Magee notes on p. 296 that Nietzsche had borrowed from “the opening paragraphs of [Wagner’s] Art and Revolution” the idea that “Greek tragedy had come about historically through the fusion of the Apollonian with the Dionysian.” If you’re wondering to what extent Wagner anticipated the Apollo-Dionysus duality in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, here are the relevant paragraphs from Wagner:
In any serious investigation of the essence of
our art of to-day, we cannot make one step forward without being
brought face to face with its intimate connection with the Art of ancient Greece. For, in point of fact, our modern art is but
one link in the artistic development of the whole of Europe; and
this development found its starting-point with the Greeks.
After it had overcome the raw religion of its
Asiatic birth-place, built upon the nature-forces of the earth, and
had set the fair, strong manhood of freedom upon the pinnacle
of its religious convictions, – the Grecian spirit, at the
flowering-time of its art and polity, found its fullest expression
in the god Apollo, the head and national deity of the Hellenic
race.
It was Apollo, – he who had slain the
Python, the dragon of Chaos; who had smitten down the vain sons of
boastful Niobe by his death-dealing darts; who, through his
priestess at Delphi, had proclaimed to questioning man the
fundamental laws of the Grecian race and nation, thus holding up to
those involved in passionate action, the peaceful, undisturbed
mirror of their inmost, unchangeable Grecian nature, – it was
this Apollo who was the fulfiller of the will of Zeus upon the
Grecian earth; who was, in fact, the Grecian people.
Not as the soft companion of the Muses, – as
the later and more luxurious art of sculpture has alone preserved
his likeness, – must we conceive the Apollo of the spring-time
of the Greeks; but it was with all the traits of energetic
earnestness, beautiful but strong, that the great tragedian
Æschylus knew him. Thus, too, the Spartan youths
learnt the nature of the god, when by dance and joust they had
developed their supple bodies to grace and strength; when the boy
was taken from those he loved, and sent on horse to farthest lands
in search of perilous adventure; when the young man was led into
the circle of fellowship,
his only password that of his beauty and
his native worth, in which alone lay all his might and all his
riches. With such eyes also the Athenian saw the god, when all the
impulses of his fair body, and of his restless soul, urged him to
the new birth of his own being through the ideal expression of art;
when the voices, ringing full, sounded forth the choral song,
singing the deeds of the god, the while they gave to the dancers
the mastering measure that meted out the rhythm of the
dance, – which dance itself, in graceful movements, told the
story of those deeds; and when above the harmony of well-ordered
columns he wove the noble roof; heaped one upon the other the broad
crescents of the amphitheatre, and planned the scenic trappings of
the stage. Thus, too, inspired by Dionysus, the tragic poet saw
this glorious god: when, to all the rich elements of spontaneous
art, the harvest of the fairest and most human life, he joined the
bond of speech, and concentrating them all into one focus, brought
forth the highest conceivable form of art – the DRAMA.
The deeds of gods and men, their sufferings,
their delights, as they, – in all solemnity and glee, as
eternal rhythm, as everlasting harmony of every motion and of all
creation, – lay disclosed in the nature of Apollo himself; here
they became actual and true. For all that in them moved and lived,
as it moved and lived in the beholders, here found its perfected
expression; where ear and eye, as soul and heart, lifelike and
actual, seized and perceived all, and saw all in spirit and in body
revealed; so that the imagination need no longer vex itself with
the attempt to conjure up .the image. Such a tragedy-day was a
Feast of the God; for here the god spoke clearly and intelligibly
forth, and the poet, as his high-priest, stood real and embodied in
his art-work, led the measures of the dance, raised the voices to
a choir, and in ringing words proclaimed the utterances of godlike
wisdom.
Such was the Grecian work of art; such their god
Apollo, incarnated in actual, living art; such was the Grecian
people in its highest truth and beauty.
This race, in every branch, in every unit, was
rich in individuality,
restless in its energy, in the goal of one
undertaking seeing but the starting-point of a fresh one; in
constant mutual intercourse, in daily-changing alliances, in
daily-varying strifes; to-day in luck, to-morrow in mischance;
to-day in peril of the utmost danger, to-morrow absolutely
exterminating its foes; in all its relations, both internal and
external, breathing the life of the freest and most unceasing
development. This people, streaming in its thousands from the
State-assembly, from the Agora, from land, from sea, from camps,
from distant parts, – filled with its thirty thousand heads the
amphitheatre. To see the most pregnant of all tragedies, the
“Prometheus,” came they; in this Titanic masterpiece to see the
image of themselves, to read the riddle of their own actions, to
fuse their own being and their own communion with that of their
god; and thus in noblest, stillest peace to live again the life
which a brief space of time before, they had lived in restless
activity and accentuated individuality.
Ever jealous of his personal independence, and
hunting down the “Tyrannos” who, howsoever wise and lofty, might
imperil from any quarter the freedom of his own strong will: the
Greek despised the soft complacence which, under the convenient
shelter of another&146;s care, can lay itself down to passive egoistic
rest. Constantly on his guard, untiring in warding off all outside
influence: he gave not even to the hoariest tradition the right
over his own free mundane life, his actions, or his thoughts. Yet,
at the summons of the choir his voice was hushed, he yielded
himself a willing slave to the deep significance of the scenic
show, and hearkened to the great story of Necessity told by the
tragic poet through the mouths of his gods. and heroes on the
stage. For in the tragedy he found himself again, – nay, found
the noblest part of his own nature united with the noblest
characteristics of the whole nation; and from his inmost soul, as
it there unfolded itself to him, proclaimed the Pythian oracle. At
once both God and Priest, glorious godlike man, one with the
Universal, the Universal summed up in him: like one of those
thousand fibres which form the plant’s united life, his slender
form sprang from the soil into the upper air; there to bring forth
the one lovely flower which shed its fragrant breath upon eternity.
