Ayn Rand and the Ghostly Hero

The godlike hero has no tale of his own

The Superman Flaw

When Siegel and Shuster created Superman for the comics, he was a lot weaker than he is today. He could leap as far as one-eighth of a mile; he could run as fast as a speeding train (how fast was that in 1938? Eighty kilometers an hour?); and his skin was impervious to anything less than an exploding shell. But in the course of the Second World War (and maybe faced with the competition of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, Earth’s Mightiest Mortal), Superman’s powers grew greater. He could fly; he could sink a battleship with a single blow; his skin became impervious to anything but kryptonite. And in twenty years Superman could survive in outer space and fly faster than the speed of light and travel through time.

As a result, once the great War ended, Superman could find no antagonist worthy of his mettle. He could overcome the occasional natural catastrophe such as a plane falling out of the sky, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods. But a bank robber with a gun posed no challenge. So we could never feel fear for Superman’s safety in such a situation. The outcome was never in doubt. There could be no suspense, which is the balance in our minds hearing the tale, between what we hope will happen and what we fear will happen.

To solve this problem of talesmanship, the writers and editors matched Superman not with strong antagonists, but weak ones, clever ones, and magical ones. For example, Mr Mxyztlepk was a magical creature from another world or dimension who (in a nod to Rumplestiltzkin) could not be overcome unless he said his own unpronounceable name backwards. Therefore the challenge was to Superman’s wits rather than to his brawn. The other main story type they made up involved Lois Lane’s unending efforts to woo and wed Superman, and uncover his secret identity. Time and again Lois learned Superman was Clark Kent with absolute evidence, and Superman had to use his wits again to fool Lois into believing that what she had proved to be true was false.

Whenever I find a hero so wise, so strong, so fast, or so skillful that he can overcome all obstacles between him and his goal with ease I think back to the changes in Superman. So I call this the ‘Superman flaw.’ Unlike Achilles’ heel, the Superman flaw is not a weakness but rather too much strength.

Ayn Rand and the Heroic Ideal

Ayn Rand fell prey to this ‘Superman flaw’ in her writings also. And when we study her approach to her heroes, we can learn a lot from her mistakes about how to make our own heroes, and what laws a hero needs to obey in order to star in a compelling tale we will long remember.

Rand wrote many times that her goal in writing was to describe and elaborate on the ideal man. This was a Romantic goal as well as a romantic goal: Romantic art in general works in regions that are larger than life, bordering upon Eartherea in this respect; and Rand’s personal motive was to create in her tales such men she wished she could love, and who would love her.

But for Rand, ‘ideal’ meant ‘perfect.’ Her perfection was not physical in the sense of Superman, though her heroes were extraordinary in their physiques and physical skills, able to master any physical skill with seeming ease and quickness. But to Rand this was by the way, a natural consequence of the moral and intellectual or rational genius of her heroes. And she concerned her heroes with moral and intellectual wars to win.

A logical consequence of the hero’s moral and intellectual superiority was, to Rand, the villain’s moral and intellectual inferiority. As outstanding as her heroes were, her villains were equally contemptible.

The Hero Who was Loved

Rand at first could not even bring herself to write about her heroes directly. Though she had found in her childhood many examples of heroes of the late Victorian era in pulp tales of bold dashing British officers, explorers, and soldiers of fortune, she turned her back on these when she grew up and came to America. She had endured the troubles of the Russian Revolution, and in collectivism she had found her ultimate evil. After this she could only contemplate heroes who would oppose and overcome such grand social evils.

Unable to create her first hero, Rand took recourse in one of her first tales in English, ‘The Man I Loved,’ to depict rather the feelings of a woman in love with an idealized man. But she did not dwell on the qualities of the love-object. Her aim here was simply to indicate the degrees to which a woman would go in order to express and uphold her love for a man. The man is presumed to be great rather than shown as such, and the woman’s greatness, her heroic quality, lies not in her own creation, but rather the depth and purity of her feelings of love, or worship, for her man, and her refusal to compromise her love for the sake of social conventions.

The Hero of the Parable

Ten years later, Rand made her first hero. He is the nameless ‘we/I’ of her tale Anthem and he hardly exists as a character. Anthem in its hero and the world of the future it depicts are shown with a blurry, impressionistic vision. Rand as yet couldn’t bring her hero into sharp focus, and so in Anthem she attempts something more like a parable or fable, a fairytale of anti-collectivism. And just as the hero and his world are blurred, so too the drama is muted. The drama isn’t well done at all and here again the problem is that Rand wants to show us the moral and intellectual rebellion of her hero, and not its physical counterpart. There are no hair-raising escapes, trials, firing-squads, battles, near-misses, as we love in Dumas père’s tales or the science-fantasies of Amazing and Astounding pulp magazines. The struggle in Anthem is all very quiet, and rather dull.

Two Heroes

Howard Roark in The Fountainhead is a great leap forward for Rand. She portrays Roark much more clearly. His moral struggle to design and build buildings only in the best way he can find, without regard to the aesthetic opinions of the masses or his clients, causes him great pain. He loves to build, he longs to build, and it hurts him with a pain almost physical not to be able to build.

But in The Fountainhead Rand introduces another dramatic flaw. She conceived the tale as a contrast between the careers of two men: Roark, the uncompromising individual, and Peter Keating, the architect who never wanted to be an architect, but wanted success in the world as the world defined success: fame, fortune, prestige. Keating’s story is a long nightmare of rise and fall, fall, fall.

I do not think it is an accident that Rand shows Keating’s career, especially in his rise and how he wins his way to the acme of his profession, with greater excitement and detail than she shows Roark’s. Already with Roark Rand has created her first hero with the Superman flaw: after a brief period of training (and one mistake in building) Roark faces no problems in designing he can’t solve. His problem is solely in finding clients who will pay him to build in his own manner. He does this about a third of the way into the book, and never looks back.

