What follows is a series of blog posts in which I attempt to read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and furthermore attempt to comment on it in an pithy or at least mildly entertaining way.
These were originally written way back in 2014, as an amusing diversion based on something of a dare. The include a bit of philosophical as well as literary background. As the series wore on, it became an explicit attempt to compare Rand and Nabokov’s writing styles – with the amazing parallels in their life stories and their veneration of the individual, I thought it might be instructive to see what ended up separating them as writers.
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The Fountainhead? Good Lord, why?
As an exercise in mind-broadening, or possibly masochism. Full disclosure: I have never been an enthusiast of Ayn Rand, and I think Objectivism is a half-baked philosophy, or approaching a cult, depending on how seriously you take it.
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Ayn Rand: managing expectations
It is no secret that I come to The Fountainhead with rather low expectations. Everything I’ve heard, even sometimes from otherwise admirers, suggests that Rand’s prose will: Exist purely for the service of an extremely rigid political idea. There will be no variety, no fun to be had, except to hammer home the message of…
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Light relief: the funny stuff in Objectivist Epistemology
Reading through the Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology was frankly a bit of a chore, but it was brightened by Rand’s trademark bizarre language. Here are some of my favourites: Mathematics is the science of measurement erm… Man can perceive the length of one foot directly; he cannot perceive ten miles Never, ever, has any man…
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Goodies and Badies
My favourite source (wikipedia) describes the process of the The Fountainhead as a series of interactions between Roark, the “author’s ideal man of independence and integrity” and a continuum of lesser personalities. While it’s certain that Roark is an flawless paragon for Rand, as I plowed through the first section it became very clear that…
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Reasoning why
Read the first half of this post here In some lighter posts, I’ll come onto the severe weaknesses in Rand’s writing which I believe she cannot control, and which generated some of the fun that kept me sane during the harder going parts. But I think it’s clear that partially Roark’s bizarre construction is an…
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Luzhin, exceptional and familiar
Affirming our opposition to bad art and banal thought is satisfying and often necessary. In the few days after I’d immersed myself back into the sludgy consistency of Rand’s novel, with all its bald and unchallenged commonplaces, I felt a real need to vent distaste, even just as cathartic resistance. Schadenfreude is fun, but it can…
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Execution
Let’s take some time to look in detail with how Rand executes the features we’ve identified. We can make the trouble with Rand’s writing stand out in bold relief when we compare Roark’s portrayal in The Fountainhead with Nabokov’s of Luzhin in The Defence in these terms.
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The Roark Attack
Howard Roark was a chess genius. He had known this, utterly securely, since his sixth birthday, when he had discovered the chess set in his attic and immediately known how to play. Sitting on pile of magazines which contained the dreary, identical thoughts of the chess ancients, he had there and then created his own…