Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged [1957], Penguin Modern Classics, 2007, £10.99.
|
RATING: 0
|
Buy this book?
|
No
|
Atlas Shrugged is an excruciatingly bad book - ill-conceived, clumsily executed, pretentious, and far too long. This has nothing to do with the fact that it is a tale of a capitalist strike against a 'collectivist' government, or that it advocates a form of capitalism in which the 'only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law’ (1062-3). That is not a view that I share, but it is a perfectly coherent proposition from the perspective of the bourgeoisie, or if you like, the capitalist class, and it could have informed a distinctive and potentially powerful moral fable. The problem, rather, is that Rand had no insight into her own strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Practically every decision she took in writing the novel was wrong, starting with the 'Aristotelian' three-part structure (Non-Contradiction, Either-Or, A is A). How true to Aristotle's philosophy this is, I can't tell you. But it goes down like a lead balloon, notably in John Galt's interminable radio broadcast from which the quote above is taken (1009-69). It is symptomatic of a larger problem - Rand's habit of sprinkling her ideas about society and human relationships through the text in ways that weigh down the story she is telling. Another problem is that despite the 'Aristotelian' framing, Atlas Shrugged actually repeats the narrative structure of The Fountainhead, in broad terms and in detail, suggesting that the whole process of composition was insufficiently thought through. The narrative drive of the earlier novel came from the central role of Dominique Francon, and her relationships with Peter Keating, Gail Wynand, and the 'ideal man', Howard Roark. Atlas Shrugged adopts exactly the same formula: the female protagonist, Dagny Taggart, has three relationships that structure the narrative, with Francisco d'Anconia, Hank Rearden, and John Galt. Not only that, but despite the fact that Dagny is a very different person, her successive sexual encounters (described at length, in graphic terms) echo directly those of Dominique, down to the detail that her first sexual encounter with Galt, like Dominique's with Roark, takes place when he is employed as a manual worker in the family business. In The Fountainhead Rand's personal erotic fantasies were more or less congruent with the narrative, but here they are not, so they get in the way of coherent plotting and characterisation.
Nor do echoes of The Fountainhead end here. Practically all its signature features recur in Atlas Shrugged, down to the smallest detail - the constant presence of cigarettes, given a role here in the plot itself; the elegance of the female lead; the fixation on gauntness, as part of the contrast between the physiognomy of the 'ideal men' on the one hand, and the flabby 'moochers' and 'looters' on the other; the cartoon-like characterisation of the latter; the preaching, here much extended; and the overtly Christian iconography, turned to a secular theme. Both novels build up to cataclysmic events, but Atlas Shrugged lacks dramatic tension, for three reasons. First, it is much longer, at 1168 pages, and much more laboured, than The Fountainhead. Second, in The Fountainhead the female protagonist, Dominique Francon, does develop as a character, growing from a state of self-hatred to become a worthy partner to Rand's ideal man. But Dagny Taggart, her equivalent in Atlas Shrugged, is close to begin with to Rand's ideal, so no such development takes place. As Chief of Operations of Taggart Transcontinental, she spends her time in an increasingly desperate attempt to keep the company on the rails, while her brother James engages in skulduggery with his mates in Washington. But it is clear from early on that she will eventually give up and join the strike, so the only question is when. We have to wait a very long time. The same is true of Hank Rearden, the industrialist who invents a metal alloy stronger, cheaper, and lighter than steel ('Rearden metal'), used by the railroad company. Third, there is no progression in either the characters or the evil deeds of the collectivists. From the start, they intend to eliminate competition in the name of fairness, and they are uniformly corrupt and self-serving. Orren Boyle is typical: he argues that 'free economy' is on trial: 'Unless it proves it social value and assumes its social responsibilities, the people won't stand for it. If it doesn't develop a public spirit, it's done for, make no mistake about that'. But this is hypocrisy: 'He had started out with a hundred thousand dollars of his own and a two-hundred-million dollar loan from the government. Now he headed an enormous concern which had swallowed many smaller companies. This proved, he liked to say, that individual ability still had a chance to succeed in the world' (45). As in The Fountainhead, the moral deck is stacked from the start, and the same game is repeated over and over: the successive anti-competitive measures that are introduced, the 'Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule', The Equal Opportunity Bill, the Rail Unification Plan and the Steel Unification Plan being prominent among them, are variations on the same theme, and we get the idea long before Rand tires of piling example upon example.
I'll say more about Rand's notion of capitalism later, but first, we need to look more closely at Dagny and the four leading male protagonists: Hank Rearden, who has yet to learn, at the outset, to grow out of the duty he feels towards his family, and become truly selfish, and three larger-than-life heroes: the Argentinian mining tycoon, Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián d'Anconia, no less, who improbably 'owns half of South America'; the 'pirate', Ragnar Danneskjöld, and the inventor John Galt, the initiator and leader of the strike, and the acme of super-heroism. Here are the first four:
Dagny Taggart: 'Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car and oddly incongruous with the rest of her. She wore a battered camel's hair coat that had been expensive, wrapped shapelessly about her slender, nervous body. The coat collar was raised to the slanting brim of her hat. A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulders. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were conscious of her own body and that it was a woman's body' (12-13).
Hank Rearden: 'The glare cut a moment's wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice - then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair - then across the belt of his trench coat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them: this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five. Ever since he could remember, he had been told that his face was ugly, because it was unyielding, and cruel, because it was expressionless' (28).
Francisco d'Anconia: 'His tall slender figure had an air of distinction, too authentic to be modern, and he moved as if he had a cape floating behind him in the wind. People explained him by saying that he had the vitality of a healthy animal, but they knew dimly that that was not correct. He had the vitality of a healthy human being, a thing so rare that no one could identify it. He had the power of certainty. Nobody described his appearance as Latin, yet the word applied to him, not in its present, but in its original sense, not pertaining to Spain, but to ancient Rome. His body seemed designed as an exercise in consistency of style, a style made of gauntness, of tight flesh, long legs and swift movements. His features had the fine precision of sculpture. His hair was black and straight, swept back. The suntan of his skin intensified the startling color of his eyes: they were a pure, clear blue' (117).
