Well, not quite. But Conan creator Robert E. Howard’s 1933 story “Talons in the Dark” (also titled “Black Talons”) does feature a character named John Galt. (It’s not a particularly good story, but there ya go.)
Tag Archives | Rand
The Plot Thickens
The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet:
if a melody has not reached its end,
it has not reached its goal.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow
Beginning fiction writers are often told to ask themselves whether something they want to put in will “advance the story” or “advance the plot.” Rand, for example, wrote that an author should “devise a logical structure of events, a sequence in which every major event is connected with, determined by and proceeds from the preceding events of the story – a sequence in which nothing is irrelevant, arbitrary or accidental, so that the logic of the events leads inevitably to a final resolution.”
On the face of it this seems like bad advice. After all, the point of a story is not to get to the end as quickly as possible; it’s to enjoy the journey along the way. It’s certainly true that all the elements one includes should hang together organically and contribute positively to the work as a whole, but to equate that with pushing the plot along is to reduce the work to its plot.
Admittedly one function a story element can serve is to advance the plot. Advancing the plot is one desideratum among others, but in each case it needs to be weighed against competing considerations; it’s not an iron rule that trumps everything else.
Consider Key Largo (a Bogart-Bacall movie far inferior to, say, The Big Sleep or To Have and Have Not). The characters are holed up in an inn during a hurricane, and being held hostage by a gangster, an escaped con who is waiting for a boat that will take him out of the country. The gangster has been reunited with his former girlfriend, an aging ex-singer, and at one point he demands that she sing to the group.
At that point the filmmakers have a choice: should she sing well or badly? is she still in good form, or is she over the hill? They choose to have her sing badly, and doing so indeed serves to move the plot along: her poor singing leads the gangster to treat her cruelly, which allows Bogart’s character to express sympathy for her, which in turn lays the groundwork for her betraying the gangster to help Bogart later on. Having her sing well wouldn’t have moved the plot forward at all. But just imagine: in the middle of a Florida Keys hurricane – the winds howling outside, the lights flickering – a singer stands up and sings beautifully, hauntingly, defying the storm without and the terror within …. Wouldn’t it have made a better scene? It would have improved the movie for this viewer, at least; I’d happily trade away the more plot-integrated scene for the more beautiful scene.
Nevertheless, the advice I mentioned above isn’t necessarily bad advice. We may think of it as remedial advice; advice that describes, not the way an accomplished practitioner would do things, but rather something that may help an un accomplished practitioner become accomplished. Aristotle says the right thing to do is whatever the wise person would do; but since he recognises that an unwise person may have trouble identifying what the wise person would do, he also recommends erring on the side of the vice that is the opposite of one’s own vice. For example, the coward should err on the side of being too bold and the rash person should err on the side of being too cautious. In this case his advice is not to do what the wise person would do (the wise person would not err on either side), but to do what will make it easier for one to develop the habits that help one become a wise person.
Similarly, the requirement often taught in grade school composition, that each paragraph should have a “topic sentence,” can look utterly crazy if it’s thought of as a description of what good writers do – since good writers of course do no such thing. But it’s less crazy advice (I’m not actually convinced that it’s especially good advice, but anyway it’s less crazy) if thought of as on a par with training wheels, as a way of forcing writers to think about the unity of their paragraphs, and thus curbing the tendency to make breaks among paragraphs arbitrary.
On the same principle, telling writers to make sure that every element advances the plot no matter what can be good remedial advice, as a corrective to the tendency of inexperienced writers to let their stories become episodic and fragmented. But this shouldn’t be confused with a description of what accomplished writers actually do. And fortunately, writers (e.g., Rand) who give this sort of advice as though it were something more than remedial are usually too sensible to follow it religiously in their own works. (Rand is not fanatically averse to coincidence in her plots, for example.)
Free Roark!
