FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, The Face Without Pain or Fear or Guilt

Dagny returns to her Manhattan apartment after her one month absence. Looking over the fogbound city, she yearns for the presence of that One Man she has never found, the man she yearned for the night the mysterious stranger lingered at the entrance of the John Galt Line’s offices.

The doorbell rings and it’s Francisco; he wants to talk to her about what happened and to convince her to leave the railroad to the looters. But she can’t; as long as there’s a railroad to run, she’ll be there to run it. Francisco tells her she will stop running the railroad the day she discovers that her work has been placed in the service of the One Man’s destruction. Dagny intends to force the looters to make terms with her, not the other way around, but Francisco tells her it won’t work. She believes she may come to beg Francisco’s forgiveness on her knees some day, but he says it won’t be on her knees. Until then she is his enemy; he will be working to destroy the railroad and her, not Jim or Wesley Mouch, and he will be working in the service of the One Man to whose purpose he has pledged his life. Francisco tells her the road to understanding leads to Atlantis, and Dagny now understands that Francisco is in league with The Destroyer.

Then Hank Rearden arrives. Hank is furious at Francisco’s presence in the apartment of his lover, and Francisco struggles to maintain the famous d’Anconia courtesy. Hank accuses Francisco of trying to add Dagny to his list of conquests. He is willing to accept Hank’s reproaches, but not in Dagny’s presence. Hank tells him to stay away from Dagny. Francisco is willing to give his word, and at that moment Hank realizes that Dagny was the women that Francisco had loved all along. Hank slaps Francisco, and it takes all of Francisco’s self control not to kill Hank Rearden on the spot. Dagny realizes in that moment that she is witnessing Francisco’s greatest achievement. As Francisco leaves, Hank wishes he could retract the last few minutes.

Dagny admits that Francisco was her only lover before him, and Hank reels from the knowledge. Dagny expects in that moment to be killed by Hank, or at least beaten, but instead he takes her brutally, as though to drive Francisco out of her body.

The building superintendent comes to deliver a letter to Dagny that he has been holding in her absence. It’s from Quentin Daniels, and it prompts her to grab the phone and call Utah in a panic. Daniels will not work under Directive 10-289, will not work for the looters, but intends to work on the motor for his own pleasure without accepting further remuneration from Dagny. She tells Hank that The Destroyer probably has Daniels and that she has met one of his agents. Then Daniels picks up the phone at Utah Tech. Dagny wants to meet with him in person and gets him to promise not to leave until she has spoken with him. Dagny calls Eddie Willers and asks him to place her private car on that evening’s Comet. Hank agrees to meet her in Colorado.

Eddie comes over to Dagny’s place to coordinate. He informs her that the railroad building effort is going well, even though it has been difficult to find the necessary men. Eddie had even asked Dan Conway to come out of retirement from his Arizona ranch, but he had refused. As Dagny packs, Eddie notices Hank Rearden’s robe in her closet and is floored; for a second he is afraid he will speak of his secret love for her.

After seeing Dagny off, Eddie sits down to dinner with the Anonymous Rail Worker in the corporate cafeteria and brings him up to date, to include Dagny’s mission to Utah to beat The Destroyer to Quentin Daniels. After hinting of his own feelings for Dagny, he lets slip that Dagny is sleeping with Hank Rearden. The Anonymous Rail Worker bolts from the room without further word.

Check this new Amazon review of FEAT:

Foreign Enemies and Traitors is a beautiful tour de force that combines the clash of values at the heart of America’s present political / economic crisis with an Atlas Shrugged like story. Conservatives in America should take to this tale like the colonists took to Paine in ‘76.

The Second Great Depression (what author Matt Bracken has dubbed the “Greater Depression”) rages throughout America. The country is splitting up geographically with several secessionist movements in response to a radical leftist administration recently ushered into power in Washington, but also geologically due to a once-in-a-century earthquake that levels Memphis, TN causing massive panic confounded by hordes of refugees, pillaging war lords, and the inevitable reversion to barbarism that such societal collapses bring.