Ragnar Danneskjöld (who meets Rearden on a lonely road at night and hands him a bar of gold): '[Rearden] knew - by the proud posture of the body standing in the open, by the straight line of the shoulders against the starlit sky - that the man was not a bandit. ... He wore a dark blue cap, and all that could be seen of him in the night were his hands, his face and a patch of gold-blond hair on his temple. ... He looked from the bar to the man's face, but the face seemed harder and less revealing than the surface of the metal. ... Rearden found himself thinking that it was not the face of a man, but of an avenging angel. ... The next shock was to see Danneskjöld smile: it was like seeing the first green of spring on the sculptured planes of an iceberg. Rearden realised suddenly, for the first time, that Danneskjöld's face was more than handsome, that it had the startling beauty of physical perfection - the hard, proud features, the scornful mouth of a Viking's statue - yet he had not been aware of it, almost as if the dead sternness of the face had forbidden the impertinence of an appraisal' (573-6). We shortly learn, too, that he has 'sky-blue' eyes.
It wasn't just Howard Roark, then. All Rand's heroes look the same - if you are not tall and gaunt, and made of angular planes, you are more than likely some kind of Communist. John Wayne (6 ft, 4 inches or 1.93 metres tall, and thin-lipped), with whom she would collaborate in the viciously anti-communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, is I guess as likely a model as any. It is Dagny, however, who gives the novel its shape, and its tone. Impropriety alert! As noted above, she gets to fuck (or more precisely to be fucked by) three of the four super-heroes. She misses out on Ragnar, no doubt because he was more often than not at sea. The basic routine is familiar from The Fountainhead. The first time is with Francisco d'Anconia, a childhood friend, when she is seventeen, and already working on the railroad as a night operator. Rand signals the onset of lust in her own delicate way (104-7); they later walk through the woods to an isolated clearing, and we are back with the first encounter between Dominique and Roark, except that Rand is at pains now to signal Dagny's (unspoken) consent:
'They stopped and looked at each other. She knew, only when he did it, that she had known he would. He seized her, she felt her lips in his mouth, felt her arms grasping him in violent answer, and knew for the first time how much she had wanted him to do it. She felt a moment's rebellion and a hint of fear. He held her, pressing the length of his body against hers with a tense, purposeful insistence, his hand moving over her breasts as if he were learning a proprietor's intimacy with her body, a shocking intimacy that needed no consent from her, no permission. She tried to pull herself away, but she only leaned back against his arms long enough to see his face and his smile, the smile that told her she had given him permission long ago. She thought that she must escape; instead, it was she who pulled his head down to find his mouth again. She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his, that he left nothing possible to her except the thing she wanted most - to submit. She had no conscious realisation of his purpose, her vague knowledge of it was wiped out, she had no power to believe it clearly, in this moment, to believe it about herself, she knew only that she was afraid, yet what she felt was as if she were crying to him - Don't ask me for it - oh, don't ask me - do it! She braced her feet for an instant, to resist, but his mouth was pressing to hers, and they went down to the ground together, never breaking their lips apart. She lay still - as the motionless, then the quivering object of an act which he did simply, unhesitatingly, as of right, the right of the unendurable pleasure it gave them' (107).
Whoever the protagonists, it seems, Rand is drawn inexorably to the same erotic fantasy. Once they have been put through it, Dagny and Francisco go on to have a lot of sex in a variety of places, experiencing radiant and innocent joy, and good luck to them. Later, in two excruciating pages, she moves on to Rearden, shortly following the erotic thrill of a high-risk, high-speed crossing of the newly-completed bridge of Rearden Metal (251-2). More intimate detail coming up, I'm afraid, because this relationship, and this episode in particular, reveal just how Rand flounders in the novel with character and plot. The writing is altogether bizarre, and a contender for the worst portrayal of sex in literary history:
'The look she saw on his face made her know for the first time that she had known this would be the end of the journey. That look was not as men are taught to represent it, it was not a matter of loose muscles, hanging lips and mindless hunger. The lines of his face were pulled tight, giving it a peculiar purity, a sharp precision of form, making it clean and young. His mouth was taut, the lips faintly drawn inward, stressing the outline of its shape. Only his eyes were blurred, their lower lids swollen and raised, their glance intent with that which resembled hatred and pain.
The shock became numbness spreading through her body - she felt a tight pressure in her throat and her stomach - she was conscious of nothing but a slight convulsion that made her unable to breathe. But what she felt, without words for it, was: Yes, Hank, yes - now - because it is part of the same battle, in some ways that I can't name ... because it is our being, against theirs ... our great capacity, for which they torture us, the capacity of happiness ... Now, like this, without words or questions ... because we want it ...
It was like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling; she felt his arms around her, she felt her legs pulled forward against him and her chest bent back under the pressure of his, his mouth on hers'.
It's safe to say that Ms Rand has some issues to work through. She goes on to make Dagny a model of female submission: 'Whatever I am, she thought, whatever pride of person I may hold, the pride of my courage, of my work, of my mind and my freedom - that is what I offer you for the pleasure of your body, that is what I want you to use in your service - and that you want it to serve you is the greatest reward I can have' (251). And she continues to endorse male violence: 'He took her wrist and threw her inside his room, making the gesture tell her that he needed no sign of consent or resistance. He locked the door, watching her face', and so on. Rand has long ago stopped thinking about the characters involved, and gone off into a dark and toxic world of her own. There is nothing before or after this to suggest that Rearden would act in this way, any more than there was with Roark, in The Fountainhead. For her part, Dagny is a highly competent and confident professional woman, and has been working with Rearden closely and in an atmosphere of great mutual respect for a good while, so her response is equally far-fetched. The whole scene stretches credulity beyond any limit. Rand now lurches off to an absurdly baroque expression of her rapacious view of humanity's relationship to nature: 'Through all the steps of the years behind them, the steps down a course chosen in the courage of a single loyalty; their love of existence - chosen in the knowledge that nothing will be given, that one must make one's own desire and every shape of its fulfilment - through the steps of shaping metal, rails and motors - they had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one's enjoyment, that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal' (252). Nothing new about this, of course - similar views are gratuitously attributed to Roark on the first page of The Fountainhead, but are never thereafter in evidence.