Amazingly, the entire film of The Fountainhead – with all its many cinematic virtues and vices (I’ll get into a list of each some other time) – appears to be available to view online. As I assume this film is still under Time-Warner’s IP control, I suspect it may be yanked down before long. But for now, there it is.
Ayn Rand Institute Lets Us Read Some Rand!
People will be able to look up BREAKFAST and see
that I did not advocate eating babies for breakfast.
– Ayn Rand
If I were running the Ayn Rand Institute – admittedly an unlikely turn of events – I’d make all of Rand’s writings available online. (So far the only major Rand work available online got there by mistake, because Peikoff & Co. apparently forgot to renew the U.S. copyright on Anthem.) So why hasn’t ARI taken this obvious step? Do they really value copyright revenue more than the chance to promote Rand’s ideas? If so, they’re still probably miscalculating: I suspect putting Rand’s works online would stimulate more book sales than it would stifle. (The Mises Institute, for example, puts loads of stuff online and yet the paper versions sell like hotcakes.)
But I suspect ARI’s decision not to put the writings online has been driven less by mercenary considerations than by some sort of notion that it’s immoral, a violation of the Trader Principle, to hand out benefits without receiving anything in return. If so, it’s a misunderstanding of the Trader Principle; unless the folks running ARI regard themselves (or Rand, insofar as they take themselves to be her agents) as having no personal interest in promoting Rand’s ideas (in which case, what’s the point of ARI?), they presumably would receive a “selfish” benefit by putting them online, and thus could do so with a clear egoist conscience.
Whatever the reason, ARI’s refusal to disseminate Rand’s writings in the most effective manner seems nearly as self-defeating as Andrew Galambos’s refusal to disseminate his writings in any form. (I’m reminded of the Shakers, a sect which died out because its tenets forbade reproduction.)
But a small chink has appeared in the armour of ARI’s anti-web policy: the Ayn Rand Lexicon has been placed online. (Conical hat tip to Karen DeCoster.) Admittedly this is a comparatively unimportant text; it’s just a collection of quotations from Rand (and sometimes her acolytes as well) on various subjects, arranged alphabetically by topic (apparently the editors were under the misapprehension that alphabetical order of topics is sufficient to make a book a “lexicon”). But it’s a start.
Randian Queries
1. A theory of universals is traditionally supposed to answer two questions: first, what makes generic identity possible across specific difference (e.g., what makes red horses and brown horses both count as horses?), and second, what makes qualitative identity (whether generic or specific) possible across numerical difference (e.g., how can red-horse-hood exist in both of these red horses at the same time when they are two horses rather than one?).
I understand Rand’s answer to the first question: red horses and brown horses possess different measurements of the same attribute, and we grasp the attribute by mentally omitting the measurements. But this can’t be her answer to the second question, since this solution, by helping itself to the notion of “same attribute,” presupposes that the second question has already been answered.
So what I’m wondering is: what is Rand’s answer to the second question? Does she even address the second question, or does she mistakenly think that all the philosophical fuss about universals has solely been about the first question? One reason for thinking she doesn’t quite see the second question is that when she first introduces the problem of universals (in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology) she describes it this way:
When we refer to three persons as “men,” what do we designate by that term? The three persons are three individuals who differ in every particular respect and may not possess a single identical characteristic (not even their fingerprints). If you list all their particular characteristics, you will not find one representing “manness.” Where is the “manness” in men?
It’s clear from what Rand says here (e.g. the reference to fingerprints) that by “differ” and “identical” she means to signify qualitative difference and qualitative identity, not numerical difference and numerical identity. But in that case she’s missed half the question. Before we can start worrying about how it’s possible for two things to be qualitatively identical in the generic sense without being qualitatively identical in any specific sense, don’t we first need to justify the puzzling notion of qualitative identity per se?
