“Man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute” (Rand, 1996, p. 1074).

       Long after the glorious Atlantis disappeared from horizon, the lost continent has become a fortress archetype that secures an individual spiritual garden beyond geographic scales. Ayn Rand constructed her Atlantis out of a dichotomous perception of reality under the hegemonic control of reasoning. The idealized miniature world was inhabited by Rand’s heroes imprinted with her personality.

Ayn Rand, born Alice Rosenbaum, was the eldest daughter of Fronz Rosenbaum and Anna Rosenbaum. Fronz Rosenbaum was a self-made man from a poor Jewish family and owned his own chemist shop in St. Petersburg. What Rand could remember of her uncaring father was a silent man with “strong convictions” towards whom she remained a “strong affection, a dutiful ‘official’ affection” (Branden, 1986, p. 4). Anna Rosenbaum, the dominant figure in the family, was a responsible homemaker and a dedicated mother for her three daughters. The closeness, however, did not solicit from Rand any love for her mother. Anna Rosenbaum was very interested in social life and Rand was the opposite. The personality conflict led to the mother’s dissatisfaction with Rand’s “every respect” (Branden, p. 5) except intelligence. In return, Rand’s disdain for her mother’s sociable character was later to be exemplified by the “emptiness of spirit” (Branden, p. 5) in her works. Branden commented that her father’s indifference and her mother’s disapproval provoked “a process of self-protective emotional repression” (p. 5). Consequently, intelligence that had won Rand the recognition from adults became the weapon to fend off her anguish towards her parents and the external world.

Rand’s idea about family obstructed her relationships with others. At school Rand had few friends, but loneliness never disturbed her as she was too eager to proclaim, “There was a mark on my forehead—and how much I wished that somebody would see it.” (Branden, 1986, p. 15). She could not befriend with others, because she “was unable of a personal, non-ideological friendship” (Braden, p. 27). Alienation, as a non-verbal communication in an interpersonal relationship, could be interpreted as others’ acquiescence in Rand’s intellectual preeminence. This allowed Rand to discover who she was without others’ imposed “conditions of worth or acceptance” (Sollod, Wilson, & Monte, 2008, p. 426). Unaware of her submerging self-structure, the little girl was busy constructing her own world as simple as the battlefield between good and evil in her favorite adventurous stories.

In such a dichotomous world, “reason, purpose and self-esteem” (Rand, 1996, p. 936) were the good premises of existence and the soil for the development of “rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, [and] pride” (Rand, p. 932). These virtues of humanity cohered with the theories of Rollo May’s existential phenomenology and humanistic psychology.

Existential phenomenological psychology shed light on the broad frame of Rand’s personality. By viewing the self as a physical, social and independent entity, May indicated that people were self-motivated in search for the purposes to justify their own acts and thus to define their beings (Sollod et al., 2008). Hypersensitive to others’ challenges to her authority, Rand held a tight control over her world. Rand was germ phobic, intolerable of dissenting ideas, and allowed no changes to her work to be published or adapted for movies and television. On the other hand, “phenomenal centeredness”, the first ontological principle, was in accordance with Rand’s voluntary assumption of her responsibilities. During the early years of her career, Rand had to work for several jobs at one time in order to support the family. Only when she was prepaid for her works was she able to quit other jobs to focus on writing.

In retrospect, the possibility of death in adolescence had laid the cornerstone of Rand’s sense of being, as May asserted that the threat of nonbeing granted meanings to life (Sollod et al., 2008). After the surging Communists had overthrown the tsarism in 1917, the Rosenbaum, like other bourgeoisies, were deprived of their properties and went to seek refuge in the countryside. On the road the family was hijacked by a guerilla. As Rand recounted, “Her back to the bandits’ guns, her body trembling under her rough sweater and old black skirt, the night stretching bleakly around her, she wondered if she would die” (Branden, 1986, p. 30). The turmoil was all doom and gloom for the country where people were starving to death. The menace to life in Soviet Russia made Rand more conscious about being being. The torrents of Communist ideologies propelled her to rebel and later become a radical capitalist and an objectivist who exalted individuality. Egocentrism, under the threat of nonbeing, occupied the kernel of her personality.

