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Earlier threads:
Our First Freeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged
FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, The Theme
FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, The Chain
FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, The Top and the Bottom
FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, The Immovable Movers
FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, The Climax of the d’Anconias
Your synopsis’ and discussion topics are really helpful, thank you. It’s eerie to be reading Atlas Shrugged and hearing the national news and comparing the perspectives.
Balph Eubank’s comment about Dagny having babies strikes a false note. In the Fifties...
Perhaps this is an insight to Rands past.
Since the age of the character is not always obvious, could this be an ideal from an earlier time, indicating the speed of the social change?
But Hank can’t keep his eyes off her bare shoulder.
and
that the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.
Recalling Dagny's visit to Rearden's office, the jade vase was the only object that tied the outside world to him. Perhaps it is one piece of the outside that had some connection (the color of his steel) and thus allowed it in his office. The description of the Rearden home did not have any such item in it. Until Dagny....
I didn't see it as a generic sexist remark regarding women.
It was a specific jab at her competence.
They would have had no problem with her having a position if she were incompetent in it.
Producers and the competent are the enemy through the whole novel.
Artists in general , at least until they reach a level of success have always been “starving” and requiring the tender mercies of a patron.
It is actually a far preferable system. It puts art in the competitive field. Competition always produces a superior product.
The National Endowment for the Arts has created a support system for a bunch of individuals that should have failed.
Art historically has been useful to elevate, it has been about beauty, now the system rewards denigration and lowering standards.
Again I advise: READ THIS BOOK carefully. Put it aside for three (3) months. Pick it up and carefully re-read it. Do NOT blow your brains out.
Remember, the political speeches you heard LAST WEEK were written into this book over 50 years ago. Be afraid...be VERY afraid!!
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Will review the chapter and post back later. Thanks Publius!
“How does one dare oppose the will of the majority? Contrast Dan Conway’s use of that question with Francisco’s.”
Put simply, Dan Conway asked this question with an air of resignation, as if it was useless to fight the mob that voted to drive him out of busness. Francisco poses it to point out the folly of the idea that the distribution of wealth should be based on need rather than ability (although none of those he asks seem to understand this).
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"Lillian moved forward to meet her, studying her with curiosity. They had met before, on infrequent occasions, and she found it strange to see Dagny Taggart wearing an evening gown. It was a black dress......The black dress seemed excessively revealing--because it was astonishing to discover that the lines of her shoulder were fragile and beautiful, and that the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained."
Does this statement actually say more about Lillian Rearden than about Dagny? It is Lillian who thinks that a woman's feminity is defined as being a piece of property. Without question Ayn Rand had some sort of domination fetish going on.....
Although, truth be told, Ayn Rand is a bit bi-polar in her feminism. Why did Dagny have to be so beautiful? I guess that is the case with her mega-producer leading men: they are all gorgeous, as well.
So, why does Hank completely give Dagny the cold shoulder after the bracelet exchange? Does he realize that he is in love with her and must hide it at all costs? Or has he admitted it to himself?
As far as the remark made to Dagney that she should be having babies. I immediately thought about a show I saw on Book Notes about the worst ideas/books of all time. On the list was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystic. He explained it as expanding marxism to include the womens movement. Friedan's view was that the 1950’s housewife, while staying at home, was freed by modern technology to pursue more intellectual goals. She saw the modern housewife as the “vanguard” of marxism for women. Contrast that to Dagney, who doesn't have time for such nonsense, she has a railroad to run. Of coarse, as another poster already stated, he may have been critiquing her job performance.
As for the game to name the contemporaries of the party members, thats like shooting fish in a barrel! But what immediately comes to mind is all of these liberal movies like Redacted, Rendition & W. No one sees them, no one wants to see them, and they don't make money. The whole point is to pontificate to the masses.
