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

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by Thomas F. Bertonneau

A coterie of gangsters begins to complain, as though the inconvenience stemmed not directly from their own sustained depredation on the economy and circumvention of the law but from inimical powers. The chief miscreant, Kip Chalmers, has come from the gang's Washington headquarters to take over a satrapy in California. Like all the other villains in Atlas he talks as though his libido were a divinity itself demanding instantaneous appeasement on every occasion. With the diesel out of commission, however, and with only a coal-fired steam locomotive available, the eight-mile-long Winston Tunnel stands as an insuperable material obstacle between Chalmers and his goal. The railroad people timidly explain this. Chalmers explodes: "Do you think I'll let your miserable technological problems interfere with crucial social issues? Do you know who I am? Tell that engineer to start moving if he values his job." (57)

All competent personnel having long since severed links with the Taggart Trans-continental, those still on the job are the ones who have, in Rand's recurrent and pejorative phrase, adapted themselves to the prevailing conditions. None wants to thwart Chalmers because to do so would put one at risk of becoming a "scapegoat." (58) They conform to the novel's ambient, semi-voluntary, self-abnegating unanimity under coercion. Hitched to a coal-burner, the Comet heads toward the Tunnel.

In earlier instances we have observed how Rand's sacrificial imagination can betray itself by a stylistic discrepancy. So it is again with the Tunnel incident. Rand always editorializes, but she rarely editorializes in such a way as to arrest the action of the story or to jolt readers out of their suspended disbelief. Something important must be at stake to compel Rand to insert the authorial passage that interposes just before the Comet, flaring and smoking, enters the lethal bore: "It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them." (59) Indeed they are not guilty--by the legally normative standard of justice which Rand putatively upholds in Atlas Shrugged and which she accuses her antagonists in the novel's grand conflict of repeatedly and egregiously violating. Just as Rearden is guilty of no particular demonstrable moral or legal infraction at his trial, except his competence, so are the passengers on the Comet--excluding, let us say, Kip Chalmers and his retinue--not guilty de jure of any proven legal transgression, as none has enjoyed due process.

Who are the unnamed "those" in Rand's sentence who "would have said," absent a hearing by the rules, that, no legitimate sentence could in the moment attach to the fated ones? We can name them as any readers who at this point in the narrative might feel uneasy about what Rand proposes momentarily to execute in her role as author, she who makes things happen. Note how the passive inflection, "happened," in the sentence, as though the event could boast of no agent, dissimulates a great deal: primarily it would dissimulate the author herself, were she not, in the writing of the utterance, betraying her manipulative and determining presence. The luckless ones must be made out as guilty. Rand must demonstrate that the random passengers have sinned sufficiently to substitute for the known "looters."