Question

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What thematic idea is suggested by the circular structure of the story and the various circular motions within it?

(in “Speaking of Courage”)

Answer 1

In her writings on art, Ayn Rand put great emphasis on the value of structural unity in an artwork. Holding that an important purpose of art is “to unify man’s consciousness and offer him a coherent view of reality,” (RM 73)[1] she held up integration—the ordering of an artwork’s component parts into a unified and harmonious whole—as a central aesthetic virtue.[2] Not only did she regard such integration as consistent with man’s need to translate experience into a cognitively coherent form, but she also saw it as a major source of aesthetic pleasure. Thus, when in The Fountainhead Austen Heller asks Howard Roark why he takes such pleasure in watching the construction of the house Roark has designed for him, Roark points out that it springs from one’s awareness of the building’s structure. As Roark explains, “Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands.”[3] (136)

The kind of structural processing Roark here describes can be transferred to the act of appraising a work of literature. Although Rand believed that the pleasure derived from a literary work chiefly lay in its subject matter—in its presentation of exciting events and characters—she also believed that the full enjoyment of a literary work, qua art, was bound up with its success in integrating its diverse elements into an artistically satisfying whole. Thus, to be properly appreciated, a good novel or play or poem requires, in a way parallel to Roark’s house, that we pay special attention to its structural composition.