lol
My opinion?
Like the majority of Rand’s works it’s trite and an unrealistic. No one sounds that way in “real life” and most people who attempt to are ignored by others or considered to be more than a little crazy.
After struggling to remain interested, I finished both The Foutainhead and Atlas Shrugged when they were given to me as gifts. Since the person who gave them to me was a close friend, I was somewhat neutral in my praise of them. If she hadn’t been or if I had read the books on my own, I wouldn’t have bothered to to finish them as they are both so terribly written.
I think even die hard Rand fans will admit that dialogue was not her strong point. She was using the story format to illustrate and advance her political and philosophical ideas. She also wrote essays where dialogue was not a factor, and I think she came across much better.
My, but she could go on.
There had damn well better not be–there’s work to be done!
It’s easy enough to point out that someone else’s idea of Utopia is stupid and impractical. Of course, it’s not surprising that Ayn Rand’s idea of Utopia (“Galt’s Gulch”) is just as stupid and impractical as well.
Finagle will come back and correct me if I’m wrong, but: I’m pretty sure that by “didn’t work” Finagle wasn’t referring to the viability of a factory run in the way described. Instead, I think Finagle meant that the story wasn’t believable as an account of something that could actually happen. (And Rand did intend that the story be taken as a description of real events that had occurred in the world of Atlas Shrugged.)
I certainly agree that it’s an unlikely set of events. The moment someone came to a factory comprising six thousand workers and said ‘we’re going to assign you extra shifts if you’re an able worker, fewer shifts if you’re a poor worker, and then pay you according to your ability to convince us of Need’ (let alone the rest of it), the workers would simply pick up and leave. As Finagle wrote, the only way it could happen that way is if the workers were prohibited from seeking work elsewhere.
I thought A.S. was set in a “near-future” after the US had been sliding down the progressive/socialist road for some time. Certainly the plight of the TCMC couldn’t have happened at the time the novel was published, or any time since, but I thought it was set in a fictional timeline in which a sort of hyper-New Deal had been in place for decades.
I couldn’t get through Atlas Shrugged without skipping some lengthy portions (“THIS IS JOHN GALT SPEAKING”) but The Fountainhead was a quick read and I thought it was moving in places. I could easily see real people behaving they way they did as depicted in the latter novel, and it left me feeling some sympathy for the characters. Rand did a good job of showing what it means to feel sorry for someone and contemptuous of them at the same time (Peter Keating).
It sort of kills your writing “cred” when dialogue isn’t your “strong point.”
I think “Animal Farm” does it better. The story happens as you read it, not in a flashback told by one person. And the characters, though allegorical, are also highly individuated.
Side note: there have been times, at my job, when I have referred in conversation to “Animal Farm,” followed with the assertion that I am not interested in playing the character of the horse, thank you very much. Not, at least, when there is such a large contingent of pigs around.
Roddy
I think “Animal Farm” does it better also because it’s a satire/criticism of Communism written by a Socialist, who is sympathetic to at least the general aims of the criticized philosophy but recognizes that it doesn’t work in practice. Rand, on the other hand, is an anti-Communist fanatic who places everything within 10000 miles of Communism under the same umbrella and aims a flamethrower at it.
Eh, tell that to J.R.R. Tolkien or George Lucas.
Tolkien could write a poem well, and created a pretty believable world. It works partly because he was wise enough to make his allegorical world far removed from ours, and partly because he did a hell of a lot of back story.
I don’t think anyone thinks of Lucas as a great writer, maybe a pretty good filmmaker.
First of all, Rand did not write in the “naturalistic” style; she described her style as “romantic realism,” and deliberately was not trying to show things as they are, but as they might be and ought to be. She didn’t include naturalistic things like John Galt catching cold or Dagny having to use the bathroom (Rand’s own examples), as a naturalistic author would have. It’s not that the characters didn’t do these things, it’s that they weren’t important, they were pointless details and not a significant part of her heroes’ lives.
And can you imagine how fucking long the book would be if she included every insignificant detail? Isn’t it long enough for you?
And she reserved her humor for the “villains,” who did catch cold. Those characters, in the long run, were insignificant, so she included the incidental minutiae of their lives, alluding to their lack of anything profound.
Essentially correct. It’s a world where “socialism” won the “great war.” There was no WWII. There was no FDR. No atom bomb. Europe is now almost entirely socialist, and the U.S. is largely isolated. We don’t have a strong President. Indeed, the President isn’t mentioned; there are only occasional references to “The Legislature.”
So, yes, the book presumes some very significant differences between its world and our own real history.
The plot elements I always admired the most were how Taggart and Rearden tried to keep the economy running anyway, within the framework of the “socialist” regulatory system, and almost pulled it off. This is the closest the book comes to “real life” – for, currently, the U.S. economy is strong, healthy, vibrant, and growing, and has far from been destroyed by our (trivial!) flirtations with socialism. The Social Security system didn’t seem to stop Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
(The worst thing to happen to our economy in living memory came about because of too little regulation!)
eh, nm.
It’s not just that. She had a really extreme hatred of most if humanity.
IIRC, at one point in the Fountainhead she says that it’s impossible to love man without hating mankind.
I can’t remember who said it, but someone said that she bought into the Bolsheviks’ propaganda. They claimed they represented the people, they destroyed her family, so she wound up hating the people.
That’s not how it used to work in socialist countries either. Poor production as a whole and per individual was not tolerated. Productive units were still rewarded. Buyers still had a certain amount of choice (they looked at serial numbers on the label, denoting the factory from whence the product was made.)
I thinks it’s a joke. What union would vote for that? Really? We have the opposite now in the US and all you Randian’s are ignoring it. Our production rates per individual have increased and pay has remained flat for decades. All workers are expected to do more and more every year for the same pay as last year, except for the executives.
Companies lay off more and more people and expect those remaining to “pick up the load.” Middle management on down are overworked, undersupported, and underpayed. Wake up people.