I was driving into Winston Salem the other day, and noticed a number plate. In North Carolina, most vehicles carry the statement ‘First in Flight’ (and many others ‘First in Freedom’). Not on this car, however. It asked, “Who is John Galt?” You may well know the answer. John Galt is the hero of a gigantic and gigantically boring work of fiction, ‘Atlas Shrugged’; the question is a theme, a motif, running through the story, the author’s attempt to give the sprawling mess some coherence.
However, my first thought when I saw that question on a car was not about John Galt. I hadn’t previously imagined that people might use a number plate as a way to declare to the world the name of their fictional hero. As my mind happily wandered, I began to fantasize about the names of other males from alternative novels.[i] Might I expect to see a car inviting me to consider, “Who is Christian Grey?” or “Who is Fitzwilliam Darcy?”.
Then my mind went back to John Galt. Do I need to spend any more time on Atlas Shrugged and all that it represents? I’d like to say no, but Ayn Rand’s novel remains one of the seminal texts for the extreme right, free market and no more government interference brigade. Reluctantly, I feel the pressure to return, yet again, to commenting on John Galt’s story, at the risk of appearing somewhat obsessed about sixty-year-old book that should have been long forgotten. I’m not sure I can say anything new, but observations sometimes benefit from a new perspective. My random thoughts while driving had thrown up three names. They were the leading males in three romances. There’s nothing wrong with dramatic stories: like all novels, they can expand our understanding of people and relationships. But perhaps comparing these books and their romantic heroes might provide a rather different angle on Atlas Shrugged.
“Who is Christian Grey?” Well, I suppose it is possible you haven’t read the same romantic page turners as I, and may not know he appears in the trilogy that begins with ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’.[ii] Christian Grey is the ultra-rich, handsome and severely troubled young man who is sorted out and saved by the relatively poor, beautiful and innocent Anastasia (Ana) Steele. Wish fulfilment at its best, even if many critics accuse the books of being poorly written eroticism.
Poorly written? The books are certainly not great literature! Nonetheless, I think E L James understood her readers well, and Ana’s sometimes squeaked comments and phrases (as well as her reflections on her “inner goddess”) make the story immediately accessible to a large segment of her intended public. Erotic? A bit of soft-core pornography was the critical element to add spice to the books (the “kinky fuckery” as it is delightfully described), although I would concede it soon palls as we read on and wait for Ana to rescue the tormented young man! It all works out well in the end. Fifty Shades is a classic romantic love story where the girl saves the man and they live happily ever after, fortunately supported by an abundance of material riches.
“Who is Fitzwilliam Darcy?” I’m sure you know about this fellow. He’s the rather unapproachable landowner in ‘Pride and Prejudice’, where he is almost always referred to as Mr. Darcy. No doubt you’re relieved to see we are moving on to an up-market book! Inspired by my musing on names on number plates, I reread Pride and Prejudice a few days ago. If Fifty Shades is undemanding wish fulfilment, this is different. Do you remember the opening lines?
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.” [iii]
I couldn’t help smiling as I read on to learn about Mrs. Bennet’s plans to acquaint her daughters, especially her eldest and still unmarried daughter, with a newly arrived and rich bachelor. I was still smiling as I learn about the foolish and rather tasteless pretensions of Mrs. Bennet, and had some sympathy for Mr. Bennet as he slipped away to his library to read in peace. Soon we meet all the daughters, especially Jane (the eldest) and Elizabeth (the second child, and the one at the centre of the story). Gently, almost without noticing, Jane Austen’s novel moves from humour to irony, spearing the pretensions of some, the apparent pride of others, and the foolishness of many. Did I say humour? Snarky humour, right from the first line.
Much more than that, this is a complex story about class and deference; about the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) barriers that fence off the strata of society; about the prejudices and misunderstandings people create and suffer. It is a dry-eyed look at poorly matched partners (Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are a dreadfully misaligned couple, much to Mr. Bennet’s regret early on in his marriage), and the mistakes made in bringing up children, especially in large families. A few pages in, my smiles are even less evident, as the author exposes more and more of the dimensions of human frailties. There’s drama, love and passion, cads and bounders, runaway teenagers and scheming young women, all the necessary elements of a romantic novel, but they are there as the building blocks of a story to help us understand the complexities of real people.
