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Tristyn Bloom
Matthew Cantirino
Anthony Esolen
Gene Fant
Greg Forster
Matthew J. Franck
Collin Garbarino
Robert P. George
William J. Haun
Leroy Huizenga
Katherine Infantine
Joseph Knippenberg
David T. Koyzis
Robert T. Miller
Matthew Milliner
David Mills
Mark Movsesian
William Mumma
Nathaniel Peters
R.R. Reno
James R. Rogers
Russell E. Saltzman
Matthew Schmitz
Kevin Staley-Joyce
David Talcott
Anna Williams
“I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”
-Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being
August 16th, 2012 | 11:22 am
I’ve heard people say that Randism is like Satanism without the hedonism. It’s the kind of thing that appeals to 14-year-old boys until they start realizing they need other people too.
August 16th, 2012 | 11:40 am
[...] {Thanks to First Things} [...]
August 16th, 2012 | 11:59 am
In retrospect, it’s hard to grasp the literary snobbery against Spillane (and his heir in many ways, Ian Fleming). By today’s lights they’re rather tame, and maybe the greater coarseness of our own time permits their literary merits–which are real–to shine through in a way that was not possible half a century ago.
Something similar may be true of Rand. Despite the torrent of media in our culture–novels, film, TV, the web–overall it has such a deadening sameness to it. In such an environment, Rand’s heterodoxy is bracing. Maybe O’Connor is right that her works would rank low on the scale of literature, but they reveal truthful things that are otherwise veiled in the cultural products of our time. It’s interesting to be in the world she creates, even if you ultimately have scruples about the desirability of such a world. And it can meaningfully clarify those scruples to confront Rand’s world.
That’s a pretty worthwhile literary purpose, which doesn’t deserve to be merely dismissed. (Now if only you didn’t have to slog through a thousand-page tome to have that experience.)
August 16th, 2012 | 12:36 pm
Oddly enough, in an interview with Playboy magazine, Ayn Rand said that Mickey Spillane was her favorite contemporary novelist:
I prefer the popular literature of today, which is today’s remnant of Romanticism. My favorite is Mickey Spillane.
PLAYBOY: Why do you like him?
RAND: Because he is primarily a moralist. In a primitive form, the form of a detective novel, he presents the conflict of good and evil, in terms of black and white. He does not present a nasty gray mixture of indistinguishable scoundrels on both sides. He presents an uncompromising conflict. As a writer, he is brilliantly expert at the aspect of literature which I consider most important: plot structure.
August 16th, 2012 | 12:50 pm
Right on, Flannery. ‘Truthful things’ that Ms Rand reveals in her capitalist bodice-rippers? Like ‘A=A’ perhaps? Like ‘existence exists’? (Real stunners, those.) Like rational self-interest is the highest good (thanks, Ms Rand, for that useful corrective to the Sermon on the Mount)?
August 16th, 2012 | 2:00 pm
Huh. If you want good vs. evil, it’s quite true that you want genre rather than literary fiction, but if the only genre author she stumbled across was Spillane — she wasn’t trying very hard to look.
August 16th, 2012 | 5:12 pm
She’s right on. That’s reason 762 that I like Flannery.
not only is Rand’s fiction abysmal, but her philosophy is ‘objectionable’ (thank you, thank you — I’m here all week). Seriously, Rand blows.
August 16th, 2012 | 7:39 pm
Over the last 50 years, many studies have been conducted, asking people what book most changed their lives.
Answer #1 – The Bible
Answer #2 – Atlas Shrugged
near the bottom, around the -33,000 mark is : “Anything by Flannery O’Connor”
‘Nuff said.
August 16th, 2012 | 8:47 pm
Whatever you think of Rand’s ideas, her fiction – judged as fiction – is in fact wretched.
As a general rule, if what you want to communicate are the sort of claims normally dealt with via nonfiction, you should write good nonfiction, not bad fiction.
August 16th, 2012 | 9:44 pm
I’d much rather have my life changed by O’Connor than Rand if I had to choose and I was seeking a change for the better. However, a writer like Tolstoy can write rather well and still make an idiosyncratic and prideful dismissal of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I suspect though O’Connor’s dismissal had more merit than Tolstoy’s.
August 16th, 2012 | 10:03 pm
“asking people what book most changed their lives.”
Oddly enough, numbers 3, 4, and 5 on these lists are all entries in the Encyclopedia Brown mystery series. That kid was a little genius. Ayn Rand would not last a minute against his analytical skills. Plus he was a lot nicer.
