Ayn Rand: Capitalist Realism

Strangely enough, for all of her fiction’s endless speechifying, Ayn Rand considered herself a novelist before a philosopher (she considered herself a great many other things, mostly narcissistic superlatives, but work with me here). It’s a fairly important distinction. Her fiction is much more than mere agitprop, which uses the confines of normal storytelling as a vehicle to preach a given message. For Rand’s whole approach to storytelling is marinated in her ideas on everything else, and so its bent approach makes reading it a decidedly different experience.

The Fountainhead shares the structural elements of a normal story: beginning, middle (more like two, really, the first punctuated, like the second, with a trial), climax, dénouement. A protagonist with a goal, and obstacles thrown in his path, an antagonist with goals athwart his own. So far so good. But it is the characters, colored by Rand’s singularly odd views on individuality, which drive the action, and give the book its hypnotically strange effect.

All of the book’s principle figures were conceived as symbols, with Howard Roark as “a man who is what he should be,” Peter Keating “a man who never could be [man as he should be] and doesn’t know it,” Gail Wynand “a man who could have been,” and Ellsworth Toohey, “worst of all possible rats. A man who never could be—and knows it.” This schematic view of plotting has the dual effect of making the characters both larger-than-life and two-dimensional, as if they were fixtures on a billboard. They serve the same basic purpose, channeling Rand’s radical individualism. The peculiar effect of her ideas about rationality and will, however, makes the proceedings feel, paradoxically, pre-ordained.

Consider what was perhaps the biggest surprise I encountered, dealing with a secondary character, Catherine, Toohey’s niece and Keating’s sometime fiancé. Such a pitiful, clingy creature is she that I was fairly sure she would kill herself out of sheer helplessness, especially after Keating ditches their wedding to shotgun marry the ice queen Dominique Francon. She instead resurfaces near the end of the book years later, reborn as a Washington bureaucrat with a lack of personality remarkable even for an Ayn Rand character:

”It wouldn’t have worked, Peter. I’m temperamentally unsuited to domesticity. It’s too selfish and narrow. Of course, I understand what you feel just now and I appreciate it. It’s only human that you should feel something like remorse, since you did what is known as jilted me.” He winced. “You see how stupid those things sound. It’s natural for you to be a little contrite—a normal reflex—but we must look at it objectively, we’re grown-up, rational people, nothing is too serious, we can’t really help what we do, we’re conditioned that way, we just charge it off to experience and go on from there.”

I ended up being more right about her fate than I had guessed: rather than merely kill herself, she killed her self.

Catharine’s lack of identity is as much a constant as Roark’s unflappable confidence, Keating’s venality, and Toohey’s super-socialism. Their essential nature is fixed, and there is never any real chance that they will ever change, for better or worse. Their defining traits merely become more pronounced, and grotesque, as the stakes raise ever higher, but the there is no real tension, no possibility of redemption or betrayal or surprise that hasn’t been telegraphed from the start. As busy as The Fountainhead's scenario is, it’s all mellow, no drama.

Yet cardboard characters aren’t derived (only) from general hackishness, rather they proceed directly from Rand’s own ideals of what constitutes a proper human being. As said by Steven Mallory, Roark’s sculptor disciple:

I often think that [Roark]’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean that he won’t die some day. But he’s living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict—and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard—one can imagine him existing forever.

Rand, who claimed her beliefs had remained essentially the same since she was a teenager, is here essentially making a virtue of stubbornness and refusal to grow as a person, under the same usual banner of willpower: the real individual knows he’s right, so why should he change? Her characters are demonstrations of this idea, as are the very many things they do and say.

Along with melodramatic plotting, Rand’s fiction is infamous for its didactic speeches and dialogues that go on for pages and pages at a stretch. My favorite, if it can be called that, involves newspaper magnate Gail Wynand and Roark going on a month-long yacht cruise—without Dominique Francon, who they’re both in love with and to whom Wynand is married. Wynand can’t stop looking at Roark’s half-naked body, “at the threads of water running down the angular planes,” that makes him think “of the yacht’s engine, of skyscrapers, of transatlantic cables, of everything man had made.” The scene’s tone veers between unintentional 300-style homo-erotica and an After School Special with amazing gracelessness:

”What’s left then? Where does decency start? What begins where altruism ends? Do you see what I’m in love with?”

“Yes, Gail.” Wynand had noticed that Roark’s voice had a reluctance that sounded almost like sadness.

“What’s the matter with you? Why do you sound like that?”

“I’m sorry. Forgive me. It’s just something I thought. I’ve been thinking of this for a long time. And particularly all these days when you’ve made me lie on deck and loaf.”

“Thinking about me?”

“About you—among many other things.”

“What have you decided?”

“I’m not an altruist, Gail. I can’t decide for others.”