Very different from Fifty Shades? Both are love stories. In both the woman both grows up and marries up, acquiring wealth and status (although Elizabeth Bennet could claim her father was ‘a gentleman’). But Ana Steele and Christian Grey offer little more than romantic fluff, playing to the dreams of young women and men. Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are part of a more complex and deeper story, their love affair an excuse to examine and expose friends, families and foolishness in a class ridden country. It’s all done so deftly, apparently harmless sentences revealing the complexities and confusions of both smart and stupid folk. By the end, we realise Mr. Bennet is as much a failure as Mrs. Bennet, and Elizabeth stands out because she is more intelligent than most, still young and impetuous at times, but increasingly wise in the ways of the world. There is every chance she and Fitzwilliam will make a successful partnership: not because he has money and a nice house, but because they are both willing to confront their weaknesses, and, we feel sure, she will be quick to puncture any pretensions!
“Who is John Galt?” As I’ve already noted, he is the hero in one of the 20th Century’s most convoluted romances. Coming in at 1,069 pages, ‘Atlas Shrugged’ [iv] is a whopper. It could be this is another novel you have yet to read. I mentioned I’ve written about it before, but it seems I can’t help myself: I’m at it again, and now I want to explore where Ayn Rand’s novel fits when compared to those by Jane Austen and E L James.
John Galt is an extremely self-centred man, prone to giving excessively long speeches justifying his plan to bring about the crash of civilisation as it is, in order to create a new world order. As I type these words, it makes him seem rather like Marx and Engels, looking for a revolution to overthrow government and create a better society. However, any passing similarity is soon set aside as you battle through the book: John Galt is a passionate advocate of only doing things for yourself, never for others. He wants our heroine, Dagny Taggart, to join him in a secret valley where that new world order is being created, free from government, free to choose, free from having any obligations to others imposed upon you.
Never a man for 100 words where 100,000 can be given, the book is littered with his declarations. Here’s an extract from page 730, where he explains his philosophy to Dagny:
“Did it ever occur to you … there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires – if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible, and destruction from their view of the practical. There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another – if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of value which is, will not bring value to that which isn’t. The businessman who wishes to gain a market by throttling a superior competitor, the worker who wants a share of his employer’s wealth, the artist who envies a rival’s higher talent – they are all wishing facts out of existence, and destruction is the only means of their wish. If they pursue it, they will not achieve a market, a fortune or an immortal fame – they will merely destroy production, employment and art. A wish for the irrational is not to be achieved, whether the sacrificial victims are willing or not. But men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to destroy – so long as self-destruction and self-sacrifice are preached to them as the practical means of achieving the happiness of the recipients … No one’s happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or destroy.”[v]
Got it? If you haven’t, get the book and read the speech he gives in a radio broadcast. It runs from page 923 to page 979, (believe me, that boy can talk!) I’ve read this novel twice, but I couldn’t face it again, so this time I had to cheat and go to the end of this particular diatribe, where he summarises his article of faith:
“I swear – by my life and my love of it – that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”[vi]
Since I wasn’t willing to read the book, I decided to watch the movie (in three parts [vii], a good five hours in total). It was a slightly less painful way to remind me of the plot and its peculiarities, recalling reviewers’ stunning one liners: “execrable claptrap” and “relentless hectoring and prolixity” have to be among my favourites. [viii] I’d add confusing, contradictory craziness, or even “a monstrous farrago of nonsense” [ix] a description of another’s writing (sadly not Rand’s)!
Ayn Rand intended Atlas Shrugged should be a fictional explanation of her theory of ‘Objectivism’. I have no interest in trying to explain her philosophy, (I suppose it can be summarised as ‘altruism bad, selfishness good’!). However, it has spawned a plethora of wonderful put-downs, and so I am going to indulge myself just a little further, and repeat a couple that give you a good sense of what others have said:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.[x]
(T)he idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. [xi]
I know, behave myself! By the end of the book, the girl gets the boy: it takes some time as Dagny Taggart keeps clinging on to her shreds of altruism, her desire to care about others. Eventually, she gets the message, and repeats the oath about “never to live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine”. Funny, it seems to be all about men? Anyway, she has passed the test, and as she totally accepts John Galt’s philosophy, she can go to live with him in The Valley, where she will be part of the team to create a better, free society, out of the reach of governments and unions, without any obligation to work for the benefit of others, all built on some extreme version of trickle-down economics?
I hope that is sufficient background. As novels, what insights do these three books and their male heroes offer? The first of two topics to explore, let’s begin with men, and what men do.
