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Altered Myths in Atlas Shrugged ***Spoiler Alert***


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*****     Atlas Shrugged — Spoiler Alert     *****

 

 

 

 

Bridging page 70 of Atlas Shrugged, Rand outlines an excerpt of Richard Halley’s life dealing with the Greek myth of Phaëthon.

His life had been a summary of the lives of all the men whose reward is a monument in a public park a hundred years after the time when a reward can matter—except that Richard Halley did not die soon enough. He lived to see the night which, by the accepted laws of history, he was not supposed to see. He was forty-three years old and it was the opening night of Phaëthon, an opera he had written at the age of twenty-four. He had changed the ancient Greek myth to his own purpose and meaning: Phaëthon, the young son of Helios, who stole his father's chariot and, in ambitious audacity, attempted to drive the sun across the sky, did not perish, as he perished in the myth; in Halley's opera, Phaëthon succeeded. The opera had been performed then, nineteen years ago, and had closed after one performance, to the sound of booing and catcalls. That night, Richard Halley had walked the streets of the city till dawn, trying to find an answer to a question, which he did not find.

One of the first explicit mythological references in Atlas Shrugged, and Rand chooses the product of a musician, where Halley gets the Phaëthon myth “wrong”. Phaëthon succeeded in Halley’s version, rather than perish as in the Greek version of the myth.

Much later, on page 480, according to this excerpt:

John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains – and withdrew his fire – until the day when men withdrew their vultures. (2.5.1.266)

What's really interesting about this is that Francisco gets the Prometheus myth wrong. Prometheus stole fire and knowledge from the gods and gave it to people on earth.

Rand had already orchestrated the prelude to this movement. She had changed the ancient Greek myth to her own purpose and meaning, much as Halley is described to have altered his. (This one in a decidedly altruist parallel.)

Part of her reasoning, as I see it, from The Letters Of Ayn Rand, pg. 670:

I decided to become a writer—not in order to save the world, nor to serve my fellow men—but for the simple, personal, selfish, egotistical happiness of creating the kind of men and events I could like, respect and admire. I can bear to look around me levelly. I cannot bear to look down. I wanted to look up.

This attitude has never changed. But I went for years thinking that it was a strictly personal attitude toward fiction writing, never to be discussed and of no interest to anyone but me. Later I discovered I had accepted as the rule of my life work a principle stated by Aristotle. Aristotle said that fiction is of greater philosophical importance than history, because history represents things only as they are, while fiction represents them "as they might be and ought to be."

 

Edited by dream_weaver
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Prometheus

Ancient myths and legends relate at least four versions of the narratives describing Prometheus, his exploits with Zeus, and his eternal punishment as also inflicted by Zeus. 

I'm not sure if you are commenting on the fact that she left out "knowledge", or perhaps you are interpreting differently "and withdrew his [John Galt's] fire – until the day when men [in America] withdrew their vultures.

Edited by New Buddha
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I missed picking up part of the excerpt. (Smoop)

What's really interesting about this is that Francisco gets the Prometheus myth wrong. Prometheus stole fire and knowledge from the gods and gave it to people on earth. Zeus, the head-honcho god, punished Prometheus for his theft by chaining him to a rock and letting vultures come and pick out his liver every day. Yuck. Francisco makes it sound like "men" sent the vultures, though. So what gives? Well, over time the Prometheus myth had come to represent rebellious, anti-establishment ideas, with Zeus standing in for things like government, organized religion, parents, etc. So Francisco seems to be substituting powerful, oppressive humans for "Zeus" here.

So yes, John Galt (stand-in for Prometheus) withdrew his fire until the day when men (rather than Zeus) withdrew their vultures.

Interestingly enough, I had started comparing this with the Wikipedia page on Prometheus some time ago and later connected it with the Atlas Shrugged passage on Richard Halley.

Edited by dream_weaver
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Phaëthon

Fragments of Euripides' tragedy on this subject suggest that, in his account, Phaëthon survives. In reconstructing the lost play and discussing the fragments, James Diggle has discussed the treatment of the Phaethon myth (Diggle 2004).

Locating a date for when these fragments were discovered has been elusive thus far.

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16 hours ago, dream_weaver said:

 Prometheus stole fire and knowledge from the gods and gave it to people on earth. Zeus, the head-honcho god, punished Prometheus for his theft by chaining him to a rock and letting vultures come and pick out his liver every day. Yuck. Francisco makes it sound like "men" sent the vultures, though. So what gives? Well, over time the Prometheus myth had come to represent rebellious, anti-establishment ideas, with Zeus standing in for things like government, organized religion, parents, etc. So Francisco seems to be substituting powerful, oppressive humans for "Zeus" here.
 