This flower was the highest work of Art, its scent the spirit of
Greece; and still it intoxicates our senses and forces from us the
avowal, that it were better to be for half a day a Greek in
presence of this tragic Art-work, than to all eternity
an – un-Greek God!
As you can see, Wagner does very little with the Apollo-Dionysus duality per se: Dionysus barely makes an appearance; it’s really all Apollo. Wagner does, however, mention an individuality/collectivity duality somewhat like Nietzsche’s. And as Magee points out, we don’t know how Wagner might have expanded on these ideas in conversation.
Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, Preface
“Ecce homo” (“behold the man!”) is of course what Pilate reportedly said when presenting Jesus to the crowd.
BW, p. 674: so resistance to truth is cowardice. What happened to the necessity and value of error?
Nietzsche: Ecce Homo: “Why I Am So Clever”
BW, p. 711: Interesting claim that Nietzsche’s own life was not one of struggle or striving.
Nietzsche: Ecce Homo: “Why I Write Such Good Books”
BW, p. 718: Nietzsche’s claim to be indifferent to reviews of his books is disingenuous; in fact he ranted and raved over the bad ones, and was thrilled about the good ones.
Nietzsche: Ecce Homo: “Why I Am a Destiny”
BW, p. 782: “I am no man, I am dynamite”: Nietzsche’s description of himself as an explosive inspired Joseph Conrad’s portrait, in The Secret Agent, of “the Professor,” a revolutionary anarchist who at all times wears a coat filled with explosives that he can set off at a moment’s notice. The novel ends with the following passage (which I’ve previously compared to Rand’s description of Toohey in his encounter with the policeman):
And the incorruptible Professor walked too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable – and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.
Nietzsche would have disputed the portrait, since the Professor is explicitly said to be motivated by “vengeful bitterness,” an attitude that Nietzsche associates with slave morality and priestly morality. But was Nietzsche really free from vengeful bitterness?
BW, p. 787: The overman conceives reality as it is; once again, the notion of error as desirable and/or unavoidable has retreated.
Rand: Fountainhead IV.12-20
IV.12: The alterations to Roark’s Cortlandt designs seem to be in the modernist architectural style known as brutalism – as one would expect from Prescott and Webb. (Prescott seems to have a good point about the balconies, though.) The diffusion of responsibility associated with government projects is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s remarks in Will to Power (p. 382).
Roark’s description of his aid to Keating as like loading a circuit with too much current probably reflects Isabel Paterson’s influence; it’s precisely her kind of metaphor. (See her God of the Machine, which came out the same year as The Fountainhead.)
Roark’s involving Dominique in his dynamiting scheme in order to set her free reminds me of V’s even more drastic manner of setting Evey free in V for Vendetta.
IV.13: Dominique officially converts from Stoicism to Aristoteleanism (essentially).
“Socrates, Galileo, Pasteur”:
biochemistry pioneer Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) seems like the odd man out here, since unlike Socrates and Galileo, he did not suffer persecution by his society, but on the contrary was the recipient of numerous prizes and honours. I suspect that Rand confused Pasteur with Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865). Semmelweis and Pasteur were both biochemists who championed the germ theory of disease, but Semmelweis did it first and encountered howling opposition from the medical establishment, and ended up beaten to death in an insane asylum, whereas Pasteur confirmed Semmelweis’s theories years later, and in a way that satisified the medical community.
IV.14: “Ever read Faust?” Toohey is comparing Peter to Faust, but in what respect? One reading is that Peter has let Toohey get his clutches into him and now can no longer escape when he wishes to; that would make Toohey into the devil with whom Peter has struck a deal. But Peter’s literal contract was with Roark, from whom he has acquired magical abilities (the ability to “design” Cortlandt) at the cost of his soul, thus supporting a reading that would make Roark the (unintentional) devil. (In either case, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus seems a better analogy than Goethe’s Faust, since the point of the analogy is that a deal with the devil, once made, cannot be evaded, which is true in Marlowe’s version – “See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul” – but false in Goethe’s.)
Toohey’s explaining that rather than see Roark killed, he prefers to see Roark imprisoned – “[l]ocked, stopped, strapped – and alive” – so that he’ll
“move when he’s told to move and stop when he’s told,” is reminiscent of Foucault’s account, in Discipline and Punish, of how the shift from the bloody tortures and executions of the ancien régime to the all-pervasive micromanagement of the modern prison represents not humanitarianism but a more subtle form of social control.
Toohey’s association of Plato with Peter’s having harnessed the higher man (Roark) in the service of the lower man (Peter) is probably a reference to Plato’s doctrine in the Republic that the wise may have to be forced to descend back into the cave to help inferior souls. On the tension in the Republic over this issue, and its relation to Rand, see my piece here.
Toohey’s “one moment when [he] wanted to burn this paper” comes as a surprise, suggesting that even he is tempted by the light side. Is even Toohey redeemable?
Most of Toohey’s speech to Peter seems to be intended by Rand as philosophically correct, allowing for the reversal of aim. Hence it is Rand’s view, too, that “the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons” – in short, those Nietzsche admires (albeit alongside Goethe, etc.) – were “fools” because they sought power without understanding its true nature, leaving Toohey as the truer and more accurate exemplar of the will to power. In other words, a deeper understanding of Nietzsche’s ideal would reveal it to embody the very sickness and resentment that Nietzsche rightly resists.
