# Views of Worlds Ending: Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED, Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD

Vincent Dussol

► To cite this version:

Vincent Dussol. Views of Worlds Ending: Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED, Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD. Rick Wallach and Scot Yarbrough, Editors. CARRYING THE FIRE: Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD and the Apocalyptic Tradition, Volume 2: Genre and Intertextuality, pp.234-250, 2020, 978-1-5323-8944-3. hal-04765534

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Submitted on 4 Nov 2024

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VIEWS OF WORLDS ENDING: AYN RAND'S *ATLAS SHRUGGED*, CORMAC

MCCARTHY'S *THE ROAD*

Vincent Dussol

Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3

An initial caveat is in order. Bringing together *The Road* and *Atlas Shrugged* may be regarded as an error of taste. In Tobias Wolff's *Old School*, the narrator's report of the reactions to the headmaster's decision to have Ayn Rand as the next visiting writer gives an idea of the possible objections:

> As a scholarship boy (...), I was (...) affected by the masters' conviction that Ayn Rand simply did not belong in the company of Robert Frost or Katherine Anne Porter or Edmund Wilson or Edna St. Vincent Millay or any of the other visitors whose photographs hung in the foyer of Blaine Hall. The school, they believed, would lose no less than part of its soul by playing host to her, and to them the money made it even worse – *whoring after strange gods*, as Mr. Ramsey supposedly had put it. (64).

As to the more precise reasons, here is Wolff's narrator's final appraisal of Rand's writing: "the swollen sentences, the hysterical partisanship of the author, the crassly symbolic, uninflected characters, the impossible things they think and say and do. Really, you can't believe a word of it" (96). In short, McCarthy and Rand would probably be regarded as not playing in the same league. Such elitist attitudes induce a measure of blindness to the bigger picture of American literature.¹ Moreover, aesthetic valuations are not the point of the present study which takes as its focus *Atlas Shrugged* (1957) and *The Road* (2006) as crystallizations – with striking
correspondences between them – of floating fears of apocalypse in 20th and 21st-century America. This essay primarily relates the experience of a reader of McCarthy's works caught by surprise at feeling on strangely familiar ground when he came across a specific passage in *Atlas Shrugged*.

Rand's novel, which its author originally wanted to entitle *The Strike*, takes place in the United States in unspecified future times of severe socio-economic crisis brought about by the conflict pitting the pro-laissez faire industrialists against the pro-welfare government. Even if they know nothing about the author, readers cannot fail to realize to which side her sympathies lean. All the blame goes to Washington. The story's heroine and heroes are Dagny Taggart, the Vice-President in charge of Operations in a railroad company, Hank Rearden, a steel tycoon and inventor, Francisco d'Anconia, the Argentinian-born heir of a huge copper-mining trust, John Galt, a genius mechanical engineer turned strike leader and political inspirer, and a would-be philosophy teacher whom the circumstances convinced to become a pirate of the high seas, Ragnar Danneskjöld. D'Anconia, Rearden and Galt are Dagny's lovers in that order of succession.

The scene we wish to focus on (264-273) takes place during a lovers' vacation which Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden decided to take from the dishearteningly adversarial context. But the situation she left behind does not entirely let Dagny's mind rest and as they are driving around Wisconsin, a conversation about how difficult it has become for Ted Nielsen, her Diesel-engines manufacturer, to purchase good motors makes her think of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, a first-rate Wisconsin-based firm which shut down for seemingly no reason seven years ago. She suggests driving there to see if there might still be machinery in the factory which Nielsen could use. All the passages below correspond to different moments of their visit to the town, named Starnesville:
And they stopped smiling. The corpse they saw in the weeds by the roadside was a rusty
cylinder with bits of glass – the remnant of a gas-station pump.

It was the only thing left visible. The few charred posts, the slab of concrete and the
sparkle of glass dust – which had been a gas station – were swallowed in the brush (...).
They drove on, not wanting to know what else lay hidden under the miles of weeds
(264-265).²

Readers of *The Road* will remember that the first material evidence of a changed world
they are given is precisely a derelict gas-station the man and his son come across: “The weeds
they forded fell to dust about them. They crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for
the pumps. The cap was gone (...) the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale” (6). Fear of
engulfment is directly perceptible in Rand’s image of a “swallow[ing]” by “brush,” less directly
so in McCarthy’s “ford[ing]” “weeds,” which nevertheless conjures up struggling through deep
water.

The run-down gas-station Dagny and Hank stop at is but a prelude to more desolation
which is conveyed through Gothic images, a conspicuous feature in *The Road*.³

On the crest of a distant hill, a single telegraph pole stood slanted against the sky, like a
cross over a vast grave (...). A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had
once been an industrial town (...). A shell of concrete, which had been a schoolhouse,
stood on the outskirts; it looked like a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless
windows, with a few strands of hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires
(265).
As Dagny and Hank continue driving toward the factory, the road and its absence become a primary concern. Though the situation is actually about finding a road, the repetitive use of the word “road” has a mantra-like quality to it. These different passages are found within the space of two pages:

They saw no trace of a road to the factory (...).

'Is there any sort of road?'

'There's roads in the woods.'

'Any for a car to drive through?'

'Maybe.'

'Well, which would be the best road to take?'

'I don't know.'

(...)

'Listen,' said Rearden, 'can you tell us whether there's a road to the factory?'

'There's plenty of roads.'

(...)

'[T]here's a road up there that's fine when it don't rain for a couple of weeks.'

'When did it rain last?'

'Yesterday.'

'Is there another road?'

'Well, you could go through Hanson's pasture and across the woods and then there's a good, solid road there, all the way down to the creek.

'Is there a bridge across the creek?'

'No.'

'What are the other roads?'
‘Well, if it’s a car road that you want, there’s one the other side of Miller’s patch, it’s paved, it’s the best road for a car (...).

‘But that road doesn’t go to the factory, does it?’

‘No, not to the factory.’

‘All right,’ said Rearden. ‘Guess we’ll find our own way.’