Rand creates another hero in The Fountainhead named Gail Wynand. Wynand is a tragic hero, a flawed hero, and with Wynand’s tale Rand achieves her strongest and most compelling Romantic tale. Wynand’s tale stands as a reproach to the rest of Rand’s talesmanship, the one example that showed what she might have done in creating stirring, thrilling tales, if only she had not fallen prey to the twin mistakes of heroes with the Superman flaw and villains that were nonentities.

Wynand has a life story that could have been published with ease in the late Victorian pulps Rand loved as a child. Roark has no life story; the notion that her hero ‘makes himself’ backs Rand into a corner: Roark’s early life contains literally nothing, because there could be no drama in it. Wynand claws his way out of the gutter in a brilliant ferocious way. He chooses a life that has within it the seeds of his own destruction, for he chooses to rule by means that in the end demonstrate that rather than leading he had to follow. Therefore with great pain Wynand must face his own mistake, acknowledge (in the grand Romantic-tragic manner) that there is no going back, and chooses to kill himself rather than carry on. In the novel, Rand only implies that Wynand kills himself; it is the one weakness in the Wynand tale, and I conclude that Rand faced a dilemma here. For if Wynand was strong, bold, and moral enough to kill himself after Roar’s acquittal at trial proves that Wynand had been wrong about life from his earliest days — then Wynand would have been strong, bold, and moral enough to begin again. But that would mean another tale just when things needed wrapping up. So Rand represents Wynand in the last action we see him take as symbolically killing himself. In her movie adaptation of The Fountainhead Rand makes the better choice, and Wynand blows his brains out on the contract he has just signed to grant Roark his greatest commission.

The Ghost of Atlas

Atlas Shrugged was Rand’s last tale, and she claimed it was her crowning achievement. Its plot derives from an idea Rand had when she was a girl. But the tale she told as an adult was far weaker than anything the girl would have told.

Rand became wealthy from Atlas Shrugged whose success brought The Fountainhead back into print, and spawned a second career for Rand writing essays about her philosophy rather than spinning tales about heroes. She never needed to write fiction to earn her bread again. She claimed that in Atlas Shrugged she had reached the end, told of her greatest, unsurpassable heroes, and therefore had no more tales to tell. To tell of less would never satisfy her now. But I think the real reason she couldn’t tell any more tales was that she had, in Atlas, written and thought herself into a corner from which there was no escape.

Her hero in Atlas Shrugged was John Galt. Galt is described in physical terms as concrete as those Rand used for Roark. Galt, like Roark, has no past, he makes himself, and therefore he has no life story to be told. But he is perfect beyond Roark, in a way that utterly destroys any chance that his tale can be suspenseful. He is Rand’s full Superman, who is so sure of himself morally that he never has a doubt, who is so brilliant as a scientist that his inventions are more science-fantasy than science-fiction, and might as well be magic. Therefore Galt is barely in the tale at all, and when he does appear, he seems more like a ghost than a man. I’m sure Rand herself would not have thought so, but see for yourself: read the scenes where Galt is physically present, and you will see that he is more like the Holy Spirit than Jesus torn on the cross, even when Galt, like Jesus, is tortured by his accusers.

In Atlas Shrugged Rand completes her philosophical explorations into the nature of evil. Influenced by her follower Nathaniel Brandon, Rand considered psychology during the years she was writing Atlas Shrugged and concluded that the nature of evil was unreason. Since the world is rational, evil does not and can never work. Therefore evil men are impotent.

We find therefore the unhappy collision of the godlike, ghostlike, unconquerable hero confronting impotent, utterly weak villains. And there is no drama here.

Rand does create in Atlas Shrugged two tragic heroes after the model of Gail Wynand. Hank Reardon has made a fatal error in his thinking, even as Wynand had. Unlike Wynand, Reardon only has to be shown the error of his ways in order to start anew and be as impervious to pain as the ghostly Galt. Francisco d’Anconia is more exciting after the manner of the Romantic pulp tales of the late Victorians. His flaw is harder to pinpoint, except that he is not so perfect as Galt. Both Reardon and d’Anconia love Dagny Taggart, who sleeps with both of them on her way to finding Galt. In these twinned love triangles Rand approaches drama at last: what will happen when her titans clash? Then she backs away from the conflict, because inside the confines of her philosophical corner, Rand can only consider a man a hero to the extent that he is rational. The rational man (whatever his feelings) is convinced by logic. He will not turn away from the logical premises or deductions, and his feelings will follow swiftly and easily upon his rational conclusions. Both Reardon and Francisco acknowledge that Galt is the better man, so ‘of course’ Dagny must prefer him to them, and so after a brief hour of pain, Francisco and Reardon accept her choice. End of conflict. (With Reardon there is not so much as even that hour of pain, as I recall: he looks at Galt — at Dagny looking at Galt — and smiles and says, ‘Of course.’ Well, that was easy!)

We Don’t Really Like Our Tales to be Dull

What can we learn from this? That we like suspense in our tales is almost a given, and conflict is needed for us to feel suspense. The more evenly-balanced the forces in conflict are, the greater the suspense we will be likely to feel.

Therefore our talesmen can only make their heroes great, to the extent that they make their antagonists almost as great. This requires a philosophy, or an outlook on the affairs of the tale, that allows for strong antagonists as well as strong heroes.

(I think we can say also, though Rand’s tales don’t have the material to support it, that weak heroes fighting weak antagonists, weakens the suspense as well. But that is another tale for another day.)

(Composed on keyboard Saturday 26 January 2008)