Toohey breaks up the phrase vox populi, vox dei, meaning “the voice of the people [is] the voice of God.”
The reference to “voting by smiles,” and “[a]utomatic levers – all saying yes” reminds me of the crowds of Villagers in the tv series The Prisoner expressing their enthusiasm for everything by pumping their umbrellas up and down en masse. (By the way, if you want to see a perfect cross between Ayn Rand and Franz Kafka, watch The Prisoner.)
The emperor who wanted all Rome to have a single neck was Caligula, according to Suetonius anyway.
Toohey suggests that the conflict between communism and fascism serves the function of presenting the fundamental choice as one between different flavours of authoritarian collectivism, thus masking the possibility of an alternative to both.
Toohey’s description of Soviet Russia (“service to the proletariat”) and Nazi Germany (“service to the race”) without naming them is like Nietzsche’s referring to the Persians, Jews, etc., without naming them in Zarathustra I.15 (PN, p. 171).
I’ve previously compared Toohey with Saruman; here’s another parallel. Keating’s unwillingness to leave Toohey, despite realising his true nature and at a certain level hating him for it, is similar to the way in which, in Lord of the Rings, Gríma Wormtonue is enslaved to Saruman:
The beggar turned and slouched past whimpering: ‘Poor old Gríma! Poor old Gríma! Always beaten and cursed. How I hate him! I wish I could leave him!’
‘Then leave him!’ said Gandalf.
But Wormtongue only shot a glance of his bleared eyes full of terror at Gandalf, and then shuffled quickly past behind Saruman.
(And again Lewis’s dwarves come to mind, trapped in an imaginary prison of their own making.)
Does Rand think that real-lfe collectivist intellectuals are as self-consciously evil as Toohey is? Maybe not in general, but she did think that about one philosopher in particular: Immanuel Kant, the “most evil man in history.” On Rand’s view, Kant’s epistemological views were a deliberate attack on human cognitive efficiacy, and his ethical views were a deliberate attack on human happiness – and, Rand further held, the cleverness and subtlety with which Kant prosecuted both attacks gave his ideas an enormous influence, and helped pave the way for, inter alia, both Nazism and Communism. (For my take on why she thought this and in what way she was wrong, see my piece here.)
The idea that Kant might have been led to his views by an honest effort to solve puzzles he could see no other way to solve is one Rand seems not even to consider, and here again I detect Nietzschean influence. Rand had much more respect for the value of rational argumentation than Nietzsche did (she placed Aristotle above Nietzsche, after all), but one trait she inherits from Nietzsche is a tendency to see philosophical views she disagrees with as motivated by malice or the like, rather than by sincere (albeit mistaken) reasoning.
IV.16: “the executed English King – or was it a Chancellor? – who had died so well”: the king they have in mind is Charles I (executed 1649); the chancellor they have in mind is Thomas More (executed 1535). (Popular fictional representations of the two events include the novel Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet, and the play [later filmed] A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt.)
Mitchell Layton probably has a good point about the sharecroppers. By putting the point in Layton’s mouth, Rand seems to treat the issue dismissively; but by Rand’s own libertarian standards, the sharecropping situation represented the effect of grants of governmental monopoly land privilege to the descendants of slaveowners.
“A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends”: Wynand’s realisation of the double-edged nature of power is reminiscent of Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic (a.k.a. the Lord-Bondsman or Lordship-Bondage Dialectic) in the Phenomenology, whereby the master, in subjecting the slave, becomes dependent on him for recognition. (Despite Rand’s antipathy toward Hegel, Chris Sciabarra has argued, in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, that this master-slave dialectic is crucial to Rand’s thought.) As for the precise imagery of the double-looped leash, this was anticipated by Herbert Spencer in his article “Imperialism and Slavery”:
[T]he exercise of mastery inevitably entails on the master himself some form of slavery, more or less pronounced. ... Here is a prisoner with hands tied and a cord round his neck (as suggested by figures in Assyrian bas-reliefs) being led home by his savage conqueror, who intends to make him a slave. The one, you say, is captive and the other free? Are you quite sure the other is free? He holds one end of the cord, and unless he means to let his captive escape, he must continue to be fastened by keeping hold of the cord in such way that it cannot easily be detached.
Wynand passes a seedy bar where a “juke box played Wagner’s ‘Song to the Evening Star,’ adapted, in swing time.” There was indeed such an adaptation, by Glenn Miller’s band, in 1940. Here’s the original:
– and here’s Miller’s adaptation.
The context – and the juxtaposition with the poster advertising Romeo and Juliet as a “folks next door” tale of a “boy from the Bronx” and a “girl from Brooklyn,” with “nothing highbrow about it” (incidentally not a reference to West Side Story, which was over a decade away) – suggests that the swingtime version of Wagner is meant as an example of great art bastardised to suit the tastes of the masses, and thus as a symbol of Wynand’s own career. (In an earlier draft the composer was Rand’s beloved Tchaikovsky.) Rand would revisit this example in her next novel, using a fictional piece of music:
The great burst of sound was the opening chords of Halley’s Fourth Concerto. It rose in tortured triumph, speaking its denial of pain, its hymn to a distant vision. Then the notes broke. It was as if a handful of mud and pebbles had been flung at the music, and what followed was the sound of the rolling and the dripping. It was Halley’s Concerto swung into a popular tune. It was Halley’s melody torn apart, its holes stuffed with hiccoughs. The great statement of joy had become the giggling of a barroom. Yet it was still the remnant of Halley’s melody that gave it form; it was the melody that supported it like a spinal cord.
