Blog-a-blog

“Howard, I’m a parasite.  I’ve been a parasite all my life.  You designed my best projects at Stanton.  You designed the first house I ever built.  You designed the Cosmo-Slotnick Building.  I have fed on you and on all the men like you who lived before we were born. The men who designed the Parthenon, the Gothic cathedrals, the first skyscrapers.  If they hadn’t existed, I wouldn’t have known how to put stone on stone.  In the whole of my life, I haven’t added a new doorknob to what men have done before me… This is not an act, Howard, and I’m very conscious of what I’m saying…” (601).

I think part of the quality of Ayn Rand’s work is part of its honesty.  There is something about honesty, and forthrightness, when a person appears to be a person and so acts like that person, which appeals to all of us.  At least, this is what I was reflecting upon when Keating says this to Howard towards the end of the novel, and finally “confesses” his sin of dependence on other people.  I’ll admit I’m not really in the mood to be as vicious as I usually am towards Rand, especially because at least some of the problems that I was getting at have really sort of been worn away (although not most, and the original points stands surprisingly well considering that I hadn’t written it before the halfway point of the novel).

Again, the problem is clear - Roark is Roark because all of Rand’s characters pay active tribute to Roark.  Dominique “allows” herself to be raped, fulfilling a frighteningly basic and human urge of Roark’s… Roark becomes wealthy, etc, etc.  It’s sort of terrible in the sense that someone who acts like Roark does… would not gain the benefits that Roark ultimately possesses.  What’s more, it is unclear that Roark ever really wants these things initially, and so these things, as not being a part of what Roark wants aside from recognition of his work as “fulfilling architectural requirement”, are not really consequential to anything at all, save for Rand’s appeal to us.

Keating is much more of a “real” character in the sense that he is motivated by much baser motives than Roark, whose motives are so obtuse that most people can’t begin to understand them, I suspect.  I think this sort of hero-creation of Rand’s is really sort of scary, considering heroism isn’t … like that.  How does one define a hero?  I certainly wouldn’t define Roark as one, even though Rand makes him out to be one…

“Steinbeck? But you’re not supposed to be reading Steinbeck.”

(And a good thing too, because I hated The Pearl, almost as much as I’m hating The Fountainhead)

But the nice thing about Steinbeck is that Of Mice and Men is very, very applicable to the lessons of The Fountainhead.

Bear with me here. And if you haven’t read Of Mice and Men, don’t keep reading.
—-

Objectivism has to do with fulfilling man’s own happiness, by pursuing one’s own self-reliance and one’s own skills. Ayn Rand, as a proponent of the free market system (sort of), believes that by basing one’s happiness on other people, we are setting ourselves up for failure, and only through being more self-reliant can we become more self-fulfilled. Sounds good, right?
Of Mice and Men begins directly contrary to this. Lennie Small and George (something?) are two people who begin working together, and George, being smaller and more quick-witted, and Lennie, being large and having the mind of a five-year old, form a mutualistic relationship. Sort of. They pursue their dreams of an independent farm, together, with Lennie dreaming of the rabbits that he will be able to pet/take care of, and George of his own utopia. This begins to take form, when Candy, a one-handed old man, asks to join them, and offers his own money to aid them.

By the end of the book, however, Lennie has become a liability to George, because Lennie has killed a rather flirtatious woman (Curley’s Wife) because he felt that her hair felt like rabbit’s fur. And so, in a tragic ending, where the farmhands are pursuing Lennie in order to lynch him, George finds Lennie, and tells Lennie to talk about the rabbits. While Lennie is so occupied, George fires a pistol shot into the back of Lennie’s head, and Lennie dies.

