From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jun 18 2002 - 21:38:30 MDT
>Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)wrote on Mon Jun 17
2002 - 00:01:13 MDT:
>>(Phil Osborn wrote)
I think his point was that Rand's choice to kill off
"people" in her novels, which she had herself declared
to be an idealized projection of her view of reality,
logically reflected her own character - murderer.
Similar to the Christian view that a la Jimmy Carter -
"Lusting after a woman in one's heart" is just as bad
as actually committing adultery. <<
<I'm not sure how you're coming down on this, Phil.
It's crazy to even begin to equate whatever Rand does
to a non-living non-breathing character to a murder of
a real person! >
Well, you should've backed up in the thread! No, I
don't believe that fictional characters are real - as
in Bob Heinlein's last rather demented novel ("The Cat
Who Walked Thru Walls"). I was discussing an old
college roommate's beliefs and trying to come to some
understanding of them. He apparently felt that Rand's
idealization of realitiy in "Atlas Shrugged" carried a
logical implication for her own moral character.
What she chose to represent as an ideal implied that
this reflected her own values - and she said as much
herself, many times. When she allowed a whole lot of
fictional characters (some reprehensible jerks and
many innocents) meant to represent what real people
would experience if she had a choice - as in God, I
suppose, instead of novelist - to die, as a logical
working out of her vision, then he concluded that her
character was that of a murderer, even though she had
probably never killed any actual person.
I suppose that if you read "Justine" or some of the
other famous Marquis de Sade novels, you might come to
a similar conclusion regarding the Marquis - that he
himself must have a sado-masochistic character. In
that case, I more than suspect that the inference
would be correct, but I would certainly hesitate to
apply a parallel logic to a science fiction author,
Brin, for example, who envisions trillions of sentient
beings dying horribly in the final scenes of his last
"Uplift" trilogy. By that standard, we are all
horribly guilty for not having figured out how to
detect Brin's "evil" before he was even born, and the
whole universe of sentient beings out there should be
notified of this horrible person, so that we may
partially expiate our horrendous guilt.
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