Ayn Rand and Tragedy

At the Institute's 1996 Summer Seminar, Kirsti Minsaas, a graduate student at the University of Oslo, Norway, presented two lectures on "Ayn Rand and Tragedy." Following are relatively brief excerpts from the first lecture.

Ayn Rand was a joy worshiper. The purpose of life, she said, is happiness. The Universe, she claimed, is benevolent. The value of art, she argued, lies in its power to inspire, to provide a moment of metaphysical joy. In fiction, she preferred happy-end stories; in music, she preferred light-hearted operatic tunes. So why have I chosen, as my topic, "Ayn Rand and Tragedy?"

Because, in spite of her rhetoric of joy, Ayn Rand harbored a darker side, a side that finds expression in her fiction. The world that she holds up to us is not an operetta world of light-hearted gaiety or frivolous joy. It's a world of conflict and struggle, frequently tinged with pain and suffering, even bitterness, and scattered with tragic casualties. Not only do some of her early works have a tragic ending, but her two mature and non-tragic works, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, are heavily loaded with tragic themes and events. Not only did she create a number of clearly tragic characters, like Kira, Leo, Andrei, Wynand, Cheryl, and the "Wet Nurse," but many of her successful heroes, like Rearden and Dominique, are potentially tragic.

Nor is Ayn Rand a stranger to tragedy in her own literary preferences. Many of her favorite works are, in fact, tragedies: as, for example, the novels by Victor Hugo and Dostoyevsky, and individual works like Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Yet, in her esthetic writings, Ayn Rand had remarkably little to say about the art of tragedy. Her tendency was simply to disregard or dismiss the genre as incompatible with her major esthetic doctrines.

I have always found this neglect unsatisfactory, feeling that here is an area that needs more exploration-and more discrimination. Her off-hand rejection of Shakespearean and Greek tragedy, because of presumed determinism or a malevolent universe premise, simply won't stand up under closer scrutiny. Even worse, her hostility toward everything tragic makes it difficult to account for the prevalence of tragic occurrences in her own fiction.

In the hope of at least partly correcting this shortcoming, I wish in the following two lectures to discuss the esthetics of tragedy. In particular, I want to examine the nature and function of tragedy as a literary genre, offering what amounts to an apology for tragedy....

[Ms. Minsaas discussed various theories of tragedy, and ways that they fit or do not fit into the Objectivist esthetics. She then asked if they applied to Ayn Rand's own literary practice in fiction.

[She began with Aristotle's theory of tragedy, set forth in his Poetics. In particular, she focused on the concept of "pity" in Aristotle's theory of tragedy, briefly comparing it with Plato's, and asked if Ayn Rand's philosophical condemnation of the emotion of pity could be consistent with an element of Aristotelian tragedy in her novels.]

"The Proper Tragic Response"
...[B]y suggesting that tragic poetry could elicit a rational and beneficial form of pity, [Aristotle]...opened up the view that it could be ennobling rather than corrupting or weakening. Although Ayn Rand would adamantly oppose Plato on the question of censorship, her esthetic preferences are not unlike his. Like Plato, she believed that art should present heroes one could admire, rather than pity. Like him, she wanted art to be exemplary and uplifting, not revolting and subversive. So, in light of all of this, it seems that we have to draw the conclusion that there is little room for the Aristotelian idea of tragic catharsis-for an art that evokes a morally refining pity-in the Objectivist esthetics. On the face of it, Ayn Rand's views seem to have more in common with the Platonic rejection of tragedy than with the Aristotelian defense.

Yet, before we draw our final conclusions about her actual alliances, we need to look yet a little closer at her position. Historical context is important here. As in the case of Nietzsche, Ayn Rand's opposition to pity is related to its central role in altruistic systems of morality, where it is held up as an unconditional virtue, embracing innocent and guilty alike. Such altruistic pity, in Ayn Rand's view, was evil because it is antithetical to justice. As she wrote: "Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent." And here, Aristotle would no doubt have agreed. For pity, conceived of in this unconditional way, was something he would have rejected, seeing it as excessive, as too undiscriminating. The pity he approved of was of a morally qualified kind, being restricted to clear cases of human misfortune resulting from conditions beyond the sufferer's control and responsibility. That is, it was a pity founded on justice, and not opposed to it. And this qualified, or contextual, form of pity is one which seems to me compatible with Ayn Rand's views.

The best proof of this is her own fiction. Although her major goal as a fiction writer was to project the ideal man, she included in her stories a large number of characters that are tragic in the Aristotelian sense that they do appeal to our feelings of pity in a discriminately refining way. To substantiate this claim I want to take a closer look at some of the tragic situations in her fiction, and see to what extent they fit various requirements Aristotle thought had to be fulfilled in order to elicit the proper tragic response.

The Good Man's Fall from Fortune
One such requirement is that the hero's suffering must be significant. That is, the hero must be shown to suffer the loss of some great and fundamental value, not just a trivial one. Trivial losses are the material for sentimental melodrama, not for tragedy. But what then is it that makes us experience a loss as specifically tragic?