"Vox populi / vox dei" - the voice of the people / the voice of god(s). Ayn Rand used this reference in her explanation of the inversion of modern morality (or lack of it), from God's will, to popular opinion. In our secular democracy, the majority decides what is legal and lawful, regardless of right and wrong.

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CD search shows "Vox populi / vox dei" used in both The Fountainhead and her essay Man's Rights.

The "the majority decides" comes across as an acronym for the "silent machine" described in the thoughts of Dr. Stadler following the announcement of the Thompson Harmonizer.

Whether a malevolent universe, or a view of man as corrupt or ruled by vice, ancient mythology touts this as a status quo. At times it seems as formidable and enduring as Eddie's oak tree, while their inversion of morality's thin gray dust is just waiting to be dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind.

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Looking for a glimmer of sunlight on the eastern horizon, reading from "For The New Intellectual":

The first society in history whose leaders were neither Attilas nor Witch Doctors, a society led, dominated and created by the Producers, was the United States of America. The moral code implicit in its political principles was not the Witch Doctor's code of self-sacrifice. The political principles embodied in its Constitution were not Attila's blank check on brute force, but men's protection against any future Attila's ambition.

Interestingly enough to me is that the Constitution provided for protection against any future Attila's ambition. Rand, in at least two passages of Atlas Shrugged, mentions the foreshortening of the historical schedule. The first, in The Concerto of Deliverance, the second in Galt's speech. Does she foresee, i.e., should we, take any stock in these suggestions. 1. that the historical schedule or 2. the foreshortened usual course of history—are potential ammunition provided for men's protection against any future Witch Doctor's ambitions?

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Not exactly part of the mythos, Fransisco was described in two passages as if he had a cape floating or waving behind him in the wind. The first time was as Dagney walked into his room at the Wayne-Falkland, to confront him about the San Sebastián disaster.

The second was when he entered Rearden's office after Hank was struck by a thug in the yard of his mills, preceded by the comment:

If it's true, he thought, that there are avengers who are working for the deliverance of men like me, let them see me now, let them tell <as_918>  me their secret, let them claim me, let them—"Come in!" he said aloud, in answer to the knock on his door.

Truth, justice and the American way. A blend of Superman, Batman, Captain America, etc.

On the myth side of things, she took the liberty to rewrite the outcome of Phaëthon, altered Prometheus, indicated the focus on need dominating the legend of Robinhood. With the cape she taps into the parallel of the current day superhero, man as the hero, in a subtle way I had overlooked on several previous readings, while turning it back in on itself here:

"Don't be astonished, Miss Taggart," said Dr. Akston, smiling, <as_725> "and don't make the mistake of thinking that these three pupils of mine are some sort of superhuman creatures. They're something much greater and more astounding than that: they're normal men—a thing the world has never seen—and their feat is that they managed to survive as such.

I looked up concerto recently. As Fransisco fittingly asks, "Why not a new symphony or opera? Why specifically a concerto?" The Concerto For Deliverance. It's a title fit for a book, not just a chapter within one.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Ben Bayer writes in Check Your Premises,

It's been a while since I last blogged about my class based on Atlas Shrugged. We are now nearly done with two thirds of the semester. This has probably been my most enjoyable teaching experience to date, and not just because I am sympathetic with the philosophy we are discussing. I've fallen in love with the idea of teaching philosophy through fiction. Students are much more intensely drawn into discussing the ideas of a novel whose characters they come to know, even when they do not necessarily agree with the ideas. It is a pity that so few philosophers chose to dramatize their ideas in literary form.

I'm currently re-reading the book, in conjunction with listening to Scott Brick's reading of it at the same time, making corrections to the OCR errors found on the searchable CD (although I'm not documenting them). There are many subtitles (some touched on in this thread) that make you go hmmm.

Why, if this generalization is true ("throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically"), does Rearden still does not feel any motivation to attend? My students suggest that perhaps he does not really think he has that duty. Perhaps they're on to something. This opening scene sounds the first notes of a leitmotif that will arise numerous times throughout the chapter. Though I note that the chapter deals with a number of other important philosophical issues, it is very interesting to notice this chapter's treatment of the relationship between reason and emotion.

"God said: Take what you want and pay for it." The duty charged for crossing the border from altruism to egoism is billed for in the coin of the realm: causality. Or as Mark Scott used to comment about the inscription on the currency of this land: "In God We Trust", all others pay cash.

