Heroic. Review on FountainHead, The - Ayn Rand

This is the first time I am writing about a book, not for them who are about to read it, but for those who have read it, considered it, understood it, and have subscribed to its ideas. A novel that has been in the bestseller’s list of every bookstore since sixty years needs no review. I shall therefore abstain from providing any synopsis of Ayn Rnd’s *The Fountainhead.

Back when it was published, The Fountainhead was thought to be a radically original philosophical story. Not anymore, though, as it advocates a philosophy which is the mainstream of the thought process of anyone who has managed to shake off the yokes of the past, anyone who believes that one’s first duty is towards oneself, and material achievement is the highest moral one can achieve.

There is nothing radical or original about this philosophy of objectivism. It has had advocates much before the time of Ayn Rnd. Some of them were Indians – which is surprising, as shunning the precedent has been considered so characteristically western by our forefathers. But these Indian advocates – most prominent of them being Rabindranath Tagore and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar – were themselves thought of as either whimsical or extreme in their views. Tagore was thought by most westerners as a typical Indian mystic(In this context I strongly recommend reading Amartya Sen’s collection of essays “Tagore and His India” from *The Argumentative Indian). And Veer Savarkar wrote aggressively about politics and the status quo. In the west we had authors like A J Cronin and Morris West, who wrote mostly in the backdrop of religion and art. Writers like John Steinbeck and W S Maugham performed a beautifully romantic segue of the contemporary literature from Naturalism to Existentialism. All these writers, irrespective of their domain, had one common hero – the individual.

Now if people have been talking of objectivism since ages, why did it take The Fountainhead for this idea to storm the realms of modern philosophy?

Was it because her writing was unconventional? No.

I’m not saying that unconventional is an understatement and she perhaps deserves a higher, more eloquent appraisal. No, her writing needs absolutely no sanction from reviewers. Her work stands as an absolute – a guidepost which some of us desperately seek to find as the ultimate yardstick.(And there are others who seek it as self help.)

It is not unconventional. It is the most aggressive manifestation of that faculty which we all, as intellectuals, are committed to – reason. It is extremely clear, precise, cold, ruthless, and unyielding. Romance is her speciality. The quality that makes her a bestselling novelist even today is her ability to romanticize those ideas, which would normally be thought of as totally incapable of any emotion at all. She wrote, “…neither politics, nor literature, nor philosophy is an end in itself. Only Man is an end in himself.” Earlier they wrote of God and the Providential. She wrote of Man and that which He is capable of(notice the uppercase letters).

She condemned collectivism in all its forms. In The Fountainhead, it came as the story of an intransigent architect who is up against a society that refuses to grant him the independence of designing buildings that are truly his own. All they ever appreciate are “copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood…” In The Fountainhead and her other books, she used architecture and engineering and mathematics not only to add local colour to the story and romanticize it, but also to use the sciences to symbolize the unyielding nature, and cold logic of her ideas. Her writing is a celebration of youth, of human spirit, of perseverance and most of all it is a celebration of joy, the rapture of contemplating one’s own creation.

In her essay “The Goal of My Writing” she says, “If anyone asks me what it is that I have said to the glory of Man, I will answer only by paraphrasing Howard Roark.”

Of The Fountainhead, there can be no reviews, no star ratings, and no recommendations. It stands there as a perpetual monument to what a human being is capable of.