Peter Keating won every prize in architecture without ever wanting to build.
Peter Keating is the most successful man in the room and the emptiest. He wins the commissions, the partnership and the praise of the profession, and none of it touches him, because he didn’t want to build. He wanted to be admired as a builder. His classmate Howard Roark wants only to build, cannot be liked, and is willing to do his own work in his own way and let himself be torn to pieces if necessary.
Most readers take Ayn Rand’s novel as a defense of selfishness, and either cheer or recoil. That misses what the two architects show. Keating is not selfish in any useful sense: he has no self to serve. So the Fountainhead is not about selfishness vs altruism but about first-handedness vs second-handedness. The question it asks is how a man can win everything and still have nothing.
The second-hander
Rand’s answer is that people like Keating live second-hand. They don’t ask “Is this true?” They ask “Is this what others think is true?” Not “Is this beautiful?” but “Is this what others think is beautiful?” The source of his actions is scattered across every other person he knows, so you cannot reason with him. Keating is all mask: behind the awards there is only a shell holding the opinions of friends and reflections of reflections.
Living this way feels safe. To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. Keeping it is harder, because it’s such a big responsibility, really to want something. Wanting something first-hand means you can be wrong in your own name. Keating avoids that risk by wanting whatever wins approval, and a quest for self-respect is proof of its lack. Roark never seeks self-respect; it arrives as a byproduct of the work.
How a culture treats Roark
A society full of Keatings doesn’t need to attack its Roarks directly. The novel’s villain, Ellsworth Toohey, explains the method:
Don’t set out to raze all shrines — you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity — and the shrines are razed.
Once mediocrity is the standard, excellence looks threatening and weird, and a first-hand builder is treated as a problem rather than a gift.
Love requires a self
The same emptiness reaches Keating’s private life. He gives up Catherine, the woman he loves, for a marriage that advances his career, because even his love has to pass through the opinion of others. The failure is not of generosity but of existence. To say “I love you” one must know first how to say the “I.” Love is a gift, and you cannot give what you don’t have.
It also means some things should not be performed. The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing. The second-hander can’t do this, since nothing is real to him until it has been seen.
The strongest objection is that Rand makes Roark’s indifference to other people look like a virtue, and that a reader can take the novel as permission to be cruel. Sometimes it does. But Roark’s indifference is to others’ opinions, not their existence, and what Rand condemns in Keating is the absence of anything to give. Rand’s picture of the second-hander’s life shows what that absence costs: as if there had never been any entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. The book leaves the harder question for the reader: of the things you wanted this week, how many did you want first-hand?
References:
- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
- See also Atlas Shrugged for the positive/negative orientation: achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death