(265-267).

The road is at the core of American mythology i.e. of a type rooted in long experience. So before being a symbol, to paraphrase Stein, “road” is a road is a road is a road. In a novel primarily focusing on the railroad, in which driving is a minor subject, the “road obsession” in these passages from *Atlas Shrugged* become all the more meaningful as if, in order to achieve a full American rendering of apocalyptic chaos, the story had to include at least one such episode.

Worthy of note in the above excerpts is the terse quality of dialogue: despite the novel's general surfeit of protracted expository conversations or monologues, such quasi-stichomythic minimal exchanges are also characteristic of Rand's novel, just as they are of McCarthy's *The Road*, as if collapsing worlds were bound to generate or call for fewer words, only arriving at verbal road ends of a kind.⁴ Hank Rearden's resigned conclusion at the end of the conversation with the locals –““Guess we’ll find our own way.”” – resonates with the father's fierce reluctance to interact with anyone they meet on their journey in McCarthy's novel. This statement is but a self-protective assertion of Rand's philosophy of radical self-reliance. The Latin epigraph to Emerson's essay – ““Ne te quaesiveris extra””⁵ – is general enough to cover all cases of supposedly unnecessary interaction with others.

We will return to this point. Suffice it to say that Rand puts John Donne's famous words – “No man is an island unto himself” – in the mouth of the hateful person acting as President (1030).
The time of year of Dagny and Hank's journey to Wisconsin is fall: "they were driving through the yellow leaves that glittered like a sea of gold coins" (264). When they ask a man for directions to the motor factory, Hank extends a ten-dollar bill to him, a gesture to which the man fails to respond. He explains that they have stopped using money, that they no longer trade with people of other towns and that they "just trade things amongst us" (266). Likewise, money stopped being of any use in the world of *The Road*. The father finds "a double handful" of South African gold coins – "kruggerrands" – "in a cloth sack" (120) in the underground shelter they chanced upon. On a road close to the southern coast, he picks up something resembling a coin: he has to chisel at it with his knife to remove the "deep crust of verdigris" to make sure: "It was a coin (...). The lettering was in Spanish" (172). The vanishing of the national currency – no mention of the dollar throughout *The Road* – means a world came to an end.

The inhabitants of Starnesville could step straight out of McCarthy's novel:

An old woman came shuffling out at the sound of the motor. She was bent and swollen, barefooted, dressed in a garment of flour sacking. She looked at the car without astonishment, without curiosity; it was the blank stare of a being who had lost the capacity to feel anything but exhaustion (...). The swollen shapelessness of the woman's body did not look like the product of age and neglect: it looked as if she was pregnant. This seemed impossible, but glancing closer Dagny saw that her dust-colored hair was not gray and that there were few wrinkles on her face; it was only the vacant eyes, the stooped shoulders, the shuffling movements that gave her the stamp of senility (265, 268).⁶

A surprising pregnancy given the circumstances is also featured in *The Road* and lays the ground for one of the novel's peaks of horror when the encounter with a small band of people
with a pregnant woman among them is then followed by the discovery of the charred remains of a baby's body a few hours later (164, 167). Famine has not hit the Wisconsin town yet but the woman expecting a baby stands as a disturbing question mark in the scenery.

When Dagny and Hank finally reach the aim of their journey, they find that “[t]he factory had been gutted long ago” by various categories of people, “random looters” among them, a miniature of the overall situation in *The Road*: “The country was looted, ransacked, ravaged” (109).

In these pages of *Atlas Shrugged* as in the whole of *The Road*, the dominant color is gray: “There was no paint left on the floor; its boards were scrubbed to a soggy gray” (268). What Danta found about McCarthy’s novel would apply to Rand’s: “Gray marks the apocalypse in this novel—or, to be more precise, gray marks the sheer fragility of the post-apocalypse” (10). The just-quoted excerpt from *Atlas Shrugged* continues: “The last thing they saw, as they left the town, was a billboard. A design was still visible on its peeling strips, imprinted in the dead gray that had once been color. It advertised a washing machine” (268). McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic townscapes bear identical marks of the demise of consumer society: “The billboards had been whited out with thin coats of paint in order to write on them and through the paint could be seen a pale palimpsest for goods which no longer existed” (108).

The frustrating information about the road to the motor factory stands for all the obstacles to actual and metaphorical motion encountered by industrialists as a whole in the present state of their world. Once finally inside the factory's experimental laboratory, Dagny digs out the “broken remnant of the model of a motor” with “a thin sheaf of typewritten pages” describing it (269). It does not take her long to realize that its inventors had come up with an answer to the problem of limited energy-supplies:
Those men, long ago, tried to invent a motor that would draw static electricity from the atmosphere, convert it and create its own power as it went along (...). It's the greatest revolution in power motors since the internal-combustion engine (...). It wipes everything out—and makes everything possible (...). Who'll want to look at a Diesel? Who'll want to worry about oil, coal or refueling stations? Do you see what I see? A brand-new locomotive half the size of a single Diesel unit, and with ten times its power. A self-generator, working on a few drops of fuel, with no limits to its energy. The cleanest, swiftest, cheapest means of motion ever devised" (270).

It will turn out that it is the inventor of this motor, John Galt, who is “the destroyer,” the one precipitating America to its end by causing all people of superior ability to quit their jobs and vanish from the scene.⁷ Twelve years before Dagny’s discovery of the model, a meeting at the Twentieth Century Motor Company convinced Galt, then a young engineer, that nothing short of “stopping the motor of the world” and starting from scratch would do for all unnecessary barriers to what he regarded as vital freedoms to be lifted. What he was objecting to was the vote of a plan for the company stating that the rule – “the moral law” (617) – was now to be “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Galt left the meeting, saying: “I will put an end to this, once and for all” (617). In this episode, the tramp telling Dagny the story witnessed the incident. He relates how from the vote of this plan, things went from bad to worse as nobody felt compelled to do their best while “the shiftless and the irresponsible had a field day of it” (611). And he tells Dagny how “when we saw the roads growing empty and the stream of cars draining off, when it began to look as if some silent power were stopping the generators of the world and the world was crumbling quietly, like a body when its spirit is gone – then we began to wonder and ask questions about him” [John Galt] (617). John Galt’s junked actual motor thus appears as a metonym for the arrested metaphorical motor of the world. It may not be
coincidental that so many signs of a world ending similar to those present in *The Road* should be found in the textual vicinity of this dead motor. For the post-apocalyptic world of McCarthy's story is also one of arrested motion.