In the case of Atlas Shrugged, it is not hard to conclude this book going to appeal to adolescent boys’ fantasies, feeding their flaring hormones by reading all about self-centred powerful men, dominating the world.[xii] Couple that with amazing leaps forward in science and technology: steel that is ten times lighter and ten times stronger than anything before; a power source (a motor) the size of a carry-on airline bag, that can power a city almost cost free; and a scientific mind so outstanding it can power an ego greater than Manhattan. John Galt, in pursuing his self-serving logical ends, can happily contemplate, plan and allow the deaths of millions. What’s this about? Ayn Rand is selling an ideology, a non-benevolent dictatorship, ripping up democracy and the caring society, manna for testosterone fuelled men who never grow out of adolescence.
Did I say ‘society’? Margaret Thatcher understood the approach. Do you recall her comment? “And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.”[xiii]
Did I say appeal to adolescents? I wish it was just them. Atlas Shrugged is read by men, and promoted by them. They are the same people who enthusiastically talk about Adam Smith and the ‘hidden hand’ in the market. Perhaps that gives us an important clue: they don’t actually read, they just hear about books from others. If they had read Adam Smith, they would have realised that their understanding of the ‘hidden hand’ was self-serving to say the least, and he would have been distressed to see how his words have been appropriated. One of Adam Smith’s non-economic books, ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’, opens with an extended examination of the importance of sympathy, of caring for others; it’s a long way from impersonal market forces:
“By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels … That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels …
“And hence it is, that to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety. As to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us.”[xiv]
We can contrast the men in Atlas Shrugged with Christian Grey and Mr. Darcy (yes, I’ve succumbed to Austen’s preference for his name). They are affluent men with considerable power, too, but the role models are very different. Grey works for the common good, projects to reduce hunger; Mr. Darcy, despite his apparent cold exterior, cares for those who work for him, and for his friends. They live in and work for society. Sadly, most teenage boys won’t read Pride and Prejudice. They might read Fifty Shades, but probably for the ‘naughty bits’ only.
My second topic is the relationship between these men and women. What does Ayn Rand think of women? In her two monster novels, she seems to treat them like baggage, moved on from one powerful man to another. Commentators have claimed Rand asserted that “the essence of femininity is hero worship – the desire to look up to man” and that “an ideal woman is a man-worshipper, and an ideal man is the highest symbol of mankind.” [xv] In an authorized article in The Objectivist, Nathaniel Branden, Rand’s lover for three years until 1957, explained Rand’s view as the idea that “man experiences the essence of his masculinity in the act of romantic dominance; woman experiences the essence of her femininity in the act of romantic surrender”![xvi]
In the case of Atlas Shrugged, it was hero worship all the way. At least Dagny got there without being attacked by her lover. This is in contrast to The Fountainhead [xvii], Rand’s earlier novel (another monster at 752 pages), where we get some further insight into the strange way she sees the relationship between the sexes. Howard Roark violently and sadistically rapes Dominique Francom in their first sexual encounter. Although several Rand acolytes manage to convince themselves that this was by consent, it was rape, with Ayn Rand writing about their encounter as if to persuade us that Dominque enjoyed the humiliation: “He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him-and she would have remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted.” If you’re not convinced, later in the book, Dominque makes it quite clear: she was raped [xviii]
Is Christian Grey another male dominating women? The books start with him as a sexual dominant, but we soon learn that his ‘kinky fuckery’ is intended to give pleasure to Anastasia Steele as much as to himself. As he struggles to overcome his warped childhood, Christian and Ana are equals. He’s no Howard Roark, not at any stage. As for Mr. Darcy, he doesn’t want to dominate as much as to hide, the cold and haughty exterior Elizabeth Bennet experiences his shield, a barrier to acknowledging his feelings, even to himself. In Jane Austen’s world, we see people as individuals, men and women alike, each with his or her own fads and foibles.
This has been a big year for followers of Jane Austen, the bicentenary of her death. Like E L James, she if often portrayed as a “women’s writer”. Like E L James, however, she is read by both men and women. Of the many commentaries I have seen in the past few months, I particularly liked this one, which clearly makes my point about what her novels achieve:
“What I came to learn over the next six years, during my Jane Austen education, was not only how to be a better person, but how to be a better man … sometimes I just feel like everything I know about life I learned by reading Jane Austen. Which means her novels enabled me to become a hero, too—if only, as David Copperfield would say, the hero of my own life.” [xix]
That car licence plate made me think about three male ‘heroes’ and three books. To my mind Fifty Shades is enjoyable and harmless light reading, a spiced-up romance, with good and rather conventional values; it is a book about hopes and dreams. Pride and Prejudice is more demanding fare, an exploration of who we are, how we see ourselves, and the challenges of understanding and relating to other people, a joy to read on every page; it is a book about the complexities of living with one another. In contrast, Atlas Shrugged is a bad book, poorly written, selling a view of people and society that is dangerous and unjustifiable.