The formula of her black-and-white world was defined as “the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A”, by which she meant that “Man’s mind is his basic method of survival” (Rand, 1996, p. 930; p. 926). The dynamisms of her personality were tainted with the dull colors whose dichotomy not only shaped Rand’s way of interacting with other people, but also made emotions more palpable and predictable. Reason, as the tool to defend her egocentrism, left little grey space between love and hatred.

Rand once proudly claimed, “I can explain the reason of any emotion I feel!” (Branden, 1986, p. 206). Emotions were like vectors with negative and positive values. Reasoning was the strategy for diminishing the incongruence and adjusting the total to zero. The aloofness left Rand more space to form her own values but little to tolerate dissentions, which always triggered off blatant reproach and condemnations of her friends’ irrationality and morality. This provided evidence for Carl Rogers’s theory that “the disparity between individual experience and how the person viewed themselves as a person” could lead to either “self-actualizing tendency” or “defensiveness, anxiety, tension, depression or other problems of living and adaptation” (Sollod et al., 2008, p. 423). Rand could be very amiable and patient when she was the one leading the conversation and then suddenly flew into a rage when her ideas were questioned.

       On the other hand, love arised from man’s heroic qualities such as “volitional consciousness” (Rand, 1996, p. 926), epitomized by Francisco d’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged:

To the rhythm of his body, with the scorching heat on his face and the winter night on his shoulder blades, he was seeing suddenly that this was the simple essence of universe: the instantaneous refusal to submit to disaster, the irresistible drive to fight it, the triumphant feeling of his own ability to win. (p. 424)

       The “masculine attributes” were alluring to Rand, as she called herself “a hero worshipper” (Branden, 1986, p. 18). The power and strength of human beings were the reason for her disdain for sociable women and the concurrent reverence for gallant men. The worship, in Alfred Adler’s term, was “masculine protest”, “a compensatory striving for superiority” (Sollod et al., 2008, p. 128). For Rand, the essence of feminism was hero-worship, the desire to look up to a man who possessed the equal high dominance as she did.

Frank O’Connor was the man whom Rand was in love with for fifty years. “It was love at first sight. I was always on the lookout for my kind of face . . . Here was my ideal face” (Branden, 1986, p. 79), as Rand described her encounter with O’Connor. O’Connor was a sensitive man who would “love anything that was small and helpless” (Branden, p. 85), and a devoted husband who always consorted with his wife and amused by the title of “Mr. Rand.” O’Connor was an unsuccessful actor when he met Rand. After their marriage, O’Connor still took whatever jobs he could find to support the family. Gradually the financial responsibility was shifted to Rand as her career took off. Branden noticed that Rand tended to idealize O’Connor so as to “announce to the world—and herself—the validity of her choice of a husband” (p. 88). He must be a hero to match with Rand’s high dominance. Though O’Connor was the most important companion in her whole life, he was not the hero Rand anticipated to “surrender” to (Branden, p. 300). As the heroic characters in her novels took shape, the Atlantis became a momentary shelter from her unsatisfactory relationship with O’Connor. Nevertheless, the ideal fortress bore the hallmark of Rand’s personality of emotional remoteness.

Branden (1986) pointed out that despite the grandiose philosophy, the “shadowy, unknowable abstraction” of the characters, and the lack of “authentic intimacy” in all the characters were the flaws of Atlas Shrugged (p. 299). Mentality always took precedence over emotions. As a result, the suppressed feminine emotions and needs that were not yet fulfilled led to the conflict between her desire to “surrender” and the fear of losing herself in a romantic relationship. In The Fountainhead, the “violent antagonism” (Branden, p. 300), the only solution to slash the defense for Rand, ended up in a rape. Branden suggested that like the impeccable heroines in her novels, Rand could not surrender until she felt “that she was helpless in the power of a hero of overwhelming dominance and will. . . . Only thus could she avoid feeling of self-contempt for her feminine instincts” (p. 300). This justified the theories of Abraham Maslow, which indicated that the “high-dominance women” wished to be “swept off her feet”, “to be dominated” and “to be forced into subordinate status” by the “straightforward, unsentimental, rather violent, animal, pagan, passionate, even sometimes brutal lovemaking” (Sollod et al., 2008, p. 405). The implementation of “violent antagonism” seemed to be unnecessary to mend the cleavage between mind and body in reality. Rand admitted that “There is no conflict between the standards of [a man’s] mind and the desire of his body. . . . Love is our response to our highest value—and can be nothing else” (Branden, p. 248). Branden sensed “somewhere inside [Rand] was a woman’s longing, a woman’s emotions, [and] a woman’s struggle for self-expression” (p. 240). The dominance of the man was essential to defuse the woman’s hesitation about humiliation and inferiority. Otherwise, the woman could never fall prey to her own sensibility and gave herself to her hero. Besides, the high dominance of the partner was a self-worth value that resonated with the woman’s own dominance, and allowed the subject to realize and actualize her own being.