Mr. Bracken thrusts into this mix a cast of heroic characters with names like Boone Vikersun and Phil Carson (think Daniel and Kit if your historical memory is sluggish) — to fight a guerrilla war in, of all places, the state of Tennessee against the overweening powers of a grotesquely corrupt Washington. Pure gold! Boone and Carson in the 21st century fighting for the Republic.

The female lead, Jenny McClure, is a winsome, feisty teenager — just waking up to the cruelty of an adult world turned upside down — and about as courageous as humans get. Upon reading of her trials and how she measures up to them, the emotion felt is twofold: immense awe and the hope that if life’s tribulations ever presented such dilemmas to ourselves, our reactions would be equally as spirited in manner.

The plot is tension-racked unfolding with surprises right up to the end. There are countless scenes in which courage, patriotism, and honor come into play in such riveting ways as to bring that tingling sensation up and down one’s spine and the nape of one’s neck for long spells.

At stake is a clash of governing philosophies between the socialist left and the free-enterprise right, between the “new Constitution” illegally rammed through in a panicky Constitutional Convention and the “old Constitution” which spawned America from the beginning and was the law of the land for over 125 years until collectivists degraded it into a “living document” to be reinterpreted with Mad Hatter’s logic.

Overlying all this is the defense backbone of the nation, our military forces, and what side they must choose in this epic clash between the treasonous forces of statism in Washington and the loyalist forces of freedom amidst the patriotic states. The former trumpets the “new” Constitution and its implementation, while the latter fights for the “old” Constitution and its restoration. Which Constitution do we uphold? The military’s leading generals must decide which to defend, and it makes for a crackerjack story that will keep you reading late into the night as Bracken’s trio of Americanist heroes — Boone, Carson, and Jenny — pull off one escapade after another to defend the rebellious states and attempt to take the country back from a quisling President and his squalid entourage of socialist apparatchiks.

Bracken writes vividly and integrates all the subtle nuances of today’s leftist media / academy brainwash into the dialogue. His grasp of all their pernicious semantic twistings is impeccable. Moreover the didacticism of the book is just the right amount, and integrated into the scenes perfectly. No long-winded lectures to take away from the pace of the story; but numerous pithy and powerful expressions of what freedom, the Constitution, and America are all about from his characters. They possess the right length and the right emotional tone.

Foreign Enemies and Traitors could be one of those turning point books of American history. I only hope that someone like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh will read it. It is a book that would take off like wildfire if they ever started promoting it. Of course, the political left will come down on this tome like a blitzkrieg to try and kill the message of its talented author if it looks like widespread popularity is coming his way. But that goes with the territory when one writes of patriotism and honor in an era that worships acquiescence and popularity.

This is a book that all red-blooded Americans will enjoy immensely — not just because it is a terrific political accounting of what America’s problems are and what the military’s proper response to the constitutional implications must be, but also because it is a splendid, scintillating story. The author has combined the two areas of “message” and “plot” together in a most persuasive and entertaining manner. Move over Tom Clancy.

Howdy, Pub’!

A bit late to the thread this week, for which I apologize. I found that chapter 19, “The Face Without Pain Or Fear Or Guilt,” made me angry again, as it did when first I read it nearly forty years ago. It is not, as will become apparent, my favorite chapter. I apologize in advance for the rant that follows, but that’s what Book Clubs are all about, isn’t it?

The problem, I think, stems from an overly sympathetic appreciation of Francisco d’Anconia, a fellow who has given up more than anyone in the story (up to this point), fortune for looming penury, fame for notoriety, the love of his life for an empty bed, and for self-respect, nothing, because if there is one core value in Rand’s moral calculus it is self-respect. His will be sorely tried in this chapter. In Rand’s opinion he triumphs in this regard; in mine, well, I’m not so sure, and that’s what makes me angry.

To events. This is the next to last chapter in this middle section of ten, after which we have a real break in the overall narrative. One has to admire Rand as a novelist for sticking to her outline – a novel of this sweep and dimension would be lost in chaos without it. As a writer of dialogue, however…well, we shall see.

