Category: The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand – a good writer after all?

Post author By jon
Post date November 14, 2022

Long after the politics have passed, literary quality – or lack of it – remains.

The following is a comment I put together on an episode of the Origin Story podcast produced by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. The episode covered Ayn Rand and her legacy – while the guys are very unsympathetic to her political position, I was pretty astonished to find that they thought she was a pretty effective fiction writer! This is my response, which became a bit ridiculously long for an inline comment – somewhat edited for clarity and to incorporate my correction. You can see the original here.

(The podcast series is really excellent, highly recommended to check it out)

There is a slight danger of slipping into conspiracism here in thinking that all critics must have had a political axe to grind. There is a simpler explanation: that there really are serious literary defects which become obvious when you are familiar with the history of the form.

Books Lit Crit Nabokov Rand Rand & Nabokov The Defence The Fountainhead

Luzhin, exceptional and familiar

Post author By jon
Post date July 23, 2014

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.

Books Lit Crit Rand Rand & Nabokov The Fountainhead

Reasoning why

Post author By jon
Post date July 23, 2014

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.

Books Lit Crit Rand Rand & Nabokov The Fountainhead

Goodies and Badies

Post author By jon
Post date July 23, 2014

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.

Books Rand Rand & Nabokov The Fountainhead

The Fountainhead? Good Lord, why?

Post author By jon
Post date July 21, 2014

As an exercise in mind-broadening, or possibly masochism. Full disclosure: I have never been an enthusiast of Ayn Rand, and I think Objectivism is a half-baked philosophy, or approaching a cult, depending on how seriously you take it.

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