Coming home from the theater the other day, it occurred to me that Ayn Rand was Russian and presumably literate, and yet she never acknowledged that Fyodor Dostoyevsky laughed at her juvenile philosophy a hundred years before she wrote it. Doesn’t everyone who reads Crime and Punishment or sees it performed have the same reaction? Just wondering.
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Snark Based Reality
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Uloborus
Hmmm. Mostly, Crime and Punishment mocks people who think they’re supermen, want to be superme- wow, it mocks Ayn Rand and everyone who follows her.
Unfortunately, no one will know because it is THE SECOND WORST BOOK EVER, losing only to Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man.
SiubhanDuinne
Ayn Rand loathed and detested Dostoyevsky and all his works. She would have taken his mocking or criticism of her writing as a source of great pride.
Josh
Poking around the ‘tubes, I find that it’s in the air. Yet there are Randroids who trace their deity’s genealogy through Dostoevsky (who gave us Raskolnikov, Ippolit, and Man Underground) and Nietzsche (who taught us to recognize ressentiment). Least self-aware philosophy evar.
And yeh, Ulo, that Joyce novel is pretty boring. Dostoevsky in English depends a lot on the prose style of the translator, however.
Yutsano
I tried to read Atlas Shruggedonce. I couldn’t even get through the second chapter it was so poorly written. So I could claim total ignorance of her philosophy, except it’s the ultimate embodiment of IGMFY. She actually predated L. Ron Hubbard with her garbage? Yikes.
TR
Wait, you’re saying the esteemed libertarian philosophy of “I got mine, fuck you” is juvenile?
calling all toasters
I’m sure Russia has produced some shitty chess players, too. They just don’t become famous because there’s no way to make the Sicilian Defense flattering to morons.
El Cid
You could easily imagine a moderately reflective middle schooler wondering, “Hey, what if me doing exactly what I wanted was the best thing for everyone? What if everybody just did exactly what was best for them and nothing else? Maybe that would be awesome!”
It’s harder to imagine someone pretending that such a silly, idle reflection might be viewed by millions and millions as a ‘philosophy’, but this is a strange world, and strange things can happen.
Wile E. Quixote
Rand would have said that Dostoevsky was “anti-life”. Murray Rothbard wrote an excellent article on Rand and the Objectivists called “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult”. Reading it makes me grateful for the fact that my adolescent career as a Randroid was nipped in the bud by my father’s calling bullshit on my Randroid beliefs and telling me to either shut up or get a job (I did both).
jl
Here I display my erudition and literary snark, or maybe my obtuse cluelessness, let the chips fall as they may. I agree with the post.
On Dosty, I never learned to spell his name from memory, but liked his books when I had to read them in that college because, um, well, to tell the real truth, because I remember he wrote em up in short chapters. Which was a big plus. Some other novelists I had to read could learn a thing or two about craft from the Big D.
I also like Dostoyevsky (that was pasted from the post) because I imagine if he were writing today he would do it all on a PC, because he could get to the internet poker quick whenever he took a break.
I like Dosty-whatever becuase the instructor was wise enough to assign Notes from the Underground first, and I, along with half the class, as dissaffected malcontent youth, took to him right off, from the opening:
“I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious).”
That was from Project Gutenberg.
Can’t beat that. If some of his other books were a bit odd and unpleasant, I forgave him.
But Gogol is my favorite, since no one can do crazy like Gogol. Generally I think crazy Russian writers and poets are good reading, and inspirational to youth.
jl
My comment on Dostyevsky is in moderation. It contained the first sentences of Notes from the Underground, which was subversive, probably.
Wait a minute, I said that I like him because I imagine if he were writing today, he would do it on a PC because he could switch to i * t * r n * t p * k * r quickly when he wanted to take a break.
I bet that is what did it. Let’s see.
jl
yep. But how can we talk about Dost-whatever his name is spelled if we can’t have frank discussions of g m b l n g addiction? And other lowlifery he indulged in?
MikeJ
Dostyevsky would not have scheduled a do or die baseball game at nine o fucking clock in the blessed am. Rand would have. That’s all you need to know.
asiangrrlMN
@Uloborus: I haven’t read Crime and Punishment, but I heartily agree with you about The Navel Gazing of a Faux Artist as A Whiny-Ass Punk. I had to read it for my MA program, and I threw it across the room the second I finished it. It hit the wall with a satisfying thunk.
CK Dexter Haven
Saw this over at the Great Orange Satan. Seriously funny stuff.
CK Dexter Haven
What happend to the link? Let me try again…
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/10/791996/-What-if-President-Obama-Posted-a-Nobel-Diary
jl
@MikeJ: I read someplace that Rand thought that Twightlight Zone was high art and embodied some of what she considered her important philosophical themes. So, if she inspired a few good TZ episodes, I guess that is a net plus.
On this here blog I learned that Rand wanted Farrah Fawcett to play the lead in a dramatization of one of her novels. Fawcett seemed kind of iffy when she talked about it in an interview.
I was amazemed that Greenspan still had some Randian notions in him when he was Fed Chair. The poor old guy still clung to some goofball and very illogical Rand notions about capitalism to persuade himself that no good capitalists would allow something like the mortgage securitization bust to occur. He said he was shocked and disillusioned that it warn’t true. I felt sorry for him a little. Makes no difference, since under Bush II, some other guy would have done the same thing using some other rationalization for sitting there and let unregulated financial markets blow up everything. So, no harm no foul for Rand there.
Rand wrote a play where the audience voted on how it should end before the last act. The actors were supposed to perform whichever ending the audience voted for. She thought that such a device was an important artistic breakthrough.
Rand was crazy, but somehow knew how to really get through to the fifteen year old in a certain kind of person.
