Chapter 9 is upon us, wherein the breathless pace of the preceding two abates a little, allowing the reader to catch his or her breath for a bit. Not that there’s any shortage of developments. They’re subtle ones, omens rather than prophecies, hints rather than statements. For all the criticism directed at Rand for stiffness of dramatic construction this chapter demonstrates that she can put a story together without having her characters march out front and make declamations.
We start with Hank being suddenly prey to a fit of post-coital depression and self-loathing, and Dagny rightly laughing at him for it. Here Rand presents a question that might have bothered 50’s-era readers more than it does their somewhat jaded successors – should Hank feel badly? Are the immovable movers exempt from conventional morality due to sheer personal excellence, or only from the corrupt bits of it? Nietszche, from whom Rand got the dilemma in the first place, would have answered “all of it.” How she answers the question remains to be seen.
But clearly Hank is disgusted at himself for having compromised his wedding vows. It is the first hint that Hank is slowly, relentlessly, being sucked out of his ethical premises on not only matters of marital propriety but on a far broader front as well. For now it is Dagny who is helping him. Who will help her when her turn comes?
It is apparent that not only industry giants are susceptible to this sort of existential crisis. We see a good deal of it in a young lady named Cherryl Brooks, a working-class girl who meets James Taggart by chance and divulges that she admires him greatly. The difficulty is that everything that she admires about him is, in fact, glory stolen from his sister Dagny. We can already anticipate that sooner or later she’s going to learn better and there’ll be trouble when she does.
The Publius Body Count may have to be decremented momentarily. Mr. Mowen of Amalgamated Switch has a brief conversation with a young transient laborer, against which sounding board he bewails the fact that industry seems to be departing his native Connecticut for the fresh fields of Colorado, motivated in part by the fact that nobody who owns a company in one place can own another in another, courtesy of the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. And so the good ones move and what is left are the dessicated husks left by the looters.
“Why are they all running to Colorado?” he asked. “What have they got down there that we haven’t got?”
The young man grinned. “Maybe it’s something you’ve got that they haven’t got.”
“What?” The young man did not answer. “I don’t see it…They don’t even have a modern government. It’s the worst government…it does nothing – outside of keeping law courts and a police department. It doesn’t do anything for the people…”
The young man, subsisting hand to mouth on transient labor, turns out to be none other than Dagny’s old and trusted employee Owen Kellogg who simply up and disappeared one day.
“Listen, Kellogg. What do you think is going to happen to the world?”
“You wouldn’t care to know.”
Well, we would, but that’s going to take awhile. Meanwhile we discover that Wesley Mouch has vaulted into national prominence in the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources. A man to watch, to be sure.
And at last Dagny dons The Bracelet. This is no longer subtle symbology, the characters know perfectly well what it signifies and say so, Dagny with a somewhat arch aside that she’d have slept with Rearden in order to consummate a necessary business deal if he’d demanded it. As long as it was he. This isn’t prostitution any more than their real intercourse was rape, but it is a prostitution fantasy (just as Rearden’s was a rape fantasy) that she finds amusing, yet another insight into her vigorous sexuality. How serious it really is, however, is highly questionable – we remember that she denied both herself and Francisco the re-ignition of their affair under much less trying circumstances. Dagny is no slut, and Hank no rapist, which may be why they can indulge themselves in the fantasies. The sexual fun is in the psychological tension that does not exist when either becomes a reality.
They do, however, trundle off on a working vacation as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, an artifice which appears to fool no one. They find themselves in the post-apocalyptic future which is our first glance at what is likely to happen after Atlas shrugs. It is worth dwelling on for a moment. After a tragicomic interval attempting to extract directions out of some country folk – I don’t know what their problem was, the directions seemed perfectly clear to me – they find at last the place they are seeking, a derelict factory that once was an automotive industry leader. Here, digging through the rubble, Dagny comes across what is on several different levels the engine of the future, abandoned, incomplete, and incapable of being recreated in the absence of its inventor. It is a motor that can quite literally call energy down from the heavens, change all of transportation and industry, transform the world, and yet it is relegated to junk. Why?
“Hank, that motor was…more valuable than the whole factory and everything it ever contained. Yet it was passed up and left in the refuse. It was the one thing nobody found worth the trouble of taking.”
“That’s what frightens me about this,” he answered.
What could have happened at the factory for a thing of such incredible value to be abandoned, for its inventor to disappear in what is becoming a rather uncomfortable pattern by now? The fellow must be found. The future of the country depends on it.
Two side notes – first, in this chapter we at last learn Dagny’s true age – thirty-five. And we learn that the mysterious figure outside her office when she was working late to create the John Galt Line was not, as we previously assumed, Rearden. Who then?
And just in case we didn’t get the point from les misérables with the diapers on the clothesline, Rand ends the chapter with the vision of a post-industrial future:
She looked down at the motor. She looked out at the country. She moaned suddenly…and dropped her head on her arm…
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She did not answer.
He looked out. Far below, in the valley, in the gathering night, there trembled a few pale smears which were the lights of tallow candles.
One understands her horror. It is a hardscrabble existence for its unlucky inhabitants. No power, no food, no hope. But it is, as we seem to get laudatory lectures about on a daily basis these days from our eco-zealot friends, a “sustainable” lifestyle. So was the Neanderthal’s. It didn’t help.
What we have here happened in the short space of 12 years since the area’s economic bubble popped. Is this believable? Absolutely, as a visit to any of the American West’s numerous ghost towns will attest. Or take a look at the Siberian city of Kadykchan, less than 20 years after the Soviet Union fell and there was no longer a sufficient reason to be there. 12,000 people used to live in that place. I picture the ruins of Rand’s Twentieth Century Motor Company looking something like this. This is what happens when Atlas shrugs.
Life in the ruins. It isn’t exactly like the purely imaginary life of Rousseau’s Noble Savage, this one has a bittersweet element, a remembrance of things that were and for most of the inhabitants of Starnesville, a clear misunderstanding of why they are no longer. Will they learn enough to avoid repeating history? Will we?
Have a great week, Publius!
Interesting. (I sort of wonder what brought this place to your attention.)
I went to your link and looked at all the pictures. Since I noticed that many were just different views of the same building, I thought to go to Google maps and zoom in to get a sense of how big the place was, and then finally out to see where it is (or was?).
We do have our ghost towns too.
ML/NJ