Otherwise Maladroit

15 January 2001 Written for Pulitika Issue 3

15 January 2001

Written for Pulitika Issue 3

Maybe

There is something curious about Rand and Tolstoy. (Wait! Before I go on, for the record, I am no expert on Rand – I still have not finished The Fountainhead, or Tolstoy – I have only read one novel: Anna Karenina. So please get a hold of your flaring nostrils.) Even though Rand had succinctly stated in The Romantic Manifesto that Tolstoy was a literary virtuoso who was as interesting as a toenail, and Tolstoy sometimes being labeled a libertarian socialist (an anarchist to you), I think they can be reconciled.

What I find irritating in Rand is that she has no subtlety in her novels. She preaches, nay, bludgeons the reader with exhausting dialogue articulating, what at times I feel like, a way to reach a new level of coolness. Howard Roark is cool. Confident, self possessed, and with undeniable talent, Roark leaves a trail of envious men – like his "priestess" leaves a trail of unsatisfied admirers. But must she give him a cape? Every time Roark is mentioned he is surrounded with descriptions of uncomfortable feelings from his detractors, his physical attributes and concise manners are pointed out, and his personality is sung hallelujahs. In We The Living, Rand's heroine is the ultimate philosophical martyr. When she, the heroine whom I don't remember the name, was first introduced, Rand made sure that she came through as virtually untouchable by those unworthy of her. And when she did finally breakdown, after her earthy idol was reduced to prostituting himself, her thwarted escape may as well be a biblical passage about the Apocalypse.

Tolstoy's Levin on the other hand was written as a man ambivalent towards ideology. Levin felt very real, in fact, his attitude toward politics was eerily close to my own feelings about it. But Levin's character did not undergo any fundamental change. He did, however, become comfortable with his ambivalence. Still, there is something rebellious in Levin, which was grumpy about authority or conformity. Moreover Levin, despite his imperfections, has a strong moral drive that led him to try and give his farmers more leverage, and made him revel in a more honest rural life. Levin is hardly a self-made man, and he constantly doubts himself, the kind of anti-hero that Rand can do without.

But their, Rand and Tolstoy's, observations on how society can cow the human spirit runs parallel. People are bitterly cruel to individuals who march on their own drumbeat. There is a constant wall of doubt towards anything new, or to anything that questions the firmament. Rand warns that this attitude produces people who are mired with self-consciousness, who are chronically insecure, who are compliant to the clique, but woefully unimaginative. These are precisely the characteristics that Levin threatens to become, had Tolstoy not given him a grain of dignity. Rand may recoil from Tolstoy's realism, but I think that they hold the same banner from opposite ends. It's a stretch, but hear me out.

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is sarcastic and ironic criticism on the tendency of society to act like a hive. Tolstoy does attack hypocrisy even though he does not magnify it. He leaves it for us to identify duplicity by the bile that we ourselves taste. His, for lack of a better word, villains are not totally hateful because they are not consciously evil. Tolstoy understands that people's perceptions are based on their ideals, and he knows that most of us helplessly conform these ideals to the norm. Levin's ambiguity is actually his consciousness of his individuality coming to the fore. The kind of individual, as I interpret, that Rand venerates.

Rand's style cuts through the fuzziness, and reveals intentions behind actions and emotions as it is. Think of Rand and Tolstoy as cops in a storm-in. Rand takes the front door, going for the direct approach, while Tolstoy takes the back door, sneaking up to his target. Still, they're after the same thing: a society that punishes individualism.

Of course, they are hardly partners. There exists a wide canyon of ideas between them. However, their ideal is a society of individuals, consciously contributing their capacity to the whole, willingly bound to its effort while remaining well away servitude to authority. How these two authors seem to have the same sentiment is indeed curious.

posted by Otherwise Maladroit @ 5:19 PM