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In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny flies her plane through the mirage created by the ray-screen which was supposed to be protecting the valley. Her plane is disabled by the screen, while her predecessor lands, intact, with little explanation of any perceivable differences.

Is this a metaphor, or is it one of only the many keys that appear to exist for discovering that which was supposed to have actually existed in the valley, according to the novel?

This, and many other unsolved mysteries continue to beguile this oft tried mind.

(Tired of looking for the key-maker [Matrix reference.])

((I have to add—either private or public.))

Edited by dream_weaver
Parenthetical consideration(s) added.
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  • 3 months later...

Ninety-Three

Atlas Shrugged, pg. 326

Dagny drew a black line across Train Number 93 on the schedule, and felt a moment's desolate satisfaction in noting that she did it calmly. It was an action which she had had to perform many times in the last six months. It had been hard, at first; it was becoming easier. The day would come, she thought, when she would be able to deliver that death stroke even without the small salute of an effort. Train Number 93 was a freight that had earned its living by carrying supplies to Hammondsville, Colorado.

The searchable CD provides three instances of Train Number 93 in Atlas Shrugged, all in the chapter "The Man Who Belonged On Earth."  The Ayn Rand Column, and The Romantic Manifesto, have tributes to Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three, with a recollection formed when she was but seven years old. She had heard her mother reading to her grandmother the passage she described as "they gave me the sense of some tremendous drama resolving events of unimaginable importance." She did not ask about the book, as she was not supposed to be listening. It would be six years before experiencing the "shock of recognition" in its closing chapters. Years later she will write:

The background of Ninety-Three is the French Revolution. The title refers to 1793, the year of the terror. The theme is that which is most signally lacking in today's culture: man's loyalty to values.

She states this more profoundly in The Romantic Manifesto

The emphasis he projects is not: "What great values men are fighting for!" but: "What greatness men are capable of, when they fight for their values!"

She recollects the sense of life from her youth that may well have been instrumental in developing her philosophy. Seeing the good possible to men and watching it vanish over the years. Perhaps she chose 93 as the Train Number, to underscore what she allegorically puts forth in Atlas Shrugged.

She knew what steps would come next: first, the death of the special freights—then the shrinking in the number of boxcars for Hammondsville, attached, like poor relatives, to the rear end of freights bound for other towns—then the gradual cutting of the stops at Hammondsville Station from the schedules of the passenger trains—then the day when she would strike Hammondsville, Colorado, off the map. That had been the progression of Wyatt Junction and of the town called Stockton.

It is not that there are not people who would want to read such books, or ride such trains. The philosophic structure required for them to be written is evaporating, much as the economic incentives needed to justify the runs to Hammondsville. As if to further exemplify the thought of her possible implicit correlation:

As she sat at her desk, over the schedules of the John Galt Line, waiting for Dr. Stadler to come, she wondered why no first-rate talent had risen in the field of science for years. She was unable to look for an answer. She was looking at the black line which was the corpse of Train Number 93 on the schedule before her.

I've not gotten very far into Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three. The copy available at Project Gutenberg is not the translation Miss Rand was requested to write her intro for. Even as difficult a read it has started out to be, the emphasis she identifies as him projecting can be ascertained.

 

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She had looked at that distant page every evening of the months behind her. Your days are numbered, it had seemed to say—as if it were marking a progression toward something it knew, but she didn't. Once, it had clocked her race to build the John Galt Line; now it was clocking her race against an unknown destroyer. —Atlas Shrugged, pg. 354

Eddie Willers, at the beginning of the story, had an uneasy feeling seeing the page of the calendar over the city. Pop Harper provided him with the sentence "your days are numbered", referring to an old typewriter destined for the junkyard. In 2003, when the power went out to the NE section of the United States for several days, some folk suggested Rand was prescient in this regard. In 2011-2012, announcements were made that the typewriter had been relegated to the dustbin of history with stories of the last factories shutting down, and the last typewriter off one of the production lines being donated to a museum. How prescient was that?

Somewhat ironically, Ayn Rand wrote her transcript of the novel by hand while having the manuscript typed up synchronously.

The John Galt Line, in the novel was a concrete stretch of track. As Miss Rand was writing the novel, John Galt's speech consisted of many of John Galt's lines. In her book For The New Intellectual, she interjected after the title: This is the philosophy of Objectivism. Writing Atlas Shrugged provided an avenue for her to concretize a hitherto unknown destroyer.

