Houseguests today so I'll have to post and run. After last week's orgy of philosophy and anger Rand is back to the plot, and so much of this will be a repetition of your excellent synopsis anyway. Here goes:
The shock waves from Galt’s speech have reverberated through room and country in Chapter 28, “The Egoist,” and now it behooves Rand to pick up the strands of her narrative and re-establish the pace. We will consider in a moment whether the interposition of a 60-page philosophical manifesto has fatally wounded the novel or merely paused it.
The speech certainly takes the ruling class back a bit. From an initial disbelief there comes a panicked moment when Wesley Mouch fears that the playing of a march to fill the dead air will lead people to believe that they authorized the speech; Mr. Thompson, quicker than Mouch, counters
“You damn fool!” cried Mr. Thompson. “Would you rather have the public think that we didn’t?”
It’s a point, actually – the issue now is control of a country roiling with revolution, and it’s fairly clear that the current bunch isn’t up to it. Each of them presumes to describe how the various constituent parts of the Aristocracy of Pull will react – Holloway for labor, Ma Chalmers for women (all of them, presumably, except Dagny, who is sitting silently in front of them), Dr. Pritchett for the scientists – each of these declares stoutly and unconvincingly that his group will have none of it. And what is most curious about this is that none of these individuals is really the representative of the respective classes at all. From the real nominal head of labor, for example – Fred Kinnan – the real nominal head of science, Dr. Stadler, we hear none of these protests. Jim Taggart seems to fraying rapidly, screaming his disbelief of the speech; the reader is a little uncertain but suspects that despite his hysteria Jim really does appreciate what the issues and the stakes are here. His partners in crime’s only hope is that he is alone in that. The speech,
…said Dr. Floyd Ferris, “It was too intellectual. Much too intellectual for the common man. It will have no effect. People are too dumb to understand it.”
He is, of course, assuming that people must understand the fine points of deontological ethics before they’ll be affected by Galt’s diatribe. It isn’t the case. In a country that unstable, even nonsense words, timed correctly, can be the pebbles that start avalanches.
“In the first place,” said Dr. Ferris, encouraged, “People can’t think. In the second place, they don’t want to.” “In the third place,” said Fred Kinnan, “they don’t want to starve. And what do you propose to do about that?”
Once again Kinnan brings them up short with a cold dash of reality. Nor will he help them by telling them what to do. The fellow who once demanded full control of the Equalization Board was after power, not the opportunity to lead. They are two quite different things.
It is, ironically, Dagny who gives them their best course of action simply by speaking the truth. Who can tell them what to do?
“I can,” she said, addressing Mr. Thompson. “You’re to give up… God damn it! You’re able to understand. It isn’t possible you haven’t understood. .. There’s nothing but destruction ahead, the world’s and your own. Give up and get out.”
Harmless enough, but then…
“You wish to live, don’t you? Get out of the way, if you want a chance. Let those who can, take over. HE knows what to do. You don’t. HE is able to create the means of survival. You aren’t.”
Disaster. For Dr. Stadler understands the issues, and after Dagny departs with Eddie, he urges them to murder Galt. They are as taken aback as if he had recommended using a bag of gold as a boat anchor, because despite Dagny’s explanations they really don’t understand Galt at all. But they – Thompson, especially – do know a potential asset when they see one, someone who might be bribed to be a figurehead, someone who might act as a fall guy, someone who might even have an idea they’d consider worth trying.
“How am I to find him?” asked Mr. Thompson, speaking slowly and carefully.
“I can give you a lead. Watch that Taggart woman. She’ll lead you to him sooner or later.”
“Mr. Thompson,” said Mouch, choking, “I’m afraid he’s a man who’s not open to a deal.”
“There’s no such thing,” said Mr. Thompson.
He is, after all, correct, but not in the way he thinks. Will Galt deal? Yes, of course – but on his terms. And unfortunately for the ruling class those terms specify its dissolution.
The country is exploding. Clearly Galt’s speech has had an effect – government representatives are being beaten up on its basis, inflation is rampant, overprinted money worthless, jails full, and people are really beginning to starve. And with each successive catastrophe it becomes clearer to Thompson and his government that they really do need Galt, if only as a sacrifice.
Dagny knows this, and she has sternly ordered Eddie, who now knows who his track-worker friend of all these years really is, not to seek Galt. She knows what the stakes are. But in a fantastically irresponsible lapse of self-discipline she seeks Galt herself. It is, actually, a little out of character, but smart people sometimes do disastrously stupid things, and this is very, very stupid indeed. If before I have mocked Eddie Willers for his lack of discretion, at least he did not know to whom he was betraying them all. She does, and as a conspirator Dagny must now rank among the most hapless amateurs in all of modern literature. Rand offers us no real explanation for this other than her loneliness. She lasted only ten days. One sympathizes. but in truth it is quite simply her worst moment in the novel.
