Thursday, February 12, 2009

Thomas F. Bertonneau's criticism of Atlas Shrugged

Rand is rarely subjected much in the way of vigorous literary criticism, as most of the criticism is quickly dismissive or shamelessly adulatory. Hence Thomas F. Bertonneau's "Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: from romantic fallacy to holocaustic imagination," published in the conservative periodical Modern Age (Fall, 2004), comes as a welcome addition to the very small collection of intelligent, insightful criticism of Rand's fiction.

Bertonneau begins by detailing Colin Wilson's reaction to Rand. Wilson had thought little of Rand at first, but then decided to give Rand a chance by reading Atlas Shrugged. Although he was hardly an uncritical admirer, he rather liked the book, and thought he had found an ally of sorts. As Bertonneau explains:
As Wilson had "always detested the 'fallacy of insignificance' in modern literature, the cult of smallness and meanness, the atmosphere of defeat that broods over the twentieth-century novel," he "was delighted by the sheer health of Ayn Rand's view." (13) He can even understand, he writes, what Rand means when she extols that virtue of selfishness for which so many applaud or revile her, depending on their perspective: "Selfishness has always been man's vital principle--not in the sense of ... indifference to other people but in the sense of intelligent self-interest." (14) Yet while Rand might lay claim to "a considerable intellect ... it is ... narrow and incurious" so that, "having established to her own satisfaction that all that is wrong with the world is lack of faith in reason and its muddled ideas on self-interest and altruism, she seems to take no further interest in the history of ideas."

Wilson's critical remarks are spot-on. Indeed, I would go further: it is precisely Rand's "narrow and incurious" intellect that constitutes, for me, her worst flaw. It helped turn her philosophy into a weird cult and isolated Rand from scholars and intellectuals who, while sympathizing with some of her philosophy, were far better informed than she was and could have helped her avoid some the embarrassing errors that disfigure her Objectivist ideology. The hostility with which Wilson's letter (and later his essay on Rand) were greeted by Branden and Rand demonstrate an over-sensitivity to criticism that is as unappetizing as it is creepy.

Bertonneau's assessment of Atlas is mixed in its appreciations: he finds plenty to both praise and criticize. He sees the novel as a sacrificial narrative/revenge fantasy:
Atlas Shrugged is, up to a limit, a true revelation of redistributive rapacity, even of the old call to sacrifice in its twentieth-century ideological manifestation; the novel is, up to a limit, a true revelation of ideology as a reversion to the most primitive type of cultic religiosity, collective murder as a means of appeasing a supernatural principle. It is also--it is primarily--a sacrificial narrative, as most of popular, as opposed to high, narrative ever has been and probably always will be. It follows that the novel's borrowed premise is sacrifice: Rand invites us to view with a satisfying awe the destruction before our eyes of those who have mistreated the protagonists, with whom she has invited us to identify. The standard Arnold Schwarzenegger or Clint Eastwood thriller achieves its effect by no different means. Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 works in the same way.
Bertonneau finishes his criticism by examining the infamous tunnel scene in Rand's novel. He notes curious new evidence (from Rand's journals) suggesting "that Rand must have had actual people in mind as models of those who die, with time enough to feel the pain of their deaths."
I assert that Rand plausibly thought of [Hollywood screenwriter Robert] Sherwood ... when she sent the adenoidal, second-rate playwright to his death in the Tunnel. The parallelism leads us to suspect that in the Tunnel episode Rand composes a cataclysme a clef. And what then does Atlas become but a grand fantasy of godlike revenge, a theater of resentment assuaged, a daydream of limitless ego?

21 comments:

  1. Atlas Shrugged also seems to anticipate current Peak Oil/Olduvai survivalist porn in a few ways. John Galt's perpetual motion machine could have saved the economy by supplying it with way more energy than it could have used for generations; but he withheld it from the market any way because he didn't want his invention to support all the people who didn't meet his philosophical standards. Instead he set up conditions for a Malthusian die off of all these suboptimal hordes while he and his friends rode out the crash in their comfortable doomstead in the the Rocky Mountains. Except for doomers' pessimism about a technological hack to restore industrial civilization after the crash, this novel describes a plausible scenario about how the wealthy could survive a potential socioeconomic breakdown caused by declining oil supplies or just a grossly mismanaged economy.

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  2. Mark Plus,

    Too bad for Rand, and us, a perpetual motion machine would violate the laws of physics.

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  3. Mark,

    I know this is an old article, but I thought it was important point that John Galt did not withhold the motor. He abandoned it in a factory and didn't tell anyone what it was, so it rotted away with the factory.

    I thought that was a cute inclusion, because it adds to the idea that the worthless members of society need the great people to put a value on something before they realize they want to steal it.

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  4. Mark is crazy to call it a "perpetual motion machine" anyway. Did he even read Atlas? The motor's principle involved some unknown relationship between static electricity and kinetic energy.

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  5. I assumed Mark called it a perpetual motion machine in jest, because it could run continuously without "fuel" indefinitely.