I'm going to say no, and not for artistic reasons, though I think that would probably be valid as well. I'm going to take as a given that people espousing big/powerful government principles is a bad thing. Then it follows that it's a bad idea to have government funding creative endeavors because if government decides who to fund who is likely to receive funding? Also, as a taxpayer I resent having to pay people to say things with which I disagree vehemently and make art I find offensive, especially when my counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum labor under no such burden.
One of my favorite chapters is number Six, a set-piece at Hank Reardon’s house at which some of the foundational ideas of both looter and immovable mover are trotted out in conversation. When first I read this I thought it painfully contrived, but that was before I heard many of these cases made in earnest by real people. Rand didn’t make any of it up; she didn’t have to. To the chapter:
Hank Reardon is a failure as a husband, which isn’t an unmixed blessing because Lillian is a failure as a wife. This one’s headed straight for the rocks, slowly and inevitably. Atlas Shrugged here shows itself a product of the 50’s, the days before the advent of vending-machine divorces wherein a feller can get gutted, skinned out, and hung up to dry in the course of a single morning and still have time for a cup of coffee he can no longer afford. Score one for modern efficiency.
To celebrate the eighth anniversary of this shipwreck of a marriage we have The Party. For Dagny such affairs are misplaced – she says that they should be a celebration, peopled by deserving celebrants. Clearly there is something epochal to celebrate – Reardon metal. And just as clearly there are very few people there who have earned the right to celebrate it or who are even aware of its import.
One who is aware is Francisco d’Anconia, who plays here the role of a satyr before the proscenium, commenting mockingly on the earnest posturings of the other partygoers. The only time he is serious is when he is occupied in his principal purpose for attending, which is taking the measure of the industrialist Reardon.
We've all been to one of these things at one time or another. In these days of computer cultism the geek corner is a fixture at nearly every one of such affairs, geek boys and geek girls, and no matter what the dress each of whom is wearing a little invisible beanie with a propeller on it. When the conversation turns technical you can visualize the propellers turning. To anyone normal the topics are absolutely stupefying and normal people tend to leave them alone. Us alone. Mea maxima culpa.
Hank doesn’t even have that comfort at his joyless affair. I could have helped him if he’d invited me. I’d take him aside and tell him, “Come on, Hank buddy, you gotta man up there. Learn some social skills, like me. If women can fake orgasms we can fake in interest in French impressionism. Let the Drillster show ya how it’s done.”
(I saunter over to a current flame).
“Wow, Mavis, that’s shore a purty drop cloth you got there. What’d the painting look like?”
“That is the painting, Bill.”
“Oh. Uh…” (Blushing, shuffling feet). “Nice.” (Long, painful silence. I slink back to the geek corner, tail between legs, propeller on my beanie drooping).
Which brings us to the topic of Silicon Valley. (Work with me here, I’m in coffee-fueled state of free association). Rand died in 1982, which was just a little too soon to see her imagined world of immovable movers take shape before her, but take shape it did, and I was there to see it. You didn’t see a lot of this sort of party there at the time. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, was too busy.
And so is Reardon here. Breaking off from a hot project to tend the home fires is absolutely one of the hazards of domestic felicity. I don’t think anyone could maintain that state of intensity for long, as Reardon does, even with a toxic home life to avoid. A sad gaggle of Silicon Valley burnouts are what’s left of the people who tried it. I’ll be comparing the world of Atlas Shrugged to that of Silicon Valley at greater length as the novel progresses. For now let us return to The Party and examine the menagerie.
The creature in the first cage is one Dr. Pritchett, a philosopher by trade, the successor to Professor Akston at Patrick Henry University. Check him out:
“Man? What is man? He’s just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur,” said Dr. Pritchett…
A fair enough case, I suppose, but there’s chemicals, Doc, and then there’s chemicals. Ethanol, for example. As a side note, neither Reardon nor Dagny drink. It might have helped.
“But which concepts are not ugly or mean, Professor?” asked an earnest matron…
“None,” said Dr. Pritchett. “None within the range of man’s capacity.”
A young man asked hesitantly, “But if we haven’t any good concepts, how do we know the ones we’ve got are ugly? By what standard?”
“There are no standards.”
