Reactions on reading Fountainhead!

Reactions on reading The Fountainhead

Everybody and I mean EVERYBODY seems to have read "The Fountainhead" - from film stars to the intellectuals, to your average nobody who you would not expect to have even read the book. Now why am I looking down on them - you might ask – and I will say, I am not exactly looking down, all I am doing is saying that you would not expect them to devote their time towards a book even for a minute's entertainment and yet even they seem to have given the time to read through this whole novel of around 800 pages. Not only that they, seemed to have loved it enough to praise it profusely. Now of course like usual cynics I thought this is all balderdash that they are simply uplifting this book just for the sake of hype and nothing else - the book is itself becoming the true symbol of all it set out to show as wrong in a way. Makes me smile here at this ironic arrangement but maybe she really believed in it, who knows. I am not saying that the book is something you should just put aside and forget. What she is saying is true but the factor is other people have said the same thing and in my opinion have done a better job of it. I don’t see why she has to be seen to be spearheading a whole movement called Objectivism and seen to be the inventor of this philosophy. Aristotle said the same things in his story of the cave where men saw the outside world as shadows and that was the only way they could conceive of it but then one among them, the one who was creative and had the guts went out and was amazed by what he saw - the colors, the three dimensional objects and he like a poor ignorant fellow came back to try and make the cavemen understand his point of view and they outcast him because they thought he was a mad person. Isn’t this what Gail Wynand suffers? What is so different in this story and the whole 600 page story that Ayn Rand puts forward. The only difference is that Aristotle probably took 3 pages to tell his story and put forth his views on human existence while Ayn Rand commercialized it and made it into an 800 page book with a dash of sensationalism thrown in to get to the masses, make them understand her point of view. She was probably as big an Ellsworth Toohey as she could be. She knew exactly what spices she needed to add to the text of her philosophy. No, I will not say her philosophy but her conception of human existence to make it ‘gettable’ to others. Or else how would you explain the existence of a character like Dominique - granted at the beginning of the book she is an interesting character but then she slips into kind of an iceberg coldness in which she seems to have passion for nothing. An Ice Queen in the very popular lingo but something even missing from that. She does not have any purpose in life as such. Roark’s arrogance I understand because he has the talent and is granted to have the ego to separate him from the general run of the mill existence, just in order to preserve his genius. He has a definite goal in life to serve the cause of his passion. What is Dominique’s goal in life? Howard Roark – and what has she done to serve his cause - thrown impediments in his way so that he realizes the futility of his efforts and she like every other object that she loves can make it disappear from the face of the earth so that that the beauty of his creation can never again be appreciated by inferior eyes. Granted she has worked hard for this cause but considering she is the heroine wouldn’t one have wanted her to be able to stand up to all that and like Gail Wynand say this is what I like and no matter what I am going to stick by it. She seems to have given up too easily. Ok granted again that the plot of the story would not work if both the characters were as strong as each other, that would not make for an interesting story but then in doing so is not Ayn Rand making the same sacrifice that she speaks against – surrendering her character for the sake of the plot, which ultimately can be linked to so many other things which will in the end come down to again a people’s choice kind of a thing. Coz ultimately who decides what a good plot should be isn’t it the reader?

Surrendering to one’s emotions seems to be a banned concept in this book. Dominique seems to be the epitome of that. But seriously speaking – why would such a concept come up? What is so bad in showing one’s emotions? The most basic animal instincts are still shown, Roark and Dominique meet on that precinct that he comes to satisfy his basic body hunger with her and she does the same, probably because she recognizes a reflection of her soul in him. I grant that to her and thus her unhappy marriage to Keating also I understand but when it comes down to Gail, I will not believe that she did not share any thing with him or when they made love it was only Gail who felt anything while Dominique was cold, because there are descriptions of where she was definitely responding wholeheartedly to Gail’s kisses. And yet when the time came she left him saying he should be punished for doing what the public wanted him to do. Didn’t Dominique also make a compromise there, hadn’t she made a private promise to herself that she would never give herself to another man other than Roark at least not whole heartedly. Isn’t she a second hander there? She surrendered herself to her bodily urges, the animal side of her we might say. The Fountainhead is a book in praise of the intellect, because the intellect is the only thing that sets us apart from animals. And yet even Roark could not totally restrain himself from the most basic of the natural urges. The argument might be given that he is a human being after all. Granted but then if he can surrender to the most basic ones why not to the other ones. Why not anger why not fear why not sadness? What is so wrong in surrendering to these? And to ask this question in another way what’s so GREAT in not surrendering to them. What’s the point in all that? Wouldn’t one be more proud of a man who has faced everything been in the mire so to say, tried to bloom a lotus and ended up in the mire again. Defeated but actually not because he at least tried to rise from his present circumstances, tried to work within the system. Like Gail Wynand, not like Roark who stayed apart from the whole system and didn’t even try, didn’t show the gutsiness of trying to topple the system he just gave up, replete in the sense that when it came to saving his own skin he had the skills necessary for that. He has some definite goal in lifeh