Why the hell am I rereading Atlas Shrugged?
The last time I read it was the summer before my senior year in high school. I wanted to get into the AP Lit class, and to do that you first had to write this quick essay sometime in the last month of your junior year. I don’t remember anything about that essay, but I passed that first test and got permission to get through the second trial: read three books over the summer, keep a journal full of your notes for each book, and write a three to five page essay for each one, all of which was to be due by, like, mid-August, I think. These three pieces were Blindess by Jose Saramago, An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen, and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
The notes I kept for Blindess and An Enemy of the People didn’t even make up half of what I took for Atlas Shrugged. I filled up over half of a three subject notebook. In the beginning of the notebook I tried to keep everything very civil and appropriate. Then I realized that if I was going to do this for the next two months and not give up, I was going to have to do it my way.
So I started swearing. Profusely. I felt like all of the notes I took were relevant to the text and incisive, but I wasn’t afraid to yell at a character, call out what I thought was going to happen next, or, in the case of getting to Galt’s speech, threaten suicide (“If this entire chapter is the speech, I am going to pound a nail into my forehead with a sneaker.”). I turned in the notebooks, along with my paper, a couple of days before the due date, and found out before school started that I had passed and I was going to get into the class.
The teacher was Mr. McCallum, a gangly, bespectacled man who was too good for my crappy high school. On the first day of school he welcomed us to the class, congratulated us for making it in, and brought up our summer assignments.
“Your papers were excellent, and your notebooks were…amusing…which one of you is Shannon?”
I raised my hand quickly. I wasn’t afraid he was going to be mad – he’d already accepted me into the class. He couldn’t kick me out now. And it’s funny how when something happens you think you’ll remember every detail for the rest of your life, but I already can’t remember exactly what he did after that, only that it was an acknowledgement that it was going to be a weird year.
So, I’ve already had a months long relationship with this book, why reread it? Especially since I have a long list of unread books in front of me, and Atlas Shrugged isn’t exactly something you can skim through over a meal.
First, it’s been six years since I last read it, and I feel like my perspectives have changed a lot since then. I spent four years in college to get an English: Creative Writing degree. I feel like I come at books a lot differently than I did in high school, both in the way I look at them as a reader and they way I look at them as a writer.
Second, I had kind of an attitude with Ayn Rand and the characters of this book the first time I read it. I’d like to find out if that attitude holds, or if I was just being a snotty teenager.
And finally, I am currently hanging out in Rand Land on the Road to Finnegan’s Wake, and not reading Atlas Shrugged while in Rand Land is like going everywhere except the Eiffel Tower while in Paris.
I’m reading Atlas Shrugged while I go through the other Ayn Rand books I have to hopefully speed things along a little, but seeing as how I’ve written around fifteen hundred words just for the first ten pages, I might be reading this for a while. For now I plan to be this in-depth with my notes, because Atlas Shrugged is a long, heavy, and dense book, ‘dense’ both in the sense that the pages are about as thin Kate Moss (cheap shot!) and the words are printed to be about the size of dust mites, and in the sense that there is about half a million things going on in this book at any given moment.
I’ll be breaking it down to short sections like these because holy shit this thing is eleven hundred pages long. If I tried to do just one write up on it at the end I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Also, while I want to do a small section a day, next month I go back to school to get a second degree, so I can’t guarantee that schedule.
So, with that, we’ll quit inching out way into the cold lake water and dive in.
Pages 11-20
· And we’re off with a bang! “Who is John Galt,” possibly the most annoying question on the face of the planet and a perfect start to the story. I might as well keep a tally on how many times the question “Who is John Galt?” gets asked in this thing, so we can start the tally off at one.
· One of the things I found out when I read this back in high school is that the name ‘Galt’ means ‘high ground,’ which indicates to ME, anyway, that Ayn Rand is one of those writers who picks names with a purpose, rather than just opening up the phone book at random. ‘John,’ means ‘God’s grace,’ but it’s also one of the most popular boy’s names in the English language, so I imagine it was picked to give Mr. Galt an everyman feel.
· Eddie Willers. By the end of this section we know three things about Eddie: one, he is one of the novel’s good guys; two, he is clearly unhappy with the way most everything is going; and three, he is in love with Dagny Taggart. Yeah, we haven’t even met Dagny yet, nor gotten her name. She is just the unnamed sister to James Taggart, both of whom Eddie grew up with. But between the half baked memory of talking to ‘her’ from his childhood to the way James gets all moody when Eddie brings her up, it’s fairly obvious boyfriend is crushing hardcore.