       The accumulated suppression of emotions and desires were to blow up. Admitting to her love for Nathanial Branden, once her appointed intellectual heir, Rand had the four people by the two marriages sit together as she rationalized her affair with the man 25 years younger than her. Rand said, “By the total logic of who we are—by the total logic of what love and sex mean—we had to love each other. . . . It [is] something separate, apart from both of you and from our normal lives” (Branden, 1986, p. 258). O’Connor and Barbara Branden (the wife of Nathanial Branden then and the author of the biography of Rand) acquiesced in the affair which was to last for 14 years. Branden later recalled that her adulation for Rand let her fall victim to her “spell” (p. 262). It was the surrender to her feminine desire as much as the surrender to her inundated emotional conflicts disguised by her cerebral being. As a woman of high dominance, Rand had never had her basic needs of “belongingness and love” (Sollod et al., 2008, p. 412) fulfilled. Loftiness and contempt for intellectual incompetence had never permitted Rand to be involved into intimate interpersonal relationships. Emotions eventually took a cathartic revenge on reasoning and logic.

The battlefield between good and evil in her childhood revealed the leitmotif of Rand’s life. The awareness of her potentials at an early age established mentality as the core of her self-structure. The heroic characters in Rand’s Atlantis were the beacon of hope for the real world. The archetypal fortress, in Jungian theories, was an emotional powerhouse (Storr, 1973). Only by deification and glorification could the typical figures and objects bear phenomenal significance to Rand.

Fleeing away from the abysmal Soviet Russian at the age of 21, Rand succeeded as a writer and philosopher in the United States. This attested to the omnipotence of her mind in the black-and-white world—the Atlantis that resembled Abraham Maslow’s Eupsychia, in which Rand was the fishwife:

She wore slacks, rolled above the knees of her bare legs, she had dark, disheveled hair and large eyes. . . . The young woman stood looking after Galt. And even though hopelessness, serenely accepted, was part of the worship in that glance . . . a feeling [of] a stab of jealousy. (Rand, 1996, p. 660)

Atlas. Lee Lawrie. Rockefeller Center, NYC.(wikipedia)

 References

1. Branden, B. (1986). The Passion of Ayn Rand. New York: Anchor Books.
2. Rand, A. (1996). Atlas Shrugged. New York: Signet.
3. Sollod, R. N., Wilson, J. P., & Monte, C. F. (2008). Beneath the Mask: An Introduction to Theories of Personality (8th ed.). Danvers, MA: John Wiley & Sons.
4. Storr, A. (1973). C. G. Jung (F. Kermode, Ed.). New York: Viking Press.
5. Rand picture from  http://home.ca.inter.net/~grantsky/aynrand.html

Atlas Shrugged自 1957年出版以来在美国一直是畅销书,着迷了几代人,其中包括Alan Greenspan(他还是学生的时候就去拜访过Rand,在Rand的葬礼上他读了Rand最喜欢的诗).昨天和朋友偶尔聊起Rand时,又收获了段小 插曲,她的家里在上世纪七八十年代曾经也是个"民间Rand俱乐部",当时的常来的年轻人中既有Ted Turner(CNN的创始人).

这本书在2007年(应该是第一次)在中国大陆由重庆出版社发行中文版,就文字本身来说,对翻译作者就是一个不小的挑战.

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文章作者：Yi 原始站点：嘻来嚷往 – IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. 原文标题：Ayn Rand and Her Atlantis 发表日期：2010年01月08日 原文链接：http://xirang.ca/2010/01/ayn-rand-atlantis
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