Ideal
Ayn Rand
NAL
Ideal is uncomfortable reading for anyone who’d like to forget their time spent ploughing through Rand’s Objectivist tome Atlas Shrugged. Written as a novella by Rand in her early twenties, and later revisited as a play, this volume publishes both formats of Ideal side by side. Ideal serves as a wireframe for the bulkier works: it features standard Rand themes (idealism versus ‘second hand lives’), and a cast of archetypes including villainous Communists, aristocrats, and one evangelical priest. The dialogue swings between political oration and the kind of clammy, porno lines you’d feel uncomfortable reading aloud (‘I am a very bad woman, Johnnie. Everything you’ve heard about me is true. Everything – and more.’)
The plot follows a woozy miracle play structure: actress Kay Gonda is accused of murder and goes on the lam, visiting the homes of the ‘little people’ who worship her on screen. Gonda follows in the classic Rand heroine mould of the expertly-tailored Gorgon: a woman so beautiful she can lure men to their deaths, and heartless enough to do so. She is apparently based on Greta Garbo, and Rand takes the daring measure of having her introduced to readers initially as a cardboard cut-out. Gonda speaks little, except to inform us that she owns 200 pairs of shoes and ‘diamonds, by the handful’ (in the play the number is downgraded, disappointingly, to 50.) She walks an Objectivist stations-of-the-cross, martyred at every turn by feckless ‘comrades’ and down-home grotesques.
If Ideal sounds schlocky, sentimental and flamboyantly ill-reasoned, that’s because it is. But it also makes the case for Rand as a Hollywood product, a writer in thrall to fame who worked in the wardrobe at RKO even as she began producing fiction. It is essentially Garbo fan-fiction, and a study – however unintentional – of the Hollywood cult of self. Roland Barthes wrote that ‘Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy.’ But as the trials of the Kay Gonda indicate, sometimes a pretty face is not enough.
Words: Roisin Kiberd