Dagny is back in the fight after a month of self-exile. It is the railroad that has drawn her out of her refuge but she finds herself caught between the poles of two men: one, her old lover Francisco d’Anconia, who wishes to pull her out of it all, and the other, her current flame Hank Rearden, who quite inadvertently is pulling her back in. The railroad is the trump card in this and she’s shackled to her desk because she has locked the thing in place with her own two hands.

It is Francisco who comes to her first. Here there is the wistful flavor of a man who has lost his love but hopes in the end to win her back. There is also the sympathy and loyalty of an old friend who knows she’s in need of one at the moment, and it isn’t the first time. One must admire that loyalty whether it were directed at a dog, who merits it, or Dagny, who one might be tempted to wonder about. They both have the same values, beliefs, and yet they are pursuing them in opposite directions. Why?

“Dagny,” he [Francisco] said slowly, “I know why one loves one’s work…what is it you see when you think of a moving train?”

She glanced at the city. “The life of a man of ability who might have perished in that catastrophe, but will escape the next one, which I’ll prevent…the kind of man who is what we were when we started, you and I. You gave him up. I can’t.”

Clearly Dagny does realize that her passengers are her trust and that there were, after all, innocents aboard the doomed Comet, or at least might have been. It is a rather grudging moral epiphany but it’s something. And yet Rand will have none of it. Is Dagny serving that hypothetical ubermensch by saving his life if it means perpetuating the system that enslaves him?

“All right, Dagny. I won’t try to stop you. You will stop on the day when you’ll discover that your work has been placed in the service, not of that man’s life, but of his destruction.”

“Francisco!” It was a cry of astonishment and despair. “You do understand it, you know what I mean by that kind of man, you see him too!”

“Oh, yes,” he said simply…”Why should you be astonished? You said that we were of his kind once, you and I. We still are. But one of us has betrayed him.”

It is this in stark terms – to Rand the system is a moral abomination and its cessation worth the price paid in blood no matter who pays it; that to maintain it does not avoid paying that same price and worse. We will encounter this moral absolutism frequently in the coming pages. Atlas may fight this conviction but when finally he comes to accept it, he shrugs.

There is a charm, even a nobility, in Dagny’s stubborn insistence on keeping a dying machine running, a recognition and defense of the achievements that were against the ruthless attrition exacted by the Destroyers. But, for the latter’s program of renascence to take shape the societal machine must halt. And she is keeping it running.

“Until then, Dagny, remember that we’re enemies. I didn’t want to tell you this, but you’re the first person who almost stepped into heaven and came back to earth…It’s you that I’m fighting, not your brother James or Wesley Mouch.”

“Francisco!” she cried, in desperate defense of him against herself. “How can you do what you’re doing?”

“By the grace of my love” – for you, said his eyes – “for the man,” said his voice, “who did not perish in your catastrophe and who will never perish.”

An odd usage, that. Coupled with a phrase dropped earlier in this same conversation concerning “that man” permitting no tribute to Caesar, permitting no Caesar, we realize that Francisco is not speaking of an individual here but an archetype, which is well, because very few individual human beings are likely to survive an ammunition train explosion and a mountain being dropped on them. Once again we see that Rand has pressed godhead onto her idealized perfect human being, her ubermensch. In my opinion that isn’t a hat that fits very well. But let’s roll with it for now.

“I wish I could spare you what you’re going to go through,” he said, the gentleness of his voice saying: It’s not me that you should pity. “But I can’t. Every one of us has to travel that road by his own steps. But it’s the same road.”

“Where does it lead?”

He smiled, as if softly closing a door on the questions that he would not answer. “To Atlantis,” he said.

So does he still love her? Of course he does.

“I’ll always wait for you, no matter what we do, either one of us.”

It is the loyalty of a gentle soul, warding off the bleak image of a lonely future with a scrap of hope. The present, however, bursts through the door in the person of Hank Rearden, who imagines despite his previous insight into Francisco’s character that the latter is there to make Dagny one of his petty conquests. It is a brutal scene, one of accusations that cannot be answered, of false assumptions that may not be challenged. Perhaps it is Dagny’s presence that works to madden Rearden but it is not at all a flattering moment. And at its end comes an admission out of context that causes Rearden to put Francisco to his greatest trial.

