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FReeper Book Club: Introduction to Atlas Shrugged
Part I, Chapter I: The Theme
Part I, Chapter II: The Chain
Part I, Chapter III: The Top and the Bottom
Part I, Chapter IV: The Immovable Movers
Part I, Chapter V: The Climax of the d’Anconias
Part I, Chapter VI: The Non-Commercial
Part I, Chapter VII: The Exploiters and the Exploited
Part I, Chapter VIII: The John Galt Line
Part I, Chapter IX: The Sacred and the Profane
Part I, Chapter X: Wyatt’s Torch
Part II, Chapter I: The Man Who Belonged on Earth
Part II, Chapter II: The Aristocracy of Pull
Part II, Chapter III: White Blackmail
Part II, Chapter IV: The Sanction of the Victim
Part II, Chapter V: Account Overdrawn
Part II, Chapter VI: Miracle Metal
Part II, Chapter VII: The Moratorium on Brains
Part II, Chapter VIII: By Our Love
Part II, Chapter IX: The Face Without Pain or Fear or Guilt
Part II, Chapter X: The Sign of the Dollar
Part III, Chapter I: Atlantis
Part III, Chapter II: The Utopia of Greed
Part III, Chapter III: Anti-Greed
Part III, Chapter IV: Anti-Life
Part III, Chapter V: Their Brothers’ Keepers
Part III, Chapter VI: The Concerto of Deliverance
Part III, Chapter VII: “This is John Galt Speaking”
Part III, Chapter VIII: The Egoist
I think Dagny was at the low point of her hormonal cycle. She shrugged. She probably threw things, too.
parsy.
Chapter twenty-nine now, entitled “The Generator.” It is a very short chapter, and one wonders if perhaps Rand was cheating a bit on her plan of thirty chapters. There is no grand philosophical dissertation here, no one left, apparently, to take his or her place behind an empty podium. That is done now, and there is left only the narrative.
Dr. Stadler has taken all of four days to reach Iowa from New York, an indication that travel is now next to impossible in a disintegrating country. Where before we have travel impossibly compressed in time – the aircraft, for example, appear to display supersonic speed over the great white areas on the map that compose the American Midwest – here we have a bit of reality, and for Stadler, it isn’t pretty. (We learn in an aside that the great Taggart Bridge is not only a railroad bridge but is open to automobile traffic as well, at least for those who can still manage to find fuel).
They aren’t having much luck convincing their prisoner Galt to save the country, or rather to do so on their terms, which are leaving the present ruling class in place and taking a place at its head that its members cannot conceive it possible to wish to refuse. They don’t understand Galt, but they do understand how to get people to do what they wish, and they know that Stadler means something to Galt. By the time they find out what that really is Stadler realizes that they might have done him to death. Hence his panicked dash for power, the power that possession of his own invention will confer.
The motive? His mind had repeated insistently that his motive was terror of Mr. Thompson’s gang, that he was not safe among them any longer, that his plan was a practical necessity…To seize control, to rule…there is no other way to live on earth…
He isn’t the only one to think that way. Stadler manages to bully his way through security by merely invoking his own name, at least until he finds out who The Boss is. That is one rather drunken Cuffy Meigs, who has his own ideas about seizing control. The notion of such a thug in possession of his brainchild rouses Stadler’s last scrap of self-deception.
“…Do you think I’ll let you cash in on my life? Do you think it’s for you that I…that I sold – “ He did not finish…
Oh, but he did. Sold, indeed. But in his world one doesn’t get value received for value offered. That’s only true where the terms of exchange are Galt’s, not Cuffy Meigs’s. In the world Stadler has chosen there are only looters who have, at last, run out of things to steal.
And Stadler himself has run out of time. Project Xylophone does turn out to be a formidable weapon, and in an effort to demonstrate that he is as good a man as any of those “dime-a-dozen” technicians, Meigs throws the wrong lever.
It destroys the entire site. It also slices the Taggart Bridge in half, which is decidedly inconvenient for the first six cars of a passenger train that end up in the Mississippi as a result. Quite a swan song for the weapon of mass destruction that takes with it, in its death throes, its creator and its usurper.
The significance of this is not lost on the reader – that bridge was, after all, the one thing keeping Dagny from at last shrugging herself. Gone now in the blink of an eye, by a jackbooted ignoramus pulling a lever, a fitting end for Stadler who has, in the final analysis, sold out to precisely such a man.
His counterpart Dr. Ferris, however, is in his moment. He has the means to bring Galt around to cooperation, a rather unpleasant-sounding device known variously as Project F, or the “Ferris Persuader.” Jim Taggart shows a particular enthusiasm for its employment on Galt. And what is it that they intend to persuade Galt to do?
“We’ve got to…MAKE HIM…take over…We’ve got to force him to rule,” said Mouch in the tone of a sleepwalker.
The notion of a shackled Philosopher-King is nearly too ridiculous for fiction were it not for the fact that Rand does understand her villains so very well, and what Mouch has in mind actually does make a twisted sense.
“He has to…take over…and save the system.”
Just so. Galt is to perpetuate the very system that keeps them all in power despite the fact that they can create nothing, produce nothing, merely confiscate and redistribute all the efforts of men and women greater than themselves. At last the parasites realize their peril: of all the world, this host is the last one, and when it perishes, they do. Mouch still clings desperately to their original faulty premise: given that all of capitalism is theft, who would not want to take his place as a Prince of Thieves?
