...One of the chapters in the book deals with Ayn Rand. I’m going to quote from it directly as I don’t think there is a better way to sum it up. “Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladamir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.”
I really don’t think I’ve seen a better quote summing up the phenomenon that is Ayn Rand. This is not political jousting either – in the book you’re generally quite respectful of conservative theorists. But Ayn Rand is unusual in that… well… she really was a hack. There is no way she was on par with the other theorists discussed in the book. Her work was just cartoonish, amateurish; almost a self-parody. She had no real philosophical influences and this shone through in the innumerable cracks in what she referred to as her ‘philosophy’. So, how on earth do you account for her popularity today? Is her mediocrity part of what makes her so appealing?
CR: This is one of the questions I really struggled with in writing about Rand, and I don’t think I ever fully resolved it. Because you’re right about her mediocrity, and I’m certain that’s part of her appeal, but what makes that strange is that she is a writer who claims to speak for excellence. And that’s what’s so odd to me: I don’t know that I can think of a single less talented writer who has ever pressed the claims of superiority – that there are superior beings out there, that she is one of them, that her readers are among them too – with such unwarranted self-confidence. It’s that marriage of total arrogance and total confidence that I find so mystifying.
Some people think that that is in a way her appeal: she gives not very talented people a sense that they are part of an Olympian guard. I’m not really persuaded of that. I think her appeal lies elsewhere: she has a vision of transcendence, of self-overcoming, which is central to conservatism, but it’s a vision that is ultimately flat and cartoonish.
It’s the purest form of kitsch: it preys upon an idea of high culture, of cultural greatness, but it doesn’t make the demands of that culture, except in a cheesy and romantic way. It allows people to imagine themselves living these exalted lives, without having to actually live those lives. It’s pure movie magic.
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