The eternal source
The eternal source (original title: The Fountainhead ) is a longseller first published in 1943 by Ayn Rand . The extensive novel has been translated into German twice so far (as of 2008) : in 1946 by Harry Kahn as Der ewige Quell (new edition 1993 by Goldmann Verlag) and in 2000 by Werner Habermehl as Der Ursprung (Gewis-Verlag).
In the book, Rand projects her moral human ideal onto the life of the gifted architect Howard Roark. The action takes place in America from the 1920s to the 1940s and addresses the American present at the time, the time of the New Deal , whose reforms Rand strictly rejected.
The motif
The novel describes its hero Howard Roark as a person who draws the motivation for his work from himself and does not seek the applause of others. To him, the multitude of normal people is portrayed as inherently collectivist . These people have no self, they live in the other, second hand. Not their actions, but the image of their actions in the eyes of others is what matters to them. They feel small and helpless in the face of the forces of nature, while creative people like Roark are reminded by the forces of nature of the greatness of the human will to create.
action
The young architecture student Howard Roark is gifted, but has little contact with his fellow students and deliberately violates the guidelines of his university. He accepts his de-registration as he does not expect any further knowledge gain from continuing his studies. From then on he worked as a draftsman for the brilliant, aging but economically unsuccessful architect Henry Cameron.
When Cameron closes his office for reasons of age, Roark works for a fellow student, Peter Keating, who, after graduating with ruthless intrigue, has made a steep career with a recognized architectural firm. Roark secretly helps him with the crucial architectural tasks in his career, he does not want to be associated with these products by compromises. In this office he fails as much as with his own, which a customer made possible for him who had his house built by him. When he has to close his office (he rejects an offer of support), he takes up work in a quarry.
The daughter of the owner of the quarry and architecture firm that Keating works for is the beautiful journalist Dominique Francon. She is looking for relaxation near the quarry. Dominique falls in love with Roark at first sight and subsequently hires him to do some manual work in her house. After being humiliated on her part, Roark rapes her. Roark leaves the quarry a few days later to accept an order for a commercial building.
Back in New York, Dominique realizes the architect's true identity and hampers his success through her journalistic engagement. Then she goes to Roark to submit to him as a sexual partner. To keep the tension between them, she promises Roark to keep fighting him in public. For Roark, this request is a reason for his love.
Roark was commissioned to build a “Temple of the Human Spirit” and won the sculptor Steven Mallory for the only central statue. Dominique is the model for this statue.
If the struggle to assert the genius is one of the scenes in the novel, the second is the manipulation of public opinion by the media. Editor Ellsworth Toohey is the astute adversary of Roarks and his followers. He manages that the client rejects the temple and sued Roark for damages. In the process, Dominique experiences a change of heart: she defends the building, contradicts the prosecution's witness, Toohey, and then loses her job as a journalist. Frustrated by a world in need of indicting a Roark, she decides to show the world her contempt by submitting to the rules she loathes. She marries Peter Keating. With her as wife, Keating becomes one of the most successful architects in the country.
Media mogul and property speculator Gail Wynand has supported the fight against Roark in his newspapers and newsreels. Now he has one of the most important building contracts in the country. Gail offers this to Keating if Dominique releases him for him. Both agree. Dominique believes that her devotion to Wynand can inflict further humiliation. But Wynand turns out to be a person who is able to recognize something ingenious. He recognizes Roark as a gifted architect, becomes his closest friend and lets him build his dream home.
Meanwhile, Keating Roark asks again for help, this time for a social housing project. He cannot fulfill the condition of continuing Roark's plans unchanged because Toohey is intriguing. Roark blows up the site after breaking the deal he made with Keating. In the reporting that followed, Wynand's newspapers took Roark's side against public opinion and suffered an existence-threatening decline in sales. Wynand can't cope with this defeat and gives up friendship with Roark.
In the compensation process, Roark defends himself with a representation of his worldview and is acquitted. Wynand orders him to build New York's tallest skyscraper for him. Roark marries Dominique.