The “train in the woods” complete with its big diesel electric locomotive (150) discovered by the little boy is one of the strongest images of arrested motion in *The Road*. All that the father can do is make “train noises and diesel horn noises” and “put the boy at the controls” in the driver’s seat: “through the silted glass (...) the track curved away in a waste of weeds” (152).

Dagny Taggart encounters a similar problem: “‘[T]here’s another problem that’s been growing all over the system since you left. (...) It’s the frozen trains. (...) We’ve had trains abandoned on the line, on some passing track, in the middle of nowhere, usually at night – with the entire crew gone. They just leave the train and vanish” (580). The novel’s most absolute arrest of movement is the burying of a whole train in a tunnel as a result of the breakdown of its outdated steam engine (no diesels were available), followed by the explosion caused by an army train loaded with explosives bumping into it at full speed. The damage is so great that the tunnel will not be re-opened, thereby tolling the end of a high-speed railway link essential to the nation’s then-most thriving state’s economy: Colorado.

America is a country whose self-image has been defined by forward motion, in all its forms. From initial exploration to the days of the Frontier, from the building of the transcontinental railroad lines to the 1956 law declaring the construction of an elaborate expressway system a national priority, from the glory days of Motor City's Big Threes to NASA's moonshots and beyond, America has concentrated on *not* standing still.⁸ Think of Whitman's “Song of the Open Road.” “Go west, young man,” “Manifest Destiny”: such phrases are suggestive of straight lines which the USA and its inhabitants are encouraged to draw. The end of the road is a particularly apt symbol of blocked American pioneering teleology. Railroad chief Dagny Taggart has this image in mind for the world: “The straight line is the badge of man,
the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line
that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end" (561).
In *Atlas Shrugged* and *The Road* alike, the coming undone of the country, the unraveling of the
social fabric is made obvious by what is happening (and *not* happening) on its roads and
railroads.⁹ Of course America's obsessive fear of arrested motion extends to all means of
transport: trucks,¹⁰ cars,¹¹ and, after *The Road*'s protagonists have reached the coast, the
ubiquitous evidence of the end of all maritime movement –"sunken fishing boats" (225), "the
shape of a tanker red with rust" (221), different shipwrecks – all adds to the apocalyptic feeling.

The two stories do not take place on the same side of apocalypse. In *The Road*, the major
disaster has already struck. With *Atlas Shrugged*, though the harbingers of apocalypse are
many,¹² it remains a staggered event of increasing intensity.¹³ Not starving to death is the man
and his son's major concern whereas only relatively late in Rand's novel does the threat of
famine start looming up when an entire "bumper crop" in Minnesota – the nation's "last granary"
(845) – is allowed to spoil following "pull"-motivated decisions in Washington to send the
available rolling stock to other parts of the country. Despite this lesser obsession with hunger,
references to cannibalism as a major source of concern are much more numerous in *Atlas
Shrugged* than in *The Road*. The word "cannibal" or its cognates appears with increasing
frequency as the overall situation deteriorates. The first time it is used as direct criticism of the
system is in court; Hank Rearden is being tried for breaking some recently introduced legislation
– "the Equalization of Opportunity bill" (125) – on competition:

'Are we to understand,' asked the judge, 'that you hold your own interests above the
interests of the public?'

'I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.'

'What...what do you mean?'
‘I hold that there is no clash of interests among men who do not demand the unearned and do not practice human sacrifices’ (442).¹⁴

Its use is part of Rand's and her exemplary characters' strategy of re-reversal of values. As defenders and apostles of laissez-faire capitalism, they demonize welfare-based policies by showing how priority given to people's needs engenders the worst of greed (when it claims to do the opposite), how so-called anti-Dog-Eat-Dog legislation passes itself off as fair share when it is just the misleading name which demagogues of lesser ability – “the fair-share vultures” (388) – found to justify neutralizing those of real merit while giving themselves a clear conscience in doing so and creating their own rotten aristocracy of “pull” with the blessing of a state they confiscated. The arbitrariness of the system is shown to engender a general loss of bearings:

> Men had been pushed into a pit where, shouting that man is his brother's keeper, each was devouring his neighbor and was being devoured by his neighbor's brother, each was proclaiming the righteousness of the unearned and wondering who was stripping the skin off his back, each was devouring himself, while screaming in terror that some unknowable evil was destroying the earth (836).¹⁵

The hunger riots finally breaking out “on the outskirts of cities” (991), or in West Virginia as a result of federal policies may be just the first stage of a process leading to cannibalism i.e. eating one's neighbor, a practice the “bad guys” in *The Road* have no qualms engaging in: when the father returns to the place where he shot one of them, “he found the bones and the skin piled together with rocks over them. A pool of guts. He pushed at the bones with the toe of his shoe. They looked to have been boiled” (60). The threat becomes more real as the journey unfolds. The father comes across the frightful sight of prisoners who are being kept in a cellar as a reserve
of meat with their various states of mutilation testifying to their jailers' use of them. Human beings have returned to a state of non-metaphorical dog-eat-dog-type law of the jungle.¹⁶