....Aristotle says that the tragic plot turns on a fall from fortune to misfortune, indicating that there must be a height from which the hero falls, a height of greatness and prosperity. The portrait of a merely miserable life will not evoke pity or fear. It will only depress us, or disgust us, or bore us. For a hero's fall to be properly moving, it has to involve a loss that impairs a previous state of successful living. In many tragedies, this frequently involves the loss of relational values like love, trust, and friendship; or the moral values, like honor and integrity. What makes Othello such a tragic play, for example, is not just that it ends with so many dead bodies lying scattered around the stage but that it shows us the terrible spectacle of a man who's made to kill the woman he worships more highly than anything on earth.

As he himself comes to realize, he has cast away his own most precious pearl. His following suicide merely seals the fact that in throwing away this pearl, he has thrown away everything that made his life meaningful, everything that made him a happy man.

Thus, grand tragedy presupposes passionate value-affirmation. I think this is one reason why Ayn Rand veers so strongly toward the tragic-and why she resisted it so strongly. To be a valuer, which she believed was the essence of being an Objectivist, is to aspire to happiness, to value fulfillment; but it is also to expose oneself to the risk of tragic frustration. The unlived life, the passively drifting life, which we see in Naturalistic fiction, is not tragic. There's nothing to lose because there's no value, no desire, no ambition. Only the aspiring life can be tragic, because it's the only life that can flourish. This implicit value-affirmation is the crux of the tragic vision presented in classical tragedy, and it lies at the heart of many of Ayn Rand's tragic projections.

Disillusioned Hero-Worship
One type of tragic value-loss in Ayn Rand that confirms this is that of disillusioned hero-worship. Cheryl Taggart is a good example. One of the things that makes this girl so tragic is not just that she ends up marrying a bad guy (many girls do), but that she makes the devastating discovery that the man she thought was a great hero is a complete rotter, a spiritual killer who marries her to destroy her. Her mind just cannot take in the distance between what she thought he was and what she discovers him to be. Had she been an ordinary girl, this discovery would not have broken her. Her vulnerability springs precisely from her hero worship, and her own aspiration to make herself a worthy wife. This is why her disillusionment moves us, why we have to pity her.

Another type of significant value-loss in Ayn Rand is wasted greatness, or the kind of unfulfilled potential that we see in cases like Leo and Gail Wynand: the men who could have been. The thwarted ambition of a hero, his failure to win fame or recognition in the external world, is not seen as tragic in Ayn Rand, as long as the hero manages to preserve his soul, to keep his integrity intact, the way Howard Roark does. Tragedy occurs only when a soul of the same potential fails to become what it should have been, and might have been. We might despise these men for failing to fulfill themselves, but I think we are meant to see the waste of genius as a pitiful and regrettable loss.

On the basis of these examples, I think it warranted to claim that Ayn Rand, like many of the great tragedians, located the tragic situation in a serious impairment of value fulfillment, in a privation of values that are essential for a flourishing life. Although the depiction of such situations is negative, it may nevertheless involve a positive affirmation in an indirect way by showing us the tragic implications of losing or wasting those things that make life meaningful, and hence the importance of these values.

For Aristotle, however, it's not sufficient for the tragic effect that the hero suffer an irreparable loss. A second requirement is that he must also be a special moral type. Basically, he should be a good man, preferably someone who is (Aristotle repeats several times) better than most. His reason for this requirement is that only the fall of a decent man could be experienced as tragic, since the fall of a bad man, or a villain, would be experienced as just-and hence as morally satisfying. To be moved to pity, we have to experience his fall as unjust, as undeserved. At the same time, however, Aristotle believed that tragedy must not depict the fall of a man of absolute perfection. For this, he claims, would be experienced as shocking, or repugnant, and not as tragic. Thus, a good tragedy, in Aristotle's view, is one that presents the fall of a noble but flawed hero, a hero who is neither outstandingly good nor utterly vicious.

I believe this account of the tragic hero should make it clear that Aristotle did not believe, as Ayn Rand claimed, that poetry should project man "as he might be, and ought to be." This is simply wrong. Aristotle never said any such thing. What he said was that the poet is superior to the historian because he presents things not as they are but as they might be and could be. "Could be," mind you, and not "ought to be." Aristotle's concern is not with the ideal, but with the probable, with the fact that the poet has greater license than the historian to present things imaginatively rather than journalistically.

That Aristotle was not concerned with man as he might be and ought to be in any Randian sense becomes clear if we consider the different contexts of their discussion. For while Ayn Rand was discussing what kind of hero could arouse admiration, Aristotle was discussing what kind of hero could arouse pity and fear, and surely this kind of hero would have to be somewhat different from the Randian ideal man.

Yet, the two philosophers may not be so far apart as I have here suggested. For no doubt Ayn Rand would agree that a perfect man should not be seen falling into misfortune. Now, scholars disagree as to why Aristotle thought the perfect hero unsuitable material for tragedy; but one likely possibility is that he found it morally offensive, since it would be so totally undeserved and unjust that it would be experienced as intolerable. Instead of evoking pity or fear, it would only evoke disgust, and this seems to be a sentiment shared by Ayn Rand. If you think about this,for example, it's conspicuous that there is no tragic person in [Atlas Shrugged] ...of full heroic stature. The tragic casualties are all of lesser stature, like Cheryl Taggart, Eddie Willers, and the Wet Nurse....

Like Howard Roark before him, John Galt was created in deliberate rejection of tragedy, as a demonstration that heroic success is possible on this Earth. For Ayn Rand, the very idea of a tragic John Galt would be revolting, both morally and esthetically. So there is a link between Ayn Rand and Aristotle, here, but not in the way she thought.