Here the Professor has departed the bounds of reason, literally. This statement is a violation of Aristotle’s rule of non-contradiction, (which is, after all, the title of this section of AS). You can't judge by standards that don't exist, and Pritchett has judged. But Pritchett is not simply a fashionable nihilist. One can hear in him some of the more dreary excesses of the school of Existentialism, which Rand saw succeed Aristotle in the real world as well as at her Patrick Henry University. Glance at The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus and tell me if it doesn’t resemble Reardon’s life and that of all of Rand’s immovable movers before Atlas shakes himself free of the burden, before Sisyphus tosses his rock back at the gods.
To Rand this secular hell is the result of the denial of reason. Nietszche stated that in the absence of God there is an inescapable trend toward nihilism. Rand is stating that in the absence of reason one gets the same result.
On a side note, one tends to get other things as well – there appears to be something in the proponents of Existentialism that gravitates toward totalitarianism. Not all of them, to be sure – Camus, for example - but certainly Heidegger was attracted to Nazism and Sartre to Communism. Perhaps that is another result of the denial of God or the denial of reason. Perhaps both. A topic for another day.
There isn’t really much left of the school of Existentialism in formal philosophy these days. It has, however, bled over into the field of social science and constitutes one of the sources of the feminism of Simone Beauvoir and other fields such as Critical Race Theory. Rand presents it as a malign influence in modern intellectual life. One occasionally hears its feminist adherents deride Aristotle as “linear male logic,” as if a syllogism possesses a penis. Rand has no time for that sort of hyperimaginative silliness and frankly it is amazing to me that anyone does.
In Rand’s world a reach for intellectual depth must be accompanied by intellectual rigor. “Things are not what they seem” is a perfectly permissible proposition both to Rand and to Aristotle. Pritchett’s “Things are not what they are,” is not. That’s what “A is A” means.
But this is the way Rand saw academia decaying, Akston to Pritchett, Aristotle to Sartre. And by the way, where did Akston disappear to? And what about the composer Richard Halley, where did he go? And where did Reardon’s foreman at the beginning of the chapter go, and why? Good people, hard to replace. It’s almost as if there's some sort of con…
Speaking of Halley, we note that his immortal Fourth Concerto has been stolen and transformed into sappy movie music, for which the thief, a menagerie display named Mort Liddy, has won an unnamed prize. And in the real world we hear with apprehension that Atlas Shrugged itself may soon be worked over by Hollywood, an irony not lost on the reader of this chapter. If it’s used to sell soap Rand might excuse it; if it’s used to sell socialism she’ll be spinning in her grave.
One last thought from Pritchett: ”The purpose of philosophy is not to seek knowledge, but to prove that knowledge is impossible to man.” I suspect that might be a weak case - it’s knowledge, after all, that enables you to load the rifle when the tiger is coming for you and unlike Existentialist philosophy, tigers are real. We all can echo Francisco’s laughter at this ridiculous poseur.
In this chapter we are introduced to the Equality Of Opportunity bill, whose title (remember, this was written in 1957) echoes the Newspeak grotesqueries of, say, the “Fairness Doctrine” today. This is, in reality, an anticompetitive measure designed to force industrialists such as Reardon to give their assets to government lackeys. It will become significant as the novel develops. From the next cage in the menagerie we hear one of the animals bleating:
“A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to allow them to be free.”
We may be tempted to laugh at this patent silliness, supposing it an exaggeration on Rand’s part, if we hadn’t heard it coming from the television so much of late. The underlying theme of much of the economic “stimulus” legislation is the notion that markets are only truly free under coercion. It is considered impolite to give that notion the horse-laugh it deserves. Francisco d’Anconia is more polite:
“…that nationalization. [James Taggart asks] What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“But surely you don’t want me to do anything about it. My mine and your railroad were seized by the will of the people. You wouldn’t want me to oppose the will of the people, would you?”
