Howard Roark was a chess genius. He had known this, utterly securely, since his sixth birthday, when he had discovered the chess set in his attic and immediately known how to play. Sitting on pile of magazines which contained the dreary, identical thoughts of the chess ancients, he had there and then created his own unique and devastating attack. He knew that any any honest chess player could not beat it.
Let’s take some time to look in detail with how Rand executes the features we’ve identified. We can make the trouble with Rand’s writing stand out in bold relief when we compare Roark’s portrayal in The Fountainhead with Nabokov’s of Luzhin in The Defence in these terms.
Affirming our opposition to bad art and banal thought is satisfying and often necessary. In the few days after I’d immersed myself back into the sludgy consistency of Rand’s novel, with all its bald and unchallenged commonplaces, I felt a real need to vent distaste, even just as cathartic resistance. Schadenfreude is fun, but it can get close to bad conscience if that’s all we’re doing – often something of an online speciality. Spending our whole time decrying the bad doesn’t cut it – something that Rand herself would have done well to mark: for all her pleas of positive virtue created by individuals, the majority of The Fountainhead is spent sneering at the trivially dismissable.
Read the first half of this post here
In some lighter posts, I’ll come onto the severe weaknesses in Rand’s writing which I believe she cannot control, and which generated some of the fun that kept me sane during the harder going parts. But I think it’s clear that partially Roark’s bizarre construction is an intentional effect. Rand wants to create an embodiment of her virtues: if we were to describe Roark even in negative terms as unreflective, callous, monomaniacal or bone-headed, I can see the committed Randian openly embracing these qualities (though I suspect they would rather cast them as unswerving, selfish, focused).
So why does it backfire so badly? I would challenge even the most starry-eyed devotee to find the Roark we’re given compelling. The narrative voice – and by extension Rand herself – chooses to spend more of the novel away from him than otherwise. Even if we allow ourselves to discount the rape scene – where the distancing is total, and he may as well be an incidental criminal – he comes out as a pretty second-rate kind of superman.
My favourite source (wikipedia) describes the process of the The Fountainhead as a series of interactions between Roark, the “author’s ideal man of independence and integrity” and a continuum of lesser personalities. While it’s certain that Roark is an flawless paragon for Rand, as I plowed through the first section it became very clear that Rand has no interest in providing us any nuanced characters. The Fountainhead is a Manichean novel where the characters are neatly split into badies and a vanishingly small number of goodies – it is never in any doubt which are the favoured creatures – and there is no prospect of complexity, heterogeneity of character, or redemption.
Reading through the Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology was frankly a bit of a chore, but it was brightened by Rand’s trademark bizarre language. Here are some of my favourites:
Mathematics is the science of measurement
erm…
Man can perceive the length of one foot directly; he cannot perceive ten miles
Never, ever, has any man been able to see ten miles.
In this second philosophical preamble to actually starting talking about The Fountainhead, I’m going to give an overview of the more relevant part of Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, the ethics.
Unlike the epistemology, which has a very ad-hoc vibe to it, it’s hard to dispute that Rand’s system of values was present (in increasing degrees) in her earlier novels, until it came to dominate her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged. The length of the novels, and the volume of speechifying, correlates with this. Rand published a distillation of her position in The Virtue of Selfishness in 1961 (predating the epistemology), and it’s this we’ll draw on.
Given the critical tone of my last posts, the main motive for my overview of the Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology would seem to be scorn. On the negative side, as well as a the expected deep inconsistencies I was genuinely surprised to find how many straight-up contradictions I found when I started to tabulate Rand’s claims against other types of philosophical system: a particularly perplexing one is her attitude to measurement, which she simultaneously suggests is unnecessary and the only way essential characteristics can be compared.
But I maintain that we need to give credit when it’s due, and try to find the sensible equivalents of Rand’s positions – she is after all mimicking the greats.
“Mathematics is the science of measurement” – Ayn Rand, An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
Before I jump (or sink) into The Fountainhead, I thought I’d put together an (amateurish) primer on Ayn Rand’s philosophy in two parts. The first will deal with what she calls her “epistemology” – something that is usually understood as a means of knowing. The second will deal with the ethics. In each case, I’ve taken most of Rand’s material from her own words – if you want to follow along here, this is all taken from her book, An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I’m also indebted to the wonderful Partially Examined Life podcast’s episode on Rand – I’d highly recommend this for a professional touch – and the rest of their episodes too, for that matter.
It is no secret that I come to The Fountainhead with rather low expectations. Everything I’ve heard, even sometimes from otherwise admirers, suggests that Rand’s prose will:
I list these to make my initial biases explicit. My aim in reading The Fountainhead is to give credit where it’s due – I want to acknowledge where Rand’s text is good (or even just ok), and particularly where it bucks these trends.
Hey, sometimes low expectations can be a good thing.