Recalling Marx's characterization of capital as a vampire that "'lives only by sucking living labour,'" critic Sheehan goes on: "[t]he cannibal (...) is the anti-capitalist par excellence. Instead of limitless accumulation, the cannibal survives by devouring his own kind, a figure of pure, non-replenishable consumption", puzzled at the conclusion this leads him to: "The loss of civilization, therefore, is signified by a disconcerting compact: the absence of capitalist exploitation, in favor of the horrors and abominations of cannibal consumption" (95). When much in *The Road* may lead one to trace the causes of the apocalypse as indirect consequences of greedy capitalism that sucked Earth dry of fossil sources of energy, went all-nuclear etc, Sheehan's analysis would lessen the charges against it, suggesting it may be a lesser evil than others, a rampart against the worst kind of violence, a view which would have been agreeable to Rand who was averse to the use of violence and regarded self-defense as the only valid reason to resort to it. Economic considerations aside, cannibalism is surely the absolute opposite of self-reliance, a value which all the protagonists in *Atlas Shrugged* and the father in *The Road* stick to. For that matter, the first pages of Emerson's famous essay on the subject sound surprisingly "randian" when re-read in the wake of *Atlas Shrugged*: "Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all good men in good situations. Are they *my* poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong" (179-180). Compare the above with: "'I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine'" (1042). Rand's nemesis — welfare policies — encapsulated in the Marxian dictum from *The Critique of the Gotha Program* that caused John Galt to leave the Twentieth Century Motor Company ("From each according to his ability, to each according to
his need.”) is but large-scale “philanthropy,” a literal etymological reading of the word could be
“love of human meat.”

When confronted with the adversity of post- or pre-apocalyptic conditions, the self-reliant person never says die: “Okay. This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They dont give up” (116). The father stresses the point when he feels his forces leaving him: “And you cant give up. I wont let you” (160). One way of ensuring one’s survival is to show resourcefulness which means adequate mastery of technology. *The Road* and *Atlas Shrugged* stress this point each in their own way. The accuracy of McCarthy’s denotative vocabulary, his fastidious descriptions of the father’s bricolage match the care with which whatever resources he and his son chance upon are salvaged. Similarly, Rand’s heroine Dagny Taggart is constantly forced by circumstances to find solutions to the problems that keep arising. When the signals go dead at the Grand Central terminal, she comes up with the best possible expedients to keep some trains running (868-874). Rand’s writing is probably at its best when she gives free rein to her technology-friendly pen so as to convey the smooth running of machinery (or of a railroad network), “the union of consciousness and matter, the frozen form of a mind’s ingenuity giving a physical existence to its purpose” (874). The father’s response – “stirred” and “struck by the beauty” – on his finding the sextant on board the shipwreck, his intense enjoyment as he feels the right gestures coming back to him would not be out of place in *Atlas Shrugged*.

To Rand, technology is the embodiment of reason – man’s access to self-reliance – and of
morality – “that monument to human morality, which is a factory, a highway or a bridge” (971)
or “The motors were a moral code cast in steel” (230). This determines a generally negative view
of nature in *Atlas Shrugged*. When a breakdown of its locomotive strands the Comet – the
railroad company’s luxury transcontinental train – in the middle of nowhere, Dagny Taggart’s
right-had man vents out his frustration and his fears on the first “representative” of nature he
catches sight of:
He felt the crunch of the desert dust under his feet (...). [I]n the enormous silence, he heard the rustle of tumbleweeds stirring in the darkness, like the chuckle of an invisible army made free to move when the Comet was not. He heard a sharper rustle close by – and he saw the small shape of a rabbit rise on its haunches to sniff at the steps of a car (...). With a jolt of murderous fury, he lunged in the direction of the rabbit, as if he could defeat the advance of the enemy in the person of that tiny gray form. The rabbit darted off into the darkness—but he knew that the advance was not to be defeated" (1068).

Nature is not to be trusted and is equated with savagery which leads, in Rand's chain of associations, to cannibalism. There is no hankering after a new pastoral in her novel. Nature is instrumentalized into symbols echoing the rise or decline of civilization: "The fire of the mills was dying down. There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth" (140): "the evening redness in the west"? *Atlas Shrugged* abounds in environmentally-averse stances. As still a child, Dagny Taggart "felt an arrogant pleasure at the way the track cut through the woods: it did not belong in the midst of ancient trees, among green branches that hung down to meet green bush and the lonely spears of wild flowers—but there it was" (54). During the building of a bridge critical to the railroad link with Colorado's oil fields: "She [Dagny] was standing on a slender beam of steel above a gorge that had cracked the mountains to a depth of fifteen hundred feet. (...) She wondered why she found herself thinking suddenly that cave-dwellers had lived naked on the bottom of that canyon for ages" (155). We are told about Rearden: "he had won his every battle against inanimate nature" (152). The exploitative turn of mind is made no mystery of: "[T]hrough the steps of shaping metal, rails and motors—they had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one's enjoyment, that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal"" (236-237). *The Road* on the other
hand still conveys an occasionally elegiac relationship to nature as when the father’s childhood
memories return. Its present irrelevance notwithstanding, this happy nature-related past projects
a ray of hope into the future. *And* what remains of nature is also there as “alter-nature” (Sheehan
98), often calling forth a sense of “negative sublime”.

The questions of technology and nature are linked with that of language. Both McCarthy
and Rand make the decline of language a part of the general destruction. Language has gone
meaningless in the world Dagny lives in: “she had regarded language as a tool of honor, always
to be used as if one were under oath—an oath of allegiance to reality and to respect for human
beings. Now it was only a matter of making sounds, inarticulate sounds addressed to inanimate
objects unrelated to such concepts as reality, human or honor” (1015). The vanishing of language
is also registered and mourned for by the father:

> He tried to think of something to say but he could not. (...) The names of things slowly
> following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the
> names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How
> much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.
> Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever” (75).

