It’s a Wonderful Fountainhead
Joe Carter of the Catholic Education Resource Center explores “The Fountainhead of Bedford Falls.” As he writes, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark and Frank Capra’s George Bailey aren’t often discussed in the same breath, but the two fictitious characters, immortalized by Hollywood via Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart, two legendary mid-century leading men, have a surprising amount in common.
“To anyone familiar with both works, it would seem the two characters could not be more different, ” Carter notes. “Unexpected similarities emerge, however, when one considers that Roark and Bailey are variations on a common archetype that has captured the American imagination for decades:”
Howard Roark, the protagonist of Rand’s book, is an idealistic young architect who chooses to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his artistic and personal vision by conforming to the needs and demands of the community. In contrast, George Bailey, the hero of Capra’s film, is an idealistic young would-be architect who struggles in obscurity because he has chosen to conform to the needs and demands of the community rather than fulfill his artistic and personal vision. Howard Roark is essentially what George Bailey might have become had he left for college rather than stayed in his hometown of Bedford Falls.
Rand portrays Roark as a demigod-like hero who refuses to subordinate his self-centered ego to the demands of the community society. Capra, in stark contrast, portrays Bailey as an amiable but flawed man who becomes a hero precisely because he chooses to subordinate his self-centered ego for the greater good of the community.
Read the whole thing, found via Kathy Shaidle, who has her own thoughts on the comparison.
And for my video interview with Jennifer Burns, the historian and author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, in which we discuss The Fountainhead, along with other aspects of Rand in postwar America, just click here.
Incidentally, say what you will about Rand and Capra, Roark and Bailey, and Cooper and Stewart; the Hollywood of World War II and its immediate aftermath was undoubtedly made of sterner stuff than its current iteration.
Related: Since this is a movie-related post, I might as well hang this here: a movie Easter egg so cool, it goes to 11.
(Originally posted December 9, 2010.)
Update: Welcome Instapundit readers! When you’re done here, check out The View from Alexandria, which has some thoughts on “Politics without Foundations,” and why one Yale history professor believes that “there’s no liberal Ayn Rand.”
The problem with people like Joe Carter, who approach Rand from a religious POV is that they get stuck on the “selfishness” of the Randian characters and miss the actual point. In short, it’s a damn good thing that Norman Borlaug, the guy who developed high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties didn’t sacrifice himself to get stuck in Bedford falls instead of going to school, because about a billion more people in the world would have starved to death.
Not to mention the fact that — without Divine intervention — George would’ve committed suicide as a result of (directly and indirectly) sacrificing himself for the “greater good”.
Recall, JP, that Howard Roark saved two people from committing suicide and almost convinced a third, Gail Wynand, to steer away from that course too. Plus Roark housed the poor in a way that did not cost them their human dignity (compare to those who live today’s real-life Section 8 lifestyle).
As for Sam Schulz’s remark about “people… who approach Rand from a religious POV is that they get stuck on the ‘selfishness’ of the Randian characters”, while I haven’t yet specifically read Joe Carter’s article in my experience those who criticize Rand on this point have lost sight of the reality that God created us each with a unique self in His image. I reckon that just as the Church teaches that mutilating the bodies of ourselves and others is sinful, the less discussed mutilations of our souls, minds and spirits risk being sinful acts for the same reasons.
My fellow Christians who get all ooky over the selfishness of Rand’s heroes would do well to consider the reply of Catherine Halsey reply to her uncle Ellsworth Toohey’s grand declaration, “You must be willing to… kill the most stubborn of roots, the ego. And only when it is dead… when you have lost your identity and forgotten the name of your soul—only then will you know the kind of happiness I spoke about, and the gates of spiritual grandeur will fall open before you.” She asked, “When the gates fall open, who is it that’s going to enter?
Heaven and happiness by way of annihilation of the self is not a Church teaching, it’s a heresy.
Its even better that Norman Borlaug didn’t demand to be “fully compensated” for developing those wheat varieties, making the cost of wheat in those countries so high that a billion people could not have afforded all the extra food being produced and would have starved to death anyway.
