have been, had the Bolsheviks triumphed worldwide, as they hoped. The Ukraine famine would have been a universal rather than a local phenomenon. Why then do I say that Rand's story requires what it pretends to reject? What is the borrowed premise in the saga of John Galt?

Atlas Shrugged is, up to a limit, a true revelation of redistributive rapacity, even of the old call to sacrifice in its twentieth-century ideological manifestation; the novel is, up to a limit, a true revelation of ideology as a reversion to the most primitive type of cultic religiosity, collective murder as a means of appeasing a supernatural principle. It is also--it is primarily--a sacrificial narrative, as most of popular, as opposed to high, narrative ever has been and probably always will be. It follows that the novel's borrowed premise is sacrifice: Rand invites us to view with a satisfying awe the destruction before our eyes of those who have mistreated the protagonists, with whom she has invited us to identify. The standard Arnold Schwarzenegger or Clint Eastwood thriller achieves its effect by no different means. Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 works in the same way.

The catharsis in Atlas comes not at the end, however, but around two-thirds of the way through the story. It is the superbly stage-managed Winston Tunnel disaster.

III

Rand exerts her full ability as a storyteller to endow the calamity in the railway tunnel with the appearance of inevitability, to make it look like the entirely predictable outcome of the nihilism expressed by the "looters" at Lillian's entertainment and elsewhere. Tom Clancy might well have learned something about the exegesis of catastrophe from Rand's example, but earlier popular literature offers a number of precedents. Near the end of Part II of the novel, the industrial infrastructure of the country has radically deteriorated. Trains cannot keep schedule; those that do run, run at the whim of gangsters whose principle is that to want is to get. Diesels have all but disappeared. One of the few still rolling pulls the Taggart Comet. It has broken down, stranding the Comet in the Rocky Mountains.