An Objectivist reading of the book might start with the fact that George is now free to find his own independence, were George actually able to do anything on his own. Despite the fact that George is trapped within what Steinbeck seems to view as a perpetual cycle of labor, Lennie has run George off several farms, and if George had the vision and the ability to live independently, he might actually do so now. Never mind whether George was betraying Lennie or not - George was doing the right thing, for both himself and for Lennie, because the lynching would have been far worse for Lennie, and George could not have done anything else anyways. Lennie was dead when he snapped the woman’s neck. Society is essentially tolerant, but there are certain things that it cannot have, including homicide, despite Lennie’s compassion. Government, after all, should only have anything to do with the basic defense of life, liberty, and property, and Lennie has violated this.

From an economic standpoint, furthermore, once Lennie cannot contribute anymore to their dream, despite the fact that it is a mutual dream, he may as well be sacrificed - such is the pains of a market economy, and George’s initial compassion for Lennie must be outweighed by his own pursuit of happiness. Ayn Rand’s quote applies perfectly here “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

What George has done, in short, is not wrong, but heroic.

Wonderfully controversial. Humanity sacrificed for our own personal good, because it is both more moral and reasonable.

But this is not the point of what Steinbeck has written, and in fact, is illustrative of my problems with Objectivist thought.

George is not heroic. And Lennie is a human being. Despite the fact that Steinbeck parallels Lennie during the book to an old dog, he makes it abundantly clear that Lennie personifies some of the “nobler” aspects of humanity - Lennie is gentle beyond reason. Furthermore, without Lennie, there might not have been any dream farm for George. Lennie symbolizes the dream of ascendance, to go beyond this perpetual cycle of work that most farmhands during this period find themselves trapped within, and when George kills Lennie, he has essentially killed the dream for himself. There is no dream without both of them.

But wait, since George is not heroic, Objectivism obviously cannot apply to him - the aspects of heroism, after all, are limited to those that are heroes, and become the powerhouses of their own happiness. He is trapped within this neverending cycle of work and drudgery because he chooses to be… but doesn’t that mean he has chosen his own path of happiness? His happiness, when he executes Lennie, has shifted from the dream farm, which is now largely impossible, to more mundane things, such as alcoholism (a farm worker leads George off for a drink at the end) or soliciting prostitutes.

This points perfectly to the illogical parts of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. What happens when heroism is not heroic? Or, more precisely, when personal happiness is not dictated by what society states that happiness should be dictated by? Happiness is subjective, based on society, and so long as people ascribe to society’s basic values, they can be heroic, so long as they do not base their happiness on society.

That might be a little confusing… let me summarize.

Ayn Rand has established a sort of murky, illogical middle ground. Don’t care about society, she states, don’t build your power and your happiness on other people, because they may fail you. Simultaneously, you must believe to some degree in what society dictates, because in it lies your happiness. George shifts his happiness from a capitalistic self-fulfillment into moment-by-moment consumerism. His pursuit of happiness no longer coincides with an American dream.

Look at Roark, her perfect man. He is fiercely independent of other people, to the extent that they don’t understand him, but his motivations are essentially the same as anyone else. Rand makes all of her characters perfect slaves to the same goal - sex and money. And he is perfectly good at achieving sex and money, or so we’re led to believe. (he’s not, but I’ll get into that in another post)

What happens when someone’s happiness has nothing to do with sex or money? The part that sticks with you of Of Mice and Men is in Lennie’s dream, the one that he dies talking about… a more basic happiness, that just involves petting rabbits all day. There is something of humanity which Rand basically fails to capture. There is tragedy in Lennie’s death, there is a feeling of hopelessness and basic human agony. Where is the emotion, accident, or tragedy for Roark, or for any of them? Are we supposed to think that these things, which make us human, are negligible to the amassing of power and development of our own personal happiness?

The machinelike visionary of an entity of Howard Roark doesn’t exist. There are people who don’t all want the same things out of life, and we can’t ignore them. There are accidents, there is humanity, there is something beyond the perfection of a basic task. We’re not all purely architects, nor purely journalists. Even if you ascribe to the idea that the greatest ideal should be achieving our own happiness (and a lot of people do! I might, I don’t know…), happiness isn’t so static or general that we can define it through any economic theory or neat little aphorism…

And if it can be, well, then, we’re all screwed anyways.