Notice how being more like George Bailey is still the most critical factor in the long run.
Oh please. That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Couldn’t somebody else be Norman Borlaug? What makes you think George Bailey would’ve ended up being Borlaug if he went to college? How do you know he wouldn’t end up another embittered college leftie? You sound like one of those useless alternative history geeks wondering what if so-and-so did this or that, the world would be so-and-so. Blah, blah, blah.
As I read somewhere (see the link for the quote), while Ayn Rand did not advocate selfishness in the traditional sense of having an (almost) complete lack of concern for others, she called the the morality/strategy she does advocate, namely “rational self-growth” (or acting out of one’s rational best interest) “selfishness”. This both undermined the exact meaning of selfishness, and made some critics of Rand’s Objectivism be able to dismiss it as bad, while focusing on the traditional meaning of the word. I’ve written a little about it in a different context (about the somewhat beforehand common Israeli tendency to claim that people who write software under permissive open-source licences are “suckers”, whereas people who use copyleft licences are not).
Reflecting on the Fountainhead, it is my belief that one of Howard Roark’s problems was that he expected to succeed without doing necessary publicity/Public Relations work to make the case behind his work more popular and acceptable. While it is unlikely that in the context of the story, everyone will be convinced by that, some would (or otherwise not convinced entirely, but still willing to employ Roark). “Reality to be conquered must be obeyed.” In my own take of the fountainhead (actually a parody), Peter Keating ends up helping Cameron and Roark from the beginning, doing PR work for them, making them and all the other characters in the story much happier.
Cheers, and happy holidays, — Shlomi Fish.
Normally I’d agree, except Borlaug’s wheat is what’s giving us obesity and celiac in the West…
While we’re on the subject of The Fountainhead, there’s something about the book I’ve always found mindboggling. Roark is an atheist who, throughout the storyline of the book, overcomes adversity and obstacles to his self-fulfillment through reason and self-determination. Except there’s one little snag: Howard Roark is a fictional character: all his adversity and obstacles, and all his attributes are constructs of Rand’s imagination. By the very fact that he’s a character in someone’s book, Roark is wrong in his atheism and in his belief that his achievements and self-actualization were the product of his own mind. In short, what’s the real ontological difference between Howard Roark and the Gallant Gallstone?
Granted, Rand had a notorious aversion to irony and lack of sense of humor, but she wasn’t stupid. Did this incongruity ever occur to her? Did it ever occur to her that if Roark knew the truth that his entire fate and universe was being controlled by some transcendent goddess, his ideology and actions would have been completely different? Did it ever occur to her that she too may have been a character in someone else’s story?
Wow, and like, you know, maybe WE are all, like, just brains in vats of a mad scientist. Or — you know — in the matrix or something.
Put down the bong, dude, and get back to the freshman dorm.
What you say could apply to any fictional character, atheist or not, who does not acknowledge his status as the creation of a writer. But such an acknowledgment would destroy the story and make the work a tedious exercise in self-reference. In other words, your “argument” is against the very concept of fiction as an art form.
You never left Philosophy 101 and Plato’s illusions, or rather “reflections” of reality. A is A my friend and a fictional character is not a real person. Take one step ahead to Aristotle and it will all clear up for you.
Is Mr. Carter’s middle name Ellsworth?
I really find it impossible to believe that he’d even bothered to read The Fountainhead.
I can believe Joe Carter has read The Fountainhead just as I can believe that there’s a lot of Protestants who’ve read all of their redacted Bible and yet verses, sometimes whole passages, of the Gospels and Scriptures went right past them, their plain meanings uncomprehended. Example: The Verses I Never Saw by Marcus Grodi.
If you yourself have read The Fountainhead, Bill Dalasio, maybe you’ve noticed that the book challenges a lot of conventional assumptions and ways of thinking a lot of people have become comfortable with. Some readers, to use a phrase of Ayn Rand’s, blank out. Or to use an analogy from the Gospel, some people get so focused on motes such as Rand happily describing her heroes as egoists that they don’t notice the post of unexamined premises in their own eye.