This weird fusion of belief and behavior follows through to the book’s very end, which involves, lest we forget, a manically idealistic dynamiter being found “Innocent” by a jury. Most polemicists would stop with putting speeches in their characters’ mouths, but Rand’s conception of humans being driven by reason and ideals permeates the story’s very blood and marrow.

By traditional—objective?—literary standards, The Fountainhead is a failure: its characters are bold but ultimately dull, its plot bizarre, and its message delivered with all the subtlety of a boot stamping on a human face forever. Yet, my snarky post title notwithstanding, it’s unfair to consider it mere propaganda--that it bears some resemblances to the blandest Soviet pablum is a function of a circular political spectrum in which at a certain point the far left and far right begin to look alike. Nor is it pop fiction, which never aspires to be more than merely mediocre entertainment.

Instead it is a frantically ambitious product of its creator’s very idiosyncratic sensibility, the kind that thinks turning thought experiments into hundreds-of-pages-long plots on which to hang philosophical dialogues is the pinnacle of storytelling. As a result the book is, like a Tyler Perry movie, freakishly compelling and almost always interesting. The normal standards cease to apply. It’s beyond good and awful.

Fancy Boy

A number of pieces I wrote for the Washington Fancy before their launch, went online today. There's too many to take the time to cross-post them all, so one can either go to my author directory to peruse them all, or click any of the links below:

Anthony Weiner, Tired of Crude Jokes, Changes Name to Ned

DC Under Siege by Roving Segway Gangs

Bachmann Presidential Run Shocks, Shocks Nation

Mitt Romney Literally Melts Down at Campaign Stop

California's Proposition 8 to be Tried by Golden Retriever

I've Been to the Zoo, Part 1

The other night I had an educational experience, one that almost certainly could not be had at school (and probably would not be desirable if it was--the coincidence and spontanaity adds to its appeal). I attended a professional production of a play I directed at my local community theater just a few months ago. I directed Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, but incidentally, that's not what I saw the other night. Not exactly. The reasons for that will make up the rest of this first post of a short series about what this particular experience has to tell me about interpreting a play.

The Zoo Story begins with a well-to-do man, Peter, reading on a bench in Central Park, who is approached by the dishevelled Jerry, who proceeds to tell him increasingly troubling things about his life and eventually bringing Peter down to his level. Written in 1958, The Zoo Story was Albee's first play. As of right now, it is also his most recent play. Sorta. What happened is Albee went back and wrote a prequel act, Homelife, involving Peter's interactions with his wife Ann before he decides to go read at the park. Along the way he made some slight modifications to The Zoo Story, the second act of this new work, At Home at the Zoo: some lines were altered (a "colored queen" is now a "black queen"), Peter's income is adjusted for inflation, and Jerry's final speech is reduced to a few lines. According to Wikipedia, and implied by a New York Times interview, professional companies must produce At Home at the Zoo in its entirety. Non-profit groups can still produce The Zoo Story as a standalone, which is what I opted to do last Fall. I hadn't read Homelife, and felt The Zoo Story was fine on its own. (I also didn't want to tackle a full-length show for my first directorial outing, but that's beside the point.) Going into At Home at the Zoo, my sense was that the new act had to justify its existence, as any part of any story must.

Unfortunately, it didn't. The writing itself is fine--though Albee seems to be in love with a dependent clause construction (that) eliminates the word 'that,' as I just did; seriously, it comes up four or five times and, while gramattically correct, feels artificial--I had some good laughs and cringes. But it's inconsequential. The particulars we learn about Peter and his wife are only making explicit that which was already implied in the original play: they're a comfortable but bored middle-class couple, and Peter is somewhat submissive to her and daughters' wishes, in order to keep everyone happy. There's never much at stake, because the very identity of this half-new play dictates that the real meat is coming after the intermission. The Zoo Story was never intended to have more than its very effective single act, and so all of its firepower is, naturally, spent there. Additionally, great many people have seen or read The Zoo Story already and know what's coming, and the events of Homelife are far too chronologically close to it to hold any real surprises. Had Albee substantially revised The Zoo Story to balance the two acts out and shake things up--and made it the first act, to announce that all bets are off--the new act would have more to do than kill time before Jerry comes on the scene.

Albee is, of course, free to do what he will with his play and his characters, but what he has done is still baffling. Jerry is a commanding presence, but that's because the play is fundamentally about him; Peter exists in The Zoo Story as an audience surrogate and an example of bland, bourgeois success that his exposure to Jerry contaminates. My sense was, and still is, that The Zoo Story is complete story, a powerful one made so by its compactness. It suffers in At Home At The Zoo by the dead weight of the first act. Albee has objected in the past to play development conferences, that:

"It is to de-ball the plays; to castrate them; to smooth down all the rough edges so they can't cut, can't hurt. It's to make them commercially tolerable to a smug audience. It's not to make plays any better. Most playwrights who write a good play write it from the beginning."

At Home At The Zoo proves him mostly right, in the worst possible ways, and he didn't even need a conference.