…he asked, pointing at Dagny, his voice low and strangely unlike his own voice, as if it neither came from nor were addressed to a living person, “Is this the woman you love?”

Francisco answered, looking at her, “Yes.”

Rearden’s hand rose, swept down, and slapped Francisco’s face.

Francisco forces himself to take the blow unanswered.

He was looking at Rearden, but it was not Rearden that he was seeing. He looked as if he were facing another presence in the room and as if his glance were saying: If this is what you demand of me, then even this is yours, yours to accept and mine to endure, there is no more than this in me to offer you… She knew that what she was witnessing Francisco d’Anconia’s greatest achievement.

I find this more than a little disturbing, actually. Francisco is a complete believer, a dedicated revolutionary striving for utopia. But in this paragraph his dedication is not directed at an ideology, and apparently, no longer at an archetype. It is unmistakably directed at a specific man. What man? We’ll table that for the moment but we certainly aren’t short of clues. This is the devotion of a religious follower worshipping that godhead that is embodied in the person of a man of achievement, the man Dagny is running her trains to save, the man Francisco is destroying his mines to free. But this one is real. He is godhead taken unto flesh. For an atheist Rand certainly doesn’t skimp on the Christian imagery, does she? But this is no Christ. And Francisco’s religious fervor is, for my taste, a little creepy.

Nevertheless, Hank has delivered the blow, and realizes too late

- that he would give his life for he power not to have committed the action he had committed.

There is more, actually – Dagny chooses to reveal that Francisco was no threat to her, that in fact he was her first lover. Francisco has departed with what dignity is possible in such a shattering situation, his mouth bleeding. And so the two of them dash through the streets of New York in pursuit of Francisco, to tender an abject apology for an unforgivable insult…

Well, no, they don’t. What they do instead is to copulate like a pair of fever-maddened spring rabbits. It gets worse.

…she felt Francisco’s presence through Rearden’s mind, she felt as if she were surrendering to both men, to that which she had worshipped in both of them…which had made of her love for each an act of loyalty to both.

An act of what? Perhaps in Dagny’s endorphin-soaked brain this is some sort of cosmic twofer but in plain point of fact one fellow is boinking her with the enthusiasm of a sailor fresh off a six-month cruise and the other fellow is walking through the streets with a bloody mouth. Those are the facts on the ground, my dear, and the rest of it is sophistry that even a Dr. Pritchett would be embarrassed to bleat.

I’m angry again.

It is here that Rand’s sexual theories reach the far shore of adolescent fantasy. Dagny is not being disloyal, mind you, for the simple reason that she is not having sex with another human being, but with an idea; and as long as she remains true to the idea, the human being in whom it is embodied at the moment is essentially irrelevant. It is a credo that is consistent in its internal logic, personally extremely convenient, and perfectly monstrous. It is a portable morality with padded, ergonomic handle. It is simply another manifestation of that preference for the exigencies of the moment that Rand professes to find distasteful when it is applied by her villains anywhere else.

As a male I shall not presume to draw any broad conclusions from this ethical Three Card Monte as to how well Rand knew women, but I am not in the least reluctant to state from narrative circumstance how poorly she knew men. Francisco is, by Rand’s specific description, a scion of old-world honor, and here he has been offered a physical blow, by the successful rival to the love of his life, in her very presence. Rand regards this as the provocation that it is, but I don’t get the impression she fully appreciates just how outrageous. It is insufferable, unforgivable, a mortal insult in the precise sense of the term. I like Rearden too but if he’d done that to me the New York Fire Department would be prying my fingers off his throat with the Jaws of Life.