In edit: I got all of four or five pages into Atlas Shrugged. That is all I ever read, other than a few of her interviews. I read more of her economic writings, which are a hoot, if you are an economist. Really really funny stuff.
Uloborus
A) Gogol did rock. Gogol was insane in the finest Russian fashion.
B) I think the ultimate proof of James Joyce’s writing ability is that he wrote a book about visiting prostitutes that was *boring*. Not disgusting, titillating, offensive, shocking, grim, sad, or anything else. Just a book about how a guy kept giving in to his lust and hiring prostitutes that was absolutely dull and lifeless.
C) Really, the more I think about it, the more Crime and Punishment was a complete denial of Rand’s philosophy, so I guess it’s natural she hated Dostoyevsky. The central premise, as I recall, is ‘There’s a big difference between assholes and sociopaths, and both suck in different ways.’
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Uloborus:
I like Crime and Punishment substantially better than numerous other books I can think of. Starting with every book ever written by Ayn Rand.
jl
@Uloborus: I don’t remember much of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, except I think that one of the chapters is about a religious fright night about Hell, thrown by a Jansenist Roman Catholic Priest. I do remember that, since I grew up in an area where that kind of conservative Christianity was common, and was subjected to that kind of stuff a couple of times. Protestant version, but close enough for that chapter to really ring a bell.
I’m not sure why James Joyce is supposed to be such a great writer. But I am OK with James Joyce, because through him I learned about Samuel Beckett, and I like Beckett’s stories and novels, which I think are funny in a bleak black comedy way, much better than his plays.
McGeorge Bundy
Beckett’s fantastic trilogy for the win. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable.
But I think Joyce was the better writer than Beckett, especially on a technical level. Later in his life Beckett recognized this in his acknowledgment that he couldn’t do what Joyce did, and so had to forge his own way. (And he did, brilliantly.)
FWIW, Portrait is one of my favorite novels.
Moby-Dick
Ulysses
Blood Meridian
Malone Dies
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Sorry to get all literary on you guys.
Jason Bylinowski
@Uloborus:
@asiangrrlMN:
While I respect your opinions on Joyce, I feel I must give him some love because I hear a lot of complaints about Joyce these days, which in my view are unwarranted. If there’s an author out there who gets more grief than James Joyce today, I’ve not heard tell of it. & for what? Because he’s hard to read? Because he made up his own words for things? Well Shakespeare was and did both of those things, but because he came along 400 years previous that somehow lends it more weight. YMMV of course but I’m just speaking as someone who came through an English Lit program.
I agree that Portrait was not his strongest novel. Finnegan’s Wake is not a novel at all in my opinion so much as a puzzle. But Ulysses will continue to stand tall as the most genius piece of metafiction ever written. I don’t expect everyone to have the patience or time to get through Ulysses: that’s like saying everybody should sit down and read the Bible from cover to cover, or the entire Shakespeare folio. But those few of us who have sat down with it, it is a life changer. I actually took an advanced lit class (actually it was a pair of classes) back in the late 90’s; we took an entire year to read the whole thing front to back and, no doubt, it was an awesome, awesome thing to do.
Anyway it’s pretty much silly to say you “should” or “should not” like such-and-such an author, and that’s not my point. Just wanted to represent the small but passionate group of folks out there who have put real time into decoding some of his work. It’s been a freaking gold mine (my senior thesis was on Chapter 5) and even now there’s still so much to figure out.
Short Bus Bully
The “classics” are the books that no one ever reads but everyone agrees that everyone should read.
WTF?
The Randian philosophy, short short version? “Keep acting like you did when you were six years old.”
Keith G
@Snark Based Reality: I’m not sure “butt hurt” is among your best choices here.
Jason Bylinowski
Anyway, speaking of great and underestimated writers, I’ve got some Gene Wolfe to read, just starting in on the Book of the Short Sun as soon as I finish up Glen Cook’s first Black Company series, which should happen here in a few minutes. Both of these guys are just utter masters of Sci-Fi, and they’ll probably both go to their graves barely still in print. Meanwhile Dan Brown is probably getting a blowjob from a supermodel as I write this, because he knows how to spell Opus Dei correctly.
jl
@McGeorge Bundy: I guess for me, as Wagner for Mark Twain, James Joyce’s writing is better than it reads. And to tell the truth, I am one of the ‘Wagner’s music is better than it sounds’ school.
There is a long recording of an actor reading Ulysses, and I have listened to the whole thing, a little bit at a time. I have favorite parts that I read. But going through the whole thing at once. I don’t think that will ever happen.
Beckett’s novels are like listening to a bleak, happy go lucky suicidal jokester all pinted up. It is a kind of literary slapstick. I like the three novels. Parts of More Pricks than Kicks are hilarious, but probably not qualified to be high art among the literary here.
But then I like humor, and unless the text is going three directions at once, and one direction can be interpreted as a satire on the others, then I am not so much into it. So, a lot of high art is too serious for me. So, I like Shakespeare and Chaucer when they do that kind of thing, and Beckett, and some others, can’t think of their names right now.
Edit: OK, I can think of one: Gogol.
Hob
@Short Bus Bully: Whatever. That’s easy to say, but says nothing about the books. I loved Crime and Punishment.
Jason Bylinowski
@Short Bus Bully: “The “classics” are the books that no one ever reads but everyone agrees that everyone should read.”
This is probably the definition for “classics” that should be in the dictionary, yes. A secondary def might be, “books that most everyone is afraid of”.