Roark's plea
Howard Roark's plea at the end of the novel sums up the author's ideas and, in the film version, is considered the longest monologue in cinema history. Roark begins his plea with the assumption that the inventors of the fire and the wheel were burned at the stake or whacked at the stake by the so gifted mankind. “The great creators, the thinkers, the artists, the researchers, the inventors - they always stood alone against the people of their time. Every thought met resistance (...) They argued, they suffered, they atone. But they won. “The creative people never act out of the desire to help their fellow human beings, since they rejected their knowledge, but only for the sake of knowledge, the end product itself. Creative works could only be done for their own sake.
Every person is faced with the decision whether they want to lead a life as a parasite "who feeds on the spirit of other people" or whether they want to create completely independent works as a creator. The "normal" person sees it as the most important task to alleviate the suffering of his fellow human beings. This would make suffering “the most important part of life”, which ultimately means that he has to wish for fellow human beings who are suffering in order to be able to live out his charity. A creative person cannot achieve this, however, since he “is not (would be) set for illness, but for life”. Through his discoveries and inventions, he would have “brought about more relief from suffering than all altruists together could ever imagine;” - “When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander did the countermove. He invented charity. ”.
America is the "noblest country" in world history with the greatest achievements, the greatest prosperity, the greatest freedom, since it is built on the principle of individualism, according to which everyone searches for their private, personal selfish happiness. This principle is combated by collectivism, the rule of second handers and second-rate players - “The largest part of Europe is already swallowed up. And our country will be drawn into the vortex. "
Roark designed the settlement he blew up at the price that it would be built unchanged. This price has not been paid, the benefits of his work have been taken away and he wanted to force him to give this work as a gift, but he is not an altruist and does not give gifts: “I stand here and say that the integrity of the creative work is one thing People is more important than any welfare pursuit. The people who do not understand this are the ones who destroy the world ”.
If he were convicted, his fatherland would have broken with the principle of freedom and would become a “society of slaves”. He did not want to live in such a society and his years in prison would in this case be seen as a “declaration of loyalty” “to every creator who has ever lived and suffered”.
Person overview
Howard Roark's buildings convey “... a heavy-blooded, demanding joy. Where you have the feeling that your experience means your own achievement, involves a personal accomplishment. You look and think: If I am able to experience this, so I'll be a better person. " . He is indifferent to his fellow men if their actions are of no importance to his life. It is believed that Ayn Rand developed the character of Howard Roark on the model of Frank Lloyd Wright. At least this is suggested by Rand's close contact with Wright at the time the novel was written.
Steven Mallory creates statues of divine beauty. His statue for the “temple of the human spirit” in the “figure of a naked woman” symbolizes the “human spirit. The heroic in people. Longing and fulfillment in one. Uplifting in his urge - and uplifting in his being. Seeking God and finding oneself ... " .
Dominique Francon's beauty enables people to understand for the first time "... what artists meant when they talked about beauty." She humbled herself in order to learn self-contempt, as she felt a superiority over the "second-handers", which she did not want to affirm . Only after she overcomes her pity, stops hating the world of the "second hand", is afraid of it and has learned not to pay any attention to it, does she become equal to Roark.
Gail Wynand is a “creator” who has worked his way from shoeshine to billionaire. "He looked like the decadent, last accomplished, over-refined end product of a long line of exquisite blood mixtures, and thereby know anyone that he came out of the gutter." .
After he recognized the corruption of an editor he admired at a young age, he only focused his work on economic success. He himself despises his products and surrounds himself with an unprecedented art collection that is only accessible to him. As a “seismograph of public opinion” he delivers his newspaper “body and soul to the mob” . After getting to know Dominique, he undermines this principle by prohibiting him from reporting about their marriage in his press organs. Another reason for his failure is his underestimation of Toohey's despite Dominique's warnings.
Ellsworth Toohey is the astute opponent of Roark and his idea. He has the ability to recognize “gifted people” and their works at first sight. He fights these creators because he wants to help himself and the collectivized world spirit of the second hand to world domination. He considers himself a philanthropist, since his fight against the genius prevents the untalented from feeling inferior.
