Atlas Shrugged or Fountainhead?

Sarah,

I did not understand Post 36.

I got both the what and the why in both of your examples the first time out - and I read that book the first time around in two days.

I see her plot completely tied in with the motivations of her characters - and the different themes running throughout the book.

Michael

Post 41

Thursday, October 20, 2005 - 2:31pm

Michael,

I'm not saying the what wasn't there, the whats just held no impact for me. I wasn't attached to the characters or the world.

Sarah

Post 42

Thursday, October 20, 2005 - 4:55pm

Are you saying, then, Sarah, that you didn't "relate" to any of the characters?

Post 43

Thursday, October 20, 2005 - 5:01pm

Robert,

As I said in post 36, I didn't "relate" to the characters outside of an intellectual context.

Sarah

Post 44

Thursday, October 20, 2005 - 5:04pm

OK - is this because they were mostly male characters? The only really heroic female being Dagney? The only other non-evil being Cheryl and Rearden's secretary?

Post 45

Thursday, October 20, 2005 - 5:18pm

Robert,

Not really. Those characters (the good guys) would have been oozing with passion for their work and their lives to do what they did. The way they were written, though, I couldn't feel that passion. I think that's why many people accuse Rand's characters of being emotionless.

Sarah

Post 46

Thursday, October 20, 2005 - 5:21pm

Sarah,

We have had vastly different reactions to Atlas Shrugged. When I first read it, I almost went nuts wanting to know what happened next. Rand's descriptions of her hero's battles seemed to cut into my inner beefs about other people with a scalpel and her passages of exaltation echoed all I had yearned to find in the world to a "T". Even her dialogue seemed a great deal like the way I talked back in school. (An almost girlfriend told me back then that I should read aaaaan raaaaaand - very nasal - because I seemed to have jumped out of that book.)

I even repressed emotions the way her heroes did. I even fell for the Galt talking to Willers gimmick all the way up to the end. I simply could not put Atlas Shrugged down - not even to eat.

Since then, I have read it a few more times. Each time has been an intense pleasure.

I have had some pretty hard knocks since then. I have had to revise some of my more hardheaded concepts and learn to look at reality as it is before I engage my idealism. But that almost childlike pleasure and sense of goodness I always felt about Atlas Shrugged is still there intact. It is unchanged. Especially the sense of heroic exaltation on building stuff that never existed before.

After this book has spoken to me like that time and time again, how could I find her literary style to be anything less than great?

I'm not criticizing you for not having had this type of experience. I do get faintly curious when I encounter people who like Rand and have not had something similar with her fiction, though.

(You don't know what you're missing, girl.)

Michael

Post 47

Thursday, October 20, 2005 - 9:24pm

Michael,

Me: The way they were written, though, I couldn't feel that passion. I think that's why many people accuse Rand's characters of being emotionless.

You: I even repressed emotions the way her heroes did.

You sure we had such different reactions to AS?

Sarah

Post 48

Thursday, October 20, 2005 - 9:44pm

Sarah,

They didn't repress ALL of their emotions. Just some of them. (And I know the hard way that repressing emotions is not a good thing in life - suppressing for a while maybe, but not explicit negation.)

It so happens that the emotions they feel intensely - their overwhelming love for their work and integrity, for instance - are ones that I have shared since the beginning. These emotions were portrayed wonderfully.

Unfortunately, the contempt and ranting is well done also - and this is something way too people many imitate.

Anyway, there is something in her wordy style that Michael M lampooned that is extremely powerful if you let it penetrate.

One of Rand's big challenges with Atlas Shrugged was that there were all those cross themes to integrate into the same scene all the time. She had to touch on or insinuate all the pertinent ones in one scene in order for her keep the thing tied together and make the climaxes seem inevitable.

She also got it into her head that the speeches were necessary - and they were but only because of the philosophy, not because of the drama. Unless you consider that it was the philosophy that was driving the drama.

Then she had a mannerism she gained from Victor Hugo, which was to express things by contrasting them with seemingly contradictory elements. Thus a virtuous man is rude, an apparent lack of emotion by a hero at a critical moment becomes identified by a supporting character as a highly intense statement, and so forth.

Back to the cross themes. If you take a long paragraph of description and start to break each phrase down into what it is really saying, you will start to notice patterns. If you allow those essences (the themes) into your subconscious with an open mind, the prose starts to flow in a manner that will surprise you - including the emotional impact.

Frankly, all this deserves an article. There has been a lot written on Rand's style, but a "how-to" thing on reading her fiction for maximum enjoyment and impact just occurred to me as probably a good idea.

Michael

(Edited by Michael Stuart Kelly on 10/20, 9:47pm)

Post 49

Friday, October 21, 2005 - 9:25am

Andy you are of course right. AS is compelling and speaks to we who value it, on a deep level. I remember an actual physical feeling reading *both* books. Hard to describe, but almost a feeling of being more alive, more capable, more "heroic".

That's it, right there. For me there's only a handful of books that even hit that level of transcendence, and none of them like that.

There was another one for me, which is related in a certain way, Heinlein's Time Enough For Love.

There's a couple of things with AS that become apparent very quickly. One is that that the characters are tremendously "weighted" in terms of having to perform many functions and represent many elements. The other one, related to that, has to do with the fact that Atlas stands out clearly as a novel that has man himself as the mythical subject. Atlas remythologized.

Post 50

Friday, October 21, 2005 - 9:58am