re: #118 What Would Spalding Gray Do?

Can you summarize it? I’m curious what would get you so riled up, but don’t want to inflict it on myself.

I haven’t read it in about five years, and I don’t recall all the details well, but here’s what I remember. It’s a futuristic dystopia where language has been stripped of the words ‘I’, and we only speak of ‘we’, and ‘us’. People have been reduced to drones, family is gone, art is gone, individuality is gone, sex only takes place in quasi-forced arrangements for reproductive purposes. One individual somehow IIRC, finds a stash of pre-all-of-this writings, and reads and writes. He connects with a girl, and in the end they run off to the woods together to get away from the commie dystopia.

What blew it for me is that in the end…well, several things. He sheds the name and number given to him by the society, and renames himself Prometheus. Fair enough, heavy handed, but clear. Then he announces that his girlfriend will be Gaia. And she says “That will be my name”.

Then he thinks happy thoughts to himself about how his sons will be free men. And ends by putting up a sign that says EGO over his new door. EGO is the last word of the book.

So, EGO is the Holy Grail, but only for boys. He names himself, in an act of individualism, but she gets her name given to her by him, as he looks forward to a lovely life of being a head of household in the woods. They have sex shortly before this, and it’s lovely, even though she’s a virgin, and he’s only ever done it under the animalistic conditions imposed by the old society. Or at least, it’s lovely for him. We don’t hear from her. And he’s very happy that she’s a virgin, because it’s kept her PURE from the horrible way they have sex at home—despite this being a man who should have no cultural attachment to virginity whatsoever. (At least Huxley and Orwell understood that how a man thinks about sex is dependent on what he’s been told about it.)

At the end, he is free. She’s exchanged one master for another. And I don’t think Rand even notices. It’s this self-conscious paean to individualism that ends up with Individual and Mrs. Individual, happy ever after. The happy ending for a man is freedom and the happy ending for a woman is a man whose socks she can wash.

And then I threw the book across the room.