August 17th, 2012 | 12:06 am
Interesting gauging these matters based on popularity. A lot of people partake of a lot of particularly unfortunate things which also change their lives. What should we infer about that, Craig?
August 17th, 2012 | 4:52 am
It is worth pointing out the root principle underlying Ayn Rand’s philosophy; it is one that has a long pedigree.
It was a fundamental principle of the Enlightenment that the nature of the human person can be adequately described without mention of social relationships. A person’s relations with others, even if important, are not essential and describe nothing that is, strictly speaking, necessary to one’s being what one is. This principle underlies all their talk about the “state of nature” and the “social contract,” and from it is derived the notion that the only obligations are those voluntarily assumed.
One can see it clearly expressed in Bentham, who describes the idea of “relation” as but a “fictitious entity,” though necessary for “convenience of discourse.” And, more specifically, he remarks that “the community is a fictitious body,” and it is but “the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.” Rand, like Nietzsche before her, merely carries this idea to its logical conclusion and it is one that vitiates her ethics, politics and economics.
The incoherence of this notion has been demonstrated by Wittgenstein, particularly in his Philosophical Investigations,” in which he shows that the idea of a “private language” is meaningless. The idea of the atomized individual collapses along with it, for reason is only mimic discourse – “In the beginning was the Word.”
It is the very antithesis of Aristotle’s principle that man is a political animal; for him, as for St Thomas, the individual can only be adequately described in terms of his relationship to the polis or community of which he is a living element.
August 17th, 2012 | 7:01 am
[...] Ayn Rand has been in the news recently, thanks to Paul Ryan. Famed Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor was not a fan. [...]
August 17th, 2012 | 8:27 am
[...] won’t go into the literary quality of Rand’s novels, which is, to quote Flannery O’Connor, “as low as you can get.” If I’d received a copy of Atlas Shrugged for Christmas as a present [...]
August 17th, 2012 | 8:58 am
How true. The most fundamental error is that it assumes that people start adults. They in fact start squalling and helpless creatures who would surely die without aid.
August 17th, 2012 | 10:06 am
Michael:
I am not very sure that it is a premise in the enlightment philosophy to see human beings in an atomistic way. And certainly I wouldn´t count Bentham as an Enlightment figure. Actuallly, the qualities of human nature are described in a methaphysicall sense since the greeks (saying aristotle spoke of a political animal doesn´t mean he didn´t thought the mind in mere abstract ways), including the christian medieval tradition. The thinker who realled started thinking human nature in terms of social relations was Marx, which I am not very sure conservatives are very fond of.
Now, I´ve never been a fan of Ayn Rand myself (I have disliked her followers in every instance I met one of them). My libertarianism is more informed by more tradtional figures (XIX century french liberal economists, XIX century anarchist such as Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker, austrian school of economics, Robert Nozick etc…). But such contempt from the right for her my make me reconsider my position.
August 17th, 2012 | 5:38 pm
I had the distinct pleasure of escorting Ms. O’Connor up and the down the stage steps of Marquette Hall of Loyola New Orleans where she was giving a lecture on literature and fiction. I had never read any of works until then. I had a short story read to me in high school. She was marvelous, charming lecture so much so that I immediately went and read three of he works without stopping I have been hooked ever since. I share her appraisal of Ms. Rand’s fiction. It is not uplifting at all
August 17th, 2012 | 7:11 pm
[...] won’t go into the literary quality of Rand’s novels, which is, to quote Flannery O’Connor, “as low as you can get.” If I’d received a copy of Atlas Shrugged for Christmas as a present [...]
August 18th, 2012 | 3:54 pm
Not long before he died William F. Buckley discussed Ayn Rand on Charlie Rose’s show. Mr. Buckley reprised his meeting with her in which she told him “You are too intelligent to believe in God. ” He also said “I had to flog myself to get through ATLAS SHRUGGED.” Although he had enjoyed THE FOUNTAINHEAD. I doubt the founder of the National Review would have been fastidious about supporting Rep. Ryan on the presidential ticket. Their views on economics are essentially the same and Ms. Rand would have been in fundamental agreement as well. Literary criticism isn’t going to get us out of the mess were in and which will deepen if the current occupant of the White House is re-elected. As I recall the president’s literary efforts were universally praised. As the rector of the minor seminary I attended as a boy told me — you’re strong in the humanities but weak in math. If only the president had received a similar evaluation as a young man. Not that he would have listened…
August 18th, 2012 | 7:01 pm
[...] Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand – Anna Williams, First Things/First Thoughts [...]
