Atlas Shrugged Read-Through: PP 11-14
As far as starting your novel in media res goes, it takes pretty big balls to make your opening line the motif that will haunt the rest of the book. The story starts out right away with "Who is John Galt?" and clumsily tries to catch up to it.
Our introductory POV character (the story is told mostly in first-person limited with occasional dips into third person omniscient) is Eddie Willers, who is undoubtedly one of the more likable characters in the book. Eddie is 32, straightens his spine with "self-conscious discipline" and we meet him as he's giving a dime to a panhandler on the street.
I like Eddie for that. Eddie is unnerved by the man asking him for change, and is unnerved at the constant refrain of the city that seems to be cadging dimes out of the pockets of the well-to-do, but Eddie doesn't pause. He is uncomfortable, but he gets the dime out of his pocket anyway.
Eddie is walking the streets of New York at sunset, trying to figure out what is causing the anxiety that's preying on his mind. He eventually settles into the realization that twilight is making him anxious.
This is because, in the context of the novel, the industrial world is in its twilight.
And this is because Ayn Rand was the least subtle person on the planet.
Further evidence of Rand's earth-shaking unsubtlety is the giant calendar projected on the roof of a skyscraper that will become a way of marking Serious Happenings in the novel. The calendar also makes Eddie uneasy, and looking at it gnaws on him for a page or two until he realizes that the calendar has made him think of the phrase "your days are numbered."
As Eddie walks through the street we are taken on a tour of his anxieties; he is unnerved by the increased frequency of people asking for cash, disturbed by the coming darkness and the numbered days of the calendar, and the fading brightness of the city reminds him of a lightning-struck tree that he saw as a child, one that was already rotted from the inside by the time it was hit in a storm.
There's a paragraph here that I almost like for its language, and that I actually like because of what it says about Rand. The paragraph reads:
The clouds and shafts of skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of a motionless lightning, the length of ten stories. A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire, still holding the glow of the sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire, but a dying one which is too late to stop (12).
What I almost like about that paragraph is the way that it's written. When I say that I find Rand's prose compelling, this is part of what I mean. The image of a glass skyscraper with half its reflection gone dark because it was unmaintained after all the effort to build it is arresting.
What I actually like about that paragraph is that it's not quite a full page into the book and Rand is already telling you exactly how much credit she gives her readers. It is not enough for her to imply that the buildings are poorly maintained, or to later comment on the number of closed shops or the rusty mechanisms of the streetlights, she has to make sure that you understand that things are bad in Eddie Willers' world, and that the city looks like a dying fire.
Eddie continues his journey, passing a busy street in which only 20% of the shops are dark. He walks down the sidewalk and feels protective of displays of competence (bright vegetables on sale at a stall, an expertly steered bus) and advances toward a meeting that he doesn't want to have.
The text is very clear about what kind of man Eddie Willers is. He is a man who likes productivity, a man who unflinchingly faces unpleasant tasks with his head held high and the knowledge that his effort will be of use to the people (and one specific person) who rely on him. He is not a fighter, he is not a brilliant engineer or a great thinker: he is a man whose existence is "a quiet, scrupulous progression" (13).
In the next segment (Atlas Shrugged is divided into three books of ten chapters, or 30 chapters that average about 36 pages each; each segment is typically divided into several segments with differing points of view) we will learn that Eddie is the "Special Assistant to the Vice-President in Charge of Operation, and his main duty was to be her bodyguard against any waste of time" (25). Eddie isn't a man who gets things done, he is a man who clears the path for other people to get things done.
We are meant to appreciate Eddie, but I also think we're supposed to be contemptuous of his passivity. He is a little man living his life and (explicitly) trying to do what is right, and in Rand's writing that's not enough to make him admirable.
In the matryoshka of cuckoldry* that would be a love triangle in another novel, Eddie is the outermost doll.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Eddie is on his way to an unpleasant task: that unpleasant task is to tell the president of the company that he works for that they can't let a railroad line fail.
This is a novel about industrialists.