“Pretty good?” Mort Liddy was smiling at his friends, boastfully and nervously. “Pretty good, eh? Best movie score of the year. Got me a prize. Got me a long-term contract. Yeah, this was my score for Heaven’s in Your Backyard.”
(Atlas I.6)
(Poor Glenn Miller! His version doesn’t seem so bad.)
Rand’s use of Wagner in this context suggests she admired him as a great artist (as does the fact that Toohey in II.4 ranks the story of Tristan and Isolde below the story of Mickey and Minnie Mouse – presumably another attempt to trivialise greatness). But evidence suggests otherwise. (Of course, despite the Romeo and Juliet reference, she was no great fan of Shakespeare either. Nor, as we’ve seen, of Mozart, whom she regarded as belonging to the era of “pre-music”; in reading Magee’s remarks (p. 326) about what we would say to someone who dismissed the value of Shakespeare or Mozart, I couldn’t help thinking of Rand.)
In an early draft of Roark’s final courtroom speech, Rand did include Wagner in a (subsequently omitted) list of heroic individuals mistreated by society: “Richard Wagner, writing musical comedies for a living, denounced by the musicians of his time, hissed, opposed, pronounced unmusical.” (Quoted in Robert Mayhew, ed., Essays on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, p. 14. Others on the list included Socrates, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Galileo, Martin Luther, Victor Hugo, Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky , and “Nietzsche, dying in an insane asylum, friendless and unheard.” The inclusion of Jesus and Luther is especially striking. I’m not sure what she means about the musical comedies)
But in a later interview, Rand’s assessment of Wagner is quite negative:
I think Wagner, unfortunately, is enormously vulgar .... There is a certain musical value in some of his compositions. I would not classify him as particularly great. His melodies ... are enormously lacking in originality or inventiveness. If you strip them of all their trimmings, his melodies are, with rare exceptions, street-organ or circus music. What Wagner makes his reputation on is precisely the trimmings – the technical, alleged virtuosity of his orchestrations, with a dozen leitmotifs all mixed together. amounting to nothing. What I hear in his sense of life is malevolent pretentiousness ... It is the view of a manipulator, of somebody who is playing on the fringes, but does not really have much to say. (Objectively Speaking, p. 128.)
“Mea culpa ... mea maxima culpa”: part of the Latin mass, meaning “through my fault, through my most grievous fault.” The context:
I confess to almighty God
and to you, my brothers,
that I have greatly sinned,
in thought and in word,
in action and in omission,
through my fault, through my fault,
through my most grievous fault ....
“I was not born to be a second-hander.” Does this imply that some are? A remnant of Innatism?
IV.17: “What you think you’ve lost can neither be lost nor found”: almost certainly a reference to the “reverence for itself” that is a mark of the noble soul, a reverence that “cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil § 287; in BW, p. 418) – a passage that was surely on Rand’s mind, since she originally intended it as an epigraph for the entire novel.
Dominique’s musing about the colour of the leaves, as a way of affirming her embrace of the earth she had previously been afraid to embrace, echoes Zarathustra’s admonition to “remain faithful to the earth.” (PN, p. 125).
Just as Peter’s mother had a redemptive moment in IV.7, so Dominique’s father gets a redemptive moment here. In both cases the redemptive moment takes the form of a genuine concern for their child’s happiness, and the realisation that their child should marry someone of whom the parent would not previously have approved. The Francon scene is of course much more cheerful than its Keating counterpart.
IV.18: The most important parts of this chapter, to my mind, lie not in the various courtroom speeches (even Roark’s, almost), but in the descriptions of the audience, who after the trial will “return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends ... to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached,” but who have each known “some unforgotten moment” that promised a “different sense of living.” These are the denizens of Ideal once again, but headed toward a less pessimistic dénoument. Seeing Roark stand “before a hostile crowd” in the same way that “each man stands in the innocence of his own mind” causes them to realise that “no hatred was possible to him.” This leads them to wonder for a moment, “do I need anyone’s approval? – does it matter? – am I tied?” – and this moment of clarity leaves each of them “free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room.” Here Rand states one of the central paradoxes of The Fountainhead: altruism leads to hatred, while egoism leads to benevolence.
Incidentally, just as Nietzsche never personally achieved the kind of universal affirmation that he predicted for the Overman, so Rand seems not to have achieved the attitude she attributes to Roark; at any rate, no one who knows anything about her life would be tempted to conclude that “no hatred was possible to her.”
Back in IV.11, Roark noted to himself, after giving Wynand a speech on second-handedness, that he had failed to mention “the worst second-hander of all – the man who goes after power.” Roark’s speech here represents the follow-up he never had a chance to present to Wynand earlier, and also represents Rand’s continuing challenge to Nietzsche, and particularly to his Political Elitism: “The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary. The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men. The creator lives for his work. ... His primary goal is within himself. They parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive. The basic need of the creator is independence. ... The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men ....” This passage is the culmination of the conversation with Nietzsche that runs throughout the book; Rand here tries to make the lust for power look as unattractive as possible, in Nietzschean terms: “The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence. ... Rulers of men are not egotists. ... They exist entirely through the persons of others. ... They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit.”