That’s flippant, but the assertion placed in the mouth of Bertram Scudder, the author in the next cage, is not:
“Property rights are a superstition. One holds property only by the courtesy of those who do not seize it. The people can seize it at any moment. If they can, why shouldn’t they?”
“They should,” said Claude Slagenhop. “They need it. Need is the only consideration.”
So it is in Obama’s America and in every tinpot socialist kleptocracy ever spawned. “To each according to his need” is, of course, Marx, whose doctrines Rand would have seen in application at first hand before she fled the madness. It didn’t work even then. That formulation was, as Trotsky pointed out in The Revolution Betrayed, quite impossible to achieve at that stage of his imagined historical progression. Not, presumably, in the unattainable world of “high” communism, when Party fairies riding proletarian unicorns run the State. Stalin found it necessary to re-codify the proposition to “To each according to his work,” a rather different concept.
But it does prove convenient depending on what one means by “work.” The elite, the “brainworkers,” offer a value to society that is quite out of proportion to their actual sweat equity (just ask them) and must be offered a commensurate reward. That elite populates the menagerie at Reardon’s party and a bigger real-world menagerie seen in the pages of the NY Times, the screens of MSNBC, and in the septic ravings of the Daily Kos, in any of which we might encounter the occupant of the next cage, one Bertram Scudder:
He [Reardon] saw the article, “The Octopus,” by Bertram Scudder, which was not an expression of ideas but a bucket of slime emptied in public – an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a string of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary.
The title “The Octopus” is a reference to Frank Norris’s 1901 novel by that name, a bit of populist propaganda that was romantic and quite unfairly anti-corporate, inspired by the events of the Mussel Slough Tragedy in California. Here Rand, like Ambrose Bierce before her, wasn’t buying into the inflammatory mythology that turned Norris and the Muckrakers into celebrities. Teddy “The Trustbuster” Roosevelt did. It wasn’t one of his better moments.
Finally, as The Party reaches its climax of inanity, there is The Bracelet, a recurring symbol of merit, bondage, and Dagny’s sexual inclinations. Of those we already had a clue, which Rand reinforces at Dagny’s entrance to the party:
The diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.
Personally I never imagined a diamond bracelet in quite that kinky a vein, but symbolic it certainly is, as both Hank and Lillian Reardon grasp fully when Dagny calls Lillian’s bluff and exchanges it for the genuine chain of Reardon metal. She has, in effect, laid claim to Hank. This affront to connubial bliss is extremely interesting in view of Rand’s real-world affair with the much younger Nathaniel Branden, an early Objectivist follower (whose name appears in “Nat” Taggart, Dagny’s heroic forbear). Rand was writing Atlas Shrugged during that affair, which although nominally approved of was distressing to the spouses of both parties. It isn’t obvious whether art was imitating life or it was the other way around.
And so we and Rand move from an uncelebratory party to end the chapter in Reardon’s painfully uncelebratory marriage bed. Lillian is as cold a fish physically as she is mentally, and clearly Reardon is punishing himself for being with her by being with her. A Sisyphean rock for Hank, perhaps, but it cannot go on forever. Something has to give.
Have a great week, Publius! ;-)
bttt
Well shoot! I missed the ping , I guess, but here I am. Time to do a little catching up : o
Tatt
Please add me also. I ordered my book from Amazon last week.
I had jury duty today, so I dragged out my ancient paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged. I’m pretty much caught up with the group now.
Believe it or not, I have this copy because in 1980, I took an Econ 101 class at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, and AS was assigned by the professor. His class was my introduction to free market economics.
Boy, is that type small, though! I didn’t care when I was 19, but now at 47, I practically need a jeweler’s loupe to read it.
Please add me to the ping. Thanks!
Uneasy how she seems to be Obama's scriptwriter. It's like when he looks into the teleprompter he channels Wesley Mouch.
And even Rand couldn't come up with a Pelosi!
Her athiesm was very kneejerk...if she could have understood faith on some level, she would have been a better writer. You couldn't do a good satire of a Pelosi without some rudimentary Christianity to see what a true monster Pelosi is...