Thread by @FromKulak

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Sneering Illiterates brace yourselves... I'm just going to say it.

The great American novel has been written

and its ATLAS SHRUGGED.

Irrespective of her philosophy Ayn Rand might just be the greatest prose stylist America has ever produced

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What is ATLAS SHRUGGED? What is its genre?

Atlas Shrugged is a 1500 page screed against FDR, God, and non-BDSM sexual relationships, written as a cross between a very slow mystery (that's already spoiled), a long meeting on industrial purchasing, and a harlequin romance

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Seriously its a "Mary Sue fucks the male cast" story... Rand just didn't know she was born too soon and was supposed to write it as an erotic Harry Potter fan fic

There is no way whatsoever that this should work. It breaks every unspoken rule of not just writing, but decency

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And yet it works.

It works in spite of her political philosophy lacking any meaningful definition of the political. It works in spite of her being a bizarre robot who's turned on by sharp angles. It works in spite of her stopping repeatedly for dozen page speeches.

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As Utopian/revolutionary fiction its hackney'd... Chernyshevsky socialist "What is to be done?" might be the closest comparison.

But as Dystopian fiction? Depicting moral & economic failure & collapse? Its one of the greatest works ever written. Surpassing Orwell or Huxley

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And it all worked.

She sold 37 million copies!

2 million to American schools!

And somehow no feminists were interested in doing scholarship on this woman who published this all under her own name 10 years before the sexual revolution

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There are two possible explanations for Rand's success...

The first is that her politics are just that compelling and her philosophy that overwhelming in its logic (they're not)

The second is that her prose is just that good. That she's the American Tolstoy or Tolkien

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Tolstoy & Tolkien are two very good comparisons. In that both wrote similar novels.

Massive hundred character semi-historical parables that are meant to impart their views on spirituality and the human condition... or rather rationality and the autist condition for Rand

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Rand share's their talent for being able to write dozens of characters who all embody a meditation on a theme

The same way a dozen characters might each be their own meditation on power in Tolkien, a dozen might each have their own meditation on resentment or industry in Rand

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People dismiss some of these characters as 1 dimensional

Gandalf or worm-tongue are also "1-Dimensional" its what those characters mean in relation to their world that drives the value of the character and their interactions in unique ways

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And the themes are foundational to American experience!

The nature of enterprise, morality, self interest, freedom... These are all core American questions as much as Heirarchy/Duty is for England, or Endurance/History is for Russia

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And like every other fascinating or unique artifact American culture produces, America's elite have to try to destroy it

Same thing happened to rock, same thing to wrestling (American Theatre), same thing is going on with conspiracy theories and other folk mythology now

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"But I disagree with her politics"

Do you agree with Tolkien's Conservative Catholic "Divine right of kings" Monarchism?

Do you agree with Tolstoy's Orthodox Mysticist Pacifism?

Rand's politics Are no more central than theirs. Its just more immediate in Current Year

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This is the great American novel

This is the literary object that would give a true insight into "America" in all its contradiction

A Chinese or or Iranian would learn vastly more about American culture, politics, and Aesthetics from this than Moby Dick or Great Gatsby

P.S. I also write long takes.

Check out my piece on the seeming impossibility of properly Adapting Shakespeare to film... And Justin Kurzel gorgeous unordothox Masterpiece of Macbeth

open.substack.com/pub/anarchonom…