Rand has got herself into a fine mess here, and to see why, we need only compare Dagny's relationship with Rearden with that between Dominique and Gail Wynand. The latter played a crucial role in the interpersonal dynamics and the plot development of The Fountainhead: first, it reflected Dominique's desire to humiliate herself and hurt Roark, and second, in a significant plot development, it turned into an experience from which she learned and grew. So it was central to the story as a whole. Nothing of the sort can be said of the relationship between Dagny and Rearden - Rand is simply marking time until Dagny excuses herself, and moves on to John Galt - though, as we shall see, not before preposterous events are required to move the plot forward.
Time, then, to meet John Galt, whom Dagny sees when she comes round after passing out when her plane crashes in the hidden valley, high in the Rockies, to which the capitalists have decamped:
'She was looking up at the face of a man who knelt by her side, and she knew that in all the years behind her, this was what she would have given her life to see: a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt. The shape of his mouth was pride, and more: it was as if he took pride in being proud. The angular planes of his cheeks made her think of arrogance, of tension, of scorn - yet the face had none of these qualities, it had their final sum: a look of serene determination and of certainty, and the look of a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgiveness or grant it. It was a face that had nothing to hide or to escape, a face with no fear of being seen or seeing, so that the first thing she grasped about him was the intense perceptiveness of his eyes - he looked as if his faculty of sight were his best-loved tool and its exercise a limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted superlative value to himself and to the world - to himself for his ability to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing. It seemed to her for a moment that she was in the presence of a being who was pure consciousness - yet she had never been so aware of a man's body. The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the hardness, the gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some dimmed, soft-lustred metal, like an aluminium-copper alloy, the colour of his skin blending with the chestnut brown of his hair, the loose strands of the hair shading from brown to gold in the sun, and his eyes completing the colours, as the one part of the casting left undimmed and harshly lustrous: his eyes were the deep, dark green of light glinting on metal' (701).
Shakespeare did far better, with a single line, in The Tempest. But you know exactly what is going to happen in this brave new world, as Rand, now on familiar terrain, rolls out her signature sequence of steps towards surrender. Dagny has been injured in a crash landing, so Galt carries her:
'Here eyes kept coming back to his face. He glanced down at her once in a while. At first, she looked away, as if she had been caught. Then, as if learning from him, she held his glance whenever he chose to look down - knowing that he knew what she felt and that he did not hide from her the meaning of his glance. She knew that his silence was the same confession as her own. He did not hold her in the impersonal manner of a man carrying a wounded woman. It was an embrace, even though she felt no suggestion of it in his bearing; she felt it only by means of her certainty that his whole body was aware of holding hers' (704-5).
'Take me now', she might well have said, but for the inconvenience of a sprained ankle, sore ribs, and an assortment of bruises and contusions. As it is, though, 75 pages go by, before: 'She saw his veiled glance and the tautness of his mouth, she saw him reduced to agony, she felt herself drowned by the exultant wish to cause him pain, to see it, to watch it beyond her own endurance and his, then to reduce him to the helplessness of pleasure. ... She lay on her back, her palms pressed to the sheet at her sides, to stop herself from rising and walking into his room, knowing that she was capable even of that ...' (780-81). Dominique pressed her palms to the sheets in The Fountainhead (501-2), for the same reason, but without success, as it happens. I had no idea that this is a thing that women do. Here, anyway, consummation is delayed. Dagny is working as a servant and housekeeper to Galt in order to pay her way (a role that strangely requires the wearing of a transparent blouse), and she reflects, as she sets off to Hammond's Market to buy items for the evening's dinner: 'His wife ... for three weeks she had been his wife in every sense but one, and that final one was still to be earned, but this much was real and today she could permit herself to know it, to feel it, to live with that one thought for this one day' (799). I know. Comment is superfluous. Pleasure is further deferred, as Dagny returns to the real world, and to a moment of high melodrama: Rearden has surrendered his company to the government rather than have it revealed that Dagny has been his mistress for two years (a nonsensical plot turn which later requires more than four pages from Rearden by way of explanation, 856-60), and Dagny is instructed to speak on national radio in support of government policy, on pain of having this dreadful truth made public. She affects to do so, until: 'For two years I had been Hank Rearden's mistress. Let there be no misunderstanding about it: I am saying this, not as a shameful confession, but with the highest sense of pride. I had been his mistress. I had slept with him, in his bed, in his arms. ... Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have. If this now makes me a disgraced woman in your eyes - let your estimate be your own concern. I will stand on mine' (852). Go, Dagny! The pluperfect tense, awkward though it is, signals another plot twist - Rearden spots it, and knows that Dagny is moving on. But she does not know where Galt is, and fears (though readers know better) that she will never find him. The high pitch of melodrama continues through some of the clumsiest efforts to drive the moral home. In a series of highly contrived episodes, James Taggart's young wife, Cherryl, sees through him and runs to Darcy to apologise for having doubted her; a laboured discussion of true and false values follows; she returns to find that James has had sex with the soon-to-be-divorced Mrs Rearden (an act presented as empty, cynical, and devoid of passion, in a transparent move to create a foil for the mutual desire between Dagny and Galt); she flees, and throws herself into the river to drown, screaming, 'No! No! Not your kind of world!', 'with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation' (908). Meanwhile, Taggart Transcontinental falls apart as the national economy crumbles around it, with all manner of goods in shrinking supply (though Minnesota miraculously produces the largest ever wheat harvest in history, only for it to be lost for lack of rolling stock). The Industrial Revolution is thrown into reverse; the trains are brought to a halt; Dagny heads off to get them moving again, replacing automatic systems by men with lanterns; Galt turns up among the workers on the railroad, where unbeknownst to her he has been working for the last twelve years; Dagny heads into the underground tunnels, still wearing the diaphanous black satin dress, black cape and diamond clip she had on earlier (don't ask); Galt follows her, in his workman's attire:
