Abstract
This chapter looks into the reasons for academics’ disregard and dismissal of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s best-selling novel. The story, which features male and female entrepreneurs as its main characters, was meant to be a celebration of laissez-faire capitalism. While the message comes across very clearly, this successful part also accounts for the book’s most damaging flaw. The lack of nuance in its ideological content leaves the reader without any interpretive latitude. The dystopian/utopian genres Rand borrows from, added to the novel’s heavily epic ambitions, make for wooden characters and minimal verisimilitude. The novel’s wider popularity may testify to its deep “Americanness,” but its “democratic deficit” prevents it from qualifying as a Great American Novel in terms of Lawrence Buell’s recent exploration of the concept.
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Notes
- 1.
The story is simple. Major industrialists/inventors vital to the United States’ economy go on strike. One by one, they appear to vanish from the surface of the earth. Their efforts to keep things going have long been thwarted by the government. It takes a few hundred pages for the reader to find out that they have in fact been convinced to let go of their businesses by an active propagandist named John Galt. He directs them to the refuge of a valley in the mountains of Colorado which his scientist friends have made undetectable to radar. Meanwhile, America goes to the dogs. But Galt has not turned his back on the United States. He is just waiting for the crisis to ripen. Not until the country is on the brink of collapse, and the events have made the federal government totally powerless, does he decide it is time the rebels all went back to “the world.” They will now be able to start from scratch, holding all the cards. The novel’s title refers to Atlas, the Titan forced to carry the Heavens on his shoulders. Rand imagines him having grown tired of enduring punishment and deciding to shake the load off his back. The Titan stands for all the valorous human engines of the US economy who choose to withdraw from the competition, having been convinced of this by the excessively adversarial circumstances resulting from constant interference by the government.
- 2.
Doubtless, Rand would have dismissed a question considered central by Robert Boyer and regulation theory adepts concerning the kind of institutions called for by a capitalist economy. Boyer argues that “it is […] indisputable that financial, monetary and economic history concur in showing how important the part played by politics in developing institutional compromises and social forms of capitalism has been […]. To take but one example, firms will ‘kill’ competition and form oligopolies out of a natural inclination to corner the market. It is then up to external watchdogs to enforce the safeguarding of this cardinal principle of capitalism: competition. […] And if politics does play a part, then there are bound to be different forms of capitalism, according to each country’s own social history […]. That is why the contemporary capitalist system purports to be innovative on different fronts: technologically, organizationally and institutionally.” Author’s translation from Boyer.
- 3.
“But when the country on cracked shoes, in frayed trousers, belts tightened over hollow bellies,/ idle hands cracked and chapped in the cold of that coldest March day of 1932,/ started marching from Detroit to Dearborn, asking for work and the American Plan, all they could think of at Ford’s was machineguns./ The country was sound, but they mowed the marchers down./ They shot four of them dead” (Dos Passos 1936, p. 775).
- 4.
The distinction between round and flat characters was introduced by E.M. Forster. “Flat characters are two-dimensional in that they are relatively uncomplicated and do not change throughout the course of a work. By contrast, round characters are complex and undergo development, sometimes sufficiently to surprise the reader” (Encyclopedia Britannica).
- 5.
The French word synonymous with economic non-interventionism is either spelt “laisser-faire” or “laissez-faire,” the latter form an imperative, the former a milder infinitive. Unsurprisingly, Rand chooses the imperative form.
- 6.
As Francisco d’Anconia, the Argentinian member of the male triumvirate of virtuous entrepreneurs puts it: “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you’re facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong” (p. 188).
- 7.
Rand’s trust in the effectiveness of the counterfactual to indicate the right direction to follow (and her reciprocal lambasting of naturalism) recalls Milton Friedman’s view of economic theory as not interested in “truistic predictions” (See Boyer’s chapter in this book).
- 8.
Confined to an episode involving the wheat harvest in the northern states (Dakota and Minnesota), Rand’s representation of farming in Atlas Shrugged is also very limited and borrows from clichéd versions of it coming from the Eastern bloc during the Cold War.
- 9.
See Payen-Variéras’s chapter in this volume.
- 10.
Our coinage, in reference to “Novlangue,” the French translation of Orwell’s “Newspeak” in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
- 11.
The subject is dealt with in more detail in Vincent Dussol, “Views of worlds ending: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” In Carrying the Fire: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Apocalyptic Literature, eds. Rick Wallach, and Scott Yarbrough, Miami: The Cormac McCarthy Society. Forthcoming.
- 12.
Buell refers to a more general connection between the novel and nationhood: “The novel has been ‘bound up with the idea of nationhood,’ as Ralph Ellison claimed […]. In recent critical theory, nation making itself has been metaphorically described as a kind of narrative creation” (Buell, p. 10). He reads the idea of the Great American Novel as a symptom of “cultural legitimation anxiety” (Buell, p. 12) and links it with capitalism: “The United States as an unprecedented experiment in republican democracy forever trying to make good on the promises of the Declaration. The United States as a culture of enterprise forever innovating and casting old technologies behind. Maybe it’s too jaded, but it’s not altogether off base to consider the G[reat] A[merican] N[ovel] a characteristic expression of the ethos of perpetual obsolescence inherent in capitalist democracy U.S. style” (Buell, p. 14).
- 13.
To take but two examples, one of the novel’s arch-villains deplores the Schumpeterian drift of the economy: “We can’t help it if we’re up against destructive competition of that kind” (p. 18). Another “baddie” meant to embody the worst kind of statism, sounds vaguely Keynesian in his refusal to believe in the total predictability of events: “Nobody can tell what the course of a country’s future may be. It is not a matter of calculable trends, but a chaos subject to the rule of the moment, in which anything is possible” (p. 177). Keynes’s and other economists’ insistence on the impossible disregard of uncertainty in economic theorizing is discussed by Jens Beckert in his contribution to this volume.
- 14.
For more on this point, see Chap. 2, in this volume.
- 15.
And has enjoyed regained popularity with Tea-Partyites.
- 16.
Unlike the original Newspeak, the language devised by the authoritarian rulers of Oceania in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Rand’s variety does not involve the coining of new signifiers. It consists of a limited and strategically chosen handful of them, including proper names, whose signifieds have become the opposite of what they originally were. For a brief inventory of Randian Newspeak in Atlas Shrugged, see Vincent Dussol, “Views of worlds ending: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” In Carrying the Fire: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Apocalyptic Literature, eds. Rick Wallach, and Scott Yarbrough , Miami: The Cormac McCarthy Society. Forthcoming.
- 17.
More recently, this positing of a “pure” capitalism, “a capitalism which is only inhibited and blocked by extrinsic, rather than internal elements” resurfaced in Accelerationist scenarios (Fisher 2009, p. 46).
- 18.
Did this anticipate Rand’s awkward cobbling of genres in Atlas Shrugged?
- 19.
See also the working-class woman’s sermon about future hope in Phelps’s The Silent Partner.
- 20.
Note how in both cases, the story’s near-future setting leads to technology-enhanced preaching.
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Dussol, V. (2020). Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: “Laissez-Faire” Fiction?. In: Coste, JH., Dussol, V. (eds) The Fictions of American Capitalism. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36564-6_13
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