While it was written in the 50s it seems to have a kind of timelessness, or out-of-timeness to it. If it seems a little odd that the central conflict of a novel in the 50s would be about the failure of a railroad company, it is. The first recorded usage of "Jet Set" was in the late 40s to early 50s, and it seems, frankly, bizarre that a book published in 1957 would have trains this central to the story.
It is really, really difficult to over-emphasize how much trains matter to this book.
And, look, I get that transit is Super Fucking Important to how the world works - we have all recently experienced what supply chain interruptions can do to the world - but trains are more than transit in Atlas Shrugged. Taggart Transcontinental - the railroad that Eddie works for - is presented as a cultural symbol and a metaphor for freedom and UNIRONICALLY!!!!! an example of what determined individuals can do if unhampered by regulation.
So it doesn't read like a novel that is taking place in the 1950s, it reads like a novel that is taking place much earlier than that.
But: back to the actual text.
Eddie is determined in facing his terrible duty: speaking to his boss. Eddie walks through the Taggart Transcontinental Building, immediately comforted by its warm, productive atmosphere, and goes upstairs to talk to Jim Taggart, president of Taggart Transcontinental, who is the older brother of Dagny Taggart (the protagonist of the novel, and Eddie's direct supervisor).
Taggart's textual introduction is another example of Rand's writing actually being kind of okay:
"He looked like a man approaching fifty, who had crossed into age from adolescence, without the intermediate stage of youth" (14). That's good shit. It's evocative. It's followed by eighty words of description that undo all the wit of that zinger: "His posture had a limp, decentralized sloppiness, as if in defiance of his tall, slender body, a body with an elegance of line intended for the confident poise of an aristocrat, but transformed into the gawkiness of a lout. The flesh of his face was pale and soft. His eyes were pale and veiled, with a glance that moved slowly, never quite stopping, gliding off and past things in eternal resentment of their existence. He looked obstinate and drained. He was thirty-nine years old."
Everyone who has done even half a second of criticism Rand has noted that she is too wordy. It is practically a given. What people don't often discuss is that half of the words are good, they just get spoiled by the other half. Just like the dying fire example we looked at earlier, this description of Jim Taggart could be cutting, but she dulls her words by throwing too many of them at you. And that's not even getting into the weird body shit that will crop up again and again.
Jim Taggart's sloppy posture is a misuse of his body that makes an aristocrat into a lout; Jim Taggart's misuse of his family's company makes him into a moocher instead of an industrialist. He is squandering his inherited gifts out of a sense of misplaced guilt over possession of those gifts; this is expressed in his physical person as well as in his business dealings.
Anyway, that's where I'm going to call it for today. We've met Eddie, we've seen the streets of New York, we're inside the Taggart Transcontinental building, and we've seen Jim but we aren't talking to him yet.
This chapter is called "The Theme" and that is apt because the themes are being laid out before we've even met or protagonist and before our antagonist has even opened his mouth.
There is one more thing I would like to highlight, though:
At one point in the chapter, Eddie remembers the answer he gave when asked what he would like to do when he grew up. His answer was "Whatever is right," and as he walks toward the Taggart Transcontinental building he reflects on this:
"He still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did. It still seemed simple and incomprehensible to him: simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren't. He knew that they weren't" (14).
Eddie knows that something is wrong in the world, and he attributes at least part of that wrongness to people wanting to do something other than what is right. Put another way, Eddie thinks that what's wrong with the world is that people want to do the wrong thing.
I think that Rand genuinely believed that a great deal of evil in the world was attributable to the conscious decision to do evil, and I think that that idea, that people choose to do wrong, is at the root of the flaws in her worldview.
One of the major flaws with libertarianism and/or objectivism is the unwillingness to concede that the choice to act in your own best interests may well do harm to others. This is remarkable, considering how terribly wounded the ideology is, and how much contempt it holds for self-interest in collective contexts.
*"matryoshka of cuckoldry" is the tag that will be used to mark posts that discuss the fascinating and bizarre world of sex and relationships in Rand's work. Eddie Willers is not Dagny's partner at any point in the novel but he is the most passive, distant, and mentally/physically/capitally weak of the men who love Dagny Taggart in the novel.
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
andulkaphoto
prguitarman
pixelskylines
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