'The next span of moments was like flashes of light in stretches of blinded consciousness - the moment when she saw his face, as he stopped beside her, when she saw the unastonished calm, the leashed intensity, the laughter of understanding in the dark green eyes - the moment when she knew what he saw in her face, by the tight, drawn harshness of his lips - the moment when she felt his mouth on hers, when she felt the shape of his mouth both as an absolute shape and as a liquid filling her body - then the motion of his lips down the line of her throat, a drinking motion that left a trail of bruises - then the sparkle of her diamond clip against the trembling copper of his hair. Then she was conscious of nothing but the sensations of her body, because her body acquired the sudden power to let her know her most complex values by direct perception [a lapse here, you may notice, from Rand's entirely rationality-based creed of Objectivism, but still]. Just as her eyes had the power to translate wave lengths of energy into sight, just as her ears had the power to translate vibrations into sound, so her body now had the power to translate the energy that had moved all the choices of her life, into immediate sensory perception. It was not the pressure of a hand that made her tremble, but the instantaneous sum of its meaning, the knowledge that it was his hand, that it moved as if her flesh were his possession, that its movement was his signature of acceptance under the whole of that achievement which was herself - it was only a sensation of physical pleasure, but it contained her worship of him, of everything that was his person and his life - ... it contained her pride in herself and that it should be she whom he had chosen as his mirror, that it should be her body which was now giving him the sum of his existence, as his body was giving her the sum of hers. These were the things it contained - but what she knew was only the sensation of the movement of his hand on her breasts. He tore off her cape ...' (956-7).
Excruciating, right? There is more, after which 'she gasped and lay still, knowing that nothing more could be desired, ever'. The travails of Taggart Transcontinental are momentarily forgotten. They declare their love for each other. Then they return to work. To all intents and purposes the story ends here. Rand still has to get Rearden to give up on Rearden Metal, but she is running out of ideas, so she rehashes the Rail Unification Plan as the Steel Unification Plan, throws in an armed attack on his factory and a maudlin scene in which the 'Wet Nurse' (again, don't ask) becomes its first victim, and brings Francisco d'Anconia back to lead Rearden off to the hidden valley. Galt's speech follows. By page 1085 some in the government are willing to surrender to John Galt, while others wish to kill him. Dagny leads them to him (again, don’t ask), and he is taken into custody. In the frantic, amphetamine-fuelled finale, buildings, a train, and the Taggart Bridge are pulverised by a sound-ray machine, a torture machine called the 'Ferris persuader' is brought to bear on Galt, and Dagny commits a murder in cold blood, purely to point a moral. Galt is rescued, and the good guys repair to the hidden valley, where the banker Midas Mulligan counts his money and plans his investments, Danneskjöld reads Aristotle, Judge Narragansett amends the US Constitution, adding a new clause ("Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade ..."), and Francisco d'Anconia busies himself with the design of a new smelter. The novel closes, though, with Dagny and Galt looking out 'not at the valley below, but at the darkness of the world beyond its walls', and as in The Fountainhead, Rand explicitly evokes a Christian motif. Salvador Dalí's Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, was apparently her favourite painting, and she is said to have compared the torture of Galt with Christ's suffering on the cross. He has now risen from that ordeal, and the novel concludes with this: "The road is cleared," said Galt. "We are going back to the world." He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar" (1168). Galt's kingdom, ruled by the dollar, backed by gold, will now be established on earth - or in the United States at least.
What should we make of this quasi-religious worship of capitalism? Atlas Shrugged is a tale of trains, planes, and automobiles, and a general fascination with industrial processes, machines, and the factory. Its point of reference is the Industrial Revolution, and the self-made capitalist tycoon. The US dollar is at its heart, its symbol printed in gold on the cigarettes manufactured in the hidden valley. Francisco d'Anconia's speech on money (sparked by a comment at a party that it is the root of all evil) argues that it is the source of all good, so long as it is fixed to gold so that profligate governments cannot adulterate its value, and extols America as the country of money par excellence:
'To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money - and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being - the self-made man - the American industrialist' (414).
This is a mythical version of America, in which conquest and slavery are not so much overlooked as celebrated ('Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work', 475), and an equally mythical version of the 'Old World', where apparently the Industrial Revolution did not take place. The United States is 'the only country in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only country whose money was the symbol of man’s right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself’ (683): in short, the Industrial Revolution is seen as a supreme good, produced uniquely by private enterprise, based in America, and personified by the early twentieth-century tycoon. Galt himself worships the machine, and has no time for Marx's law of value: "The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. … The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor others" (1064). Such reflections on the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation, however, are few and far between. Rand presents it in moral terms, as pitting ‘the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud’ (or 'moochers', 'looters', and the like) against ‘the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure’ (1050). This moral dichotomy is supported throughout by the visual aesthetics of the novel, where in contrast to her heroes, the collectivists and hoi polloi are variously 'flabby', 'fat and pallid', their eyes small, black slits, or fishy, cold and dead, their noses bulbous, their lower lips pendulous, their mouths shapeless, and their stomachs protruding. Rand has no sympathy for the common people, and (unlike contemporary apologists for capitalism) she does not claim that it benefits them, or care either way - simply, capitalists are the only producers of wealth, and they have the right to keep what they produce, and no duty to pay tax on their income.