Of the three, it is this last one that many men refer to (almost exclusively men, I suspect), and that should make us worried: it isn’t harmless light reading, it isn’t insightful literature, it is a justification of demagoguery, sexual domination and selfishness. I wish I would never hear of the book again. But I will, and I will have to write about it another time, because there will always be self-centred men who never grew up. There will always be the need to help guide the immature past their adolescent fantasies about mastering the world. There will always be men seeking absolute power and control, men for whom “Who is John Galt” holds the key to what needs to be done. We’ll be critiquing Atlas Shrugged for a long time yet.
An Aside: Are these three books best sellers? [xx]
Leaving on one side religious and ideological books (like The Bible, The Qur’an, and the Sayings of Chairman Mao, all of which are claimed to have seen more than 5bn copies produced), Don Quixote leads with 500m sold, and Pride and Prejudice comes in at 79th=, way behind such classics as The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books, Alice in Wonderland, Lolita, Anne of Green Gables, and Wind in the Willows – and also The Da Vinci Code, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Valley of the Dolls, Who Moved my Cheese, and several others, some too embarrassing to mention!
As for series, Harry Potter comes in at the top with 510m sales, and Fifty Shades at 21st= with 125m. In between we find such collections as Goosebumps, Perry Mason, Nancy Drew, The Baby Sitters Club and Peter Rabbit.
I know, you’ve been waiting for Atlas Shrugged: it’s way, way down the lists, with a mere 7m sold. However, around 400,000 are given to college and school students every year. Incidentally, a contribution to that total comes from the copy given to every one of the nearly 1,500 incoming undergraduate students (freshmen) at our local (private) university.
[i] You might well ask, what about a woman in a novel? I have a reason for choosing these three, as this is a blog about men.
[ii] Actually, the correct name for the trilogy is ‘Fifty Shades’; the books, by E L James, are Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed, all (re)published by Vintage Books in 2012, having started life as a self-published series of e-books and print-on demand novels
[iii] Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Egerton, 1913: page 1
[iv] By Ayn Rand, 1957, my edition is the Signet version of 1992. In fact, I have a copy of the 50th Anniversary Edition!
[v] Op cit, page 732
[vi] Op cit, page 979
[vii] Atlas Shrugged Part 1, 2011; Part 2, 2012. Part 3 2014. Part 1 scored just 10% on the Tomatometer.
[viii] Both reported by M R Gladstein, in The New Ayn Rand Companion, Greenwood Press, 1999.
[ix] James Connolly, quoted in Donal Nevin, James Connolly, A Full Life, Chapter 18, page 5, Gill Books, 2005
[x] John Rogers, quoted by Paul Krugman in ‘I’m Ellsworth Toohey!’, The New York Times, 23 Sept, 2010
[xi] John Scalzi, What I think about Atlas Shrugged, Whatever, 1 October 2010
[xii] Reading? I did like one comment I read, suggesting most young men, if they had a girlfriend, wouldn’t have the time to read a book as big as Atlas Shrugged!
[xiii] So said Margaret Thatcher, in an interview with Douglas Keay, published in Women’s Own, 31 October 1987. She later rephrased her comment, in a statement published in The Sunday Times, 10 July 1988: “All too often the ills of this country are passed off as those of society. Similarly, when action is required, society is called upon to act. But society as such does not exist except as a concept. Society is made up of people. It is people who have duties and beliefs and resolve. It is people who get things done. [Margaret Thatcher] She prefers to think in terms of the acts of individuals and families as the real sinews of society rather than of society as an abstract concept. Her approach to society reflects her fundamental belief in personal responsibility and choice. To leave things to ‘society’ is to run away from the real decisions, practical responsibility and effective action.” She must have read Ayn Rand as well as Friedman!
[xiv] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Chapter V: Of the Amiable and Respectable Virtues, 1759
[xv] But the source for this has disappeared: I couldn’t find it
[xvi] Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-esteem, Nash Publishing, 1969. I guess that’s clear!
[xvii] Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, Bobbs Merrill: 1943
[xviii] The Fountainhead, op cit, page 657 “He raped me. That’s how it began.”
[xix] William Deresiewicz, A Jane Austen Kind of Guy, The American Scholar, 5 September 2017 https://theamericanscholar.org/a-jane-austen-kind-of-guy/
[xx] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books. It’s a riveting list to read.