An important influence on Roark’s final speech here is the climactic speech in Enemy of the People by Rand’s beloved Ibsen. Toward the beginning of this video I play an excerpt from the speech:
When Roark is told to rise and face the jury, Wynand rises also – and a soon as he hears the verdict he departs, presumably because Roark’s exoneration constitutes his own condemnation. I suspect that Rand was influenced here by the final scene of Ninety-Three, where (in Rand’s description) “the white-faced figure of a man ... rises to pronounce the verdict of a revolutionary tribunal, while the crowd waits in total stillness to hear whether he will spare or sentence to death the only man he had ever loved”:
:
Gauvain walked without constraint. Neither hands nor feet were bound. He was in undress uniform, and wore his sword. ... The same pensive joy that had lighted his face when he said to Cimourdain, “I am thinking of the future,” still rested upon it. Nothing could be more sublime and touching than this continued smile.
When he reached the fatal spot, his first glance was turned to the summit of the tower. He disdained the guillotine. He knew that Cimourdain would feel it his duty to be present at the execution; his eyes sought him on the platform and found him there.
Cimourdain was ghastly pale and cold. Even those who stood nearest heard no sound of his breathing.
When he caught sight of Gauvain not a quiver passed over his face; and yet he knew that every step brought him nearer to the scaffold.
As he advanced, Gauvain looked at Cimourdain, and Cimourdain looked at him. It seemed as though Cimourdain found support in that glance.
Gauvain reached the foot of the scaffold. He ascended it, followed by the officer in command of the grenadiers. ... [H]is heroic and commanding expression gave the idea of an arch-angel. He stood upon the scaffold, lost in reverie. There, too, was a height. Gauvain stood upon it stately and calm. The sun streamed about him, crowning him, as it were, with a halo. ...
The headsman paused, uncertain what to do.
Then a voice, quick and low, and yet in its ominous severity distinctly heard by all, cried from the top of the tower, –
“Execute the law!”
They recognized the inexorable tone. Cimourdain had spoken. The army shuddered.
The executioner hesitated no longer. He moved forward, holding out the cord.
“Wait,” said Gauvain.
And turning towards Cimourdain, he waved his free right hand in token of farewell; then he allowed himself to be bound. ...
He was laid upon the plank. The infamous collar clasped that charming and noble head. The executioner gently lifted his hair, then pressed the spring; the triangle detached itself, gliding first slowly, then rapidly: a frightful blow was heard.
At the same instant another report sounded; the stroke of the axe was answered by a pistol-shot. Cimourdain had just seized one of the pistols that he wore in his belt; and as Gauvain’s head rolled into the basket, Cimourdain sent a bullet through his own heart. A stream of blood gushed from his mouth, and he fell dead.
Thus these twin souls, united in the tragic death, rose together, – the shadow of the one blending with the radiance of the other.
IV.19: “Time marches on!” was the tag line of “The March of Time,” a radio news series (later a newsreel series) popular in the 1930s and 40s. In this context, of course, it refers to the fact that the menace that Toohey represents has not been finally defeated.
To hear the original line, jump to 29:30 here:
The “News on the March” newsreel in the second clip from Citizen Kane last week was a direct imitation of “The March of Time.” The medical charity “March of Dimes” also gets its name from “The March of Time.”
Roark’s expression of trust in signing Wynand’s contract without reading it is reminiscent of an anecdote about Alexander of Macedon. As the story runs, Alexander received a letter warning him that his physician, Philippos, was planning to poison him. When Philippos brought him a draught of medicine, Alexander handed him the letter, and then drank the concoction while Philippos was still reading.
IV.20: Peter once described Roark as a command to rise. Here we see Dominique literally rising to meet that challenge.
“The ocean mounted as the city descended”: Rand in her descriptive passages, perhaps as a legacy of her cinematic background, is often alert to the different ways in which different parts of a stationary background appear to move when one is in motion. Compare this passage from Atlas I.8: “Trees and telegraph poles sprang into sight abruptly and went by as if jerked back. The green plains stretched past, in a leisurely flow. At the edge of the sky, a long wave of mountains reversed the movement and seemed to follow the train.”
“She passed the pinnacles of bank buildings. She passed the crowns of courthouses. She rose above the spires of churches.” Roark is superior to all of society’s institutions – commercial, governmental, and ecclesiastical. Notice the sequence: in ascending order of which institutions are most popularly respected, though probably in descending order in terms of Rand’s own evaluations.
In the movie version of this scene, as Dominique ascends in the hoist (which looks a lot sturdier in the film than what Rand describes in the book), we see Roark looking down, watching as she ascends. But in that shot he looks hella old, and the angle from which he’s supposedly watching Dominique is geometrically impossible.
Zack Snyder wants to make a remake of The Fountainhead. Not sure how I feel about that.
By the way, I can’t recall if I’ve mentioned this before, but although The Fountainhead is not a comedy, it does feature many of the elements of what Stanley Cavell (in Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage) calls “comedies of remarriage,” a particular variety of screwball comedy that did not necessarily involve actual remarriage, but which did feature romantic relationships between soulmates at least one of whom needs to undergo transformative education to make a successful relationship possible, and – typically – an alternation in scene between the urban world (usually represented by New York) and the green world (usually represented by Connecticut), with the latter being “a place beyond the normal world, where the normal laws of the world are interfered with; a place of perspective and education” – which is of course where Dominique meets Roark. Rand was a fan of the screwball comedy genre, so the similarities may not be coincidental. (Rand herself spent her two happiest summers in Connecticut.) I’ve written about this somewhere but can’t lay my hands on it at the moment.