She is entitled to these opinions. But if we consider Atlas Shrugged as an artistic creation, it is clear that there is a contradiction at its heart. It is a moral fable that makes no pretence to conform to reality, either social or historical. It pitches impossibly skilled, daring and good-looking super-heroes capable of incredible feats against an evil world, in a way that mimics the comic books that proliferated in America from the late 1930s onwards, but it encumbers itself with hugely repetitive mundane detail, and intrusive philosophical sermonising. Any competent editor, presented with the finished manuscript, would have said: "Cut out the philosophy - let the story speak for itself. Simplify the plot. Cut out everything about the anti-competitive 'collectivist' government except the 'Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule', The Equal Opportunity Bill, and the Rail and Steel Unification Plans. Concentrate on just two or three villains, and get rid of the rest. Cut the space given to d'Enconia and Rearden down to match that on Danneskjöld. Get rid of the rough sex and other baggage from The Fountainhead. Let Dagny spend her early adulthood spurning romance, then unite her with Galt. And cut the overall length from 1168 pages to 168. Let it be the moral fable it wants to be. Most people will hate it, but at least they might read it".
Nor do echoes of The Fountainhead end here. Practically all its signature features recur in Atlas Shrugged, down to the smallest detail - the constant presence of cigarettes, given a role here in the plot itself; the elegance of the female lead; the fixation on gauntness, as part of the contrast between the physiognomy of the 'ideal men' on the one hand, and the flabby 'moochers' and 'looters' on the other; the cartoon-like characterisation of the latter; the preaching, here much extended; and the overtly Christian iconography, turned to a secular theme. Both novels build up to cataclysmic events, but Atlas Shrugged lacks dramatic tension, for three reasons. First, it is much longer, at 1168 pages, and much more laboured, than The Fountainhead. Second, in The Fountainhead the female protagonist, Dominique Francon, does develop as a character, growing from a state of self-hatred to become a worthy partner to Rand's ideal man. But Dagny Taggart, her equivalent in Atlas Shrugged, is close to begin with to Rand's ideal, so no such development takes place. As Chief of Operations of Taggart Transcontinental, she spends her time in an increasingly desperate attempt to keep the company on the rails, while her brother James engages in skulduggery with his mates in Washington. But it is clear from early on that she will eventually give up and join the strike, so the only question is when. We have to wait a very long time. The same is true of Hank Rearden, the industrialist who invents a metal alloy stronger, cheaper, and lighter than steel ('Rearden metal'), used by the railroad company. Third, there is no progression in either the characters or the evil deeds of the collectivists. From the start, they intend to eliminate competition in the name of fairness, and they are uniformly corrupt and self-serving. Orren Boyle is typical: he argues that 'free economy' is on trial: 'Unless it proves it social value and assumes its social responsibilities, the people won't stand for it. If it doesn't develop a public spirit, it's done for, make no mistake about that'. But this is hypocrisy: 'He had started out with a hundred thousand dollars of his own and a two-hundred-million dollar loan from the government. Now he headed an enormous concern which had swallowed many smaller companies. This proved, he liked to say, that individual ability still had a chance to succeed in the world' (45). As in The Fountainhead, the moral deck is stacked from the start, and the same game is repeated over and over: the successive anti-competitive measures that are introduced, the 'Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule', The Equal Opportunity Bill, the Rail Unification Plan and the Steel Unification Plan being prominent among them, are variations on the same theme, and we get the idea long before Rand tires of piling example upon example.
I'll say more about Rand's notion of capitalism later, but first, we need to look more closely at Dagny and the four leading male protagonists: Hank Rearden, who has yet to learn, at the outset, to grow out of the duty he feels towards his family, and become truly selfish, and three larger-than-life heroes: the Argentinian mining tycoon, Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián d'Anconia, no less, who improbably 'owns half of South America'; the 'pirate', Ragnar Danneskjöld, and the inventor John Galt, the initiator and leader of the strike, and the acme of super-heroism. Here are the first four:
Dagny Taggart: 'Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car and oddly incongruous with the rest of her. She wore a battered camel's hair coat that had been expensive, wrapped shapelessly about her slender, nervous body. The coat collar was raised to the slanting brim of her hat. A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulders. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were conscious of her own body and that it was a woman's body' (12-13).
Hank Rearden: 'The glare cut a moment's wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice - then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair - then across the belt of his trench coat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them: this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five. Ever since he could remember, he had been told that his face was ugly, because it was unyielding, and cruel, because it was expressionless' (28).
Francisco d'Anconia: 'His tall slender figure had an air of distinction, too authentic to be modern, and he moved as if he had a cape floating behind him in the wind. People explained him by saying that he had the vitality of a healthy animal, but they knew dimly that that was not correct. He had the vitality of a healthy human being, a thing so rare that no one could identify it. He had the power of certainty. Nobody described his appearance as Latin, yet the word applied to him, not in its present, but in its original sense, not pertaining to Spain, but to ancient Rome. His body seemed designed as an exercise in consistency of style, a style made of gauntness, of tight flesh, long legs and swift movements. His features had the fine precision of sculpture. His hair was black and straight, swept back. The suntan of his skin intensified the startling color of his eyes: they were a pure, clear blue' (117).
Ragnar Danneskjöld (who meets Rearden on a lonely road at night and hands him a bar of gold): '[Rearden] knew - by the proud posture of the body standing in the open, by the straight line of the shoulders against the starlit sky - that the man was not a bandit. ... He wore a dark blue cap, and all that could be seen of him in the night were his hands, his face and a patch of gold-blond hair on his temple. ... He looked from the bar to the man's face, but the face seemed harder and less revealing than the surface of the metal. ... Rearden found himself thinking that it was not the face of a man, but of an avenging angel. ... The next shock was to see Danneskjöld smile: it was like seeing the first green of spring on the sculptured planes of an iceberg. Rearden realised suddenly, for the first time, that Danneskjöld's face was more than handsome, that it had the startling beauty of physical perfection - the hard, proud features, the scornful mouth of a Viking's statue - yet he had not been aware of it, almost as if the dead sternness of the face had forbidden the impertinence of an appraisal' (573-6). We shortly learn, too, that he has 'sky-blue' eyes.
