Sorrid Lives: A Comedy in Four Chapters Book

Part VII of a multi-part review series.

Fairly pedestrian courtroom melodrama, complete with improbable reversals. Displays the normal problems of non-attorney writing legal thriller: procedure and decorum are dicked up, objections are made by lawyers not on the basis of the rules of evidence, but rather on whether the facts are deleterious to one's case. In fact, numerous bona fide evidentiary objections are not made in the narrative because writer does not know law--lotsa hearsay running around, for instance, though a charitable reading would impute these defects to the characters, i.e., as bad trial attorneys. (I feel no need to be charitable to this author.) Murder victim is an unsavory capitalist; main state witness is his widow, who is heir to some kind of fortune. Defendant is victim's mistress, also his employee. So, yeah, Rand thought she stacked the deck one way, but it kinda is stacked the opposite. Gimmick is that jury is drawn from audience, who then render a verdict on the facts, and the play proceeds with alternative endings based on same--so, dinner mystery theatre at its low ebb.

None of those are especially egregious defaults. It's just kinda dull and unrealistic, rather than affirmatively offensive (even the ruling class protagonist cliché is simply part of the background radiation of bad amateurish writing).

What drops this text into the lower echelon of suckitude is, as usual, author's appendage of ideological bullshit in the prefatory remarks. The text is "romantic symbolism" (1), "not a philosophical, but a sense-of-life play" (id.), which is a term of art that she lays down in The Romantic Manifesto, and summarizes here as "sense of life is a preconceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man's relationship to existence" (id.). (I know, right?)

Every text "is the product and expression of its author's sense of life translated into conceptual, i.e., philosophical terms, or it may express only an abstract emotional sum." This one happens to be "pure, untranslated abstraction" (id.), whatever the hell that means.

Before going further, a brief comparison: here, we have a "preconceptual" "untranslated abstraction"; we know from her other essays, repeated many times with much arrogance and vitriol, that the principle attribute of humanity is allegedly reason, which is allegedly what differentiates us from mere animals, and that reason allegedly works with sense perceptions and allegedly integrates them as concepts, allegedly the sole source of ideas, as humans allegedly have no innate ideas, by contrast with mere animals. If the latter series of dogmatic allegations is true, what human person thinks in preconceptual abstractions? It is a nasty diremption, and makes aporetic nonsense of one set or the other of her propositions.

But, whatever. We are instructed that the text's "events are not to be taken literally; they dramatize certain fundamental psychological characteristics, deliberately isolated and emphasized to convey a single abstraction: the characters' attitude toward life" (id.). I humbly attest that this does not occur in this text, which probably requires an elaborate series of glosses, cross-referenced with Atlas Shrugged for the fullness of the preconceptual abstraction to be translated.

The text presents "the confrontation of two extremes, two opposite ways of facing existence: passionate self-assertiveness, self-confidence, ambition, audacity, independence--versus conventionality, servility, envy, hatred, power-lust" (2). No express indication of which side of the case is which, but she implies the answer when she states that murdered capitalist is based on one Ivan Kreuger, a historically unsavory capitalist who committed crimes, but was purportedly denounced not because he was an unsavory criminal, but for "his ambition" as a capitalist (3). (Yes, it's that kind of stupid.) It hits the nadir when unsavory historical capitalist is brought low for "his venture into politics--mixed-economy politics" (4). Socialism is the reason for capitalist unsavoriness, of course! So, decedent in the text is Kreuger as he "might have been, or, perhaps, ought to have been" (4-5). I suppose this means that the "two extremes" are good capitalist vs. evil employee, or so.

Despite all that, preface declares that defendant is not guilty (6). How can anyone care?