—

I haven’t read Of Mice and Men since ninth grade, so you’re going to have to bear with me or correct me if I’m a little inaccurate in some places.  I do think the basic message is very, very applicable, though.

“But the pain remained- and a helpless wonder.  The thing he saw was so much more real than the reality of paper, office and commission.  He could not understand what made others blind to it, and what made their indifference possible.  He looked at the paper before him.  He wondered why ineptitude should exist and have its say.  He had never known that.  And the reality that permitted it could never become quite real to him”(82-83).

This is part of the strength and weakness of The Fountainhead.  There is so much made blatantly obvious in this that it is almost shocking - only rarely are we permitted to see what is actually going on inside the mind of Howard Roark.  The problem is that when we do see it, it is so extraordinary that I don’t see how Ayn Rand wants us to relate to him at all.  These sorts of passages are visionary, that come from an unquestioning and an ego that cannot be satisfied by simple society alone.

We are not Howard Roark, nor can we possibly pretend to be.  Nor are we, for the most part, Peter Keating, without form or function and just endlessly sycophantic.   The insidious part, as I’ve written before, comes when Rand makes us believe that we can be like Roark.  For who among us has ” wondered why ineptitude should exist and have its say” to themselves?  We do this on a daily basis.  And yet we are not Howard Roark, because the dictates of society and the realization that we are not the antithesis of ineptitude guide us.

There is something missing from Rand’s writing.  There is no admission of spontaneity, nor accident.   There is passion, in the form of love, but even this is so mechanically done that it is only the obtuseness of the way that it is written that makes it seem at all like love.  If she later gives me a couple pages on how Howard Roark is human, how the most commonplace of errors drag him down from greatness into obscurity, then maybe there will be something redeeming about the novel.  But I just don’t see that happening.

There are many things that keep us from being Howard Roark.  Some of us lack the vision.  Some of us lack the ability to discard society.  Some of us do not have the omniscient perspective that Rand has bestowed upon him.  But the thing that keeps most of us from becoming Roark is simple humanity - we are prone to errors, we are imperfect.  And imperfection does not come from admittance of other people’s value to our own lives.

And if you know what The Fountainhead is, you can already tell what my problem with it is going to be already from the title.

It’s lifeless. The characters are lifeless, and so they do not emulate life at all. The major premise of the book is that Howard Roark does not compromise with anyone about his work, which is architecture. Roark is a brilliant engineer, but one who does not enjoy recreating Classical themes of architecture. This is a good premise - we get to see how at first, his skill is based on himself alone. He is juxtaposed with a student of the architecture school that he was kicked out of, who fails to be able to draw without Roark’s help the first time he is expected to, and does no work until a year after he leaves school.

But none of this is human. Roark’s refusal of aid is contingent upon him seeming, or being, a renegade genius. This earns him the fear, respect, and understanding of his rival. But it doesn’t work like this in reality. I see why Ayn Rand is so fiercely popular- Roark, after all, is mythic in his status, even from the beginning. People don’t understand him, and he makes no effort to be understood, and actively tries not to burden himself with this worthless socializing and power brokering of his peers. He is, however, mythic to the other characters in the book. In reality, Roark would not work - no one is like this, no one should be, and certainly few try to be to the same degree that he has been in this book.

Roark rejects using other people, but does not reject their charity or their recognition. For a profession like architecture, which is based on beauty, an inherently subjective notion that Ayn Rand notes that no one has a clue about, Roark, after all, is the only fresh mind in what is a stagnant industry. At some point, however, he must pander, and he must appeal to something other than his own concept of aesthetics. And compromising this one point, the rest of Roark is much less interesting - the juxtaposition between him and Keating begins to fail, since Keating is the extreme opposite. Keating is not competent, just a socialite, and we are encouraged to dislike him.