His intrigues determine a large part of the novel's plot. The aim of his actions is to devalue great personalities and their works as untalented by upgrading ridiculous people and works and calling them equal. He explains to his followers, “ They would gain a higher kind of happiness if they gave up what actually makes them happy. There is no need to be too clear about this. Use only big, blurred words: 'Harmony of the Universe' - 'Eternal Spirit' - 'Divine End Purpose' - 'Nirvana' - 'Paradise' - 'Racial Superiority' - 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'. ” His utopia, all for the will of all to submit: "Universal slavery - without even the dignity of a master ...". He sees this already realized in the prevailing communism and fascism of the Europe of that time.
Locations
Ayn Rand may be referring to the fictional Wynand Building at Rockefeller Center (1929-40) . The context and time of the novel suggest an analogy to the building complex, which at the time represented a groundbreaking urban and architectural solution for skyscrapers.
publication
The Eternal Well was Rand's second novel. Twelve publishers rejected it until it was published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company in 1943.
In the United States, the novel was a bestseller two years after publication and sold 6.5 million times by 2004.
The novel in popular culture
The novel was made into a film in 1949, the German title of the film is Ein Mann wie Sprengstoff (in the English original the film is called like the book). Its production was delayed because of the Second World War . Although the novelist had also written the script, she didn't like the finished film at all. The film's economic success was moderate.
In Matt Ruff's novel GAS , the detonator of a bomb threatening New York takes the form of a character Ayn Rand monologizing to himself.
In the fantasy comedy Heaven should wait (1978), Julia Farnsworth reaches for an edition of The Fountainhead in order not to appear suspicious at the discovery of the murder of her husband (alleged or canceled by a body switch ).
The animated series The Simpsons parodies Ayn Rand's novel Der Ursprung ( The Eternal Source ) in the episode Four Power Women and a Manicure . In an earlier episode, Clear the Stage for Marge , Maggie Simpsons was sent to a day care center called "Ayn Rand School for Tots".
In the 1980s, the Irish rock band The Fountainhead named themselves after the novel.
In the film Dirty Dancing , a waiter recommends the novel of the main character in the film ("Baby").
The computer game BioShock and its successor BioShock 2 is inspired by the ideas in the book.
Jürgen Kuttner and Tom Kühnel set the novel in 2011 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin as a play under the title Capitalista, Baby! around.
literature
- The Fountainhead . Plume Books, 2005, ISBN 0452286751
- The eternal source . Goldmann, 1993, ISBN 344203700X
- The origin . Gewis, 2000, ISBN 3932564367
Individual evidence
- ↑ in the 1946 edition of Morgarten Verlag the novel has 941 pages
- ↑ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 920 ff.
- ↑ ibid. P. 699
- ↑ Frank Lloyd Wright On Ayn Rand, "What's My Line"
- ↑ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 290
- ↑ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 439
- ↑ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 141
- ↑ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 585
- ↑ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 624
- ↑ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 520; "But somewhere, lost in the line of ancestors, there was once an aristocratic root; ... there had once been a glorious blue-blooded ancestor and then an equally forgotten fate that had brought its descendants into the gutter." D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 535
- ↑ "Power, ... I didn't want anything else. To know there is no living person in the world whom I cannot force to do what I want ... to everything “ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 666
- ↑ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 544; “… The Wynand papers didn't have one conviction, except that it always depends on reflecting the greatest prejudices of the greatest number of people.” D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 400
- ↑ “You are just a tank; but this is a very clean, decent weapon. An honest weapon on the battle front, which is the first to set off, rolling everything down in front of you and taking every counter blow. Toohey is a poison gas. One of those that eats away at the lungs ”ibid. P. 671
- ↑ “… He knew neither the man's name, nor his profession, nor his past; he didn't need to know; for him it wasn't a person, but a force…. “ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 344
- ↑ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 671
- ↑ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 369
- ↑ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 632
- ↑ D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 861.
- ↑ The doctrine that strangles the individual is opposed by a doctrine that slaughters the individual. D. e. Quell , Ayn Rand, Morgartenverlag 1946, p. 866.
- ↑ Writings of the Erich-Mühsam-Gesellschaft, issue 31, p. 78, 2008, ISBN 3-931079-40-6
- ↑ http://simpsonspedia.net/index.php?title=Ayn_Rand_School_for_Tots
- ^ Rüdiger Schaper: Je oller, je Dollar , in: DER TAGESSPIEGEL, September 12, 2011