Still, and despite the occasional distrust of words – as an infinite source of lies – shown by
the man (158), McCarthy displays strong trust in language as the last utopia possible (Holloway
148): amidst the gloom of the wastelands, his inventorying passion is catching: “drive sockets,”
“hapstaple,” “hasp,” “kerfs,” “grommets,” or “gimballed stove” are unforgettable hallmarks of
*The Road* obviously meant to be relished and clung to. “[L]anguage [is retrieved] as an aesthetic
tool that might transcend the indeterminacy of representation” (Holloway 153). Though not to
the same degree, Rand’s sharper writing as the subject becomes more technological, also goes
against “that fog of switching definitions” (964) denounced by Galt. It should however be
pointed out that Rand too proved an adroit exploiter of the instability of meaning she denounced
so vehemently as a characteristic of the perverted thinking of welfare state times. Associating
“strike” with employers and hijacking “Objectivism” to infuse the term with meanings very
inimical to the original Left-leaning Objectivists – like poet George Oppen – shows certain
“Newspeak proficiency.” More generally, for anyone not embracing Rand’s ideas, the whole
thesis defended in *Atlas Shrugged* is a huge forgery since the more consensual and usually
positive meaning of much political vocabulary is systematically stood on its head, as with this
definition of private property in the mouth of a loathed (by Rand) second-rate industrialist and
her hero Hank Rearden’s arch-rival who has defected to the “collectivist” government’s side:
“[P]rivate property is a trusteeship held for the benefit of society as a whole” (50).

The word “apocalypse” combines the senses of “great or total devastation, doom” and
“prophetic revelation”¹⁷ in variable proportions. In the common understanding, destruction
weighs much more heavily than construction. *Atlas Shrugged* and *The Road* do not make
exceptions to the rule, which accounts for the previously noted Gothic strains in both works.¹⁸
The protagonists of *The Road* have to fight the cold of a permanent unnatural winter. Here is a
typical landscape from *Atlas Shrugged*: “The earth was snow-covered now, and what remained
was like the skeleton of the countryside she remembered (...). It was gray and white” (185).
Ruins and other pictures of dilapidation are a massive presence in both novels. Some ghostly
ruins in *The Road* vaguely echo an interrupted version of 9/11: “In the evening the murky shape
of another coastal city, the cluster of tall buildings vaguely askew. He thought the iron armatures
had softened in the heat and then reset again to leave the buildings standing out of true” (229).
As *Atlas Shrugged* opens, the mention of the Usheresque “crack in the shape of a motionless
lightning, the length of ten stories,” “[h]igh on the side of a [skyscraper]” (12) in New York
strikes a first Gothic note, a fact that the time of day of this initial scene confirms and which
reflects in the mood of the character present at this point: “It’s the twilight, he thought; I hate the
twilight” (12). There is a clear feeling of foreboding: “wondering why he always felt at this time
of day, this sense of dread without reason” (11). In case the reader did not receive the message,
this transparent allusion to Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic world appears a few pages further:
“Good men were strangely hard to find” (24). Elsewhere, the description of an industrial
wasteland makes the Gothic picture complete with the powerful addition of cannibalism: “he saw
the brown-red of rust, like dead blood, on the steel of the giant cranes – and bright, green, living
weeds, like gorged cannibals, growing over piles of broken glass at the foot of walls made of
empty frames” (37). Fear of becoming the victim of the cannibals is one of the reasons of the
mother’s suicide in *The Road*: “They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us (...) You’d rather
wait for it but I cant” (48). In *The Road*, other kinds of ruin – those of the monetary system –
partake of the horror: “He hoped it would be brighter where for all he knew the world grew
darker daily (...). The dead came to light lying on their sides with their legs drawn up and some
lay on their stomachs. The dull green antique coppers spilled from out the tills of their
eyesockets onto the stained and rotted coffin floors” (180). An interesting twist is that in *Atlas
Shrugged*, guilt, an essential dimension of Gothic, is itself denounced as the Gothic mode is used
to expose guilt as the secret engine of welfare policies, creating a kind of guiltiness over guilt.¹⁹

Still, to very different degrees of definition, both stories delineate the prospect of a new
start for humanity. That is linked to an essential feature shared by the two works: their common
kinship with the epic. Revelation is probably the most epic book in The New Testament,
featuring plenty of battles and destruction. Yet it ends on the vision of the “holy Jerusalem,
descending out of heaven from God” (21, 10). Though the city is “readybuilt,” the reader is
given abundance of architectural details relative to its construction and the materials that were
used. Vision goes hand in hand with reconstruction.
The slow decay of the nation in *Atlas Shrugged* is foundation reversed as a prelude to reconstruction. Faced with railway disasters throughout the West, Dagny Taggart's advocates a back-to-square-one approach: ""Let us shrink back to the start of this country but let us hold that start"" (866). This verifies the intuition of McCarthy's grown-up protagonist in *The Road* that "[p]erhaps in the world's destruction, it would be possible at last to see how it was made" (231). Indeed, construction and destruction are closely linked in different instances: for example, as the boy's signs of growing up multiply, he is shown to be building a small village out of sand and accepting that "the ocean's going to get it" (207); that right after this he should confirm, in answer to his father's question, that he can write the alphabet suggests an association between writing and the future, just as the dollar-sign mark is used by the future re-builders of the country in Rand's story.

(Re)-foundation is the work of heroes. Battling back the "cult of zero-worship" (961), *Atlas Shrugged* clearly aims at rehabilitating, reinstating heroes whom Rand's villains, the "undoers of civilization," have been assiduously debunking. The steel tycoon's wife tries to destabilize her husband with her pronouncement that ""[t]he day of the hero is past"" (429). Says one of the government's top-men:

"I wish we'd get rid of that hero worship! Heroes? They've done nothing but harm, all through history. They've kept mankind running a wild race, with no breathing spell, no rest, no ease, no security. Running to catch up with them... always, without end... Just as we catch up, they're years ahead... They leave us no chance...They've never left us a chance" (502).

"The heart of any culture is to be found in the nature of the hero. Who is that man who is revered? In the classical world it is the warrior. But in the western world it is the man of God.
which you treated as a guilty underground (...) the premise that man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, that man's life, his freedom, his happiness are *his* by inalienable rights'(971-972).