· Also, Eddie is short for Edwin (I totally cheated on this one and looked it up on Wikipedia because Eddie is short for, like, six different things). ‘Edwin’ supposedly means ‘friend of riches,’ which I’d say is apt. ‘Willers’ is a sort of common surname that points to him being English and German, but if you fudge it a bit and decide it’s some form of ‘William,’ you get ‘determined guardian.’ I honestly don’t remember much of Eddie’s role, so we’ll wait and see what happens on that one.
· Ayn Rand Nerd Alert! “It’s the twilight, he thought; I hate the twilight.” I KNEW she’d hate that shit.
· Rand then does a superb job of showing the readers just how much we’re NOT in our world for the following events:
“The clouds and the shafts of skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of a motionless lightning, the length of ten stories. A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire, still holding the glow of a sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire; not an active fire, but a dying one which it is too late to stop.
No, thought Eddie Willers, there was nothing disturbing in the sight of the city. It looked as it had always looked” (p12).
The emphasis up there is mine, because despite the fact that I still think Rand isn’t entirely graced in subtlety and nuance, she kills it here. A quick description of New York City that sounds more like Pripyat than any American city ever, and a character living in it who thinks everything is just fine and dandy. Immediately you’re thrust into the world, and then immediately after that you’re thrust into that world’s way of thinking. On the same page, just to hammer it all home, we get this little gem:
“He enjoyed the sigh of a prosperous street; not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty.”
That’s Fifth Avenue he’s talking about. And he’s loving every minute of it. At this point, as the reader, you should be completely aware that this New York City is not our New York City, and this New York City has gone FUBAR.
· Also, enjoy some heavy symbolism!
“The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot on the Taggart estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree’s presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.
One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside – just a thing gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it” (p13).
Something Eddie took as indestructible and great has actually been rotting from the inside out, and possibly has been since before Eddie was even alive. Rand just lets you soak in it for a bit, before revealing more of Eddie’s character: despite the fact that he was just thinking about an oak tree that went all Titanic, he still has the same thoughts about the Taggart Transcontinental building: “It would always stand there, thought Eddie Willers.” Ever the optimist.
· Meet James Taggart, President of Taggart Transcontinental. ‘James’ is another wildly popular boy’s name in English, but it also means ‘he who supplants.’ ‘Taggart’ means ‘son of the priest.’ James as a supplanter makes sense to me based off of what I remember from high school. I don’t know what to make of ‘son of the priest.’
· And we can tell quite easily that we’re not really supposed to like James Taggart. He isn’t worried about one of his rail lines running like shit because no one can blame him, he’s allowing his company to be shrifted by a steel company because that way people will blame them for the one line running like shit, he doesn’t like an oil tycoon because he makes too much money, and he doesn’t like Eddie Willers because of Eddie’s “habit of looking straight into people’s eyes.” James Taggart is a man of the system, and while we haven’t learned much of it yet, I think we’ve learned enough to understand that it’s as broken as the Rio Norte Line.
· Orren Boyle – “He spoke for an hour and a half and did not give me a single straight answer” (p 16). ‘Orren’ is most likely a variant of ‘Orrin’ and is a river in England. ‘Boyle’ seems to mean ‘vain pledge,’ which I think makes sense. It’s also, straight up, an ugly name. ‘Boyle’ makes me think of ‘boil’ and makes me hope we get to see Orren Boyle lanced at some point.
· We should also pay special notice to the fact that James Taggart wants to work with a company called ‘Associated Steel,’ run by Orren Boyle, but refuses to work with ‘Rearden Steel.’ We don’t yet know the exact reason why he won’t work with Rearden, but it’s no coincidence James Taggart won’t work with a company named after a single man.
· Ellis Wyatt, Oil Tycoon Extraordinaire. ‘Ellis’ is a form of ‘Elias’ which in turn is a form of ‘Elijah,’ which means ‘the Lord is my God,’ but perhaps more importantly was the name of a prophet in the Bible. ‘Wyatt’ means ‘war strength.’ And we know we should like Ellis Wyatt based on the fact that James Taggart doesn’t.
· Pop Harper is quite frankly DONE with this shit.
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