My advice for people who want to read the classics is always, “Read Hemingway”. It’s easy as pie to pick up. Then if you wanna go global, read Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time” – I can’t think of a “classic” book that’s more fun to read, except for maybe Tom Sawyer, but that’s okay because Mark Twain is our next stop anyway. I read a lot of popular fiction as well so don’t take me for one of those reading nerds, but some of these books are called “classics” because they really do have something to offer us, no matter how old they might be. It can be good stuff.
LB
Crime and Punishment is actually one of the more readable books by Dostoevsky. Still, his ideas are far from universally accepted and some of them are quite wacky (Russian exceptionalism, for example).
jl
Just to tone things up a bit: there is a very funny Loony Tunes with hilarious riffs on The Inspector General. “What, no gravy!?” ROFL stuff when I first saw it. Can’t find it now.
The Bearded Blogger
@Uloborus: Your tastes in literature are interesting… what do you LIKE?
@SiubhanDuinne: I think A.R was just a spoiled enfant terrible… so shallow, so un-russian, so tiny in comparison with the likes of Tolstoi or Dostoyevski…
@El Cid: It is not a worthy or deep philosophy in itself, but it serves as an underpinning for a powerful ideology… Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution has a chapter on Giovanny Gentile, Italy’s philosopher of fascism… his philosophy is crap, but he was the most prestigious philosopher in the country because he jsutified fascism…
Notorious P.A.T.
Speaking of classics, I’ve been re-reading Poe lately. That’s some good work right there.
Short Bus Bully
There are a lot of books that get better when explained in a collegiate setting by a trained literary pro, and most of the “classics” fall into that category. Hard core philosophy is in that same vein. Reading them with a virgin mind will nearly always create nothing but frustration. Having someone there to explain to you what the hell is actually going on is very helpful, and you just don’t get that by yourself cruising through ten or so pages every night in bed before you fall asleep.
Of course, having the “classics” explained to you in class can also lead to an overdose of Academic Douchebaggery and lead one to generally despise the self congratulatory circle jerk fluff-fest that goes by the name of Literature at most modern universities…
Just sayin’
kth
I don’t know if C&P really refutes Ayn Rand, but only because Galtism would be so pathetically beneath Dostoevsky’s interest that he couldn’t possibly bother. It isn’t just that Rand’s ethic is egoism, it’s such a third-rate egoism. There are about a hundred greater thinkers: Nietzsche, Byron, Stendhal, shit, H.L. Mencken, that Dostoevsky would first have to slay before he would care about some stupid Chamber of Commerce asshole’s delusions of grandeur.
SGEW
“Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” is best read as the prologue to “Ulysses,” and should be regarded in that context.
That is all.
The Bearded Blogger
@Short Bus Bully: Nietzsche talked about the camel, the lion and the child. I think Rand could be characterized as either the ostrich or the spoiled brat.
JK
@McGeorge Bundy:
I love Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man and Moby Dick
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison tops my list.
Been meaning to read this book for a long time Dedalus in Harlem. the Joyce-Ellison connection by Robert N. List
Jen R
Aw, the “wingnut butthurt” link won’t open for me. Tried three different browsers, and I just get a blank screen.
Common Sense
The “classic” that always bugged me was Citizen Kane.
While I completely agree that the movie was revolutionary — in particular the tracking and deep focus shots are aped constantly today — the script felt banal and the acting is simply childish. Frankly I feel the same way about Kane that I do about Star Wars. It’s all flash and no substance. Eye Candy that does not provoke but merely titillates. About the only thing the script has going for it is the nonlinear timeline, which is a nice technique that can (and in this case does) hide a flawed plot progression.
I never understood the fascination. It’s OK. But best movie of all time?
Ardsgaine
A few quotes from Ayn Rand’s collection of essays on art, The Romantic Manifesto:
“I like Dostoevsky, for his superb mastery of plot structure and for his merciless dissection of the philosophy of evil, even though his philosophy and his sense of life are almost diametrically opposed to mine.” (p. 43)
“Dostoevsky gives me the feeling of entering a chamber of horrors, but with a powerful guide.” (p. 43)
“The integration of an important theme with a complex plot structure is the most difficult achievement possible to a writer, and the rarest. Its great masters are Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky. If you wish to see literary art at its highest, study the manner in which the events of their novels proceed from, express, illustrate and dramatize their themes: the integration is so perfect that no other events could have conveyed the theme, and no other theme could have created the events.” (p. 86)
“The depth of characterization depends on the psychological level of motivation which a writer regards as sufficient to illuminate human behavior. For instance, in an average detective story, the criminals are motivated by the superficial notion of “material greed”– but a novel such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment reveals the soul of a criminal all the way down to his philosophical premises.” (p. 88)
“Among novelists, the greatest are Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky…
The distinguishing characteristic of this top rank (apart from their purely literary genius) is their full commitment to the premise of volition in both of its fundamental areas: in regard to consciousness and to existence, in regard to man’s character and to his actions in the physical world. Maintaining a perfect integration of their plot structures, these writers are enormously concerned with man’s soul (i.e., his consciousness). They are moralists in the most profound sense of the word: their concern is not merely with values, but specifically with moral values and with the power of moral values in shaping human character. Their characters are “larger than life,” i.e., they are abstract projections in terms of essentials (not always successful projections as we shall discuss later). In their stories, one will never find action for actions’ sake, unrelated to moral values. The events of their plots are shaped, determined, and motivated by the characters’ values (or treason to values), by their struggle in pursuit of spiritual goals and by profound value-conflicts. Their themes are fundamental, universal, timeless issues of man’s existence–and they are the only consistent creators of the rarest attribute of literature: the perfect integration of theme and plot, which they achieve with superlative virtuosity.” (p. 107)
Steeplejack
@asiangrrlMN:
Dubliners, however, is sublime. Just read “Araby” and tell me that’s not great. (It’s only 2,300 words.)