Rand: Introduction to the 25th Edition of The Fountainhead
This is what the cover of The Fountainhead used to look like:
In that version, right after the section about her husband, Rand’s introduction used to say:
These are some of the reasons why, for me, the most profound personal meaning of this new, anniversary edition is the fact that its jacket carries the reproduction of a painting by Frank. It is like the completion, the proper climax of the book’s history.
That painting was not done for The Fountainhead. It represents Frank’s version of a sunrise we had seen once in San Francisco. His title for the painting is Man Also Rises.
After Rand’s death, when the publisher changed the cover art, they also omitted the above two paragraphs from her introduction, with no notice that they’d done so. (Incidentally, Frank O’Connor could have benefited from some training in perspective; the angles of the girders don’t make sense. Still, it’s no worse than the bland covers the publisher has replaced his painting with.)
The quotation from Aristotle’s Poetics is a mangling of what Aristotle actually said – but the mangling is not Rand’s invention. The line in this form is frequently attributed to Aristotle in a number of different early 20th-century sources. Rand may have gotten it from Albert Jay Nock, an individualist thinker she (mostly) admired..
Rand explains what she does and doesn’t like about Nietzsche, but the disagreements she mentions are mainly metaphysical and epistemological, not ethical or political. Oddly, her challenge to his conceptions of power and mastery doesn’t get a mention.
[Addendum: Fountainhead Comic Strip
How did I forget? In 1946 The Fountainhead was adapted as a comic strip, by Frank Godwin. Back in the 1990s the strip was collected in a handy volume (I have a copy somewhere):
Unfortunately, it’s out of print now, and used copies go for exorbitant prices.]
Rand: Atlas Shrugged
We’re not reading Atlas in this course (for one thing, it’s hella long; for another, it features far less engagement with Nietzschean ideas than her previous works). But as long as I’m offering notes I thought I’d add a few for Atlas.
Atlas has far fewer real-world connections than the other works we’ve been reading, but there are a few. I’ve already mentioned her basing Robert Stadler on Robert Oppenheimer, and “Head of the State” Mr. Thompson on President Truman. As far as fictional referents go, I’ve mentioned Fritz Lang’s Siegfried as possible inspiration for Ragnar Danneskjöld, and both Zorro and Schiller’s Fiesco as definite inspirations for Francisco d’Anconia. I’ve also mentioned how Francisco d’Anconia’s name (which includes a Carlos) contains a shadow of Rand’s husband’s name (Charles Francis O’Connor). Another connection I didn’t mention is that the real-life Anaconda Copper company is probably partial inspiration for d’Anconia as well, since he runs a d’Anconia Copper company. Indeed, “d’Anconia” is what one might well come up with if one wanted a Latin-sounding name that was a cross between “Anaconda” and “O’Connor.”
I’ve also linked previously to my article on Atlas’s references to Plato’s Republic.
The Wayne-Falkland Hotel, where a number of the novel’s important events take place, is based on New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (birthplace of the Waldorf Salad, fwiw).
Galt’s Gulch, the hidden valley headquarters of John Galt and his fellow conspirators, is based on Ouray, Colorado, a town Rand had visited while traveling around the American West:
I don’t know how familiar Rand was with such 1930s-1940s pulp heroes as the Shadow, Doc Savage, and the Avenger, but some features of the plot of Atlas suggest she might have been borrowing pulp elements in order to transfigure them into something more philosophically and literarily complex (as she had done with Zorro, another pulp hero). Galt’s vast, shadowy, secret conspiracy is particularly reminiscent of the Shadow’s clandestine recruitment network (and Dagny first sees Galt as a shadow in the street outside her window), while Galt himself, the superhero genius inventor who “looked as if he were poured out of ... an aluminum-copper alloy, the color of his skin blending with the chestnut-brown of his hair,” is reminiscent of Doc Savage, the superhero genius inventor called the “Man of Bronze,” because he looks as though he is “sculptured in hard bronze,” with the “bronze of the hair ... a little darker than the bronze of the features.” Doc Savage’s hidden Arctic headquarters, the Fortress of Solitude (preceding Superman’s) also prefigures Galt’s hidden headquarters in the Colorado Rockies. As for the Avenger, his face “a lean square of inflexible purpose,” “terrible in its utter lack of expression,” with eyes “like pale steel” or “ice in a glacial dawn” seems to prefigure the “gaunt” Hank Rearden, with his “expressionless” face, and eyes “the color and quality of pale blue ice.”
Switching from Atlas back to The Fountainhead, and from heroes to villains, recall Catherine’s vision of Toohey in I.12 as casting a terrifying shadow much larger than himself – which is precisely how the Shadow often manifests. And of course Toohey certainly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men ....
I guess I should mention that Atlas was recently (2011-2014) made into a three-part movie; here’s the trailer for Part 1:
YMMV, but I think the movie trilogy is pretty dreadful. I can forgive the low budget. But the film(s) can’t decide whether it wants to give us the austere, stylised, quasi-surreal quality of Rand’s novel, or instead a “realistic” movie in which the characters speak and act in ordinary and “relatable” ways – so it lurches back and forth between both. (Of course I have a similar criticism of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien movies, albeit to a lesser degree, and certainly I like those much more.)
It also shoves the economic and political themes front and center, and pushes the metaphysical and epistemological themes to the periphery, which just makes it comes across as political propaganda. Also John Galt, Rand’s superhero genius inventor sculpted out of copper-aluminum alloy, looks and talks like, I dunno, a slightly pudgy surfer/stoner dude. Oh,
and the third installment basically forgets about Hank Rearden, one of the main characters. (There’s already been talk of a remake, but I don’t know if it’s going anywhere.)
