None Dare Call It Reason

...The entire Romantic conception of creativity, of a democratic spirit moving across the face of the earth, is anathema to Ayn Rand Her "Reason" is a force demanding clean streets and docile students, clear outlines and happy endings It is Reason alone that must decide what ideas and values artists may describe, Art can only be the willing slave of this cerebral tyrant How else, she says, can we recreate the Parthenon'' But Miss Rand forgets that the Greeks added color to those bone-white statues tor which she feels such Sehnsucht, and Demeter, goddess of fertility, was given a central position on the face of the temple dedicated to the warlike Athena The rich, authontanan priests who erected the temples of Apollo were never able to efface the Dionysian origins of 'their god, and finally were destroyed by the forces they had hoped to control with their mottoes of "Know Thyself" and "Nothing In Excess " Miss Rand's dogmatic subservience of Art to a monomaniacal Idea-principle causes her to ignore many other aspects of literature and history that such a "manifesto" should have considered There is, of course, no mention of the social implications of the Bible or Greek Tragedy Shakespeare is attacked for having a tragic sense of life that opens the door to altruism...

...Miss Rand's greatest hatred Anna Kai-enina is listed m the index as "an evil book" Joyce and Kafka are "rotgut" The authors who receive applause from the Founder of Objectivism have one thing in common the ability to create characters similar to Howard Roark, the girlish masturbation fantasy of 77k Foun-tainhead The creator of Buck Rogers, for example, is given the Objectivist Seal of Approval, Rod Serhng, of television-thriller fame, is fervently acclaimed, Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming are presented with laurel wreaths for conceiving those modern-day moral "heroes," Mike Hammer and James Bond Besides being a pulp fiction fan, Miss Rand is an angrily attentive reader of the newspapers One of her Manifesto pieces excoriates a Sunday Times contributor, Richard Maibaum, for poking fun at a James Bond movie she had found to be morally significant By indulging himself m a parody of Fleming, Maibaum apparently threatened the Objectivist values she had projected onto that supenndividuahst, James Bond Parody, along with Richard Maibaum, is seen as one of the causes of the "pigsty" of modern art The author's greatest anger, though, is directed at what she calls "Naturalism " This literary heresy consists of showmg the canker on the rose rather than the idealized rose She says some harsh things about Zola, but her notion of Naturalism bears little resemblance to the naturalistic post-Realism of the literary critics Shakespeare, we are told, is the true ancestor of Naturalism because he chose to portray tragic human conflicts rather than Roark-esque fantasies Miss Rand grudgingly admits that Tolstoy was a competent novelist, although she condemns his "naturalistic" description of the "sewers" of human life as a continuation of Shakespeare's mistake Quotations from her own novels are frequently given as illustrations of the Objectivist concepts that somehow eluded both Shakespeare and Tolstoy...

...What Objectivism and Ayn Rand will never understand, I fear, is that the canker and the ideal rose are two aspects of the same dilemma This is the meaning of the anti-Platonic development in Shakespeare's drama, and of the Realism perfected by Tolstoy (and influenced by Stendahl, not Shakespeare) as a method of dealing with the human condition, the tension between ideal and imperfect Miss Rand seems never to have understood that little poem of Blake's about the "sick" rose infected by a self-engendered worm The Romantic Manifesto could only have been written by the leader of a cult The self-glorification accompanying the Puntan frenzy of such cult-announcements always exhibits hostility toward the dialectical truths of literature Ayn Rand's manifesto is, m actuality, an attempt to destroy these truths, which would make straw of her dogmatic teachings The "Reason" her book serves to champion is grounded in a self-tortured and paranoid irrationality —the angry, threatened conscience of a censor...

...None Dare Call It Reason THE ROMANTIC MANIFESTO By Ayn Rand World 202 pp $5 50 Reviewed by JOHN W. HUGHES Ayn Rand's novels have always reminded me of D H Lawrence's final books—a kind of polemic sputtering, inflated with a phallic giantism, displacing the usual considerations of artistic taste and cogency Just as Lawrence's later tracts seemed dangerously similar to the ranting rhetoric of Mem Kampf, Miss Rand's new study of literature, The Romantic Manifesto, has passed beyond the limits of esthetic sanity Her slight talents and modest insights have been cast into the all-consuming phoemx-fire ot messianic individualism—without, unfortunately, her ever having written a book like The Rainbow The angry deity who has hardened Ayn Rand's sympathetic arteries is, oddly enough, an Apollonian god He is familiar to us in a more amenable form, by way of T S Eliot, George Sefens and Evelyn Waugh He stimulates a Nietz-schean nostalgia, a vision of ancient clanty and cleanliness, seen through the spectacles of a sterile, elitist modernism The Romantic Manifesto comprises a senes of Miss Rand's articles published m her cult-newspaper, The Ob/ectivist These articles have little in common, however, with literary Romanticism as it is usually conceived, and their author seems blissfully ignorant of the energies and conceptions that inspired a Blake or a Wordsworth Her ideas, in fact, are an embodiment of what Coleridge, in "Dejection An Ode," one of the greatest Romantic poems, called "viper thoughts"—l e , the ironclad categories produced by an intellect sealed off from the fresh springs of feeling that startle the dull pain ot consciousness and "make it move and live...