It’s been many years since I last considered Ayn Rand a major influence in my life (fortunately I had the wisdom even as a teenager not ever to want to be an “Objectivist”), but as a dedicated reader of Slate and as someone who was at least turned on to liberty and to a somewhat distorted concept of philosophy by Rand, I owe her much more than this defense:
Slate’s review of two new books about Rand is the worst article I’ve ever read on that usually wonderful site. Its distortions are so crude and clumsy that I can’t understand how it made its way past an editor.
Sentences like this one are pretty dumb:
She takes the flabby staples of romantic fiction and peppers them with political ravings and rapes for the audience to cheer on.
Ayn Rand famously said that the three most important elements of a novel are plot, plot and plot. Is that true? No, there are many important things in a novel, plot only being the single most important. Undeniably the characters in her famous novels tend to be flat and uninteresting. For example, Howard Roark, the hero in The Fountainhead, is so boring that Dominique Francon, his love interest whom he “rapes,” becomes central to my reading of the story. But in We The Living, many of the characters are actually deeper and more developed.
Rand’s books are about politics, so while it might have been possible for her to write political stories without rantings (as, say, romans à clef) or as fables (like Animal Farm), why should she be faulted for not doing so, if what she wanted was to write in a style that’s both “romantic and realistic,” attempting to emulate her own favorite novelist Victor Hugo? And by the way, I haven’t seen any articles trashing George Orwell’s political novels lately, even though they’re not better written than Rand’s. Perhaps that’s because he was a socialist, but perhaps also it’s because he didn’t set out to write anything that would be great in itself.
The rape issue has been tread and retread so thoroughly that I don’t think there’s much to add to it, but to me at least, the way sex is treated in the novels is pretty peripheral and it just isn’t very central to any of the stories, with the possible exception again of We The Living, which is also her shortest novel, best written, least political and most personal (I never bothered to read Anthem and it’s more like a novella anyway). Rand herself said about the infamous rape scene: “if it was rape, then it was rape by engraved invitation.” She could have denied outright that it was rape, and I would have agreed with this. She also could have said simply that it resembled rape, might have been rape, could easily be mistaken for rape or shared some elements with rape. But I didn’t think it was rape when I first read the book (nb: as a teenager I also read a lot of spy novels that always had sex scenes much steamier than in Rand’s books) and only was able to see some glimmer of rape in it after I’d been to college and had rape re-defined for me by campus feminysts.
A certain percentage of women do have rape fantasies. Maybe it’s a very small percentage, and maybe it’s half of women or more, but it is a fact that women desire men who are heroic and who share some qualities with Rand’s heroes. Is there something literary and great about the way Ayn Rand handles love and sex in her books? Probably not, but there is something to learn from it as literature; it is not worthless trash.
This is also a pretty stupid thing to write:
All have the same core message: Anything that pleases the Superman’s ego is good; anything that blocks it is bad.
Actually Rand’s heroes do evolve, especially in Atlas Shrugged. John Galt doesn’t, but the book is not about him: it’s about Dagny Taggart more than anybody. She isn’t the same at the end of the story as she was at the beginning; what pleases her at the end would not necessarily have pleased her at the beginning. More importantly, Rand’s heroic characters all are people who like to create and build things. They are not the kind of people to sit around having their egos stroked. At no point in any of her books does one seriously get the impression that she wants to suggest that “good” is that what makes a hero happy. She has a notion of good with some complexity that is entirely separate from what her characters want.
She said the United States should be a “democracy of superiors only,” with superiority defined by being rich.
Oh, really? Ayn Rand equated superiority with wealth? When and where? A lot of her great heroes are in fact poor. Howard Roark, for example, comes from nothing; Kira Argounova has lost everything; and Atlas Shrugged is in fact a story of wealthy people giving up their own fortunes because they recognize that they money holds them back from living life the way they believe it ought to be lived.
Alan Greenspan was one of her strongest cult followers and even invited her to the Oval Office to witness his swearing-in when he joined the Ford administration. You can see how he carried this philosophy into the 1990s: Why should the Supermen of Wall Street be regulated to protected the lice of Main Street?
Alan Greenspan actually has never been a legislator and hasn’t had any authority to regulate the banking industry. Needless to say, notwithstanding his youthful association with Rand’s circle, he is no Objectivist and he had no problem in his years as Fed Chairman to use government to manipulate the economy. It is also a foolish canard that “deregulation” caused this recession or any other, but I don’t think any serious people believe that anyway….
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