Yutsano
@Common Sense: Oddly enough I have the exact same opinion of Gone With the Wind. Seen the movie a couple of times, still don’t get exactly what is so great about it. Maybe my mistake was reading the book first. Oh yeah the book’s not all that fantastic either.
asiangrrlMN
@Jason Bylinowski: He’s not hard to read at all. I just found the book to be whiny, dull, self-absorbed, and not well-written. Not my style of writing, to put it more simply.
For the classics, I enjoyed Anna Karenina. Shakespeare, I could take or leave. I liked Jane Eyre when I read it. Didn’t care for Wuthering Heights. Really didn’t like Catcher in the Rye. Liked, if that’s the right word, Animal Farm. Didn’t care for War and Peace or The Scarlet Letter. To be fair, I read them on my own when I was in fifth grade. Well, to be honest, I read half of War and Peace in fifth grade. I got too confused halfway through and stopped reading it. Didn’t like Great Gatsby. Liked The Stranger.
That’s just a brief list of my classical literary tastes. To be honest, classical literature is neither my bailiwick or a particular interest of mine.
gwangung
And you can grow up to be a serial killer.
asiangrrlMN
@Steeplejack: It is very well-written, I will grant you that. (Araby, that is. I did not read the others).
marrus
Crime and Punishment was precisely anti-randian because the central character tried to act as if he did not care about other people (Randian), but in fact emotionally he always wanted to be connected and accepted by other people. Hence (and my memory may be off here) Raskolnikov intervenes in a situation on behalf of a prostitute, he has a dream about intervening (or merely sobbing?) when a horse is beaten in the street, and at least one other event which showed that deep down instinctively he had empathy for other people (even “trash” and even horse)s.
Damn, there was one other really key example. I totally got a straight A on a college essay on this book about 15 years ago. Best literature essay I ever wrote. Can’t remember the third example though.
Common Sense
@Yutsano:
I do have the same opinion of Gone With the Wind. Can’t stand it to be honest. I felt no pity for Scarlet O’Hara. My only thought was “What a bitch.”
@asiangrrlMN:
I’m pretty close to you. I simply did not get the appeal of Salinger. I love Camus, and Tolstoy puts me to sleep. I like F. Scott Fitzgerald though, in particular his short stories.
I’m more of a modern lit guy myself. Robertson Davies is probably as “classic” as I usually get.
I liked Anna Karenina as well as Crime and Punishment.
MoeLarryAndJesus
Here’s what I wonder about – if Megan McArdle and Rebecca Lobo had a fight, who would win?
McGeorge Bundy
@Steeplejack: Wow, a story recommended in Dubliners that isn’t The Dead. Neato.
@jl: I really like More Kicks than Pricks. Have you ever read Dream of Fair to Middling Women? Most of the stories in Kicks are from Dream. It was Beckett’s first novel, left unpublished until 1993. Worth the read. It’s definitely Beckett’s most Joycean work, which should surprise no one. (It was written in 1932; Beckett was helping Joyce here and there with what would become Finnegans Wake. Transcribing mostly.)
@asiangrrlMN: I’m curious, what is it about the writing in Portrait that you think it’s so poorly done?
Yutsano
@MoeLarryAndJesus: To the death with a dual-kill outcome?
Wile E. Quixote
@Common Sense
I think there’s also a fascination with the fact that Wells made a movie about William Randolph Hearst while Hearst was still alive. Hearst was a mean bastard and was still a powerful man in 1941. Making a film like Citizen Kane about him was an incredibly ballsy thing to do.
Raincitygirl
Bearded Blogger:
The drug addiction probably didn’t help with any of those pesky intellectual inadequacies. Mind you, the inadequacies may well have preceded the addiction.
Chuck Butcher
I read Crime and Punishment the first time in 9th grade, I liked it other than trying to keep track of the Russian patronymics, diminuatives, and assorted other “nicknames.” I was at an age where Rand’s selfishness and Dostoyovski’s mockery of supermen and egoism created a bit of a collision. Fyodr won out.
I absolutely agree that the translator has a lot to do with whether C&P gets across or not. I’d also give some consideration to the idea that it takes a particular (peculiar?) turn of mind to like C&P.
You could wonder why I wound up in a Mech Egr program and ended as a construction contractor/laborer…
JoePo
@Jason Bylinowski: This.
Alright, you philistines. Joyce is one of the greatest writers the world has ever seen because in Ulysses he’s able to distill pretty much every form of literature that has preceded him and reconstitute them into new forms that challenge everything we assume of literature. In one novel, he anticipates an entire century of literary innovation. Faulkner, Ellison, Bellow, none of these writers exist without Joyce.
To condemn him because he’s hard to understand is to condemn trigonometry because you actually have to know something about math to understand it.
Does all of this sound just vague enough to make it sound like I know what I’ve been talking about? Good, because I’ve been drinking.
Steeplejack
@JoePo:
Does all of this sound just vague enough to make it sound like I know what I’ve been talking about? Good, because I’ve been drinking.
That’s pretty much the quintessential Balloon Juice modus operandi in a nutshell.
Steeplejack
@McGeorge Bundy:
Don’t get me wrong. I like “The Dead” a lot, but I don’t think it’s the best thing in Dubliners, which is one of the best “thematic” story collections ever.
(See also: Hawthorne, Twice Told Tales; Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; Salinger, Nine Stories; Borges, Ficciones; Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.)
mclaren
Hey, let’s have a little love for Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. Compared with schlock like Finnegan’s Wake, which is truly unreadable, Portrait comes off pretty well. I liked it, actually. Not much plot, but as a psychological study it worked well.