And yet Francisco withdraws from the confrontation like a whipped pup, not, in fact, an alpha dog suddenly turned beta, but one who has been a beta dog for quite some time. Should Dagny’s idealistic bed-hopping land her in another hutch – it’s almost inevitable by now, isn’t it? – Rand apparently feels the two men will be able to shake hands and be pals again, secure in the happy status of eternal beta-dom. It is a resolution as unlikely in real life as a gargoyle suddenly sprouting wings and littering the landscape with rose petals. These three characters are each admirable in his or her own way, I suppose, but far from being avatars of moral clarity, these are some seriously dysfunctional people, all three of them. In my humble opinion.

We move from this quagmire of solipsism, sweaty bodies and sexual abandon to the somewhat more prosaic field of Afton, Utah, (not that Aftonians, if they exist, do not enjoy the pleasant frisson of the flesh but that they are likely to do so in the more morally well-founded confines of a cut-rate brothel), wherein Dagny’s hired engineering genius Quentin Daniels has come to his own independent conclusions concerning the propriety of giving the miracle motor to an unappreciative and exploitive society. He too has traveled the road that Francisco predicted for Dagny and at its end is the abnegation of the flesh for the good of the soul:

“And this is the thing that I cannot take, even were I able to take all the rest: that in order to give them an inestimable benefit, we should be made martyrs to the men who, but for us, could not have conceived of it. May they be damned, I will see them all die of starvation, myself included, rather than forgive them for this or permit it!”

One more Atlas has shrugged, and lest we miss the significance of this moral epiphany Rand drives it home with another curious image. Daniels isn’t actually going anywhere, he’s continuing as a janitor, he’s just giving up working on the motor. However,

“It is a strange feeling – writing this letter. I do not intend to die, but I am giving up the world and this feels like the letter of a suicide. So I want to say that of all the people I have known, you are the only person I regret leaving behind.”

The contrast between the two cases of the sober Daniels and the Francisco/Hank/Dagny triangle of whatever it is – the term “love” seems inadequate – could not be any clearer. Rand has at last returned to her very formidable case and it has taken the monk-like asceticism of Quentin Daniels to bring her there. One might be forgiven for suspecting that to be a revelatory moment lost on its own author, especially in the light of what follows.

Because there is, once one has cast off the sweat-soaked sheets, a railroad to be rebuilt, the full weight of which act has fallen on the shoulders of Dagny’s right hand man Eddie Willers. She is off to chase Daniels, to attempt to convince him to re-enter her tumultuous and failing world, and all Eddie has to do in the meantime is the entire reconstruction of a transcontinental railway line. It is no real surprise that under this sort of pressure Eddie seeks out his own safety valve, his unnamed track-worker confidante in the company cafeteria. And the track-worker has, as a plateful of cigarette butts attests, been waiting for him. An odd fellow, really, isn’t he? He is still voiceless but now we are made aware of his appearance.

“Do you know what’s strange about your face? You look as if you’ve never known pain or fear or guilt.”

Hence the chapter title, and our own growing awareness that this track-worker is something more than he appears. This time he offers a reaction – the fellow is, after all, due to commence his month-long vacation, so perhaps that’s it. Or perhaps it’s the knowledge that Quentin Daniels has made landfall on Atlantis on his very own, perhaps the notion of Dagny launching herself out on a hazardous mission to Utah. Or perhaps it’s Eddie’s sudden and embarrassing admission that the woman that Eddie, too, has discovered that he loves, is sleeping with Hank Rearden when the two of them manage to find time for slumber. Eddie is undoubtedly a magnificent manager of projects but he possesses all the private discretion of a giggling schoolgirl on Valentine’s Day. And he is clearly in the grip of his own existential crisis.

“Why is there nothing but misery left for anyone? What are we doing? What have we lost? A year ago I wouldn’t have damned her for finding something she wanted. But I know that they’re doomed, both of them, and so am I, and so is everybody, and she was all I had left…the world is perishing and we cannot stop it. Why are we destroying ourselves? Who will save us? Oh, who is John Galt?!”

One suspects it might be from the distraught Eddie’s uncomfortable and contrived monologue that the track-worker flees suddenly. I would certainly forgive him.

Have a great week, Publius!

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