For Rand to call – through her spokespersons in the novel – the propagandists of state altruism “looters” and then “cannibals” is meant to perform the restoration of Value and a value system based on hierarchy of merit and unhampered enjoyment of the benefits of one’s work. At different stages of the strikers’ progress, various positive characters spell out the new gospel: “‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade’” (1069). Asked for advice by a President at bay, Dagny Taggart tells him to “‘Start lifting taxes and removing controls’” (993). Pirate of the high seas Ragnar Danneskjöld’s gift to Hank Rearden – a bar of gold to compensate him for all the income tax he paid – announces both a likely return to the gold standard²¹ and a state pared down to a minimum. In *The Road*, the father’s fierce reluctance to provide material help to those they meet on their journey stems from his insecurity about not being able to ensure his son’s survival; but it is also his clear-cut Manichean division of human beings into “good guys” and “bad guys” based on his confidence in his set of values which governs his line of conduct.

There are hardly any mentions of children in *Atlas Shrugged*. They are briefly shown to be victims of a government force-feeding them with – in Rand's view – the “wrong” ideology. A child who was ordered by his law-abiding mother “to give his best toy to the children of neighbors” (989) becomes a case in point of unjustified and unfair government intervention. The message this absence of children delivers is clear: there is no future. McCarthy chose the diametrically opposite option by placing the child center-stage precisely because there are so few children left – “I never thought to see a child again,” says Ely (145) – and their radium-rarity
makes them the embodiment of hope. The boy is intuitively taking an interest in what makes a country what it is as when he asks his father what state roads are:

(...) they used to belong to the states. What used to be called the states.

"But there's not any more states?

No.

What happened to them?

I don't know exactly. That's a good question.

But the roads are still there.

Yes. For a while.

How long a while?

I don't know. Maybe quite a while (36-37).

Even though the political entity is gone, he also shows the epic sensitivity to territory and mastery of space: "The boy sat by the fire at night with the pieces of the map across his knees. He had the names of towns and rivers by heart and he measured their progress daily" (181).

Father and son on the move after apocalypse struck with glimmers of hope for a new world kept alive by the fire-carrying son inevitably calls to mind the group sculpture by the Italian Renaissance artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini known as *Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius* which represents Aeneas fleeing from the burning city of Troy bearing his elderly father Anchises on his shoulders, and his son Ascanius carrying the sacred fire of the hearth, while Anchises holds the 'penates' or family household gods. This forced hiving off will result in the foundation of Rome. Bernini elaborated on Virgil's poem which only mentioned the child's hair being on fire and the phenomenon being interpreted as a positive sign.²² In his sculpture, the child's function is made plainer. Though not focusing on the boy's role, Oliver Mort nicely brings together the
more obvious epic features of *The Road*: “Traveling alone on a road full of horror and murder, they live by their own idiosyncratic heroic code—“we’re carrying the fire” (136). However, they also like to imagine a world with a universally available system of value: they stare at a map and yearn to see “things in its place. Things justified” (56) » (Mort 255). He also raises the question of geopolitical relevance, which should be addressed with the two works under consideration: “The American emphasis on the individual taking charge of the world is not too dissimilar to the classical epic” (Mort 250). But neither *Atlas Shrugged* nor *The Road* should be read with nation-colored glasses exclusively.

While the time of the apocalypse is rather historically indefinite in the two stories, such is not the case with the place where it occurs/ occurred, though a calculated degree of imprecision also seems to be part of Rand's and McCarthy's strategies. *Atlas Shrugged* abounds in place names – of cities, of States, of regions of the USA – but the realistic intent in describing them accurately is minimal. The landscape-related notations are largely allegorical. However, precise geographical location is not solely a factor of toponym density. Unlike *Atlas Shrugged*, *The Road* only offers one certain clue that the story is taking place in the southern USA: “A log barn in a field with an advertisement in faded ten-foot letters across the roofslope. See Rock City” (18).²³ The description matches the information google-able by the reader: “a roadside attraction (...) in Lookout Mountain, Georgia (...). It is well known for the many barn advertisements throughout the Southeast and Midwest United States that have the slogan "See Rock City" painted on roofs and sides.” But many other indications – the vegetation (34) and the architecture (172) most notably – enable the reader to identify the setting of the story as the southern United States. Both authors, though, dilute the geographical focalizing of their story by placing it against the background of a global disaster. In *The Road* that dimension is brought home even more vividly to the father once he and his son have reached the coast: he refers to “the bitter ashes of the world” (184). No salvation lies across the ocean's waters. In *Atlas Shrugged*, the numerous
Many classical epics feature a *nekuia* with the hero descending into the Underworld for different reasons. Rand's heroine Dagny descends into the tunnels of her company's huge New York railway terminal in an attempt to find Galt: "She had searched for him through the tunnels, she had walked for hours, night after night" (995). Boy and father go down into the cannibals' underground reserve of live meat and in many respects *The Road* is a succession of views of a world-gone-to-hell: "the noon sky black as the cellars of hell" (149). However, it can be observed that a few significant modern works related to epic – Neruda's *Canto General*, MacDiarmid's longer poems among them – have replaced the Underworld with the more tangible subject of geology. Rand endows one of her heroic figures with the power to emulate the birth of Planet Earth when she describes the first heat for the first order of Rearden Metal: "[t]he slag was crusting in thick, brown ridges that looked like the crust of the earth. As the crust grew thicker, a few craters broke open, with the white liquid still boiling in it" (34). The accuracy in the description of the cave in the father's dream and the episode of the boy's first experience of an earthquake equally testify to geological awareness.

A temporarily final point regarding the joint epic dimension of *Atlas Shrugged* and *The Road* would have to be the way both works take up a tradition – with Homer as its first major exponent – of associating the genre with the art of simile. Readers are bound to notice how Rand and McCarthy literally peppered their texts with the harmonics afforded by comparison. A line in *The Counsellor* may well be an ironical comment on the author's past use of this figure of speech, when Reiner objects to Malkina comparing the place where they are to Argentina: "It doesn't have to be like something else" (21). Most of McCarthy's similes are positive echoes from a vanished world whereas Rand's more generally serve the purpose of "genre markers."

