The Duplicity of Howard Rourke, and Other North Atlantic Differences

It's difficult to know who to trust in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, and your narrator Paul Pennyfeather, absent as his voice is from much of the narrative despite his central location to it, doesn't provide much insight. Instead it seems like the lonely reader has to build his understanding of a range of characters who, despite being open to telling Paul their stories seem more bent on creating their own personal mythology specific to who their listener is at the time: Though more examples abound, recall how Grimes lives a double (or is it a triple) life with wives scattered across the country, 'Sir' Solomon spins three separate yarns to his three colleagues - though is never caught out and the novella finishes without providing any evidence as to his true identity - and it is the surprising deceit of Margot that lands Paul in the slammer. Thus it is in this context of deliberately unclear allegorical operation that one is meant to unpick the meanings behind Professor Silenus, Waugh's 25 year old Professor of Architecture from the Bauhaus who's life intersects with Pennyfeather's at key moments in the plot.

The impression upon meeting him the first time is that on the face of things Silenus is an absurd parody of the Modern architect: Obsessing over his art to the point of destruction and a complex fabric of paradoxes: Rather like Howard Rourke in both the novel and subsequent film of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. However, despite Silenus' yearnings for the control of the discrete and legible machine, he himself is clearly very human, torn between the inertia of his own humanity and the reassuring stasis of the machines, the perfect residents of an architectural system, that he futilely yearns to emulate.

Whilst Rourke does not aspire to the mechanistic efficiencies that are Silenus' undoing, he still acheives them, from the constant textual references to the angular machinic qualities of his body to the rigour with which he adheres to his code of operating as an architect. Though he remains a thoroughly unrealistic character precisely due to this lack of humanity both physically and emotionally, Rand imagines him as ultimately successful despite the inflexibility means he desires to make the word through. In setting Rourke - the driven self-interested revolutionary thinker who creates only to progress himself - in opposition with the second-hander critic Ellesworth Monkton Toohey whom he makes ultimately irrelevant, Rand makes a moral comment that it is progress for its own sake that should be the goal of man, rather than the manipulations of those progressions or the curation of controllable cronies into mechanisms of power. It's all so clear as to the extent that both film and novel become less allegory and more of a manual for how to aspire to practice as a an architect and even a critic.

Conversely, the duplicity of Waugh's characters results in an invitingly complex rather than predictably binary allegorical roles is perfectly encapsulated by Silenus' final monologue to Pennyfeather, which sees society not as those who carry within them a natural momentum to alter both it and themselves but rather a spinning disc, occupied at the centre by the static, at its fringes by those for whom the ride is thrilling and seek to quicken the rotations, and those in the middle who are either happy to watch the thrill seekers or shift closer to a state of equilibrium. Again in Rand, the direct didacticism of her narrative simmers under what is otherwise a universe so compellingly crafted that people in our seminar believed it to have risen to becoming the second most powerful book in the US after the Bible, unsurprisingly so given it's romantic justification with the selfishness of the North-Atlantic Capitalist dream. The duplicitous predictability of the apparently liberatingly visionary creator Rourke however ensures that The Fountainhead's artistic depth, inasmuch as one can define that through its capacity to hold the reader's imagination, is far more shallow than Waugh's imagining of Silenus, despite the latter's peripheral role to the story of Decline and Fall.

Don't get me wrong: I love the Heroism of Howard Rourke, but it's just that he is incompatible with the real world. If you believe that you can sway the collective opinion of a jury baying for your conviction for arson for no apparent reason then you must be an American. But is that to say that real architects can learn more from Silenus? If what we're meant to learn is how to be successful in an anti-Objectivist way (ie by doing this), then I suppose not. Those are the parameters that Rand sets for herself to operate in though, but I guess in Europe we appreciate a bit of mystique... I'm sure Zaha, Zumthor and H+dM would agree at least.