The Early Ayn Rand

... She had not learned the proper camera angles, she had not learned the correct screen makeup; her mouth was too large, her cheeks too gaunt, her hair uncombed, her movements too jerky and angular. She was like nothing ever seen in a film before, she was a contradiction to all standards, she was awkward, crude, shocking, she was like a breath of fresh air. The studio had expected her to be hated; she was suddenly worshiped by the public. She was not pretty, nor gracious, nor gentle, nor sweet; she played the part of a young girl not as a tubercular flower, but as a steel knife. A reviewer said that she was a cross between a medieval pageboy and a gun moll. She achieved the incredible: she was the first woman who ever allowed herself to make strength attractive on the screen.

The paragraph begins with a description of Vesta's mouth, her hair, her movements, etc. This description re-creates the concrete reality, sets the physical essentials of a young Katharine Hepburn type before us, so that we can, in effect, perceive the event (Vesta onscreen) through our own eyes. On this basis, we are offered some preliminary abstractions, giving a first layer of meaning to these facts; Vesta comes across, we learn, not as pretty, gentle, sweet, but as crude, shocking, fresh — and we accept this account, we see its inner logic, because we know the supporting facts. Then we are given some vivid images comparing Vesta to utterly different entities of a similar meaning (a steel knife, a gun moll, etc.); this helps both to keep the reality real (i.e., to keep it concrete) and to develop the meaning further. The images seem to flow naturally out of the earlier material; they do not strike us as forced or as superfluous, "literary" embellishments. Finally, after this buildup, we are given a single abstraction which unites all of it — the facts, the preliminary abstractions, the images. We are given an integrating concept, which names a definitive meaning, to carry forward with us:"... she was the first woman who ever allowed herself to make strength attractive on the screen." By this time, we do not have to guess at the meaning of "strength," even though it is a very broad abstraction; we know what is meant by it in this context, because we have seen the data that give rise to the concept here. And we believe the term; we do not feel that it is empty or arbitrary, or that we have to take the author's word for it. We do not even feel that it is the conclusion of an extended argument (though in effect it is). We take it here virtually as a statement of the self-evident, as a statement of what we ourselves by now are ready to conclude.

This method is not, of course, repeated in every paragraph. It is applied only where the material requires it. Nor is the order of development always the same; nor are the specific steps — there may be more or fewer of them. But this kind of approach, in some form and on some level, is always present. It is one of the elements that make Ayn Rand's writing so powerful. Concretes by themselves are meaningless, and cannot even be retained for long; abstractions by themselves are vague or empty. But concretes illuminated by an abstraction acquire meaning, and thereby permanence in our minds; and abstractions illustrated by concretes acquire specificity, reality, the power to convince. The result is that both aspects of the writing become important to the reader, who experiences at once the vividness of sensory perception and the clarity of a rational thought process.

Essential to Ayn Rand's method is that the concretes really be concrete, i.e., perceptual. The entity or attribute must be described as the reader would actually see it if he were present. Yet, at the same time, the description must pave the way for the abstraction. The description, therefore, must be highly selective; it must dispense with all premature commentary and all irrelevant data, however naturalistic. It must present those facts, and those only, that are essential if the reader is to apprehend the scene from the angle the author requires. This demands of the writing an extreme ingenuity and purposefulness. The author must continuously invent the telling detail, the fresh perspective, the eloquent juxtaposition, that will create in the reader the awareness of a perceptual reality — which contains an implicit meaning, the specific meaning intended by the author.