It seemed to her that some destroyer was moving soundlessly through the country and the lights were dying at his touch—someone, she thought bitterly, who had reversed the principle of the Twentieth Century motor and was now turning kinetic energy into static.—Atlas Shrugged, pg. 355

The Twentieth Century Motor Company served as a factor[y] in Atlas Shrugged. But what of twentieth century philosophy? Consider for a moment a passage from her book For The New Intellectual:

After decades of preaching that the hallmark of an intellectual consists of proclaiming the impotence of the intellect, these modern zombies are left aghast before the fact that they have succeeded—that they are impotent to ignite the lights of civilization, which they have extinguished—that they are impotent to halt the triumphant advance of the primordial brute, whom they have released—that they have no answer to give to those voices out of the Dark Ages who gloat that reason and freedom have had their chance and have failed, and that the future, like the long night of the past, belongs once more to faith and force.

As Peikoff indicates at the beginning of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand,

Philosophy is not a bauble of the intellect, but a power from which no man can abstain.

This does not indicate if such power moves in the direction of good or otherwise.

That was the enemy—she thought, as she sat at her desk in the gathering twilight—with whom she was running a race. The monthly report from Quentin Daniels lay on her desk. She could not be certain, as yet, that Daniels would solve the secret of the motor; but the destroyer, she thought, was moving swiftly, surely, at an ever accelerating tempo; she wondered whether, by the time she rebuilt the motor, there would be any world left to use it.—Atlas Shrugged, pg. 355

The secret of the motor is, allegorically, the secret of philosophy. The race Miss Rand was running against was time. The destroyer, altruism, was moving at an ever accelerating tempo. She wondered if, by the time she put forth the ethics of egoism, there would be time for what remained, philosophically, of the world to use it.

Double entendre, or just a simple progression of a story line?  Per Merriam-Webster, a double entendre can be an expression that usually refers to sex. For Ayn Rand, sex is the expression of one's entire philosophy and attitude toward life. Would it be that surprising if she employed double entendres, such that it could be understood in two different ways—not necessarily referring to sex? (consider—The Journals of Ayn Rand 13 - Notes While Writing: 1947-1952, pg. 609)

 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

On page 68 she wrote:

It has taken so much to build this city, it should have so much to offer.

She expresses discouragement at what she saw being offered as she walked through the streets. This could be Ayn Rand looking around at the growing trends, reminiscing about the art of her youth she spoke of early in The Romantic Manifesto.

One of the specifics she mentions that ties in with the altered myth thoughts was walking past the bookstore.

The Vulture is Molting. Was it, in her mind, the novel of our century, or a parallel to two issues she dealt with both in and out of Atlas Shrugged: "The penetrating study of a businessman's greed. A fearless revelation of man's depravity."

I couldn't help but think of the part told by Francisco to Dagny, about John Galt withdrawing his fire until men withdrew their vultures. Subtle. Very subtle.

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  • 4 months later...

While not an altered myth, a tale of two cities comes to mind comparing the night the John Galt line was murdered to the night of Cherryl Taggart's demise.

"Dagny," he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, "think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He did not say, 'It seems to me,' and he did not take orders from those who say, 'In my opinion.'"

She chuckled, wondering at his accuracy: he had guessed the nature of the sickening sense that held her, the sense of a swamp which she had to escape.

"Look around you," he said. "A city is the frozen shape of human courage—the courage of those men who thought for the first time of every bolt, rivet and power generator that went to make it. The courage to say, not 'It seems to me,' but 'It is'—and to stake one's life on one's judgment. You're not alone. Those men exist. They have always existed. There was a time when human beings crouched in caves, at the mercy of any pestilence and any storm. Could men such as those on your Board of Directors have brought them out of the cave and up to this?" He pointed at the city.

"God, no!"
"Then there's your proof that another kind of men do exist."
"Yes," she said avidly. "Yes."
"Think of them and forget your Board of Directors."
"Francisco, where are they now—the other kind of men?"
"Now they're not wanted."
"I want them. Oh God, how I want them!"
When you do, you'll find them."

Contrast this with Cherryl's view of the city skyline:

From the sudden space of a broad intersection, she looked at the great skyscrapers in the distance. They were vanishing quietly into a veil of fog, with the faint breath of a glow behind them, with a few lights like a smile of farewell. Once, they had been a promise, and from the midst of the stagnant sloth around her she had looked to them for proof that another kind of men existed. Now she knew that they were tombstones, slender obelisks soaring in memory of the men who had been destroyed for having created them, they were the frozen shape of the silent cry that the reward of achievement was martyrdom.

 

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