Rand and Aesthetics 10

Naturalistic Romanticism. Rand introduces one other category of hybrid Romanticism in addition to Byronism, as explained in the following passage from The Romantic Manifesto:

Going farther down, one can observe the breakup of Romanticism, the contradictions that proceed from a premise held subconsciously. On this level, there emerges a class of writers whose basic premise, in effect, is that man possesses volition in regard to existence, but not to consciousness, i.e., in regard to his physical actions, but not in regard to his own character. The distinguishing characteristic of this class is: stories of unusual events enacted by conventional characters. The stories are abstract projections, involving actions one does not observe in "real life," the characters are commonplace concretes. The stories are Romantic, the characters Naturalistic. Such novels seldom have plots (since value-conflicts are not their motivational principle), but they do have a form resembling a plot: a coherent, imaginative, often suspenseful story held together by some one central goal or undertaking of the characters.

The contradictions in such a combination of elements are obvious; they lead to a total breach between action and characterization, leaving the action unmotivated and the characters unintelligible. The reader is left to feel: "These people couldn't do these things!"

With its emphasis on sheer physical action and neglect of human psychology, this class of novels stands on the borderline between serious and popular culture. No top-rank novelists belong to this category; the better known ones are writers of science fiction, such as H. G. Wells or Jules Verne. (Occasionally, a good writer of the Naturalistic school, with a repressed element of Romanticism, attemps a novel on an abstract them that requires a Romantic approach; the result falls into this category. For example, Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here.) It is obvious why the novels of this category are enormously unconvincing. And, no matter how skillfully or suspensefully their action is presented, they always have an unsatisfying, uninspiring quality.

The arbitrary nature of Rand's aesthetic constructs is rather carelessly on display in this passage. What she is basically saying (though she is shrewd enough not to put it so simply) is that if a novelist sub-consciuosly believes that people have free-will in regards to existence but not in regards to consciousness, they will produce novels which will project "abstract" stories combined with "conventional" characters!

Rand's slipshod analysis raises many questions without answering a single one. What on earth does she mean by stories with "abstract projections"? How does one distinguish such stories from those with "non-abstract" projections? What, precisely, is an action "one does not observe in real life"? Does she mean impossible actions? Or merely improbable actions? What is this nonsense about free will in regards to one's own character? What evidence does Rand have to support the implausible contention that human beings choose their own character? And what is she suggesting when she implies that novels belonging to this category don't have plots because "value-conflicts are not their motivational principle." Isn't a plot merely "a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax." Isn't such a progression possible without value conflicts? (Incidentally, how does Rand know that there are no value conflicts in the science fiction of Verne and Wells? Has she read all such literature?) And what evidence can Rand provide for her implausible conjecture that an author who combines exciting narratives with conventional characters believes "sub-consciously" that human beings have free will in regards to existence but have no free will in regard to consciousness? How could anybody believe, whether sub-consciously or in any other way, in such an absurdity? And how does Rand know they believe such things? Implausible conjectures require ample and detailed evidence. Yet Rand provides no evidence at all for her belief. We are expected to accept it on her say-so alone. Why should we do so?

Rand's aesthetic categories are vague, arbitrary, empirically dubious, logically incoherent, and useless. The primary controlling principle behind them seem to be Rand's own personal tastes. They are a kind of philosophical window dressing sloppily pasted over her preferences for exciting, plot-driven stories of grand-scale heroes engaged in value conflicts. Since Rand realized that some narratives might have grand-scale characters without exciting plots, she contrived her category of Byronic Romanticism. For narratives with exciting stories but conventional characters, she devised this second, nameless category.

Rand could have saved a great deal of futile labor if she had just wrote: "I prefer novels and plays with grand-scale heroes and exciting plots." For that's really what her distinction between Romanticism and Naturalism amounts to in the end.