B394-SZ6
Virtue Is Its Own Reward
Copyright © by SuZi, 7/9/06
"It is a sin to write
this": Thus begins the first sentence of the simplest of prose works, a
speculatively post-apocalyptic novella written in the mid-1930s and called
Anthem. Now, some eighty years later, one might expect-especially given
certain situations in current events-that such the resonance of this phrase
would place it into someone's list of famous quotations (or, at least, an email
signature). One might also suspect that the author of the phrase, of the novella
and other works, would have a securely bronzed position in the American Literary
Canon. In fact, the shadowy position of this author, as is true for other
authors, within the hallowed halls of the American Literary Canon reflects more
on the fickle, fashionable nature of the process by which work is determined
worthy of canonization than upon the quality of any given piece of writing.
Perhaps a crude but much utilized view of the American Literary Canon can be
found as the authors' list for any English class textbook. Textbooks, in
general, are constructions of the ugliest aspects of American publishing:
subjected to the flatulence of current educational theory, the belchings of
politics and other wearisome winds, they are expensive in more than their sale
price. For the guy next door, whose primary concern is the proper adjustment of
the thermostat to accommodate the heat from the plasma TV, the English textbooks
he had (from whatever dim dreams of his school days that still ping in memory)
are the only experience with the American Literary Canon that will ever be had.
A quick appraisal of any English textbook will yield as much attention paid to
expensive illustrations and annoying assignment suggestions as to the literature
included. Of the writings that are included, as investigation into a generation
or two of textbooks yields a bizarre choice of inclusion: some authors are in
everything; others used to be read, but are now absent; some authors were never
and might never find institutionalized inclusion. None of these conditions are
reliable assessments of the literary quality any author produced, yet they are a
tacit indication of the best American literature has to offer.
So the American Literary Canon is
suspect: rather that an ever-growing bibliography reflective of the intricacies
and brilliant idiosyncrasies found in American writing, the institutionalized
canon is an ever-shrinking catalogue of politically correct and sanctioned
literature. The effect, socially, might result in a citizenry oblivious to
literature, to thought. Such a citizenry is the target of the author of Anthem,
who wrote the novella while preparing for The Fountainhead (Forward, 1995
edition). Such a sub-literate citizenry, easily swayed by spin, is referred to
in The Fountainhead as "second-handers" and in Atlas
Shrugged as "looters". Ayn Rand refers to "second-handers"
as having 'deadliness" and continues with
They have no concern for facts, ideas, work [
] Not
to judge,
but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the
impression of doing.
Not creation , but show. Not merit, but
pull[
]You don't
think with another's brain and you can't work through
another's
hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent
judgment,
you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to
stop life
( 606).
And whereas it may seem
paradoxical to inform a citizenry of their "literary heritage" (as
Blanche says in another shadowy American Literary Classic, A Streetcar Named
Desire), while simultaneously restricting information about works in that
heritage via the limited contents of textbooks and the odd governmental efforts
to keep tabs on bookstores and libraries, our situation in our current literary
culture is in exactly the state guaranteed to promulgate Rand's second-handers
and looters among our neighbors right now.
Our passive acceptance of
restrictions placed upon our own access of our cultural inheritance will
guarantee the continuation of a dire and despair-filled cultural wasteland.
Although Rand's biography has a moment or irony in that she left a restrictive
environment to become an American writer, greater irony can be found in the
speculations her three fictional works make that strike the reader as either
logical conjecture or prophecy. A comment made by the protagonist in Anthem might
be construed as applicable to the American Literary Canon itself:
The
Council of Scholars has said that we all know the things
which exist and therefore the things which
are not known by all
do not exist (52).
The idea of restrictive
group-think, of socially sanctioned xenophobia while oxymoronically giving
lip-service to multi-culturalism seems to be the primary function of the canon
as codified in textbooks. Rand comments on this herd mentality in The Fountainhead
, calling it "collectivism" and stating
[
] to
act together, to think-together, to feel-together, to unite, to
agree to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice
[
with the result of]
the individual held as evil, the mass --as
God (639).
Surely, any human in America,
citizen or not, can see Rand's collectivism at work in grocery stores, blue jean
purveyors, automobile sales lots. The failure of the American Literary Canon to
include Rand is more than an act of censorship against perceived sedition, it is
our failure to cherish our own ability at the very critical thought that wide
reading nourishes.
From a literary constructionist
point of view, Rand's fiction is heavily symbolic. Characterization seems to
evolve from Anthem through The Fountainhead to Atlas Shrugged.
The primary female character in Anthem is The Golden One, who
becomes Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead and finally Dagny
Taggart in Atlas Shrugged. They are, of course, painted as
physically attractive in some superlative degree, with symbolic character traits
as well. Rand has Dominique Francon say of herself:
I take the
only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom
[
] to ask nothing. To expect nothing. To
depend on nothing
(144).
The immediate rebuttal in the
text is made by another character, who says "It's abnormal to feel so
strongly about anything." Yet Rand argues for the virtue of passion in both
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged through both the speeches of
the characters and through the tribulations they endure. If Rand's protagonists
symbolize the superlative, they so by their focused passion. Of Dagny
Taggart's character, Rand wrote
She could not function to the rule of: Pipe down---keep down-
slow down-don't do your best, it is not wanted (300-301).