Yeah, I’d include Notes From the Underground as a slam at the self-centered Randroid mentality too. Russia abounded with creepy self-obsessed anarchists in the 19th and early 20th century. Dostoevsky knew the type and loathed it on sight. He wouldn’t have pissed on Alissa Rosenbaum (Rand’s real name) if her heart was on fire.
Gore Vidal grabbed a sharpened stake and pounded it into the empty space where Rand should’ve had a heart in his 1961 review. He used a big goddamn hammer, too:
She has declared war not only on Marx but on Christ. Now, although my own enthusiasm for the various systems evolved in the names of those two figures is limited, I doubt if even the most anti-Christian free-thinker would want to deny the ethical value of Christ in the Gospels. To reject that Christ is to embark on dangerous waters indeed. For to justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. For one thing, it is gratuitous to advise any human being to look out for himself. You can be sure that he will. It is far more difficult to persuade him to help his neighbor to build a dam or to defend a town or to give food he has accumulated to the victims of a famine. But since we must live together, dependent upon one another for many things and services, altruism is necessary to survival. To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy. That it is right to help someone less fortunate is an idea which ahs figured in most systems of conduct since the beginning of the race. We often fail. That predatory demon “I” is difficult to contain but until now we have all agreed that to help others is a right action. Now the dictionary definition of “moral” is: “concerned with the distinction between right and wrong” as in “moral law, the requirements to which right action must conform.” Though Miss Rand’s grasp of logic is uncertain, she does realize that to make even a modicum of sense she must change all the terms. Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life a right action is consideration for the welfare of others. In the one case, through a state which was to wither away, in the other through the private exercise of the moral sense. Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.
Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. Moral values are in flux. The muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep. Trolls walk the American night. Caesars are stirring in the Forum. There are storm warnings ahead.
Gore Vidal, Esquire magazine, 1961.
That bit about storm warnings and new monsters stirring sounds prescient, eh?
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
Say what you like about Objectivism, DougJ–at least it’s an ethos.
Ripley
For a funny take on Rand – her work and the woman herself – read Tobias Wolff’s short novel ‘Old School.’ Great book: literary, humane, moving, unusual. Rand shows up, and is shown up. “Who is John Galt?” indeed.
Anne Laurie
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason:
No, it’s an anti-ethos, which is the start of Rand’s problems as a novelist.
If I had to pick one Great Work, it would be either Persuasion or Life on the Missippi. Actually, I’d argue for the collected Austen, which is not many more pages than Atlas Shrugged, but neither Emma nor Mansfield Park should be used as introductions by the uninitiated. And a well-chosen selection of Twain’s essays and short stories, plus Life and Puddin’head Wilson would be a better Twain introduction. (Huckleberry Finn is just too heartbreaking for the young & innocent to start with.)
Edited to add: I’m sticking with English originals, because I don’t have the skillz to comment on translations. But I like Chekov’s short stories.
JackieBinAZ
Here’s what my favorite writer of all time, Flannery O’Connor, had to say about Ayn Rand in a letter to a friend:
cokane
Dostoevsky is a fine writer, but I could never agree with his philosophies. I think a lot of people today would, while feeling he had plenty to add, essentially reject his overbearing Christianist doctrines.
Lupin
I remember reading somewhere that Rand thought highly of LES MISERABLES and Rostand’s CYRANO, which seems strange to me, since both works appear to be the opposite of Randian values.
She also wrote a truly terrible Hollywood movie, one of those “there’s a commie lurking under every bed” — the title of which escapes me.
I think she was (rightly) pissed off at the Russians and it became an obsession that colored her entire work, not a bad thing if you write entertaining fiction; rather terrible if you aspire at being a deep thinker (to a hammer… etc.)
rachel
@Common Sense:
You forgot “stupid” and “selfish”: Scarlet O’Hara is a stupid, selfish bitch.
(I hated the movie, but I thought I might like her better in the book. I didn’t.)
Batocchio
Crime and Punishment is a truly great novel, but I found it slow going at first, and it wasn’t until about 100 pages in that it really grabbed me. I like it better than Brothers Karamazov (although that book has some fantastic sections). I’d recommend the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (they’ve translated several Dostoevsky novels). The earlier Constance Garnett translations of Dostoevsky are also well regarded, but Pevear and Volokhonsky are better at the slang, the idiomatic speech and the freshness of Dostoevsky’s prose. Their edition also has a pretty good introduction to Russian names and nicknames in relation to the characters, since if you’re not familiar with Russian culture that can get pretty confusing.
As long as we’re talking Russian novels and translations, I haven’t read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita yet, but the Burgin and O’Connor translation is excellent, with superb endnotes.
Cheryl from Maryland
If you want a 20th C. author with great style and a fine philosophical sense of community, look no further than the great P.G. Wodehouse. Oh, and laughs. Read The Mating Season.
Otherwise, I am partial to the 18th C. classics, especially the works of Henry Fielding. It is sad that few people read his works anymore — jokes, sex, coming of age, dislike of creeds and cants, tolerance, Fielding is wonderful.
In defense of Ayn Rand, she did inspire one of the best Simpson routines ever, when Maggie leads the other babies in revolt to escape the Ayn Rand Day Care center. Set to the music used in The Great Escape. So stop reading and watch A Streetcar Named Marge!
gogol's wife
I’m a Balloon Juice lurker who’s also a professor of Russian literature, and I’m so impressed by this thread. You people can talk about anything! I had no idea that Ayn Rand had written seriously about Dostoevsky. P.S. Stick with Burgin and O’Connor for The Master and Margarita.
calipygian
Open thread needed.
Maybe the WaPo monitoring of the Hate-o-sphere will be a good thing after all. Front page story on the Malkinite hoards harrassing a NJ school principal that gets it mostly right.