I confess I do like the version of Francisco d’Anconia (the Zorro figure) in Part 2 though (the main roles are recast for each part; part 3’s version of d’Anconia is dreadful):
Nietzsche: Letter to Overbeck (1888)
BW, p. 653: Nietzsche endorses the European Union. But Nietzsche’s opposition between nationalism and pan-Europeanism is questionable. If a nationalist regime (be it Napoleon’s France or the German Reich) tries to conquer and thereby unify Europe, is it being nationalist or pan-European? Or both?
Nietzsche: Letters (1889)
PN, pp. 684-687: Nietzsche’s last, crazy letters – pretty much the last semi-coherent things he ever wrote or said. Note that he identifies himself both with God and with “the Crucified.”
Incidentally, in Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky (whose work Nietzsche had recently and enthusiastically discovered) has his protagonist Raskolnikov dream about rushing forward to protect a horse being beaten in the street.
Fodor: “Wotan’s Law and Tristan’s Love”
If you’re wondering – yes, this is the same Jerry Fodor as the language-of-thought theorist at Rutgers.
Fodor’s explanation of how Das Rheingold is not really about politics seems to make it ... about politics. Doesn’t it?
Hunt: “Thus Spoke Howard Roark: The Transformation of Nietzschean Ideas in The Fountainhead”
The above is Hunt’s preferred title, and the one he uses for the version on his website. When it was originally published, the editor changed “Spoke” to “Spake” (referencing older translations of Zarathustra) and, still more annoyingly, deleted “The Transformation of” from the subtitle.
Hunt’s contrast between dynamic and hegemonic power seem to track Lawrence’s (via Birkin) between “volonté de pouvoir” and “Wille zur Macht.”
Kelley: “Code of the Creator”
Kelley does not explicitly discuss Nietzsche, but of the three strands he mentions – the aristocratic, the Christian, and the bourgeois – the aristocratic (as represented by the figure of Achilles) obviously comes closest to Nietzsche’s values.
Kelley also, oddly, throws Plato, Aristotle, and Homer/Achilles together as three different representatives of Greek ethics, even though Plato (as Nietzsche would stress) was in large part reacting against the conventional Greek ethos as represented by Homer/Achilles, while Aristotle in effect criticises both as one-sided and seeks a middle ground. (There’s also a question as to whether Homer [or whatever person or persons composed the Homeric epics] is best understood as a proponent or a critic of the Achilles ethos.)
Would Benjamin Franklin represent “the last man” for Nietzsche? Or was Franklin enough of an Enlightenment figure that Nietzsche would classify him with Voltaire instead?
Rand Speaks!
Here’s Rand being interviewed by Mike Wallace:
The Objectihexagon
What Magee says of Wagner and his “abnormally dominating personality” – that “[m]ost people who came anywhere close to him were either overwhelmed and engulfed or had to fight to maintain their independence” – was likewise true of Rand. One of her students, the 25-years-younger psychologist Nathaniel Branden (whom I’ve met!), became her chief confidant and the second-in-command (and primary enforcer of orthodoxy) in her Objectivist movement. During the 1950s-60s, Rand and Branden had an affair, with the grudging consent of both their spouses, Frank O’Connor and Barbara Branden. (You’ve seen all four parodied in Mozart Was a Red.) When it transpired, in 1968, that Nathaniel Branden had secretly fallen in love with and was having an affair with Patrecia Gullison, another member of Rand’s salon (who was herself married to Lawrence Scott, making this a romantic hexagon), Rand angrily broke with Branden, and demanded that her followers choose sides and denounce him without knowing any details behind the break. This became known as the “Objectischism.”
Four points of the hexagon: Rand and her husband at the Brandens’ wedding (1953)
Left to right: Frank O’Connor, Barbara Branden, Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand
Five points of the Hexagon, a decade later: Rand and the Brandens at Gullison and Scott’s wedding (1963)
Left to right: Ayn Rand, Lawrence Scott, Patrecia Gullison, Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden
What a movie that would make, eh? Well, it already has. These events are dramatised in the 1999 tv-movie The Passion of Ayn Rand (drawn from Barbara Branden’s book of the same name, except that the book is a full-fledged bio whereas the movie just focuses on the affair(s) and break).
Helen Mirren won an Emmy for her performance as Ayn Rand; I can’t find a clip online, but you can watch the whole movie here.
(The movie does not cover Gullison’s subsequent strange death.)
Nietzschean Tune of the Week
The “Manfred-Meditation” (inspired by Byron’s play Manfred) is a bit more bombastic than Nietzsche’s usual:
Keith Ansell-Pearson: An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker and Nietzsche Contra Rousseau
Lesley Chamberlain: Nietzsche in Turin
Maudemarie Clark: Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy and Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics
Arthur Danto: Nietzsche As Philosopher
Gilles Deleuze: Nietzsche and Philosophy
Bruce Detwiler: Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism
Randall Havas: Nietzsche’s Genealogy: Nihilism and the Will to Knowledge
Sheridan Hough: Nietzsche’s Noontide Friend: The Self as Metaphoric Double
Lester Hunt: Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue
Walter Kaufmann: Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
Alexander Nehamas: Nietzsche: Life As Literature
Tracy Strong: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration
Leslie Thiele: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul
B. Other Works by Our Novelists
Among works by our novelists that we didn’t read, Mann’s most important is The Magic Mountain; Gide’s are The Counterfeiters (which we read part of) and the play Philoctetes; Lawrence’s are Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover; and Rand’s is
Atlas Shrugged.
