Rand’s fiction is rife with romantic triangles and quadrangles, with adultery and divorce, with homoerotic bonds among a heroine’s multiple lovers (though homoeroticism among women is unimaginable in the Randian fictional universe). There is no birth control or abortion, few children, virtually no housework. The sex scenes feature conquest and eroticized physical struggle as powerful women submit to dominant men. But they do not then cling, depend, or nag—only the weak and the wives do that. And the romances emphatically do not end in marriage. These are fantasies for the New Woman that cut in multiple directions. Aspirational creative and professional freedom, circumscribed within a context of consensual, ecstatic sexual submission to heroic men, is available to the superior single woman producer. All the other women are either nagging parasites or starving primitives and incompetents.
The sixty pages that are John Galt’s radio script took Rand nearly two years to write. In a tone of supremely confident authority, and with seemingly endless repetitive detail, it lays out her logical elaborations from her rendering of the philosophy of Aristotle, through the supreme value of reason, to the morality of individualism and the superiority of capitalism. The lessons for the student/reader are: reason is superior to mysticism/religion, egoism is a truer morality than altruism, and individualism leads upward and forward via capitalism, while collectivism leads down and back to socialist barbarism. When her editor at Random House, Bennett Cerf, asked her to cut the speech, she notoriously replied, “Would you cut the Bible?
Sayfa 114
"Sexy, gorgeous, brilliant, and thoroughly admirable heroes" so true
The plot of Atlas Shrugged is basically a moral fable that reverses the moral premises of early twentieth-century socialism and of midcentury welfare state liberalism. The novel represents the “producers” who own and run industrial capitalism as sexy, gorgeous, brilliant, and thoroughly admirable heroes, as contrasted with the flabby, unattractive, incompetent, unproductive moochers and state-backed bureaucratic looters, parasites, and thugs. Originally titled “The Strike,” the novel outlines the impact on the world when the producers—the creators and innovators of industry, science, and intellectual life—rather than the unionized workers—withdraw their labor. The “engine of the world” progressively collapses, until the lights literally go out in New York City in a scene of desperate chaos. The producers have withdrawn to the hero John Galt’s Gulch, planning to return once the world collapses without them.
Sayfa 110
Okur Takip Önerileri
Good question, go girlie!
How could a thousand-plus-page novel, featuring cartoonish characters moving through a melodramatic plot peppered with long didactic speeches, attract so many readers and so much attention? Clearly, the fantasies animating the novel struck a deep chord, resonating widely, illuminating and shaping cultural fissures from an emerging right-wing secular capitalist or “libertarian” point of view.
Hahah depends on what you want to see
Time magazine summarized the overall reception of the novel by asking, “Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare?”
Sayfa 109 - "The Solid-Gold Dollar Sign,” Time, Oct. 14, 1957.