It wasn't just Howard Roark, then. All Rand's heroes look the same - if you are not tall and gaunt, and made of angular planes, you are more than likely some kind of Communist. John Wayne (6 ft, 4 inches or 1.93 metres tall, and thin-lipped), with whom she would collaborate in the viciously anti-communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, is I guess as likely a model as any. It is Dagny, however, who gives the novel its shape, and its tone. Impropriety alert! As noted above, she gets to fuck (or more precisely to be fucked by) three of the four super-heroes. She misses out on Ragnar, no doubt because he was more often than not at sea. The basic routine is familiar from The Fountainhead. The first time is with Francisco d'Anconia, a childhood friend, when she is seventeen, and already working on the railroad as a night operator. Rand signals the onset of lust in her own delicate way (104-7); they later walk through the woods to an isolated clearing, and we are back with the first encounter between Dominique and Roark, except that Rand is at pains now to signal Dagny's (unspoken) consent:
'They stopped and looked at each other. She knew, only when he did it, that she had known he would. He seized her, she felt her lips in his mouth, felt her arms grasping him in violent answer, and knew for the first time how much she had wanted him to do it. She felt a moment's rebellion and a hint of fear. He held her, pressing the length of his body against hers with a tense, purposeful insistence, his hand moving over her breasts as if he were learning a proprietor's intimacy with her body, a shocking intimacy that needed no consent from her, no permission. She tried to pull herself away, but she only leaned back against his arms long enough to see his face and his smile, the smile that told her she had given him permission long ago. She thought that she must escape; instead, it was she who pulled his head down to find his mouth again. She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his, that he left nothing possible to her except the thing she wanted most - to submit. She had no conscious realisation of his purpose, her vague knowledge of it was wiped out, she had no power to believe it clearly, in this moment, to believe it about herself, she knew only that she was afraid, yet what she felt was as if she were crying to him - Don't ask me for it - oh, don't ask me - do it! She braced her feet for an instant, to resist, but his mouth was pressing to hers, and they went down to the ground together, never breaking their lips apart. She lay still - as the motionless, then the quivering object of an act which he did simply, unhesitatingly, as of right, the right of the unendurable pleasure it gave them' (107).
Whoever the protagonists, it seems, Rand is drawn inexorably to the same erotic fantasy. Once they have been put through it, Dagny and Francisco go on to have a lot of sex in a variety of places, experiencing radiant and innocent joy, and good luck to them. Later, in two excruciating pages, she moves on to Rearden, shortly following the erotic thrill of a high-risk, high-speed crossing of the newly-completed bridge of Rearden Metal (251-2). More intimate detail coming up, I'm afraid, because this relationship, and this episode in particular, reveal just how Rand flounders in the novel with character and plot. The writing is altogether bizarre, and a contender for the worst portrayal of sex in literary history:
'The look she saw on his face made her know for the first time that she had known this would be the end of the journey. That look was not as men are taught to represent it, it was not a matter of loose muscles, hanging lips and mindless hunger. The lines of his face were pulled tight, giving it a peculiar purity, a sharp precision of form, making it clean and young. His mouth was taut, the lips faintly drawn inward, stressing the outline of its shape. Only his eyes were blurred, their lower lids swollen and raised, their glance intent with that which resembled hatred and pain.
The shock became numbness spreading through her body - she felt a tight pressure in her throat and her stomach - she was conscious of nothing but a slight convulsion that made her unable to breathe. But what she felt, without words for it, was: Yes, Hank, yes - now - because it is part of the same battle, in some ways that I can't name ... because it is our being, against theirs ... our great capacity, for which they torture us, the capacity of happiness ... Now, like this, without words or questions ... because we want it ...
It was like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling; she felt his arms around her, she felt her legs pulled forward against him and her chest bent back under the pressure of his, his mouth on hers'.
It's safe to say that Ms Rand has some issues to work through. She goes on to make Dagny a model of female submission: 'Whatever I am, she thought, whatever pride of person I may hold, the pride of my courage, of my work, of my mind and my freedom - that is what I offer you for the pleasure of your body, that is what I want you to use in your service - and that you want it to serve you is the greatest reward I can have' (251). And she continues to endorse male violence: 'He took her wrist and threw her inside his room, making the gesture tell her that he needed no sign of consent or resistance. He locked the door, watching her face', and so on. Rand has long ago stopped thinking about the characters involved, and gone off into a dark and toxic world of her own. There is nothing before or after this to suggest that Rearden would act in this way, any more than there was with Roark, in The Fountainhead. For her part, Dagny is a highly competent and confident professional woman, and has been working with Rearden closely and in an atmosphere of great mutual respect for a good while, so her response is equally far-fetched. The whole scene stretches credulity beyond any limit. Rand now lurches off to an absurdly baroque expression of her rapacious view of humanity's relationship to nature: 'Through all the steps of the years behind them, the steps down a course chosen in the courage of a single loyalty; their love of existence - chosen in the knowledge that nothing will be given, that one must make one's own desire and every shape of its fulfilment - through the steps of shaping metal, rails and motors - they had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one's enjoyment, that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal' (252). Nothing new about this, of course - similar views are gratuitously attributed to Roark on the first page of The Fountainhead, but are never thereafter in evidence.
Rand has got herself into a fine mess here, and to see why, we need only compare Dagny's relationship with Rearden with that between Dominique and Gail Wynand. The latter played a crucial role in the interpersonal dynamics and the plot development of The Fountainhead: first, it reflected Dominique's desire to humiliate herself and hurt Roark, and second, in a significant plot development, it turned into an experience from which she learned and grew. So it was central to the story as a whole. Nothing of the sort can be said of the relationship between Dagny and Rearden - Rand is simply marking time until Dagny excuses herself, and moves on to John Galt - though, as we shall see, not before preposterous events are required to move the plot forward.