C. Fiction Prefiguring Nietzsche
We’ve already seen how Nietzsche’s analysis of ressentiment is prefigured in Victor Hugo’s Man Who Laughs (though perhaps Shakespeare got there first, albeit with less explanatory detail, with the character of Iago in Othello).
Other works of fiction prefiguring Nietzschean themes include Ivan Turgenyev’s Fathers and Sons, Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, and Fëdor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Insulted and Injured, Crime and Punisment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot.
There’s a certain irony in my conjoining these three Russian authors, since Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Insulted and Injured were both intended in part as a hostile response to Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, which in turn was intended in part as a hostile response to Turgenyev’s Fathers and Sons.
Byron’s play Manfred, a somewhat Faustian story about a sinner who defiantly chooses death over submission to divine authority, inspired Nietzsche’s “Manfred-Meditation” (see above), though Nietzsche is usually dismissive of Byron as a sickly romanticist.
Incidentally, Byron himself indirectly inspired the modern conception of the vampire. One of the earliest modern vampire stories is The Vampyre by Byron’s friend John Polidori, whose charming, amoral, aristocratic villain is based on Byron himself – a fact further signaled by his being named “Lord Ruthven,” which is also the name Byron’s ex-lover Caroline Lamb had previously given to her thinly disguised Byron character in her novel Glenarvon. And in Dumas and Maquet’s Count of Monte Cristo, the title character – himself an important influence on the later portrayal of vampires, even if he is not himself a literal vampire – is explicitly compared both to Manfred and to Ruthven. There is something rather Nietzschean, in the master-morality sense, about vampires as popularly conceived: beautiful, charming, ruthless, amoral, predatory, and ultimately parasitic. (That other modern trope, the conflicted and tormented vampire, arguably owes more to the Frankenstein monster – in Mary Shelley’s version, not most movie versions – than to the Ruthven-Dracula lineage, although a conflicted vampire is also to be found in the sprawling Victorian novel Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest.)
D. Nonfiction Prefiguring Nietzsche
Nietzsche’s most important nonfiction precursor is Max Stirner (the pseudonym of Johann Caspar Schmidt), particularly in his 1844 book The Ego and His [or Its] Own. (A more literal transation of the title would be The Unique One and His Property; a translation that attempts to capture the play-on-words feel of the German original might be The Only and His Own.) Stirner’s 1842 article “The False Principle of Our Education” also has some Nietzschean parallels. While the similarities between Nietzsche and Stirner should not be exaggerated (for the differences ran deep), as a passionate individualist who rejects God, morality, and the state as encumbrances to vital self-assertion, Stirner is clearly a figure with some affiliation to Nietzsche – though he took these ideas in a more socialistic and egalitarian direction than Nietzsche would have been happy with. (Chernyshevsky would actually be a closer fit here.)
We know that Nietzsche read works that discussed Stirner, but we have no absolute evidence that he ever read Stirner himself; there’s no mention of Stirner in Nietsche’s writings, though some of Nietzsche’s acquaintances, decades after the fact, recalled his mentioning Stirner favourably.
Henrik Ibsen was a contemporary of Nietzsche’s, so “prefiguring” may be the wrong category for him, but his plays Enemy of the People and The Master Builder deserve mention.
E. Fiction Prefiguring Mann’s Doktor Faustus
As previously mentioned, Thomas Mann’s novel was not the first to connect the Faust legend with the rise of Nazism; his son got there first with Mephisto. And Mephisto was in turn influenced by Heinrich Mann’s novel The Underling (variously translated as The Loyal Subject, Man of Straw, and The Patrioteer).
F. Other Fiction Exploring Nietzschean Themes
Albert Camus: The Stranger.
Karel Čapek: Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life.
Joseph Conrad: The Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, and Lord Jim.
Hermann Hesse: Stepppenwolf, Gertrude, Demian, Siddhartha, and Magister Ludi (a.k.a. The Glass Bead Game).
Bohumil Hrabal: I Served the King of England and Too Loud a Solitude .
Nikos Kazantzakis: Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ.
Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
Jack London: Martin Eden, The Sea Wolf, and Burning Daylight.
André Malraux: The Conquerors, The Royal Way, and Man’s Fate.
Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities.
Jean-Paul Sartre: plays Dirty Hands and The Flies, and novel Nausea.
Olaf Stapledon: Odd John and Sirius.
August Strindberg: plays Miss Julie, Pariah, and The Stronger, and novel By the Open Sea.
Kurt Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron.
Stefan Zweig: Impatience of the Heart (a.k.a. Beware of Pity) and Chess Story.
It was Apollo, – he who had slain the Python, the dragon of Chaos; who had smitten down the vain sons of boastful Niobe by his death-dealing darts; who, through his priestess at Delphi, had proclaimed to questioning man the fundamental laws of the Grecian race and nation, thus holding up to those involved in passionate action, the peaceful, undisturbed mirror of their inmost, unchangeable Grecian nature, – it was this Apollo who was the fulfiller of the will of Zeus upon the Grecian earth; who was, in fact, the Grecian people.
Cimourdain was ghastly pale and cold. Even those who stood nearest heard no sound of his breathing.
What a movie that would make, eh? Well, it already has. These events are dramatised in the 1999 tv-movie The Passion of Ayn Rand (drawn from Barbara Branden’s book of the same name, except that the book is a full-fledged bio whereas the movie just focuses on the affair(s) and break). 