2. In her 1964 article “Patents and Copyrights” (reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal) , Rand offers inter alia the following argument:
As an objection to the patent laws, some people cite the fact that two inventors may work independently for years on the same invention, but one will beat the other to the patent office by an hour or a day and will acquire an exclusive monopoly, while the loser’s work will then be totally wasted. This type of objection is based on the error of equating the potential with the actual. The fact that a man might have been first, does not alter the fact that he wasn’t. Since the issue is one of commercial rights, the loser in a case of that kind has to accept the fact that in seeking to trade with others he must face the possibility of a competitor winning the race, which is true of all types of competition.
Here my question is this: does the patent office create the right, or merely record a pre-existing right? Because if the patent office creates the right, that seems to attributing to government a more sweeping authority than Rand ordinarily wishes to grant. But if instead the patent office records a pre-existing right, then that right, existing prior to certification by the state, cannot be lost by failing to receive such certification.
Nor is Rand’s analogy with commercial competition helpful. What I have on entering the market is not an unconditional right to sell my product, but only a right to try to sell it, or in other words, a right to sell it if I find a willing buyer. So if I am outcompeted by a rival seller who snaps up all my potential customers first, I haven’t lost any right. But if my rival beats me to the patent office, I do lose the right to try to find a willing buyer for my product (and the potential buyers likewise lose the right to try to buy from me). What justifies this?
After I wrote the above, I thought to look through my older writings on copyright to see whether I’d commented on Rand’s argument before. Turns out I did, and said basically the same thing:
Rand is suggesting that the competition to get to the patent office first is like any other kind of commercial competition. For example, suppose you and I are competing for the same job, and you happen to get hired simply because you got to the employer before I did. In that case, the fact that I might have gotten there first does not give me any rightful claim to the job. But that is because I have no right to the job in the first place. And once you get the job, your rightful claim to that job depends solely on the fact that your employer chose to hire you.
In the case of patents, however, the story is supposed to be different. The basis of an inventor’s claim to a patent on X is supposedly the fact that he has invented X. (Otherwise, why not offer patent rights over X to anyone who stumbles into the patent office, regardless of whether they’ve ever even heard of X?) Registering one’s invention with the patent office is supposed to record one’s right, not to create it. Hence it follows that the person who arrives at the patent office second has just as much right as the one who arrives first – and this is surely a reductio ad absurdum of the whole notion of patents.
Oh well, I guess there’s nothing wrong with having two different wordings of the same objection out there.
No Cliffhangers Here
One of the reasons given for not filming Atlas Shrugged as a trilogy, Lord of the Rings style, is that, by contrast with Lord of the Rings, the middle book of Atlas ends with a cliffhanger (as Dagny’s plane, its engine failing, hurtles downward toward the crags of the Colorado Rockies).
That’s so true; there’s no way you could make a trilogy of movies out of a work whose middle part ends with a cliffhanger. Thank goodness, then, that the middle book of Lord of the Rings doesn’t end like this:
The great doors slammed to. Boom. The bars of iron fell into place inside. Clang. The gate was shut. Sam hurled himself against the bolted brazen plates and fell senseless to the ground. He was out in the darkness. Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy.
And ditto for the upcoming Barsoom saga, likewise being filmed as a trilogy – which they’d never be able to do if the second book had ended like this:
And as she finished speaking I saw her raise a dagger on high, and then I saw another figure. It was Thuvia’s. As the dagger fell toward the unprotected breast of my love, Thuvia was almost between them. A blinding gust of smoke blotted out the tragedy within that fearsome cell – a shriek rang out, a single shriek, as the dagger fell.
The smoke cleared away, but we stood gazing upon a blank wall. The last crevice had closed, and for a long year that hideous chamber would retain its secret from the eyes of men. …
Ah! If I could but know one thing, what a burden of suspense would be lifted from my shoulders! But whether the assassin’s dagger reached one fair bosom or another, only time will divulge.
The story also mentions the Matrix and Star Wars trilogies. The second acts of those trilogies certainly didn’t end on cliffhangers either, did they?