The Literary Achievement of The Fountainhead

Brief excerpt from "The Fountainhead Fifty Years Later;" a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Also read David Kelley's excerpt: The Code of the Creator.The event featured lectures on the novel as a literary achievement and as a dramatization of the moral code of the creator. The lectures from the celebration are available in their entirety from The Objectivism Store.The Fountainhead is also available from The Objectivism Store.

The Fountainhead provided and continues to provide a powerful inspiration to the individualist movement in America, and throughout the world. More than any other single work, The Fountainhead revived popular enthusiasm for a way of thinking, and a way of life, that in 1943 was regarded by virtually every sector of intellectual opinion as outmoded, discredited, and even dangerous. Ayn Rand's courageous challenge to accepted ideas was rendered still more courageous by her willingness to state her individualist premises in the clearest terms and to defend the most radical implications that could be drawn from them....

The romantic individualism of The Fountainhead is like DNA; it's present in every cell, and it controls every cell. The major psychological conflict of the novel, the conflict between Howard Roark and Dominique Francon, is not permitted to remain what almost any other novelist would make it, a conflict simply between two strong people. It is not even permitted to remain a conflict between two strong individualists. It becomes instead a conflict between two strong individualists who have competing ways of showing their respect for individualism, and in particular for Howard Roark's own individualism: Howard values it so much that he makes it the consistent basis of an ultimately successful career; Dominique values it so much that she tries to destroy that career before it can be destroyed by others. This is strange, but it is strange in a completely Randian way, a way that could never be mistaken for anyone else's.

Doctrine or Symbol?

The same might be said of a hundred other features of The Fountainhead. These features can be read both as doctrine and as symbol, but they are more usefully read as symbol. After Howard and Dominique have their first sexual encounter, he receives a letter inviting him to proceed to New York and undertake an architectural commission. He leaves immediately, without informing Dominique; he doesn't tell her where he is going or even who, precisely, he is. Understood as a doctrinal statement about the conduct of relationships—advice about what one should do when love conflicts with work—the episode is somewhat over specific, to say the least.... Treated as a symbol, however, Howard's seeming abandonment of Dominique becomes an intensifying summary of Rand's belief in the complete independence and self- responsibility of the individual.

The meaning of the episode is further emphasized by its integration with all the other symbolic episodes in the novel in which Roark refuses to exalt the Other above the Self. One of the most memorable of these episodes is a scene that might be called the Meeting of the Antipodes. Roark, the individualist hero, and Ellsworth Toohey, the collectivist villain who for hundreds of pages has been plotting against Roark and everything that Roark symbolizes, are finally brought together for a conversation. It is Toohey, not Roark, who feels the need to talk, so we have not just ideological conflict but the psychological conflict that underlies it: it is Toohey—not Roark—who needs to talk to others, to discover their opinions, to know precisely how cruelly he has wounded them and how much hatred they bear for him as a result. Toohey urges Roark to say what he thinks of him. Toohey is curious—and so is the reader. We, like Toohey, have been waiting for this moment. Toohey presses the issue: "Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us." Roark replies, "But I don't think of you."

The difference between Toohey and the reader—if the reader is at all aware of what Rand is doing—is that Toohey is disappointed with Roark's response, and the reader, surprisingly, is not. For the conscious reader, Roark's six-word reply symbolizes, integrates, and intensifies the meanings of Rand's vast novel: Roark's independence is constant and complete, at once psychological and ideological; it is an independence not just of actions and opinions but of the soul... Roark, as he says in his final courtroom speech, just "do[es] not recognize anyone's right to one minute of [his] life."

The reader sees, as a flash of light, the nature of Roark's consciousness—and integrated with this impression is, perhaps, an almost equally intense perception of the reader's own consciousness. We recognize that we are not, after all, disappointed, as Toohey is. We are pleased with Roark's response, and in knowing this we identify our affinity with him.

But suppose we ignore the way in which Rand uses Roark's words to enforce the novel's integrated meaning. Suppose we read his words simply as a statement of doctrine, something like: Individualists should never even think about collectivists. Such a dis-integrated reading would be nonsense. Rand herself spent a great deal of time thinking about collectivists. She spent a great
deal of time thinking about Toohey. She created Toohey. She not only created him; she made sure to integrate him completely into her novel. She did not integrate him purely in a negative way, as a mere foil to the characters she likes. She did not turn him into an idiot, which would be her way with many of the villains in her next novel, Atlas Shrugged. In The Fountainhead, Rand knows that the intensity of a long-protracted conflict needs a strong antagonistic force, a force whose influence can be felt on many levels. Roark is the active and effective embodiment of an individualist system of values; Toohey is the active and, in almost every case, the effective embodiment of a collectivist system of values that engages Roark's values at every point....