Transgression of Gary Stus

Anthem, Chapter 1

So, where we last left off we were just getting into the Council. We talked a bit about our protagonist's "curse" - that is, he's a 6 foot tall canon sue and, by virtue of that, different from everyone else in this world. I suppose when everyone in the world is the same and willingly goes along with this degenerate, straw-stuffed form of "collectivism" - which is unlike any form of collectivism that I've ever bore witness to; not even anarcho-communism is like this, and fascism elevates some individuals above others - if you even make the slightest wave you're going to stand out. But the novel shines on our friend, Equality 7-2521. He has a long and storied history making waves by being better than everyone else. But then, this comes with being a canon sue, so there should be no surprise there.

Council of Omnisicent Vagueness

Anthem, Chapter 1

So, we're still in chapter 1 of Anthem. Previously, I took a look at the character names - our protagonist, Equality 7-2521, refers to himself using the first person plural, "we", because at some point in the future people have lost all identity and individuality - never mind that Equality 7-2521 has a distinctive and individual name from his love interest, Liberty 5-3000. This has a very real literary purpose, but the mere fact that Equality 7-2521 has a separate name/number from Liberty 5-3000 suggests that they are separate individuals with distinctive personalities and therefore, have individuality. That they have individuality shoots Rand's message in the foot right out of the gate; they're not supposed to have individuality. This is a society without individuality, or one that suppresses individuality (by giving you individual names...). That's why they don't use the first person pronoun. Clearly, the book is contradictory on this when you think about it hard enough, but contradictory self-defeating logic are hardly unusual for Rand's philosophy.

I feel it necessary to state that again that it's necessary to have these distinctive names; otherwise, this would be a headache to read. "Now who the hell is this guy again?" We do it enough in books where the characters have separate names and personalities; attempting something like this would make the book unreadable (okay, okay, fine. Even more unreadable). I also feel it necessary to point out the fact that it's necessary for our protagonist to have a distinctive name shows that individuality is a human trait that, no matter how hard "collectivism" tries, will never go away. There's no amount of psychosurgery that could make that go away. To make that go away, you have to remove sentience, and therefore, you're no longer human. In fact, I remember playing (running, actually) a game called Alternity. Alternity is a game system; it has an attached setting called Star*Drive, which is a hard-ish ("hard" compared to Star Wars, "hard-ish" compared to Star Trek, and mushy soft when compared to Orion's Arm) science fiction space opera setting. One of the playable alien species in the game was a race of extremely humanoid rubber forehead aliens called the Aleerian. The Aleerian are actually born with integrated nanotechnology; it's an interesting concept, but you don't have to be an alien for that. Eclipse Phase does this with humans, who are born in exowombs. The Aleerian, however, are all wired into one another, and they willingly subdue their own personality for the greater whole of the species - in short, their hat was a theme park version of communism, manifest in alien cyborgs. They used names like what Rand uses, but they still retained a degree of individuality despite it; an Aleerian (or, because humans are bullies and creative, the Mechalus) did not have to totally submit their individuality (because, frankly, that'd make for a really boring species to play). Thus, names like Deidre-3201 and Gamma-34214, your "typical" Mechalus name, aren't unusual. There's the idea that they submit themselves to the whole willingly, but at the same time, they still have that degree of individuality present. Rand likely didn't want that degree of individuality there, nor did she want the idea that this was done willingly, since that undermines her message: collectivism does not eradicate individuality. Furthemore, the Mechalus are  fictional "aliens" with this as their hat, while these are supposed to be humans in Rand's book.

This is the problem with writing anvillious allegories. I walk a fine line when I write allegories, and I try not to let it get in the way of the story. Here in Anthem, the allegory is the story. Thus, little things like this can blow the narrative wide open, like an over-inflated car tire, and send the whole book screaming off the edge of a cliff 300 feet up in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

So, it's easily enough said, "well, that does it for this book. When your key conceit does a bellyflop instead of a swan dive and misses the pool by about six yards, it's time to call it a day."Alas, where's the fun in that?

So, let's continue learning a bit about Rand's world, and see what other problems we can find!

Names the Same

(Anthem, chapter 1)

Last time, I sat analyzed Rand's foreword and took a close look at the environment that Rand grew up. Those types of literary theory - historical and deconstruction - are good for analyzing and attempting to understand why Rand is where she is, and how she got there. I should say that I'm just as vulnerable to the whole "death of the author" thing as the next person is, but I'll try to stay impartial (pfft. Like we know that's going to happen). I'll try to keep with the historical and deconstructive methods of analysis - unlike how the term is used, I'll really be using deconstruction, but this won't be a deconstruction proper since I'll be using other literary analysis methods, too.

So anyway, having analyzed Rand's foreword, we now hold our nose and plunge headfirst into the novel proper. I promise you that it's not as heavy-handed as Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but that's like saying, oh, I dunno, that the sun isn't as hot as AB7. While both are clearly hot, there's a bit of a disparity between the degrees of hot that we're talking here.

So, let's get started.

Understanding Anthem

It's been a while since I've done a philosophy post, so I think it's long over due. So today, I'm going to do what seems to be the thing that all the cool kids in the blogosphere are doing: take a look at a book.

Back when I was doing my student teaching, I had the cruel irony of getting stuck with an English teacher who, that year, was going to use Anthem as a teaching tool. Now, for those of you who don't know the kind of person I am, I'm an open socialist. I'm a techosocialist; a progressive in the purest form who sits in the very far bottom left hand corner on the four-point politics chart. By contrast, Objectivism and Ayn Rand sit on the diametric opposite of me - in the far upper right hand corner of the chart. I'm afraid I probably wasn't as impartial as I could've been, but I was teaching an ideology that was not only totally alien to me, but also anathema to everything I stand for. Think about a life-long NRA member trying to impartially teach about why we need to make guns illegal and you're getting close.

But, I swallowed my ideology for the sake of the students (and prayed to god - I wasn't an atheist at the time - that none of them adopted it as their own personal philosophy). This actually had the unforeseen benefit of allowing me to get to know Rand's "philosophy" in depth, and it gave me the foundation that I stand on today in order to criticize her beliefs. Unlike most everyone who criticizes Rand on the internet, I actually studied Objectivism. I know all the ways in which it really fails.

Also, for those who know me personally, this won't come as a shock: to kick the unit off, I let the students play Bioshock, and we studied Ryan's speech, and if I had the chance to do the lesson again, we'd look at the different ways in which Objectivism failed in that game. That's right. This Bioshock:

They were seniors, by the way. So I wasn't letting my 7th graders bash splicer skulls in. I did mention I had difficulty staying unbiased, right? (It begs the question as to how I would introduce the students to socialism is I was teaching, say, Sinclair. I'm not sure, but not with Bioshock 2. I'm not a very good teacher.)

The book that we studied was Anthem. Anthem was also the first book that Rand wrote, and it was also the first book by her that I ever read. It was also the last book by her I read, too - Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are somewhere in my house, acting as doorstops. I started Fountainhead but I never finished it; we watched the movie and, surprise surprise, it was every bit as boring as the book was (and the female lead... gawd. There was something wrong with her. She had some sort of personality disorder). But Anthem has the upshot of being short (I know. A Rand book that's short) and being not being as blunt about her ideology. And by that, I mean rather than stamping it into your forehead with a 2 ton truck die, it "merely" brands it on a baseball bat and beats you with it.