To Argue With Their Sponsor About Literature?

So, here I am, Felicia Steele, earnest Sigma Tau Delta sponsor, proud bearer of my five year anniversary letter from the national organization, embroiled in a dispute about literary merit with my chapter's members. Each year our chapter has a marathon reading at the end of the spring semester, partially to celebrate the season, but mostly to come together around one text and the long-lost art of social reading. The origins of this custom are fuzzy--most people on campus credit a marathon reading of Homer's Odyssey that took place in 2003 or 2004, but I, of course, give myself credit for initiating the custom, since I insisted on reading Beowulf from "Hwaet" to "lofgeornost" (in Modern English, of course) in April of 2002, at the end of my first year at The College of New Jersey. Few remember the event, but I recall it fondly, especially since I believe it might get the prize for the shortest marathon reading ever. In the early days, marathon readings were very faculty-driven: my Beowulf, The Odyssey, Joyce's Ulysses in honor of the retirement of beloved professor Lee Harrod, Song of Myself in honor of the 150th anniversary of its publication (which fortuitously corresponded with our college's Sesquicentennial), Milton's Paradise Lost (coordinated by a senior seminar on the book).

But last year we decided to open the competition up to student preference. As a result, I had to face one of my demons: books I don't like. It started with Catcher in the Rye. I acknowledge Salinger's importance to our culture and recognize that it would have been appropriate to read his most famous and influential book right after his demise. But I really hate Holden Caulfield. I wanted us to read Chris Abani, since I was so impressed with the talk he gave at last year's convention. Nonetheless, I was happy to read the birthday party episode from The Lord of the Rings in my West Country accent. Yet this year...this year. We have reached a bridge too far my friends--what do I do now? The students have selected Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead as one of the three candidates in the penny wars they're conducting to choose the book (and to support the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen). Ayn Rand's ideological rant faces up against Sense and Sensibility and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I've been ranting and raving, scowling and snarling about this choice for over a month now, but I finally decided I needed to lay out my reasons against this book. The penny war is a contest, so I can be overruled, and I refuse to be the principal donor in the war, but I wanted my chapter members know why I object so viscerally to this novel, especially since I pride myself as a champion of academic freedom. And I invite my opponents to provide their reasons for the texts in question. Thus, patient reader, allow me to put Rand's The Fountainhead on trial.

My charges are thus: one count of bad prose, one count of bad economics, and one count of irredeemable misogyny. My evidence follows.

First, I'm working from Google books, so I do not have a page number for this Penguin edition. My apologies:

"Keating looked at the sketch. He had known for a long time that Howard Roark had been chosen to build the Enright House. He had seen a few mentions of Roark's name in the papers; not much, all of it to be summed up only as 'some young architect chosen by Mr. Enright for some reason, probably an interesting young architect.' The caption under the drawing announced that the construction of the project was to begin at once. Well, thought Keating, and dropped the paper, so what? The paper fell beside the black and scarlet book. He looked at both. He felt dimly as if Lois Cook were his defense against Howard Roark."

My evidence from this one paragraph suggests that Rand 1) overuses pronominal constructions making it difficult to follow the logic of her narration, 2) overuses past perfect constructions so that the text exists in a time vacuum, 3) lacks a narrative perspective. I consider all three of these traits to be sins of prose fiction and poison to an extended live reading.

Second charge: bad economics. Take this one quotation, admittedly with little context:

"He's only a common worker, she thought, a hired man doing a convict's labor."

The suggestion of a 20th century author that labor is something appropriate only for convicts is abhorrent to me--I cannot suffer to hear this kind of thing.

Third (and damning) charge: irredeemable misogyny. I somehow doubt that the students who have not yet read The Fountainhead know that it includes, as one of the actions of its nearly divine hero, the architect Roark, one of the most appalling rape fantasy scenes in all literature. I won't quote the rape itself, but from its aftermath--from what it does to the character of Dominique.

"She could accept, thought Dominique, and come to forget in time everything that had happened to her, save one memory: that she had found pleasure in the thing which had happened, that he had known it, and more: that he had known it before he came to her and that he would not have come but for that knowledge. She had not givene him the one answer that would have saved her: an answer of simple revulsion--she had found joy in her revulsion, in her terror and in his strength. That was the degradation she had wanted and she hated him for it."

Now, as many of my students know, I'm no shrinking violet, and have taught some graphic, quite horrifying literature in my classes. I think most fondly of Last Exit to Brooklyn, which one of my students thought was too scandalous for a woman to read while pregnant, as I was when I taught the book. I'm not queasy about violence. But I simply am horrified by the idea that my students will sit around a lounge, many of them in their last year of college, after having participated in presentation and event after presentation that says that "No means no," that "No woman deserves or asks to be raped," and have to listen to this indictment of female sexuality. I confer the matter to the jury, respectfully. May you vote with your spare change and pennies. --Felicia Steele