    - Chris

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  6. Chris,

    That's till not right, static electricity is the fuel the motor runs on. The nice thing is that static electricity exists in virtually limitless quantities, and it is by this fact that the motor gains its virtue.

    Not to mention that its principle runs contrary to common mechanical reasoning, releasing kinetic energy should generate static electricity as a potential, as a by-product (for example, rubbing your shoes across a shag rug), not the other way around.

    Accordin g to present day science, it would be more energy-costly to produce the static electricity needed to make such a motor operate than that which the motor could provide in electrical output. But Galt's motor was apparently able to gather static electrical potential from the atmosphere by means of some kind of simple coil sticking out from it like an antenna, and then, I surmise, to further convert this potential into kinetic energy, and from there to electricity by standard means.

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  7. Since the main point of a perpetual motion machine in popular science lit is also the main point of Galt's device (an infinite source of energy/work), what's so "crazy" about Mark's use of the term?

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  8. Actually, a motor that runs off static electricity like that strikes me as a classic example of a perpetual motion machine of the second kind. That is to say it violates the second law of thermodynamics. Just because energy is out there doesn't mean you can neatly collect it and use it for work.

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  9. Andrew,

    You're falling into the trap here. I agree with you but I don't think we should get caught up with debating whether Galt's motor was a perpetual motion machine or not. What I'm wondering is why anyone is "crazy" to refer to Galt's machine as a perpetual motion machine and why anyone making such a reference may not have read Atlas Shrugged.

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  10. Andrew,

    That's the point. A static electricity motor would require a drastic paradigm shift away from Newtonian thermodynamics. Galt, who is represented as a first-order genius, would be capable of such a mental leap. Not to mention the fact that, having the willpower of ten marines, he is capable of withstanding a government torture machine without batting an eye. So what may seem impossible to you is not impossible in Rand's fantasy realm. And in reality, over the past 200 years or more, many 'impossible' things have been made possible through technology.

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  11. OK. Cavewight fooled me. I'm an idiot.

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  12. X Laj asked:
    >Since the main point of a perpetual motion machine in popular science lit is also the main point of Galt's device (an infinite source of energy/work), what's so "crazy" about Mark's use of the term?

    Because static electricity is not an infinite source. It would be possible in theory to create enough Galt motors to drain the static electricity completely out of the atmosphere.

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  13. I have a dumb question for Greg or anybody else who knows: Bertonneau's review mentions a "cataclysme a clef" - what is that? I know what he's using it to describe, but the phrasing itself remains a mystery to me.

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  14. Because static electricity is not an infinite source. It would be possible in theory to create enough Galt motors to drain the static electricity completely out of the atmosphere.

    So the distinction is between a practical infinity and an actual infinity and based on the proposition that static electricity is not an infinite source. Mark, you really are crazy!

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  15. x. Laj wrote:

    ...Something, I'm not sure what it is, however.

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  16. "Bertonneau's review mentions a 'cataclysme a clef' - what is that?"

    A bit of obscure French, literally meaning "cataclysm with a key," where key means some kind of form or table where one can swap names. Bertonneau is suggesting that all the people Rand describes on the train who deserve to die have a real world correlate, that the whole tunnel disaster allowed Rand to come up with a fantasy wishlist of people she wished to see die.

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  17. It's also a riff on the more familiar term "roman a clef," which means "a novel in which actual persons, places, or events are depicted in fictional guise."

    Bertonneau's being cheeky ...

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  18. Guys, the actual workings of Galt's motor does not matter. It is a McGruffin; like the Walnut sized atomic reactors in the Arizov's 'Foundation' Universe, which are also not possible to build.

    If you insist on talking engineering though. Andrew Priest is correct. Simply having a lot of electrons is not sufficient to do work. You need a gradient, One place with loads of electrons, and another place with very few electrons. That gradient, plus a means to connect them, will enable you to do useful work.

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  19. I know this comment comes at a very late time but I just finished reading Bertonneau's article which is an extremely compelling read. At some point, he mentions a tally of Rand's favorite expressions after which he says "So it goes." It could be just a coincidence, but is that a veiled reference to Kurt Vonnegut (who probably loathed Ayn Rand with every fiber of his being)? "So it goes" is a phrase from his most famous novel which he repeated every time death was mentioned.

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  20. Let's say, for arguments sake, that Galt invented solar panels, thus collecting energy from the environment to use in a controlled way. Does it matter, Rand was a novelist searching for a main premise for her fictional work?

    I have never read this book, but it has come up in personal conversations and certainly is a focus of our political climate. My focus of this critique is the "narrow and uncurious" description of Rand. Do we describe her followers similarly? I guess if we did grand social experiments I'd be interested to divide a population in two based on a premise of selfish personalities vs. altruistic personalities. Separate them, give them the same resources and see where these "civilizations" are in 100 years. But, maybe I'm missing the point by not actually having read it.

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  21. Rand's view of the world would create a hell on earth for everyone but the vilest of crooks, much like the devastation the "Piddle Down Theory" has been dragging us toward for decades.

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