The final scene in Ayn Rand's *Atlas Shrugged*, has John Galt and Dagny Taggart, like the Adam and Eve of a world to rebuild, taking a nightly walk in the Eden of Galt's Gulch. It seems that the crisis in the rest of the country has ripened enough for them and all the other self-exiled
brains to envisage leaving their refuge now that they are holding all the cards: Galt had announced that none of them would go back “until the road is clear to rebuild this country” (972) and stuck to his word. “‘The road is cleared,’ said Galt. ‘We are going back to the world’” (1069). In the valley “a handmade sign nailed to a tree” hinted at that positive outcome, “pointing the way: *THE BUENA ESPERANZA PASS*” (660).

Words very close to those are found towards the end of Cormac McCarthy's *The Road*: when, after he and his son have reached the ocean, the father swims out to the shipwreck to see if there is anything worth salvaging on board, he make[s] out the worn gilt lettering [of the boat's name]. *Pájaro de Esperanza*" (188). The novel does not end on the image of a road cleared of obstacles but also provides elements of prophetic revelation foreshadowing the possible triumph of the forces of good over the forces of evil unleashed by the mysterious cataclysm whose consequences are omnipresent in the book. Right after his father's death, the boy protagonist finds physical and emotional shelter within the family who had been trailing them. The woman's assurance, in the novel's penultimate paragraph, that “the breath of God (...) pass[es] from man to man through all of time” (241) comes as a ray of hope and the novel's concluding paragraph *feels* (rather than reads) as though it is meant to confirm this. It looks a long way back, taking up the subject of trout, broached twice before in the first fourth of the story. The patterns on the backs of the trout, the narrator tells us, could once be read as “maps of the world in its becoming” (241) but they now evoke “a thing (...) which could not (...) be made right again” (241). And yet the inclusion of the word “glens” in the closing sentence brings back to mind the Celtic world and its cyclical view of time as in *Finnegans Wake's* last unfinished sentence, an interpretation which the memory of the *clinamen*-like “torsional” trout in the hand, a few sentences earlier, also in *The Road's* final fragment, bears out. The secret of that perspective may now elude human beings but we are made to intuit that the time to which brook trout belong – “older than man” – could still return and the mystery it “hummed of” become audible again.
That is a major difference from *Atlas Shrugged* in which re-foundation does not look a long way back for inspiration: responses to the apocalypse inspired by nostalgia are waved aside. On hearing a self-appointed prophet state that “[t]he day of the iron horse is past! All we got is plain, old-fashioned horse!” (1066), a character backed by Rand has this comment: “The men of that caravan (...) looked too mean-minded to become the founders of a (...) free settlement” (1066).

From Puritans to geeks, thoughts of apocalypse have been a basso continuo in American culture. Undoubtedly, the present study will be regarded as having excessively played down the differences between the music it accompanies in Rand's and McCarthy's novels respectively.

Interestingly, the theme of music is present in the two works but to different degrees. Rand's composer character, Richard Halley, writes music that “has a quality of the heroic” (69). A belated Wagner figure, he too revisits ancient myths, for instance writing an opera on Phaëthon and making the attempt of the young son of Helios “to drive the sun across the sky” (69) a successful one. The narrator summarizes the response of the audience who just heard a new work of his performed thus: “[I]t was the song of an immense deliverance” (1068). The musical style featured in her novel is in keeping with the Rand's epic intent. In *The Road*, on the other hand, the boy throws away the flute his father carved for him. He does it on the sly (134). The music is therefore over. For a new music to make itself heard, for unanticipated sounds to occur, silence offers the most favorable conditions. The boy no longer wanted to be dependent on anyone that called the tune. If there is to be a new world in the making, the genealogical road cannot be the only one to follow: “The segments of road down there among the dead trees” (4).²⁵
WORKS CITED

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Danta, Chris. ""The cold illucid world": The poetics of gray in Cormac McCarthy's *The Road*." *Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road*. Eds. Julian Murphet and Mark Steven. London, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012. 9-26.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Self-Reliance." *Selected Essays*. Ed. Larzer Ziff. New York: Viking Penguin, 1982. 175-203.

Holloway, David. *The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy*. Westport (Connecticut), London: Greenwood Press. 2002.

Marx, Karl. *Critique of the Gotha Programme*. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

McCarthy, Cormac. *The Road*. London: Pan Macmillan, 2006.

McCarthy, Cormac. *The Counsellor*. London, Basinstoke and Oxford: Picador, 2013.

Mort, Oliver. ""Are we still the good guys?": Cormac McCarthy and the Postmodern Heroic Quest." *They Rode On: Blood Meridian and the Tragedy of the American West*. Casebook Studies in Cormac McCarthy, Volume II. Ed. Rick Wallach. A Publication of the Cormac McCarthy Society. 246-255.

Rand, Ayn. *Atlas Shrugged*. (1957) New York: New American Library, 2007.

Sheehan, Paul. "Road, fire, trees: Cormac McCarthy's post-America." *Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road*. Eds. Julian Murphet and Mark Steven. London, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012. 89-108.

Virgil. *The Aeneid*. http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/aeneid.html