Time, then, to meet John Galt, whom Dagny sees when she comes round after passing out when her plane crashes in the hidden valley, high in the Rockies, to which the capitalists have decamped:
'She was looking up at the face of a man who knelt by her side, and she knew that in all the years behind her, this was what she would have given her life to see: a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt. The shape of his mouth was pride, and more: it was as if he took pride in being proud. The angular planes of his cheeks made her think of arrogance, of tension, of scorn - yet the face had none of these qualities, it had their final sum: a look of serene determination and of certainty, and the look of a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgiveness or grant it. It was a face that had nothing to hide or to escape, a face with no fear of being seen or seeing, so that the first thing she grasped about him was the intense perceptiveness of his eyes - he looked as if his faculty of sight were his best-loved tool and its exercise a limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted superlative value to himself and to the world - to himself for his ability to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing. It seemed to her for a moment that she was in the presence of a being who was pure consciousness - yet she had never been so aware of a man's body. The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the hardness, the gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some dimmed, soft-lustred metal, like an aluminium-copper alloy, the colour of his skin blending with the chestnut brown of his hair, the loose strands of the hair shading from brown to gold in the sun, and his eyes completing the colours, as the one part of the casting left undimmed and harshly lustrous: his eyes were the deep, dark green of light glinting on metal' (701).
Shakespeare did far better, with a single line, in The Tempest. But you know exactly what is going to happen in this brave new world, as Rand, now on familiar terrain, rolls out her signature sequence of steps towards surrender. Dagny has been injured in a crash landing, so Galt carries her:
'Here eyes kept coming back to his face. He glanced down at her once in a while. At first, she looked away, as if she had been caught. Then, as if learning from him, she held his glance whenever he chose to look down - knowing that he knew what she felt and that he did not hide from her the meaning of his glance. She knew that his silence was the same confession as her own. He did not hold her in the impersonal manner of a man carrying a wounded woman. It was an embrace, even though she felt no suggestion of it in his bearing; she felt it only by means of her certainty that his whole body was aware of holding hers' (704-5).
'Take me now', she might well have said, but for the inconvenience of a sprained ankle, sore ribs, and an assortment of bruises and contusions. As it is, though, 75 pages go by, before: 'She saw his veiled glance and the tautness of his mouth, she saw him reduced to agony, she felt herself drowned by the exultant wish to cause him pain, to see it, to watch it beyond her own endurance and his, then to reduce him to the helplessness of pleasure. ... She lay on her back, her palms pressed to the sheet at her sides, to stop herself from rising and walking into his room, knowing that she was capable even of that ...' (780-81). Dominique pressed her palms to the sheets in The Fountainhead (501-2), for the same reason, but without success, as it happens. I had no idea that this is a thing that women do. Here, anyway, consummation is delayed. Dagny is working as a servant and housekeeper to Galt in order to pay her way (a role that strangely requires the wearing of a transparent blouse), and she reflects, as she sets off to Hammond's Market to buy items for the evening's dinner: 'His wife ... for three weeks she had been his wife in every sense but one, and that final one was still to be earned, but this much was real and today she could permit herself to know it, to feel it, to live with that one thought for this one day' (799). I know. Comment is superfluous. Pleasure is further deferred, as Dagny returns to the real world, and to a moment of high melodrama: Rearden has surrendered his company to the government rather than have it revealed that Dagny has been his mistress for two years (a nonsensical plot turn which later requires more than four pages from Rearden by way of explanation, 856-60), and Dagny is instructed to speak on national radio in support of government policy, on pain of having this dreadful truth made public. She affects to do so, until: 'For two years I had been Hank Rearden's mistress. Let there be no misunderstanding about it: I am saying this, not as a shameful confession, but with the highest sense of pride. I had been his mistress. I had slept with him, in his bed, in his arms. ... Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have. If this now makes me a disgraced woman in your eyes - let your estimate be your own concern. I will stand on mine' (852). Go, Dagny! The pluperfect tense, awkward though it is, signals another plot twist - Rearden spots it, and knows that Dagny is moving on. But she does not know where Galt is, and fears (though readers know better) that she will never find him. The high pitch of melodrama continues through some of the clumsiest efforts to drive the moral home. In a series of highly contrived episodes, James Taggart's young wife, Cherryl, sees through him and runs to Darcy to apologise for having doubted her; a laboured discussion of true and false values follows; she returns to find that James has had sex with the soon-to-be-divorced Mrs Rearden (an act presented as empty, cynical, and devoid of passion, in a transparent move to create a foil for the mutual desire between Dagny and Galt); she flees, and throws herself into the river to drown, screaming, 'No! No! Not your kind of world!', 'with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation' (908). Meanwhile, Taggart Transcontinental falls apart as the national economy crumbles around it, with all manner of goods in shrinking supply (though Minnesota miraculously produces the largest ever wheat harvest in history, only for it to be lost for lack of rolling stock). The Industrial Revolution is thrown into reverse; the trains are brought to a halt; Dagny heads off to get them moving again, replacing automatic systems by men with lanterns; Galt turns up among the workers on the railroad, where unbeknownst to her he has been working for the last twelve years; Dagny heads into the underground tunnels, still wearing the diaphanous black satin dress, black cape and diamond clip she had on earlier (don't ask); Galt follows her, in his workman's attire:
'The next span of moments was like flashes of light in stretches of blinded consciousness - the moment when she saw his face, as he stopped beside her, when she saw the unastonished calm, the leashed intensity, the laughter of understanding in the dark green eyes - the moment when she knew what he saw in her face, by the tight, drawn harshness of his lips - the moment when she felt his mouth on hers, when she felt the shape of his mouth both as an absolute shape and as a liquid filling her body - then the motion of his lips down the line of her throat, a drinking motion that left a trail of bruises - then the sparkle of her diamond clip against the trembling copper of his hair. Then she was conscious of nothing but the sensations of her body, because her body acquired the sudden power to let her know her most complex values by direct perception [a lapse here, you may notice, from Rand's entirely rationality-based creed of Objectivism, but still]. Just as her eyes had the power to translate wave lengths of energy into sight, just as her ears had the power to translate vibrations into sound, so her body now had the power to translate the energy that had moved all the choices of her life, into immediate sensory perception. It was not the pressure of a hand that made her tremble, but the instantaneous sum of its meaning, the knowledge that it was his hand, that it moved as if her flesh were his possession, that its movement was his signature of acceptance under the whole of that achievement which was herself - it was only a sensation of physical pleasure, but it contained her worship of him, of everything that was his person and his life - ... it contained her pride in herself and that it should be she whom he had chosen as his mirror, that it should be her body which was now giving him the sum of his existence, as his body was giving her the sum of hers. These were the things it contained - but what she knew was only the sensation of the movement of his hand on her breasts. He tore off her cape ...' (956-7).