Maybe Malkin’s haraunging of the MSM to lift the rock to take a look at what the wingers are howling about will backfire big time on them when the papers find not “concerned citizens” but “councils of conservative citizens” waving Confederate flags and burning crosses.
p.a.
It’s comments like this in a thread about Dosto-fuckin’-evsky, Rand and Objectivism that keep me coming back to Balloon Juice.
zoe kentucky in pittsburgh
Tim-
I saw the same PICT production of C&P, I thought it was pretty fantastic. (As most PICT productions tend to be.) What did you think?
RedKitten
@asiangrrlMN:
Hm…I haven’t read all of those on your list, but with regards to the ones I HAVE read, I agree with you completely. Jane Eyre got better with each reading, and Catcher in the Rye was a big, annoying disappointment.
RedKitten
@gogol’s wife:
True, but none of us actually know what we’re talking about. We just try to sound smart. ;)
bago
My amused take on the whole Nobel thing.
“I ain’t yo bitch ni$%a. Win your own damn prize”.
bago
Also, I’ve been in DC for only one day and already there’s a march! I’m excited.
Jack
It’s important to understand Rand as a Russian radical (in the nihilist strain) who failed to appropriate Nietzsche, who failed to co-opt existentialism, who failed to understand positivism and ended up settling for her own third rate romantic conjurations.
It’s also important to understand that by accident of luck or malice of fate, she emigrated to the US in time to tap into a nation ready to abandon Bryant and grangism and fighting unions, with a meme making Hollywood more than eager (in its collective self-obsession) to capitalize on ersatz entertainment.
This is also roughly the same period of time in which Heinlein evolved from an E.P.I.C. socialist to a glibertarian.
Svensker
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Yes. Oh, yes. Wodehouse is my antidepressant of choice. If he can’t make me laugh, things are parlous indeed.
geg6
Just some stream of consciousness runnign through my head while reading this wonderful thread. Ayn Rand is the worst writer ever and she was just completely insane. Anyone who knew her (such as Greenspan) and didn’t catch on to that is really too stupid to live, let alone run the national bank. Both Citizen Kane and Gone With the Wind suck. I have no opinion on Dostoevsky and Joyce other than I found both very hard slogs. But I was a poli sci major, not an English major. The authors that most inspired my love of reading as a child were Dickens (I know that is sentimental and unfashionable) and Twain. I gobbled up everything they wrote and they are still the standard to which I hold every writer. Most don’t measure up. I, too, have a love of Henry Fielding and it’s criminal that he isn’t as read as he deserves. I also love Voltaire. And Gore Vidal is probably my favorite modern writer. From this list, you might say I like a bit of snark in my writers. You would be right to say that. Witness the fact that I spend so much time hanging around BJ.
geg6
Oh, and I detest Hemingway about as much as I do Rand, but in a different way. He was certainly a better writer. But I have such disdain for him as a person that I find it hard to get past it (I have the same problem with Picasso). Papa’s manly man sensibility was all a cover for his own cowardice. I have no respect for that.
Burning with stupid
If we are sending ‘shout outs’ to Russian writers, here’s a big cheer for Chekov. His short stories are beautiful and heartbreaking.
dan robinson
With regard to the lives of Hemingway, Rand, Joyce, etc., it should be remembered that making art is selfish. When I write, I decide what to write and how to write and it must please me. I don’t give a fuck if it pleases anyone else. We should not be surprised when people who practice a selfish art extend it further into their daily lives.
With regard to the offal turned out by Hemingway, Rand, Joyce, etc., there is enough bullshit there to be turned into compost by a willing cadre of grad students that I can safely say, “Enough said.”
Separating the artist and the art is hard. Miles Davis was, by many accounts, a mean, selfish man. But “Kind of Blue”, to which I’m currently listening, is one of the most achingly beautiful collections of music ever made.
SGEW
“A special little theory came in too – a theory of a sort – dividing mankind, you see, into material and superior persons, that is persons to whom the law does not apply owing to their superiority, who make laws for the rest of mankind, the material, that is. It’s all right as a theory, une theorie comme une autre.”
– Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, Crime and Punishment
J
Thanks, McGeorge and others, for putting in a word for The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man–in my view a masterpiece. I was surprised especially by the complaints about Joyce’s writing. He may be the supreme master of prose rhythm, and there are long stretches, like the closing pages of the Portrait, that are as memorable as poetry. The hellfire and brimstone sermon is a tour de force. (Though it’s hardly a masterpiece, the film version has John Gielgud as the priest who delivers the sermon, which is not to be missed). By praising parts of the book and its style, I don’t mean to imply that it isn’t a magnificent whole. It’s seems odd to describe the main character as ‘whiny’–to the extent that that’s true, it’s the story of a kind of adolescent condition surmounted and overcome. Perhaps the world is changing, and people don’t through periods of anxious, self-absorbed adolescence anymore.
RSA
I’ve discovered browsing here and there through Objectivist writing that the first rule seems to be, “Don’t read anything that wasn’t written by an Objectivist, unless it was originally written in ancient Greek.” So Rand, being the first Objectivist, didn’t have too much to worry about…
I’m half-kidding, but I don’t generally expect Objectivists to be aware of any non-Objectivist work. A few years ago, for example, I was reading various Objectivist writings on the analytic-synthetic distinction, and I waded through thousands of words without once encountering the name Quine.
grumpy realist
He doesn’t go after Ayn Rand, but Stanislaw Lem did a very funny take on Dostoyevsky and Joyce in his “A Perfect Vacuum.” (Lem’s reviews of several imaginary literary books.) BTW, I recommend most of Lem’s books. “Memoirs found in a Bathtub” is a much more savage attack on the Soviet system than anything Rand ever came up with.