In direct contrast to the heroic
females of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are both the
male characters and the other females --the unheroic, the shrill, the shallow:
Rand repeats the unpleasant mother character in both texts, first as the mother
of symbolic looser Peter Keating, and as the emotionally extorting mother
of Hank Reardon. Hank Reardon, one of many symbolically admirable male
characters in Atlas Shrugged , has the same initials as the heroic
architect of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark. Both characters are
painted as tall, lean and prominent of facial bones; they are accused of a lack
of concern for social codes, as is Dagny Taggart, about whom Rand
attributes a certain confusion
[
]wondering
how they could imagine that she would feel guilt
from an
undefined accusation (51).
Other characters are painted as
symbolically grotesque, both with the hyperbolic accentuation of physical
characteristics that remind one of the German Expressionist drawings of the
1930s), as well as the thoroughly unlaudable traits of cowardice,
duplicity and betrayal. As Rand has Hank Reardon finally surmise about his
unpleasant wife, Lillian
[
] to the self-haters and
life-haters, the pursuit of
destruction was the only form
and equivalent of love (474).
One can perhaps see the resonance
of this characterization in our current ubiquitous experiences of road rage,
deforestation, domestic distress and other forms of depravity. Indeed, Rand
predicts these modern global emergencies by calling the self-haters
"looters" upon whom she attributes responsibility for many forms of
unpleasantness, including planetary destruction:
Their plan -like
all the plans of the royal looters of the past-is
only that the
loot shall last their lifetime (740).
An ironic observation, now that we
are paying at the pump for generations of car-crazy culture.
Additionally, Rand's use of
American settings is noteworthy: from the post-apocalypse society of Anthem,
through the utopia of Galt's Gulch in Atlas Shrugged, with the presence
of cities -notably New York -and the presence of homelessness and economic
collapse as easily discernible in all of Rand's fictional texts. With all
the aids to assignments ladled into teachers' editions, teachers' supplements,
activities enrichment workbooks and other educational tools, even middle level
students would not be overly windblown by consideration of Rand's work --despite
the purient handcuffs of community standards ( ironically, a recent interview
with a reality TV starlet in the April Earth Day issue of Elle magazine
featured the thespian toting a copy of Atlas Shrugged).
Posthumously, and privately, Rand's work is used in the institutions of
education --despite being shunned by textbook conglomerates. Although not every
dead writer has an organization dedicated to encouraging continued reading of
the work, Rand does. Interestingly, The Ayn Rand Institute willingly sponsors
educational interaction: sponsoring both essay contests and, in some cases, book
donation. On the telephone, the institute personnel are friendly and seem
interested in being helpful -exactly the opposite experience one routinely has
with textbook publishing institutions. That the second hand looters of American
literature and elitist dogmaticians of the American Literary Canon would
choose the pose of hegemony should come as no surprise.
Rand's socio-political philosophy
is given through the speeches of the characters, with pro and con given
classical rhetorical weight. Rand spent the last part of her writing life
working in expository format, but most of the exposition given through the
speeches of characters rather thoroughly informs the reader of Rand's
primary tenents. What is most enjoyable in these speeches are both those which
laud the superlative and those which castigate the triflin', no-account,
sorrier citizenry:
[
]
whining rotters who never rouse themselves to any effort,
who do not posses the ability of a filing
clerk, but demand the
income of a company president, who drift
from failure to failure
and expect you to pay their bills, who hold
their wishing as an
equivalent of your work and their need as a
higher claim to
reward than your effort, who demand that
your strength be
the voiceless, rightless, unpaid,
unrewarded slave of their
incompetence [
] that yours is only to
give,but theirs only to
take, that yours is to produce, but theirs
to consume,
that you are not to be paid, neither in
matter nor in spirit, neither
by wealth nor by recognition nor by
respect nor gratitude [
]
(453).
A recitation of this passage drew
hosannahs from a number of working folk, as did many other passages quoted from
Rand. One person said Rand convinced her that it was not necessary to
compromise upon mediocrity. Is this the lesson censored from the American
Literary Canon?
Although Rand's three fictional
works mentioned here are far from perfect -this reader found the sex scenes
grueling and unpleasant ("the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm
gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained." (Atlas
Shrugged 136))-there is far more in Rand's work that is uplifting to those
chafed by the pressures of assimilation than in shelf after shelf of self-help
drivel:
[
] vicious nonsense. Just weakness and
cowardice. It's so easy
to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's
own record. You
can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake
it in your own
eyes [
] it's easier to donate a few thousand
to charity and to
think oneself noble than to base self-respect on
personal
standards of personal achievement. It's
simple to seek
substitutes for competence --uch easy substitutes
: love, charm,
kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for
competence
(Fountainhead 606).
Is this the sedition requiring
censorship by the American Literary canon -that the Ministry of Culture would
have us
kill [our] capacity t o recognize greatness or
achieve it [
that we
would no longer see] the great is the rare, the
difficult, the
exceptional. [Are we to] set up standards of
achievement open to
all, to the least, to the most inept -and stop
the impetus to effort
in all men, great or small [
]stop all
incentive to improvement,
to excellence, to perfection (Fountainhead
635).
If we do value cultural excellence
--whether or not individual readers find it in Rand per se -- we are obligated
to be passionate about literature: to ignore the restrictions imposed upon
us and to read widely, to read passionately, to insist our literature demand our
thought, and to live true to our personal standards that value literature, value
culture, and value the efforts of a mid-twentieth century author writing between
the volatile periods in our country's history now called the tragedy of the
Great Depression and the shameful events of the McCarthy era.
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