It’s been an interesting week. I’ve just
started a new casual job, as a social worker at the Crisis Contact Centre in St
Kilda, Melbourne. The work involves taking telephone calls and face-to-face
inquiries from people who are either homeless or at risk of homelessness, providing
empathetic support and immediate assistance, and referring them to services
that can provide ongoing support to get them back into secure housing, and
address related issues.
Although I’m only one week in and still
training, I can see that this job will involve plenty of challenges – from the
heartbreak of seeing people in desperate or simply depressing situations, to
dealing with outbursts of anger from frustrated or unstable clients, to dealing
with con-jobs, like the charming, elderly, somewhat teary gentleman who had
his bag stolen during a night spent at the Casino because he had no money to
stay elsewhere, was put up in the best hotel we can afford, and given an array
of vouchers to provide him with food, transport and a change of clothes, and
then turned up again the next day, driving a red sports
car.
This week I also finished reading Ayn
Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. Several
friends expressed titillated disapproval on learning that I was reading Rand, due
to the fact that she gets quoted at Tea Party protests, and was Alan Greenspan’s
guru. Her ideas have inspired libertarian and right wing
politics in the US to the point where her biographer, Jennifer Burns, describes
her as "the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right." Flannery O’Connor, a wonderful American writer and a contemporary of Rand, once told a friend
who had found a Rand novel left behind in the subway, "The fiction of Ayn
Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor
of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail."
When I came across The Fountainhead in a box of books on the street in Balmain, I was
unaware of O’Connor’s advice. In any case, I was curious to find out what kind
of story inspires libertarian politics. Maybe there was also a certain
perversity that led me to start reading this book just before I was about to
take up my new job.
For Rand, the social worker is the epitome
of badly dressed evil. Her novel is designed to persuade the reader that
altruism is the enemy of integrity, independent thought and creativity. She
explicitly elevates selfishness to a moral and political ideal, making no
distinction between self-centred indifference toward others, and the courage to
remain true to one’s principles in a climate of mediocrity and corruption. (It
is worth noting that the novel was first published in 1943 and can be read as
an attempt to understand the forces and failures that had led to the state of
the world at this time.)
The central character of the book is Howard
Roark, a talented architect who remains heroically true to his ideal of
functional beauty in the face of repeated pressures to compromise – and who
begins his love affair with Dominique Francon, the main female character in the
novel, by raping her. This beautiful, intelligent, unfulfilled woman responds
by falling aggressively in love with him, and after various plot twists
including a striking episode of self-harming which involves cutting her body
with broken glass, an act which nearly kills her, they eventually live happily
ever after. Dominique gives up her job as a journalist along the way, and
becomes content to spend her days making herself look lovely and contemplating
the beauty of nature as a background to her husband’s soaring phallic
achievements.
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| Ayn Rand (1905-1982) |
For me, the story of this woman and her
relationship with the architect was the most intriguing aspect of
the novel (admittedly I have glossed over many others in this summary). It
appeared to be an effort to come to terms with what we might now categorise as
a personality disorder, though it's likely that Rand would have condemned such
a diagnosis as an example of the evils perpetrated in the name of altruism. Naturally,
the reader is not encouraged to feel empathy or pity for this character;
rather, she is portrayed as aloof, brilliant, intensely desirable to men, and
consistently well dressed, providing a stark contrast to all the other remarkably
unattractive women that appear in the novel.
Dominique’s suffering is treated as
unimportant next to the ideals and work of her lover, but at the same time it
is clearly, even dramatically, described. It does not appear that Rand’s fans
have paid much attention to this aspect of the novel. If they did, they might
find a clue regarding the kind of personal distress that can motivate a political
commitment to extreme individualism.
But perhaps it takes the perspective of a
social worker to see that.