At some point, Roark’s behavior will fail. But doesn’t Rand admit this, when she writes of Henry Cameron, who states this passionately, fearlessly? It’s the most dramatic and powerful catch of the book.

“And you’ll set out from your house with this drawing, to have it erected, because you won’t have any doubt that it will be erected by the first man to see it. But you won’t get very far from your house. Because you’ll be stopped at the door by the man who’s come to turn off the gas. You hadn’t had much food, because you saved money to finish your drawing… All right, that’s nothing, you can laugh at that. But finally you’ll get into a man’s office with your drawing, and you’ll curse yourself for taking so much space of his air with your body, and you’ll try to squeeze yourself out of his sight, so that he won’t see you, but only hear your voice begging him, pleading, your voice licking his knees; you’ll loathing yourself for it, but you won’t care, if only he’d let you put up that building, you won’t care… But he’ll say that he’s very sorry… and you’ll go home, and do you know what you’ll do there? You’ll cry. You’ll cry like a woman, like a drunkard, like an animal. That’s your future, Howard Roark. Now, do you want it?”

“Yes,” said Roark” (56).

Roark, then, has different objectives than that of most humans, and cannot be applied to most humans, who do not have such a singular love of their profession. Our job in America dominates our life, but the wrong job does not always mean “sixty years of torture”. Ayn Rand writes elsewhere, not in The Fountainhead, that, “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”. How lovely! How controversial. We are not encouraged to look after anyone else but ourselves. Sounds beautiful, except that the way Roark exists, it does not work.

This sort of thing is what Ayn Rand frames Roark in. The setting and the other characters, however, much like the characters, is solely geared towards the creation of this myth of self-reliance. Rand cannot avoid the inevitable fact that at some point, because architecture (as everything else does) requires the admittance of other people as quality, Roark must pander to someone. I’m not done with the book yet, but the way that she writes of it, Roark essentially compels other people to admit his existence through his quality alone. And it works!

No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t work, because this is not the way the world works, not for most people. We are not geniuses, we do not create masterpieces that are readily admitted by other people solely because they are masterpieces to us. I am taking a more Nietzschean philosophy on this situation - self-reliance may create wonderful things, but it must be balanced with an understanding for where other people stand, and it must be recognized. Rand is so popular because she has created such a controversial statement through this book, but I feel as though it doesn’t capture anything about humanity.

I expressed some concerns at the beginning of the novel that stylistically, it wasn’t particularly sophisticated. This is true, but not in the way I expected - she doesn’t attempt to make her characters anything than two-dimensional copies of social action and reaction. These characters have no egos, no feelings, except for Keating, and he is a failure. Everything else is reason, and intellect. But people are not like this - egos and feelings, blind passions and irrational existence dominate our lives. Maybe they shouldn’t, but a lot of the time, they do. This is the most insidious part, I feel, of the whole novel. By creating a place, a set of people, and a world that is divinely fitted to the acceptance of Howard Roark, and setting it in familiar New York, with familiar motives and familiar consequences, we are tempted to link her world to our own. But try, then, to live like Roark, instead of to admire him?

We are not characters in this book. I almost feel that Rand has essentially pulled a literary trick on us. By controlling not only her characters in her world, but the world itself and its reactions to her characters, she is trying to tell us something about a world of her own making, which she essentially argues is analogous to ours. But most of us live someplace else entirely. The attraction of The Fountainhead, and Ayn Rand, is that of Roark’s - it is seemingly original, as amoral as Machiavelli and equally as powerful.

At least, all according to Rand…

I’ll keep an open mind for the rest of the book, but there are already some ideas that I am formulating in my head for a more precise analysis. I’m going to try to compare this to Crime and Punishment, because I think its very relevant in the way that both authors view humanity… and it does a lot to show, in my opinion, why Rand might be a talentless hack.