Ferris, however, has fewer illusions. Galt will be a cooperative figurehead for as long as he’s useful, and Ferris has the means to see that he goes along. Already we are told that several of the members of the ruling class have their private redoubts:
“He [Chick Morrison] has a hide-out all stocked for himself in Tennessee,” said Tinky Holloway reflectively, as if he, too, had taken a similar precaution and were now wondering whether the time had come…
It has come, and passed. They’re trapped unless Ferris can buy them some breathing room.
“Gene,” he said tensely, “Order all stations to stand by. Tell them I’ll have Mr. Galt on the air within three hours.”
Dagny, in the meantime, has called the number Francisco gave her and is relieved to hear a reasonable voice after the madness she has heard in the mouths of the teetering ruling class. They have been indiscreet enough to declare their intentions in front of her and she wastes no time in informing Galt’s friends. And we are as relieved as Dagny to hear Francisco, at last, become what he really is.
“Now listen carefully. Go home, change your clothes, pack a few things you’ll need…take some warm clothing. We won’t have time to do it later. Meet me in forty minutes…”
“Right.”
“So long, Slug.”
“So long, Frisco.”
The belongings she cares about are scarce, and these, Rand reminds us, she earned:
…She left [her evening gown] lying in the middle of the floor, like the discarded uniform of an army she was not serving any longer…she put her jewelry in the corner of the bag, including the bracelet of Rearden Metal that she had earned in the outside world, and the five-dollar gold piece she had earned in the valley…
And she learns that the Taggart Bridge is gone. It is the final break.
“Miss Taggart!” cried the chief engineer. “We don’t know what to do!”
The receiver clicked softly back into its cradle. “I don’t, either,” she answered. In a moment, she knew it was over.
But there is one final bit of symbolism she expresses defiantly before the statue of her heroic ancestor. Seizing her lipstick and…
…smiling at the marble face of [Nat Taggart], the man who would have understood, she drew a large sign of the dollar on the pedestal under his feet.
It is the signal, now useless, that she agreed upon to mark her final break. And now, as Francisco approaches,
…she stood solemnly straight and, looking at his face and at the buildings of the greatest city in the world, as at the kind of witnesses she wanted, she said slowly, her voice confident and steady: “I swear – by my life and my love of it – that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
He inclined his head, as if in sign of admittance. His smile was now a salute. Then he took her suitcase with one hand, her arm with the other, and said, “Come on.”
And now we encounter the strangest scene in the entire novel. It is, at once, the consummation of Rand’s view of sexuality among the elite as a form of power exchange, an expression of the supremacy of mind over flesh, and a reformulation of one of the oldest jokes about engineers in the entire body of human comedy.
Nothing is spared Galt in the way of modesty, although modesty is, one suspects, a quality more desirable in lesser men – he is stripped naked and spread-eagled on a leather-covered table, and Rand’s single concession to decency is that electrodes are attached to wrists, shoulders, and ankles instead of the more customary locations. We are treated to a two-page description of his physical circumstances that for the time would have bordered on the pornographic. Rand here is very much on the edge of outrage and reveling in it.
One is tempted to caution the reader not to try this at home. The Ferris Persuader runs electrical current through, as Rand describes it, the lungs, which is in real application across the heart as well. “Safe voltages” only, according to her, although there is, in fact, no such thing, and it is amperage and not voltage that kills in any case. That aside, Galt is in for a remarkably unpleasant few minutes, spurred on by Jim Taggart in a rather disturbing sadistic frenzy. Even Wesley Mouch is alarmed.
“What’s the matter with you?” gasped Mouch, catching a glimpse of Taggart’s face while a current was twisting Galt’s body: Taggart was staring at in intently, yet his eyes seemed glazed and dead, but around that inanimate stare the muscles of his face were pulled into an obscene caricature of enjoyment…
Even by modern standards this is pretty strong stuff. The room reeks of sweat, sadism and homoeroticism. Jim is revealed as finally having crossed the line into the insanity whose borders he has spent the novel exploring. One must wonder what the recently deceased Cherryl would have thought of her husband and conclude that her watery grave constitutes a kindness of sorts.
We are relieved – and the novel remains publishable – by the fortunate malfunctioning of the Persuader, specifically its generator, reminding us once again of the chapter title. And so to the joke – one must wonder if Rand had heard it, or something like it, or simply came across its expression of irony all by herself. It is simply that a true engineer – and Galt is certainly that – reacts to this situation in character, which is to state, as a technical challenge. One early version of it had an engineer condemned to the guillotine watch two of his predecessors released by a malfunction in the dropping of the blade, and when his turn came pointed up and said, “Oh, there, I see what the problem is!”
And so Galt tells them in cold detail how to fix the instrument of torture to which he is affixed. What results isn’t laughter, it is flight on the part of the crew and the final descent on the part of Jim Taggart into screaming madness. He has, at last, noticed the monster in the mirror.
“No…” he moaned, staring at that vision, shaking his head to escape it. “No…no…”
“Yes,” said Galt.
So much for Jim. While they escort his quivering remnants from the room they caution the guards to guard carefully,
…the living generator [that] was left tied by the side of the dead one.
That is Galt, of course. He remains, bound, naked – Rand has taken considerable trouble to remind us of the point – and triumphant. And his friends are on the way.
Have a great week, Publius!