She is followed, of course, and they are caught. Galt has quite a place tucked away among the tenements, a laboratory, workshop, a slice of Galt’s Gulch on the East River, his refuge during his twelve working years watching over Dagny at Taggart Transcontinental. He is apparently a wizard of some expertise as well, for all that the invading police find of his wonderland of inventions is dust, the same thing that he had mentioned would happen if anyone were to violate the sanctity of his generator house at Galt’s Gulch. But they don’t need his inventions, they have him.
He has insisted that Dagny pretend to have betrayed him, an act which she accomplishes with the cold efficiency which, had she shown it before setting out to traipse across Manhattan at 4 AM, she would hardly need now. And so off with him to a highly secure suite in the Wayne-Falkland hotel, where he will be wined and dined as, one by one, the leaders of the ruling class try to convince him to use his formidable intellectual skills to pacify a country in revolution. And one by one, they fail.
One of them has not entirely wasted his time, the only one who has seemed to know the score throughout the novel. It is labor mobster Fred Kinnan.
“Nobody can talk to him,” said Dr. Floyd Ferris. “It’s a waste of time. He doesn’t hear a word you say.”
Fred Kinnan chuckled. “You mean, he hears too much, don’t you? And what’s worse, he answers it.”
“Well, why don’t you try it again?” snapped Mouch. “You seem to have enjoyed it. Why don’t you try to persuade him?”
“I know better,” said Kinnan. “Don’t fool yourself, brother. Nobody’s going to persuade him. I won’t try it twice… Enjoyed it?” he added, with a look of astonishment. “Yeah…yeah, I guess I did.”
“What’s the matter with you? Are you letting him win you over?”
“Me?” Kinnan chuckled mirthlessly. “what use would he have for me? I’d be the first one to go down the drain when he wins… It’s only…that he’s a man who talks straight.”
“Trouble is, he doesn’t want anything,” said Mouch. “What can we offer a man who doesn’t want anything?”
“You mean,” said Kinnan, “what can WE offer a man who wants to live?”
The implication is that, as Kinnan predicted, their scam is coming to an end all too soon, and that they are likely to pay for it with their lives. It is a stark warning, far more believable now with the country falling apart than it was when they were discussing the fine points of Directive 10-289. Jim, who is obviously at the end of his tether, begins screaming again.
A parenthetical moment. Twice in the text we have Galt described to us as an “egoist,” hence the chapter title, and Rand does so with a precision of meaning that sends us to the dictionary to discover the difference between the term and its more prevalent cousin, “egotist.” An egoist is, in this sense, an individual for whom self-interest, rational or otherwise, is the basis for morality, which describes the Objectivist ideal to a T. An egotist is someone with an exaggerated sense of self who expresses it by self-aggrandizement. Although the two terms overlap there are subtle shades of difference. Rand’s code demands the former and sees the latter as a weakness. That’s quite a bit of mileage to get out of a single letter of the alphabet.
Galt won’t cooperate, of course, and Mr. Thompson resorts to asking the opinion of the one who guided them to him, Dagny Taggart. She recommends they let Galt know from their confidential reports what the state of the country is. It is two-edged advice: Thompson thinks it will impel Galt to help them, she knows it will only steel his resolve. But that evening, while she is contemplating the reward money (now worthless in any case) she spies an envelope. And in a familiar handwriting, one she last saw mocking the entire city of New York, she reads
Dagny: Sit tight. Watch them. When he’ll need our help, call me at OR 6-5693. F.
We are as relieved as Dagny is that a competent conspirator has finally come along to take charge of the thing, and Francisco is both master dissimulator and man of action. The time for dissimulation is almost over; soon it will be the time for force.
We come at last to a climactic meeting – philosophically speaking – between Galt and his old teacher, Robert Stadler. Dr. Stadler delivers an apologia that is rife with self-justification and hostility toward the man who has held to the standards that Stadler taught and betrayed. Galt doesn’t have to say a word to leave Stadler a trembling puddle of self-realization and self-loathing.
Galt’s voice had the same unbending austerity as his eyes: “You have said everything I wanted to say to you.”
And now Mr. Thompson tries one last time to create a propaganda vehicle that will quell the rising violence. It is a plot device that Rand has used three times now for dramatic effect and frankly, it’s getting a bit predictable: first Dagny, in her abortive debate with Bertram Scudder over the merits of Rearden Metal, then the radio broadcast in which she declared her affair with Hank, then the broadcast that ended up being “This Is John Galt Speaking,” and finally this one, in which the country’s new savior, John Galt himself, is to be introduced as a figurehead of the new government. It is no more successful than the others.
“And now you will hear his own voice – now you will hear his own message! Ladies and gentlemen,” [Mr. Thompson] said solemnly, “John Galt – to the collective family of mankind!”
The camera moved to Galt…then, standing straight, facing the cameras, looking at all his invisible viewers, he said: “Get the hell out of my way!”
It is perhaps not entirely the message Mr. Thompson was looking for. But anyone who has heard Galt’s polemic on the radio knows exactly what he means, whether they understood deontological ethics or not. He isn’t playing along. They’re on their own. And at long last, the main course for the hungry looters will be the government itself.
Have a great week, Publius!
You know out of all the bad guys Kinnan was the only one I liked.