Do you get the impression that I’m getting passionate about this?

Excuse the French.

Or something like that.

This is what Wordsworth defined poetry as, and even though it’s not always applicable (especially to non-Romantic poets like T.S. Eliot), I still feel as though there is something essentially emotional about what Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men”. I’ve always remembered this quote, because I feel as though it always, always makes poetry much more interesting. Indeed, whether he’s saying something about World War I, or some greater alienation in modern times, there is something deeply intense and passionate about the end. It is liturgical, like a chant, but there is also something passionate about church services, about religion itself, that I don’t think is adequately demonstrated through our monotonic choral reading of it.

Perhaps it is because of my own personality, or something like that, but when I read this poem, I read it without pausing for the end of lines (except where it is natural to do so, and that’s pretty important), and there was something very powerful about the lyrical way that the poem is actually written. Specifically, the ending lines evoke an almost breathlessness that strikes me as enormously powerful, especially when you reach this part:

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The middle stanza here, with the “For thine is/life is/for thine is the” is so wonderfully breathless, and confusing. For one, are we to say “For thine is” on its own? For you are? For you exist? For life exists? But that’s not to be the way it is read when he leaves off with the “For thine is the”. It’s important to note the linguistics of this, and where this liturgy breaks off, because this just makes no sense to chant chorally, and it is also where our class’s ability to recite together broke off, quite intentionally. The stanza(s) before this are quite repetitive, and then when it breaks, it creates a marvelous sense of crescendo, ending in the This is the way the world ends, etc, etc.

This makes powerful feeling. Something has gone wrong with the chant, almost, I feel, and the darknesses that Eliot cites can no longer be contained when he breaks this off- this is the way the world ends. This may not be Romantic poetry, but it still has a passion to it, a dead passion. This is what’s excellent about literature - we are free to ascribe our own powerful feelings to it, whether it be a powerful feeling of defiance or a powerful feeling of alienation.

In fact, I feel as though we almost get too caught up in the feeling of the poem to really understand what’s going on. The “death’s kingdom” repetition, I feel, almost makes people think, “This is morbid, morbid, dark, dark”, and like the hollow men which Eliot describes, we all think the same thing - we don’t understand what’s going on, but damn if it isn’t dark and creepy. This isn’t enough. We can’t just ignore “pricky pear prickly pear” and say to ourselves, “Well damn, this is cracked out, dude, let’s go get a pizza or read the rest of the poem or whatever”.

Everything is important.

We need to figure out what it means. I don’t even care if we get it right, because we can’t. We’ve all been told that there is no right answer, and this might very be true, but the important part is to try to find an answer at all, and not get lost in complacency.

For me, it’s powerful because there is a terrible helplessness that he evokes through the inability of man’s souls to find their own way. From this helplessness comes a suffused emotion in its own right, and it conjures up images of our own daily lives, because we are these souls who cannot find their own way. I think of Eliot, thinking of World War I, and our collective inability to do anything progressive with the human race but kill and die en masse. When he writes of “the cactus land” and “lips forming prayers/to broken stone”, I think of Shelley and Ozymandias (cited a couple blogs below) and its image of the decay of civilization and the way that we are all ultimately and terribly forgotten. When he writes of the shadow that falls between idea and reality, motion and act, I think about the corruptibility of man. When he writes of the prickly pear and waking up at 5 AM, I am immediately struck with this sense of utter absurdity, which is terribly personal because I have to wake up at 5 AM, and no one should have to wake up that early. When he writes of “lost/violent souls” and the shadow between “the desire/and the spasm”, I think of the passions in both violence and love that could possibly make us more than just another soul in the collective swarm of hopelessness, and how there is a shadow between every moment that renders these passions potentially useless. Is he right? When he writes “For Thine is the Kingdom”, I think of the places that are ours, that we are responsible for, and the dreams of Heaven and utopia and our own individual kingdoms - our future families, our future jobs, and when he concludes with “This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper”, I am struck with a sense of immense futility and despair, but also with a conviction that this should not be so.