In keeping with my name, I try to read literary works in the original since so much does depend on the translator and I’ve run into so many real howlers. Also, it’s almost impossible to translate authors like Rabelais….
aimai
In defense of Gone With the Wind I think people are mistaking the character of scarlett with a real person, and scoring the book along the lines of “great literature/not great literature.” There are tons of gone with the winds–as many as there are viewers and readers. To my mind, since I detest the myth of the lost cause and etc…the gone with the wind I love is the one that explores the vanity and folly of the war and of the pre-war south and also exposes the stupidity and fakery behind the ideal of chivalry and feminine weakness. Scarlett is stupid, and vapid, and selfish, and all that but she’s the heroine because when the war, and the men, and society go mad and crush everything around them she fights to get back the wealth and power that she knows are the real thing. She fights, and ends up dragging all the other whiny, selfish, childish, bitches and her crazy father and weak and feeble ashley along with her. She doesn’t lie down and agonize over what she’s lost she gets up and fights not for the dreamy dream of the noble south but for food, and clothes, and money, and power. And that’s what Rhett loves about her, at least in the movie. But he also can’t forgive her (in the end) for being herself and not a cardboard cut out of a good little girl grown up/a perfect mother/perfect melanie like wife. And he walks out on her. But she still doesn’t give up.
That’s why its a great women’s movie and always will be.
aimai
pragmatic idealist
““A special little theory came in too – a theory of a sort – dividing mankind, you see, into material and superior persons, that is persons to whom the law does not apply owing to their superiority, who make laws for the rest of mankind, ”
– Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, Crime and Punishment”
Wow, what a perfect description of the Bush administration.
mclaren
Lupin claimed that Ayn Rand only wrote a couple of Hollwood scripts. In fact, Ayn Rand was fully credited for writing three Hollywood movies: Love Letters (1944), You Came Along (1945) and The Fountainhead (1949).
The Fountainhead is actually a good script. Yeah, I know — hard to believe, isn’t it? But Rand cut out essentially all the book’s turgid preachy dialogue, she hugely toned down Roark’s flake-a-mundo rape/seduction scene, she completely changed the main villain from a self-proclaimed commie into a nameless “bad guy,” and she cut down the over-the-top final speech by Roark in the courtroom from an epic 225 words to 130 words. She also submitted herself to all the requirements of the Hollywood censor board, which in the 1940s were pretty strict. Things like “unnecessary lip action” between the stars would get you in hot water, if you can imagine.
All told, The Fountainhead works well as a movie. Her screenplay moves right along. The absurdly phallic symbolism of the final scene, in which Patricia Neal ascends an elevator to the top of a giiiiiiiiiiiiiigantic penile skyscraper with an orgasmic look in her eyes while Gary Cooper struts and preens on top…well, unintentional humor just doesn’t come any better than this. (And I do mean “come,” ladies ‘n gents.)
Personally, I think Cooper was miscast. He seems too taciturn and reserved to play Roark convincingly, but Patricia Neal is delicious and Raymond Massey steals every scene he’s in. The architectural renderings, based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, look modernistic even today, so that works well too. Although the entire film is a completely wacky gallimaufry of crazy Objectivist cant and nutso characters with freaky names, it all works if you suspend your disbelief sufficiently. Good enough to waste a bowl of popcorn over, anyway. And yes, Rand wrote the entire screenplay by herself. She can’t write novels worth spit, but her 1949 Fountainhead screenplays really works.
Beauzeaux
@Common Sense:
Kane has always struck me as a product of Welles in his magician mode. Very flashy and a lot of jaw-dropping technique which still dazzles, but, yeah, the story is rather thin.
It’s too bad his next film, The Magnificent Ambersons, was mutilated by the studio while he was out of the country. That story was vastly more compelling and there are plentiful indications that Welles was rapidly maturing as a film director. The first third of Ambersons is nearly flawless. Unfortunately the film rapidly loses its punch after that, because the studio made massive cuts and re-shot some key scenes without Welles’ approval or input.
Enlightened Layperson
My question is, what would Ayn Rand have thought of Scarlett?
Enlightened Layperson
I read and loved Crime and Punishment. I must say, though, I never saw it so much as a rejection of the superman so much as a rejection of utilitarianism (at least in its cruder forms).
Raskolnikov chooses an worthless social parasite — a useless old pawnbroker. She squeezes the poor; she accumulates a huge fortune and never puts it to any useful purpose; she has no mercy for hard luck stories; she is suspected of beating her half-witted sister. Raskolnikov figures if he kills her, he can use her fortune to do countless good deeds that will outweigh the original crime. But it turns out not to work like that.
As I understand it, Dostoevsky’s intent was to mock theories popular on the Left in his day (not necessarily Marxism, but its predecessors) that reduced people to social roles instead of seeing them as sacred individuals with immortal souls. He was upholding the sanctity of the individual against what he saw as the appallingly mechanistic theories of the Left that regarded individuals as having no intrinsic worth, but only mattering for the role they played in society. (This subject was an obsession with him). That made Crime and Punishment a great conservative novel. Of course, that also makes it a great liberal novel. Great literature is like that — it transcends any crude political message and makes a universal and timeless statement about the human condition.
sfHeath
I worked on the stage version of C&P earlier this year. I liked it a lot, but what really made me happy was the axe murder. Why aren’t there more axe murders onstage? This play and “Evil Dead: The Musical” are the only two I can think of…
Enlightened Layperson
I have not read either anything by Rand or Jack London’s The Iron Heel, but my father says they always reminded him of each other a great deal. As I understand it, in The Iron Heel a capitalist tyranny has arisen in the US and crushed the common people under its iron heel. A small band of heroic socialists with a Gault-like leader are fighting their oppressors. He thinks that Rand loved London’s heroic individualist (!) socialist fighting capitalism and turned him into a heroic individualist capitalist fighting socialism.