Excruciating, right? There is more, after which 'she gasped and lay still, knowing that nothing more could be desired, ever'. The travails of Taggart Transcontinental are momentarily forgotten. They declare their love for each other. Then they return to work. To all intents and purposes the story ends here. Rand still has to get Rearden to give up on Rearden Metal, but she is running out of ideas, so she rehashes the Rail Unification Plan as the Steel Unification Plan, throws in an armed attack on his factory and a maudlin scene in which the 'Wet Nurse' (again, don't ask) becomes its first victim, and brings Francisco d'Anconia back to lead Rearden off to the hidden valley. Galt's speech follows. By page 1085 some in the government are willing to surrender to John Galt, while others wish to kill him. Dagny leads them to him (again, don’t ask), and he is taken into custody. In the frantic, amphetamine-fuelled finale, buildings, a train, and the Taggart Bridge are pulverised by a sound-ray machine, a torture machine called the 'Ferris persuader' is brought to bear on Galt, and Dagny commits a murder in cold blood, purely to point a moral. Galt is rescued, and the good guys repair to the hidden valley, where the banker Midas Mulligan counts his money and plans his investments, Danneskjöld reads Aristotle, Judge Narragansett amends the US Constitution, adding a new clause ("Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade ..."), and Francisco d'Anconia busies himself with the design of a new smelter. The novel closes, though, with Dagny and Galt looking out 'not at the valley below, but at the darkness of the world beyond its walls', and as in The Fountainhead, Rand explicitly evokes a Christian motif. Salvador Dalí's Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, was apparently her favourite painting, and she is said to have compared the torture of Galt with Christ's suffering on the cross. He has now risen from that ordeal, and the novel concludes with this: "The road is cleared," said Galt. "We are going back to the world." He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar" (1168). Galt's kingdom, ruled by the dollar, backed by gold, will now be established on earth - or in the United States at least.
What should we make of this quasi-religious worship of capitalism? Atlas Shrugged is a tale of trains, planes, and automobiles, and a general fascination with industrial processes, machines, and the factory. Its point of reference is the Industrial Revolution, and the self-made capitalist tycoon. The US dollar is at its heart, its symbol printed in gold on the cigarettes manufactured in the hidden valley. Francisco d'Anconia's speech on money (sparked by a comment at a party that it is the root of all evil) argues that it is the source of all good, so long as it is fixed to gold so that profligate governments cannot adulterate its value, and extols America as the country of money par excellence:
'To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money - and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being - the self-made man - the American industrialist' (414).
This is a mythical version of America, in which conquest and slavery are not so much overlooked as celebrated ('Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work', 475), and an equally mythical version of the 'Old World', where apparently the Industrial Revolution did not take place. The United States is 'the only country in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only country whose money was the symbol of man’s right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself’ (683): in short, the Industrial Revolution is seen as a supreme good, produced uniquely by private enterprise, based in America, and personified by the early twentieth-century tycoon. Galt himself worships the machine, and has no time for Marx's law of value: "The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. … The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor others" (1064). Such reflections on the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation, however, are few and far between. Rand presents it in moral terms, as pitting ‘the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud’ (or 'moochers', 'looters', and the like) against ‘the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure’ (1050). This moral dichotomy is supported throughout by the visual aesthetics of the novel, where in contrast to her heroes, the collectivists and hoi polloi are variously 'flabby', 'fat and pallid', their eyes small, black slits, or fishy, cold and dead, their noses bulbous, their lower lips pendulous, their mouths shapeless, and their stomachs protruding. Rand has no sympathy for the common people, and (unlike contemporary apologists for capitalism) she does not claim that it benefits them, or care either way - simply, capitalists are the only producers of wealth, and they have the right to keep what they produce, and no duty to pay tax on their income.
She is entitled to these opinions. But if we consider Atlas Shrugged as an artistic creation, it is clear that there is a contradiction at its heart. It is a moral fable that makes no pretence to conform to reality, either social or historical. It pitches impossibly skilled, daring and good-looking super-heroes capable of incredible feats against an evil world, in a way that mimics the comic books that proliferated in America from the late 1930s onwards, but it encumbers itself with hugely repetitive mundane detail, and intrusive philosophical sermonising. Any competent editor, presented with the finished manuscript, would have said: "Cut out the philosophy - let the story speak for itself. Simplify the plot. Cut out everything about the anti-competitive 'collectivist' government except the 'Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule', The Equal Opportunity Bill, and the Rail and Steel Unification Plans. Concentrate on just two or three villains, and get rid of the rest. Cut the space given to d'Enconia and Rearden down to match that on Danneskjöld. Get rid of the rough sex and other baggage from The Fountainhead. Let Dagny spend her early adulthood spurning romance, then unite her with Galt. And cut the overall length from 1168 pages to 168. Let it be the moral fable it wants to be. Most people will hate it, but at least they might read it".