“The only authentic epochê is . . . victory over desire, victory over Promethean pride.”
—René Girard¹

“When the SS torturer becomes the villain of the war film, he is turned into a sacrificial figure, a scapegoat, [he becomes the] structural equivalent of the Jud Süss in Nazi cinema.”
—Eric Gans²

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No account of Ayn Rand’s (1905–1982) sprawling, morally incoherent end-of-the-world story Atlas Shrugged (1957)³can begin elsewhere than in an acknowledgment of the way in which the novel’s fascinating spectacle can draw a reader in despite himself. This spectacle is the book’s secret, which the present essay aims to investigate.

The British writer Colin Wilson gives a typical account.⁴He first became conscious of Rand’s work while lecturing in America in the autumn of 1961; university students would ask him his opinion about her. He responded that he had never heard of Rand, whereupon, as he writes, “somebody presented me with paperback copies of her two major novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged—the latter more than 1,000 pages long.”⁵Delving into the former, Wilson found himself “immediately put off by the rhetorical tone of the opening,” which he quotes: “Howard Roark laughed. . . . He stood naked at the edge of a cliff,” and so forth.⁶Turning to Atlas, Wilson writes, “I remembered that I had seen some of this book before . . . an immensely long speech, made over the radio by a man called John Galt . . . to justify individualism.”⁷Rand’s prose struck Wilson as “too wordy” and he had, on that former occasion, “given it up.”⁸

When students now would ask what Wilson thought of Rand, he described her as “a typical female writer, a kind of modern Marie Corelli, much given to preaching and grandiose language.”⁹In the autumn of 1962, however, confined to bed by a severe case of influenza, Wilson revisited Atlas, “determined to give it a fair trial.” Pushing himself through the first twenty pages, Wilson at last finished the book, finding that he “had done Miss Rand a considerable injustice” insofar as she possessed “the ability to tell a story . . . with a minimum of clichés.”¹⁰