August 19th, 2012 | 1:15 am
I always liked this quote…
“Two novels can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs.” Kung Fu Monkey
August 19th, 2012 | 10:01 am
[...] Flannery O’Connor, God rest her acerbic soul, said this about Ayn Rand: I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re: fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky. (The Habit of Being, h/t Anna Williams at First Thoughts). [...]
August 20th, 2012 | 1:47 am
[...] the church is to mean anything going forward it must be on side of liberation.”“She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”“If you’re a Christian, you’ve got to ask some serious questions about [...]
August 20th, 2012 | 4:26 am
Actually, that’s an insult to Mickey Spillane. Sure his writing style was gritty, cynical and violent; but it was also just that — *stylish!* Rand, on the other hand, had all the style of a prison menu — utterly unappetizing and it makes you sick to think that one human would give something like that to another.
August 20th, 2012 | 9:52 am
The Buckley interview with Rose on NR’s critique of Rand notwithstanding, there is a debate to be articulated on Ryan’s alleged flirtation with Randism from the perspective of Aquinas and Thomistic natural law which could clarify conservatism and the dilemmas of modernity with its diluted public square. Among other metaphysical and ethical problems, she misses the communitarian dimension of Aristotle’s observation that man is by nature a social animal, as well as the ontological effects of charity on human happiness.
August 20th, 2012 | 10:40 am
To Craig: You may not be familiar with O’Connor, but she is hugely influential in American and world literature despite not living to see 40. She is also treasured by Catholics.
August 20th, 2012 | 1:14 pm
RAND: Because he is primarily a moralist. In a primitive form, the form of a detective novel, he presents the conflict of good and evil, in terms of black and white. He does not present a nasty gray mixture of indistinguishable scoundrels on both sides. He presents an uncompromising conflict.
I would say that this is a comic-book view of morality, but that would be unfair to comic books, which discovered moral nuance a couple of decades ago.
August 20th, 2012 | 4:21 pm
So some folks here don’t like Ayn Rand’s writings. Yeah, and some folks find the books of the Bible tiresome to read too.
So some folks here don’t like the behavior of the characters in Ayn Rand’s books. Yeah, and some folks find the behavior of the characters in the books of the Bible reprehensible too – including sainted ones such as Moses (a murderer), David (a murderer and an adulterer), Peter (a coward and a liar)… examples abound.
By the same standards to which Ayn Rand’s ideas are being judged by some folks here, one must also conclude that Christianity is an intolerably ugly system too.
Or maybe some folks here would like to grow up and engage the ideas rather than indulge in a food-fight over literary dislikes and lives lived in sin.
August 20th, 2012 | 10:02 pm
@ Craig
Over the last 50 years, many studies have been conducted, asking people what book most changed their lives.
Answer #1 – The Bible
Answer #2 – Atlas Shrugged
near the bottom, around the -33,000 mark is : “Anything by Flannery O’Connor”
‘Nuff said.
“around the -33,000 mark” Rigghht.
You can’t really cite any studies, either, can you?
Several years ago, a friend of mine was dying of cancer. I had been driving her to church and such for a couple of years and we often talked about books. Several times she told me what a great book Atlas Shrugged was. She had read it when she was 18 and really wanted to read it again before she died. She was 72 then.
The last time I visited her before she died, she told me she had finally gotten a copy of Atlas Shrugged, read it, and wondered how she could have ever thought it was a great book.
It would be interesting to know how many other people have had similar experiences with Ayn Rand’s books. Of course there are other books we like at 18, find simplistic if we read them again years later.
Flannery O’Connor was not the writer who told Mike Wallace she was “the most creative person in the world.” Ayn Rand was the one who said that when Wallace interviewed her. Not a very objective thinker, was she?
August 21st, 2012 | 12:52 am
“some folks find the behavior of the characters in the books of the Bible reprehensible too – including sainted ones such as Moses (a murderer), David (a murderer and an adulterer), Peter (a coward and a liar)… examples abound.”
Yet the Christian’s focus is on Jesus, far from a reprehensible figure.
Yes, the discussion is on ideas and 200 year, 2000 years from now the ideas and teachings of Christianity will continue. Ayn Rand’s ideas will fade and become increasingly obscured over the next couple of decades.
August 24th, 2012 | 12:43 pm
The funny thing about Objectivists is the sheer weight of resentment and anger they seem to carry around against all them moochers out there.
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