Michael Mitchell: Archive

Journalism Versus Art

The popular heroes are popular because the public desperately needs a certain fuel: not statistics about the favorable prospects of police work or the percentage of successful lawsuits, but an affirmation of the human potential. It is this affirmation that the intellectuals resent and seek to negate.

Not all happy endings convey a positive meaning. In Ayn Rand's We the Living, for example, the theme is the evil of dictatorship. All the characters of stature (including the heroine, who tries to flee the country) are destroyed -- owing to the nature not of life, but, as the story makes clear, of statism. In this context, a happy ending would have declared that freedom is inessential to human life, which would imply that man is a mindless puppet, i.e., the opposite of a hero. Here again journalistic fact -- the fact that some men do flee a dictatorship without being caught -- is irrelevant. An art work is not a report on how well the borders of a nation are guarded.

No concrete within an art work, such as the type of ending given to a story, can be judged outside the full context of the work. The point is that, within the context, every concrete, simply by virtue of being included, acquires significance.

As a teenager, I told Miss Rand once that it was difficult to live up to the exalted quality of her novels. "If John Galt were out on a date," I said, "he would open a bottle of champagne with the ease of flourishing a cape, and the mood would be highly romantic. But when I do it, the cork sticks, I fumble with the bottle, and the mood is sabotaged. Why can't life be more like art?"

Miss Rand answered that the cork could very well stick for a real-life Galt, too. But if it did, he would brush the distraction aside; he would not let it affect his mood or evening. "In life," she said, "one ignores the unimportant; in art, one omits it."

Objectivism: The Philosophy Of Ayn Rand

Leonard Peikoff