I haven’t read either book myself, but put this out for the consideration of anyone who has read The Iron Heel.
Bubblegum Tate
I was a philosophy minor in college. In damn near every class, there was some Randroid who tried to argue with everything because “but…but…but…objectivism!” It got to be a running joke among the profs, some of whom tried to gently inform such students that Rand is not a serious philosopher so much as somebody constantly trying to retcon the world to fit her inner surly teenager, and some of whom merely rolled their eyes, let the Randroids have their say, and quickly moved on.
I was also an English major. Randroids didn’t even bother bringing her up in English class–most of them understood what a monumentally awful writer she was.
On the subect of Russian lit, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, if “enjoyed” is the right word to use for such a depressing work. Furthermore, I would just like state for the record that Lolita is a work whose genius cannot be overstated.
On the subject of Joyce, I really did like “Araby,” and I’m not even going to pretend that I read Ulysses.
@sfHeath:
Isn’t there a play about Lizzie Borden? Or is that just a figment of my imagination?
Interrobang
This thread is great; it’s wonderful to see so many people who are as cranky about what I refer to as the Whitest and Deadest of the Dead White Men as I am, having done a degree and a half or so in English literature. (Granted, I did it in Canada, where one does English literature, so I never read the Russians mostly…)
I feel about the same as the majority of people here about James Joyce. If someone can explain to me exactly what The Dubliners was supposed to be about, I’d appreciate it, since it seemed to me to be a bunch of vignettes (no visible plot!) about a bunch of unremarkable people, so there’s basically no there there. I kept expecting some brilliant O. Henry style endings and they just kept not happening. I always thought that in order to really get it, you probably had to grow up Irish Catholic, and I didn’t.
On the other hand, I’m enough of a child of my times that I missed the fact that in The Great Gatsby, the car accident is supposed to be the great pivotal event, and so I read the whole thing waiting for the plot to start. I was 18 when I read it and didn’t quite grasp that at the time it was written, car accidents were much more remarkable than they are now.
By the way, Common Sense, Robertson Davies is considered integral to the canon in Canada, so you could just claim to be into CanLit. (Of course, in order to do that, you’d also have to take Margaret Atwood –blurch–, Ernest Buckler, and W. O. Mitchell, so maybe you’d rather not…on the upside, you’d get Anne Hebert and Marie-Claire Blais too.)
Bubblegum Tate
@Interrobang:
That was me reading Ethan Frome. God, I hated that fucking turd of a book. It was the teacher’s favorite novel, and I used to rip on it mercilessly. I got thrown out of class a lot during that part of the lesson plan.
Reason60
I think it is a fitting cosmic irony that the advocate of individualism and free thinking is remembered today mostly for her unthinking cultish followers.
McGeorge Bundy
@Interrobang: Dubliners a bunch of vignettes? Who would have guessed! It’s not a novel, it’s a collection of naturalist short stories depicting everyday life in Dublin.
Jack
@Reason60:
…her inner circle, while she was alive, was known as The Collective:
http://www.2think.org/02_2_she.shtml
Anne Laurie
@Bubblegum Tate:
As a horror novel, it’s damned effective. I read it right after reading some Ann Radcliffe (I was on a Northanger Abbey kick), and to me it seemed like Wharton was doing a modernized version of the three-volume Gothick thriller. The traveller reaches the benighted Village of the Doomed, and we wait with an increasing sense of dread for the lifting of the Dreadful Veil… much creepier than Turn of the Screw, which is the high-school-lit standard for that trope.
Bubblegum Tate
@Anne Laurie:
A valiant defense–and an intriguing one, I must admit–but it’s just not gonna do it for me. I hated that book, and I think Dave Barry pretty much nailed it here:
McGeorge Bundy
I don’t know who Dave Barry is, but Ethan Frome is not an “early American novel.” It was published in the 20th century.
Jay in Oregon
@McGeorge Bundy:
Dave Barry is a humor columnist. Factual errors are likely intentional.
http://www.miamiherald.com/dave_barry/
Batocchio
@gogol’s wife:
Spaceba! That was my impression, that Burgin/O’Connor was better, from browsing through the P&V translation in a book store. I find some of the other Bulgakov translations a bit stiff, although I’m sympathetic to the challenges of translating him. (I studied at MXAT for a semester, but my Russian is mostly conversational and rusty at that. I do own a Russian copy of Master, though.)
Batocchio
Also, two of Woody Allen’s best films (if you’re a fan) are inspired by Dostoyevsky – Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point.
W.B. Reeves
I have to agree with those who say this is an awesome thread. It’s nice to know that some else has read A Hero for OurTime. I find it interesting that I agree with most of the raves while disagreeing with most pans. The single exception being that I share in the general contempt of Ayn Rand’s pretense of being a novelist. I’m really astounded that some one who not only appreciated Dostoevsky but actually had such insights into his talent could have been the next thing to functionally illiterate in her own writing.
For myself I love Twain and Dostoevsky, Melville and Orwell, Shakespeare and Joyce, etc. I think they are all great writers.
Since the discussion has been weighted toward the Russians, I would suggest an addition to the reading list. The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge. It’s the finest thing I have ever read dealing with the mass repression in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
A parting shot on Rand. Robert A. Heinlein was both a better writer and a better thinker.
gogol's wife
@Batocchio: You might be interested in this article: http://www.thinkaloud.ru/feature/berdy-lan-PandV-e.html