We should take his lines, and do what we want with them. Discard none of them as unimportant, but remember the ones that are important, the ones that strike us deeply- the last thing to always remember is that we must make emotions from those of others, because without doing so, we fail to be human.  And with that being the truth in many cases, literature among everything else is senseless.

I read Death of a Salesman in sophomore year, and obviously it has a great deal in common with Fences.  I suspect that the essay comparing the two have a great deal in common.  In both Death of a Salesman and Fences, there is sort of a mystical brother (Ben? in Death of a Salesman may or may not exist, and in Fences, Gabriel is obviously something quite symbolic), there are the similarities between the family structure (wonderful wife, one son who chooses a path similar to his father’s and one son who doesn’t), etc, etc.  I think the most salient similarity, and the one I was thinking about most carefully, is the infidelity of both Willy Loman and Troy Maxson.  The more and more I think about it, the more I suspect that the sin of infidelity itself is somehow significant to what both plays are attempting to impart.

Of course, it is worth reminding that the infidelity is different, as are the characters.  Willy is suicidal; Troy is just arrogant.  Willy’s wife does not know about his indiscretion, whereas Troy confesses it to her.  There is no Bono equivalent in Death of a Salesman.  But they do both have several compound sins that make their death shameful, in a lot of ways, and this is central to the message of the story.

I’ll compare these two at length later… but right now, I need to find something and focus on something specific, as there are a rush of ideas right now.  Why are they different?  What about the different racial cultures alters the situation?  Which story is more effective?  All of these are pretty worth thinking about.

More later.

Taken from an interview with a novelist on the radio recently:

“… but the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.”

And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music.

The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.”

The group’s discussion on the blinding white fog conjured up images of a book I read last year, called Blindness.  I forget who wrote it, now, but it was one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read.  In it, an entire city is debilitated by blindness, but not a regular, dark blindness, but a milky white blindness.  Soon, the city is devastated by its own people, who have essentially turned into animals - murder, rape, theft, and starvation become common.

It struck me that this book must have been at least in some degree inspired by Heart of Darkness.  Sensory deprivation is one of the most frightening things that humans can experience or conceptualize, because it resembles something more primal that we do not understand.  In Blindness, one more perfect woman than the rest is not afflicted by the blindness, and it is only through her civilizing touch that some of them around her are preserved.

In Heart of Darkness, there is no such civilizing touch.  The ironic juxtaposition of savagery and civilization between the pilgrims and the natives only goes to a point.  The “noble savage” is still not civilized, and there is still no order in what goes on in Heart of Darkness… and it is important to remember this, when we are thinking about Heart of Darkness allegorically.  In the heart of darkness itself, no one is really civilized.

There is one poem in particular that came to mind while reading “The Hollow Men”, by T.S. Eliot. Even though it’s thematically different, I couldn’t help but feel that it was the poem that Eliot intended to evoke when he wrote a specific stanza of the poem.

I’ve copied and pasted the poem here.

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822

It’s pretty classic.

The difficulty with reading any book that you’ve heard a lot about beforehand is the fact that there’s going to be a great deal of bias involved.  I haven’t really gotten too far into the book, but already I am thinking about the concepts of Objectivism that Ayn Rand has presented.  This makes me think that maybe I should pick another book, but since I haven’t read it before, and I’ve heard it needs to be read, so here I am, reading The Fountainhead.

The first thought that I had entering this book is that it is very different stylistically.  Ayn Rand is not Joseph Conrad, nor Shakespeare, and again, I sort of wish that there was some sort of stylistic continuity here.  I don’t know whether I like or dislike Ayn Rand’s style of writing so far.  From the introductions of the characters, I can already tell (to some degree) what they’re most likely going to represent.  Her characters seem symbolic already.

Is subtlety necessary to work a piece of literature?

Will write more about this later.