Einherjar86
Active Member
Rand probably thinks so--but no, not at all. Additional substance--whether it be formal, stylistic, conceptual, etc.--would potentially invite skepticism and additional contemplation on the reader's part beyond any point of view depicted in the text. It would make possible the activation of irony, defamiliarization, ambiguity, and other fictive notions that would move a work like Atlas Shrugged beyond manifesto and toward novel.
I'll do a comparison with a novel by an author whom I know you don't like: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. I choose that novel because it's possible to read (and many have read) the character of Judge Holden as the mouthpiece of the novel, and to read the novel's basic stance as being that of the judge. The judge speaks significantly more than any other character, and his lines are by far the most memorable and quotable.
Yet the judge is also a psychopath. He murders children and drags along a mentally handicapped person as a king of gimp. He might make some poignant observations about modern culture and history, but overall his philosophy is detestable. It inspires disagreement and discomfort in and among readers.
But Blood Meridian isn't interested in pushing a point of view on anyone, especially not the judge's. It invites readers to throw out the judge's manifesto(s), but not the text's formal arrangement, its stylistic flourishes, its narrative perspective, and other non-thematic elements. The playfulness and interaction of those novelistic elements facilitate readings beyond content, beyond the deplorable specifics of the judge's rhetoric (and of the novel's relentless violence generally speaking). A novel shouldn't have a singular moral or thematic view, for which it is the only purpose of its formal components is to reinforce. Novels permit us to doubt the moral systems of their characters by virtue of their formal elements, and not only through recourse to our personal feelings or reactions.