Wieth, Ronja. "A Frontier Myth turns Gothic." *They Rode On*: Blood Meridian and the Tragedy
<footnote n="1">¹ “I don’t think he [McCarthy] makes haut modernist distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture,” Rick Wallach points out, adding: “After all, the ‘Penny Dreadful,’ the cheaply produced and usually badly written little 19th century novelettes about cowboy ‘heroes’ and famous Indian killers is the scaffolding upon which he hung *Blood Meridian* in the first place.” E-mail message (6/5/2014).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² The episode is recalled by Dagny nearly 400 pages later in very different circumstances: the luxury of a meal served on a train is seen as “a remnant which was soon to vanish, like the white filling station on the edge of the weeds of the jungle” (606).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Let two examples serve as a reminder: “The faintly lit hatchway lay in the dark of the yard like a grave yawning at judgment day in some old *apocalyptic* painting” – emphasis ours – (131). And that description of the eyes of the gang-member who tries to take the child hostage: “Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes” (53).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Obviously, in this instance, the paucity of words primarily suggests dourness on the part of the locals – a topos of American literature – but also an incommunicado mood resulting from economic struggling. In *The Road* on the other hand, the often minimal exchanges suggest perfect mutual understanding between father and son. But they may also indicate the child’s profound sadness and disapproval of his father’s views and decisions.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ “‘Do not seek yourself outside yourself’” (203).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ See below concerning the color gray in *The Road*.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Galt left the firm and stopped his research on the motor the fruits of which would have benefitted his employer and a socio-economic order he disagreed with. He then started talking the people of the mind into going on strike and settling a utopian colony in a remote valley in the mountains of Colorado kept off the radars by its inhabitants’ scientific skills. As prospective re-founders of a new America, they might bide their time there until the day to go back to the world arrived.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ “‘Motive power—you can’t imagine how important that is. That’s the heart of everything (...)’” exclaims Dagny Taggart’s closest collaborator (65).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ “The road’s significance,” writes Sheehan, “is heightened by the fact that it is a metonymy, twice removed, of capitalist modernity—first, via America’s once-mighty automotive industry, which necessitated the widespread construction of interstate freeways; and then through the Fordist methods of mass-production which made that industry thrive, between the 1940s and the 1960s” (95).</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ “When the bridge came in sight below them there was a tractor-trailer jackknifed sideways across it (...) The truck had been there for years” (McCarthy 37, 38).</footnote>
¹¹ Compare: “There still were cars on the roads of the country, but they moved like travelers in the desert, who ride past the warning skeletons of horses bleached by the sun: they moved past the skeletons of cars that had collapsed on duty and had been left in the ditches by the side of the road. People were not buying cars any longer, and the automobile cars were closing” (Rand 325). “Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire” (McCarthy 230).

¹² To give but a few examples: there is the gigantic calendar erected – on the mayor’s orders – on the top of a building in New York which creates a count-down effect (12); Dagny’s anxious question: “Hank, what’s wrong with the country? (...) I remember wondering (...) what it would be like in the last days of the world. I think it would be ... like this” (162).

¹³ Industrialist Rearden has these words: “‘What’s one more disaster? Everything’s going anyway, it’s only a question of a little faster or a little slower, all that’s left for us ahead is to keep the ship afloat as long as we can and then go down with it’” (396). Still, it is one specific event – the blast caused by a Dr. Strangelove figure – which generates the equivalent of the “long shear of light and then a series of low concussions” that stopped “the clocks at 1: 17” (McCarthy 45). As in *The Road*, hearing and sight, in that order, are the primary channels of perception:

the sound of a monster turning upon itself (...). Within the radius of a hundred miles, enclosing parts of four states, telegraph poles fell like matchsticks, farmhouses collapsed into chips, city buildings went down as if slashed and minced by a single second’s blow, with no time for a sound to be heard by the twisted bodies of the victims—and on the circle’s periphery, halfway across the Mississippi, the engine and the first six cars of a passenger train flew as a shower of metal into the water of the river, along with the western spans of the Taggart Bridge, cut in half (1036-1037).

Looking down, they could see the last convulsions: the lights of the cars were darting through the streets, like animals trapped in a maze, frantically seeking an exit, the bridges were jammed with cars, the approaches to the bridges were veins of massed headlights, glittering bottlenecks stopping all motion, and the desperate screaming of sirens reached faintly to the height of the plane (...). [A]s if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations – and that the lights of New York had gone out (1060).

¹⁴ Subsequent instances are found p. 37, 602, 679, 683, 836, 838, 891, 925, 934, 935, 943, 952, 970, 972, 988.

¹⁵ This apocalyptic blurring of “Value” gets worse as the violent apocalypse draws nearer: “The explosions of oil refineries, the crashes of defective airplanes, the break-outs of blast furnaces, the wrecks of colliding trains, and the rumors of drunken orgies in the offices of newly created executives “ (990).

¹⁶ The threat that cannibalism might become a necessity is brandished – a Swiftian proposal minus the satirical intent – by the President of the USA to humor John Galt into accepting to collaborate with a government brought at bay:” ‘For instance, in view of the desperate shortage of food, it has been suggested that it might become necessary to issue a directive ordering that every third one of all children under the age of ten and of all adults over the age of sixty be put to death, to secure the survival of the rest’” (1020).

¹⁷ http://www.thefreedictionary.com/apocalypse
<footnote n="18">¹⁸ “Gothic is the appropriate mode for American literature to deal with particular aspects of its experience as it addresses the latent tension between order and disorder (...), utopia and reality” (Wieth 135).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ See Wieth 134.</footnote>

<footnote>The realization or revelation of widespread and unfair victimization is found in both novels. *The Road*: “The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done? He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it” (28).
In *Atlas Shrugged*, see (among many other similar passages) Francisco d'Anconia's plea for the end of undeserved suffering (568-570).</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ The emphasis is ours.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ See Francisco d'Anconia's plea for it in p. 378.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² "Strange to relate, from young Iulus' head
A lambent flame arose, which gently spread
Around his brows, and on his temples fed.
Amaz'd, with running water we prepare
To quench the sacred fire, and slake his hair;
But old Anchises, vers'd in omens, rear'd
His hands to heav'n, and this request preferr'd:
'If any vows, almighty Jove, can bend
Thy will; if piety can pray'rs commend,
Confirm the glad presage which thou art pleas'd to send.'"
*(Aeneid, v. 682-691)*</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_City</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ See p. 378 for example.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ William Carlos Williams's *Paterson*, Hilda Doolittle's *Trilogy*, Thomas McGrath's *Letter to an Imaginary Friend*, all three of them poems with foundational purposes, include sections on trees. Trees in *The Road* collapse, this "unfixity" standing — in this reader's view — for possibility. See Paul Sheehan's thorough analysis of the subject (98-101).</footnote>