To the right is the cover of the first paperback edition of
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged that I read
while still in high school in 1962. The print of my hand with my thumb pushing
up through the word "Atlas" can still be seen. As a slow reader in
high school, it took several months to read it, carrying it with me through all
my classes. I savored every word and soon embraced the philosophy Rand
espoused.
My father, who read this very same edition before me, said
Rand's novel was an allegory, but I was overpowered by it. I even had the
experience of asking Ayn Rand a question during a lecture she gave in late 1962
in Philadelphia. I couldn't help but to notice how many in the audience dressed
to emulate the characters in her novels, how many women dressed to look like
Dagny Taggart and how many of the men fancied themselves to look like Howard
Roark. My question was a simple one about cinema. Many in the audience
snickered openly at my question, but Rand gently admonished them and, having
begun her career in cinema as a screenwriter and extra in Hollywood, and
patiently answered my question and left a lasting impression. Later when I
became a student of cinema I found her answer to my question valuable for my
own assessment of the films I later viewed.
As I continued to live my life I attempted to embody Rand's
philosophy to my own life, using it to address my personal problems and
shortcomings. Over time I found Rand's philosophy in this manner an utter
failure. Coupled with my father's comment that Atlas Shrugged was an allegory, the epiphany provided by my
participation in the Vietnam War, the Counter Culture and reading Marx, Engels
and Lenin revealed the central allegory of her novel.
Time and better understanding had caused her philosophy to
fade from my mind, but I still relished the fact that Atlas Shrugged is a marvelously written work, which contributes to
its power as a great piece of American literature that remains in print.
However, the notion of allegory, of looking at Atlas Shrugged as a literary work, led me to discover a fatal flaw in
Rand's use of it to promote a faulty philosophy.
In Atlas Shrugged
is found the refrain, uttered during critical points in the narrative,
"Who is John Galt?" We don't really meet John Galt in Rand's novel
until near the end of the story. However, the reader learns little details
about him throughout the earlier parts of the novel, the main one being that
John Galt is an inventor who has invented a kind of perpetual motion machine.
In spite of the literary device of delaying the appearance
of the novel's prime character, John Galt does make appearances throughout Atlas Shrugged. He is a worker for Dagny
and her brother James's Railroad Company. Anonymously, Galt occasionally
engages in coincidental conversations in the company's lunchroom with Eddie
Willers, who is one of Dagny's underlings. Willers conveys the essence of these
conversations to Dagny Taggard, who is conflicted as to whether she should join
the strike of all men of mind—and presumably some women—who have brought the
economy to its knees by disappearing or withdrawing from the world and hiding
out in a secret location.
Hindsight had exposed the ultimate literary allegory,
embedded in the very nature of the prime character of Atlas Shrugged, that of John Galt. It occurred to me that the only
perpetual motion machine engaged in production of all sorts, the only thing
that produces wealth itself is the working class. It would be fitting and
appropriate for Rand to originally portray the "inventor" of the
perpetual motion machine as an anonymous worker. Near the end of the novel,
John Galt commandeers the world's broadcast system and imparts his—and
Rand's—tome to the individual with all its allusions to human value and secular
morality. It is the philosophy of "objectivism" in a nutshell. At the
end of the novel, almost like a benediction, Galt traces the sign of the dollar
in the air. We need to remember that the dollar is not wealth in and of itself,
only the means of exchange, called "currency,” by which labor, which in
the parlance of "labor power" is the commodity we exchange for the
commodities we produce as that perpetual motion machine called the working
class. By tracing that sign of the dollar in the air, Galt reaffirms the true
exchange of wealth from those who produce it to those who use it, and from
those who use it to those who produce it, a notion dangerously close to the
axiom, "From each according to their abilities to each according to their
needs."
One wonders if Ayn Rand had not been spinning her wheels in
order to avoid her aversion to the a socialist model of human endeavors, which
we as a species have not completely worked out in spite of all those stops and
starts, setbacks and experiments and later perspectives. After all, one might
argue that Rand, who as a girl, may have been traumatized at her young age from
her family's escape from the travails of the Bolshevik Revolution. As time went
on in the midst of an American capitalist orgy, her faith may have been
bolstered in the notion of an ultimate efficacy of capitalism tempered by a
kind of idealized libertarian anarchy. In the end we might come to the
conclusion, in the case of Ayn Rand's considerable literary contribution, that
the most durable and efficacious truths may be embedded less in her philosophy
and more in her literature.
After 50 years, I still remember Ayn Rand’s answer to my
question. She told me how some filmmakers use texture in their conveyance of
image and subtle emphasis to certain details to reveal intent. She suggested
that these devices could transform image into what is beautiful, and that by
the end of the film help certain truths to emerge from the mind of the
filmmaker. After 50 years since I plodded word for word through the texture and
details in Atlas Shrugged, certain truths,
perhaps unavoidably, have emerged from the fertile soil of experience and
knowledge as well as from the literature, not the philosophy, of Ayn Rand.
