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Ayn
Rand’s Atlas Shrugged : by Andrea Sharretts |
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This project began as an attempt to explore, and hopefully to account for, the fact that while Ayn Rand’s novels continue to sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year, she is still largely dismissed by intellectuals of both the philosophic and literary communities. Initially, I had but one goal: I intended to do what it seemed essentially nobody had done before—to analyze Rand’s fiction as fiction and to then use my findings to assert either that Rand does, indeed, deserve recognition as a serious author or to concede that she does not. In order to accomplish this, I intended to apply specific methods of literary criticism to Rand’s final novel, Atlas Shrugged. I chose this work over the others because she herself considered it to be the culmination of her life’s work and moreover, because it seemed representative of what I saw as kind of American ideal. Initially, I planned on applying three methods of criticism to the text: deconstructive, feminist, and cultural. While I had planned on completing this project in the suggested four-week period, my second week into the project, I realized that this was not feasible. And so, with Professor Robertson’s consent, a summer-long project commenced. The entire first four weeks of the project I devoted mainly to doing a close reading of the actual Atlas text. Professor Robertson read the novel too, and we met every Friday to discuss our observations. While I was concentrating on the text itself, I began to search for materials I hoped would provide me with a firm understanding of the methods I intended to employ and which would enable me to manipulate the discourses of these methods. This proved to be a more difficult and time-consuming part of my project than I had initially anticipated. After pouring over numerous texts on various methods and from various disciplines, I found myself overwhelmed with the quantity of interesting—and what I felt to be pertinent—information I had collected. Finally, reluctant to leave any of this information out of my final analysis, I decided that I would attempt to further explore some of the texts I had found and ideas I had conceived, in the form of an Honors thesis. This decision enabled me to temporarily set aside feminist and deconstructive criticism altogether. The focus of my summer project then changed slightly and narrowed greatly. My ultimate goal remained the same. I still intended to examine why Rand’s works are so widely dismissed by academics and yet are so widely purchased and read by the American public. I still intended to use specific critical methods as tools to help determine the significance or insignificance of Rand’s work as fiction. However, by this point, I had decided to use the unlikely combination of cultural and myth/archetypal criticism to determine this significance. While I initially thought these two methods of criticism to be incompatible, I have since come to find that they are not. Both methods address the concept of ideology, and both can be used to reveal the often conflicting ideologies, which exist within a given text, such as Atlas Shrugged. The concept of ideology has become the unifying force of my investigation. It is, if you will, what holds all the pieces in place. In my attempt to define ideology, I have drawn on several sources, most notably Melodrama and the Myth of America by Jeffrey D. Mason, and James Kavanaugh’s essay "Ideology." According to Mason:
Kavanaugh defines ideology as proposed by Althusser as the rich "system of representations" worked up in material practices (including texts such as Atlas), which helps create individuals who "freely" internalize an appropriate "picture" of their social world and their place in it. This Althusser referred to as a social subject’s "lived relation to the world" (Kavanaugh 310). I maintain Althusser’s proposal that the function of ideology is essentially pragmatic. As Kavanaugh notes, ideology functions not to "give knowledge" or make an accurate copy of reality, but rather to "constitute, adjust, and/or transform social subjects" (313). For the most part, I have taken a decidedly Marxist approach to cultural criticism in this project. Like Jeffrey Mason, whose work I use as a prototype, I find it particularly useful to apply Marxist critical techniques to American texts. As Mason notes of these techniques, "they can elucidate the operations of any social system, especially one in which capitalism is the dominant mode"; what is more, they can reveal the ways in which the texts act to serve this mode. I have chosen to apply myth/archetypal criticism to Atlas Shrugged because I think that the work embodies certain mythic and archetypal elements, some universal, others distinctly American. Guerin et al., assert the relevance of myth as a "dynamic factor everywhere in human society; it transcends time, uniting the past (traditional modes of belief) with the present (current values) and reaching toward the future (spiritual and cultural aspirations)" (149). In this project, I have set out to answer several questions. I have attempted to discern the ways in which myth presents and (re)presents experience, thus serving a kind of ideological function. I have gone on to ask: In what ways—and to what ends—does the American myth, in particular, employ these strategies of (re)presentation? Finally, I have asked: In what ways does Rand utilize and alter the American myth in Atlas Shrugged, and toward what ideological ends does she work throughout the body of the novel? Although throughout this fellowship I have chosen mainly to focus on analyzing the text of Atlas Shrugged, I have also decided to include in my final paper, a cultural analysis of the published responses the work has drawn from critics and scholars alike. In her essay "Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture," Ien Ang uses cultural criticism to expose what she refers to as the "ideology of mass culture." Ang defines this ideology as one in which "some cultural forms—mostly very popular products and practices cast in the American mould—are tout court labeled ‘bad mass culture’" (407). Ang argues that the ideology of mass culture offers not only a negative label for certain works, but also that it "serves as a mould for the way in which a large number of haters of (those works) account for their displeasure" (407). Using Ang’s work as a model, I have analyzed published reactions to Atlas Shrugged. What I have found is that much of the existing criticism of Rand’s works, particularly that which applies to Atlas, is grounded in the ideology of mass culture. I hold this finding relevant as it offers one possible explanation of how—and why—intellectuals and critics are so quick to dismiss and decry both Rand and her works. I have not accomplished over the course of my summer research all that I had initially intended. Due to time constraints, I have not yet gone back to apply deconstructive or feminist methods of criticism to the text, although I still view both as highly applicable. The work I have done applying cultural and myth/archetypal criticism is by no means complete by my own estimation. What I propose to do now is begin my senior Honors thesis where I have left off with this fellowship. This fall, I intend to begin both feminist and deconstructive readings of the text while doing still more extensive work with cultural and archetypal methods. The opportunity to participate in the Sweet Briar Honors Summer Fellowship has proven an invaluable experience for me. I have learned much from having the freedom to design and structure my own work. Perhaps more importantly, I have learned how to narrow the focus of my investigative endeavors to accommodate time restraints. Furthermore, I have learned much about criticism, including the startling extent to which different schools of literary criticism borrow from one another and the ways in which they overlap. The searching and sifting which have comprised the research component of this fellowship have enhanced my critical and analytical skills enormously. Finding useful texts, analyzing various theories, and ultimately trying to decide which information was pertinent to my investigation and which was not—each step of the research process has contributed greatly to my intellectual development.
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Bibliography Ang, Ien. "Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture." The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. New York: Routledge, 1993. 403-420. Guerin, Wilfred L. et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, third edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Mason, James D. Melodrama and the Myth of America. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993. Kavanaugh, James H. "Ideology" Critical Terms for Literary Study, second edition. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Homas McLaughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 307-320. |