A character sketch of Howard Roark

[some assignment I did someplace. For what this novel means to me, this ought to be here.]

From The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand belonged to the Romantic School of writing. A form of writing different from the Naturalist School in a way that it deals with how things should be or ought to be done, and not how they are or how they were. This form of writing involves creation of a plot that swears on idealism. Therefore, the primary attribute of Howard Roark as canvased by the Romanticist is his idealism.

“Howard Roark laughed.”

The opening lines of the novel are in itself an overture to the character Howard Roark lives. He stands naked at the edge of the cliff, his hide, his body, a more literal portrayal of his nude mind that has nothing to conceal from a latent world. He fears none and laments not a moment; he is unperturbed by rejections, failures, condemnations. His mind and soul are in tandem, an ideal synchronization, and his naked body, of straight lines and angles, is a ‘personification’ of a mind so dauntless.

Howard has a clear mind, one that contemplates a weary journey ahead, his lone swim against a ferocious tide, his solitary boat in an upstream ride, but a mind that is not anxious, for everything is clear to him. Howard Roark has a productive mind. He wants to cut the granite into walls, the trees into rafters and melt the iron ore under his feet to emerge as girders in the sky. The rocks he dreams, are waiting to be crushed and rebuilt with his hands, his brain. His self-occupied dreams make him absent minded, towards his clothes, towards other people and towards their misery. His mind is solid as rock, except that his heart is stoned too.

His drawings are unprecedented; they are buildings never erected before, ideas never heard of before, the structures appear simple and austere yet a real look reveals his supremacy, his intensity. The drawings never yield to pre-written axioms; they are not obsequious to those grandiose styles of Gothic and Roman architecture. A building to him is as alive and throbbing as a man, and that its integrity not follow truth and fidelity is ‘blasphemous’, is depravity.

Howard isn’t toady to fame or money. After expulsion from Stanton for impertinence towards those apostles of traditional architecture, he decides to work under a rather broke Henry Cameron, another ingenious architect rejected by the ostentations of a country gypped, by Roman and Greek styles. Under Cameron he knows, he can learn and efface the lacunae in his drawings.

Howard Roark is hardnosed and stubborn when it comes to the integrity of his designs. No matter how much loss he incurs, he wants his buildings to be the exact manifestations of his designs, lock stock and barrel. He refuses to adapt to the norms of the society and at times when his financial condition is dire, he refuses to submit to the temptations of his prospects simply because a corrupt building to him is the highest form of treason. He can work in a granite quarry as a labourer, but not as an architect who relents to the idiocies of a society, a society which thrives on ‘plain-flamboyance’. Not that Howard never finds his coterie; his skyrocketing dreams do get fulfilled with the Enright House, the Monadnock Valley and aplenty more, but at every step, he is encountered by people who wish to bend him, make him surrender to what all have genuflected already. But Howard never gives in to their hypocrisy; he keeps on working with what people reckon as his presumptuousness.

For Howard Roark, reverence for his ability to draw transcends all protocols of success. He wouldn’t mind languishing one day, decades later, alone in an office like Cameron. For him, gratification of self is the highest form of virtue, something which comes to him when he designs buildings. Howard helps Peter Keating in his projects not because he wishes to influence his friendship by wheedling him, but for the seraphic joy he attains when a dash of his hand gives life to concrete. He is unaffected by the shekels that Keating is raking in, and continues to – in the words of Keating – ‘assist' him. He feels overjoyed at his designs taking shape and feels there is no other purpose to it than this. Keating’s manipulative and deceptive tactics are unable to unearth him.

"A house can have integrity, just like a person, and just as seldom."

Howard won’t do something without a reason, be it a callous drink with Keating or the majesty in the façade of a design. For Howard, ‘reason’ is the only reverent entity; no God, no self-sacrifice can ever outweigh it. His apparels, his room of essentials-only, his life and above all his drawings symbolize reason, simplicity yet paramountcy. Every stroke of the pencil and every throb of the heart must have a reason for Howard Roark. He argues that a human body has not a single muscle that is not carved for a purpose; there is not a single line in the body that holds futility; every detail has a reason that fits the idea, the idea and life of a man. Why then, he retorts, should a building be ornamented with trimmings and useless carvings and arches when they serve no purpose? Why then should there be buildings which please the charlatans who live not for themselves but for the whims of others? Howard finds no reason in a life of bootlicking others’ desires. He believes that most people have no sense of judgement of their own and they chew what is thrown at them. This love for reason makes Howard a cold person. Those fabricated people do not exist in his life and they bear not apples but the cold shudder of his indifference. He remains unaffected by people around him, stoic to their resentment towards him. Though his blue eyes pierce like a bayonet, he makes people anticipate their inexistence in his presence. He neither hates nor loves people, he is blind to acknowledging people’s existence and is impervious to emotions, of blithe or pain, of love or despair. But just as indifferent he is to the pretence of other people, he is puzzled at their indifference to reality. Their phony designs and their pompous lives bewilder him.

Somewhere deep down, Howard’s emotions for his work do surface. After a long hiatus that almost seems eternal, when he finally gets a job at Eric Snyte, his fingers tremble at the first hold of the pencil. When he realizes that his designs on Cortlandt Homes have been manipulated and tarnished and that the promise made to him by Keating is broken, he goes on to destroy the apartments, for their very sight evokes contempt in him. His designs of the Stoddard Temple are an attestation of the profound emotions he bears for Dominique and the respect he holds for his work. His affection for Henry Cameron, his love for Dominique Francon, his camaraderie with the electrician Mike, underpins his humanity, except that it emerges from the bedrock of ‘reason’. He sees himself in Henry Cameron, or better, vice versa. He loves men not for they can do for him, or for what he can do for them; he loves them for their virtues, the values that they achieve in their lives. 

Howard is a man strong enough to wage a battle against the world. Right from his expulsion at Stanton to his trial for Cortlandt, Roark wages a lone battle against every force in this world. He fights the only woman he loves, for he wants her to realize, that things one loves should not be abandoned or annihilated fearing they’d be taken away, that one has to fight for one’s ego and ideals in a world that runs on men but yearns for rats. His battle is not just against those fake architects who with their craft win commissions, but against every man who corrupts the honesty in a building and thus, another man. His fight is not against Keatings for they are innocuous and fickle minded, but against Tooheys and Wynands who thrive on the common din to destroy men like him, who realize the presence of geniuses but who want to favour the weak, for that’s what the world seeks.

Howard Roark is a modern adaptation of the man who invented fire, of he who invented the wheel. They are lambasted for their genius, for their transgression into a territory man never ventured into before, but they are the prime movers of the world. They are men who tread on undiscovered paths and stand alone against their time. As Robert Frost once said,

“"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

They are men who devise man’s progress, man’s evolution. They are not sacrificial, for they live for none but themselves. They live for their right to independence, for their own ego, for nothing but their own selfish pleasure, because they are born as individuals first. They respect another person’s freedom but emphatically deny taking part in slavery. They are the Edisons, Einsteins, Aristotles and Roarks.

HOWARD ROARK IS AN EGOIST. His signature at the entrance of his office is a sign that moves the world, which has to fight the dogma, the conventions, the clichés, and come out victorious. His will is subjected to the oppressions of the society; he is tried for the beauty of the Stoddard Temple, for his genius in Cordlandt Homes. Men like Howard Roark are the motor of this world, for they do not rely on the past but on themselves, and mark a new epoch, into which the world enters, evolves. Howard Roark is an egoist. And for him, Man’s ego is the FOUNTAINHEAD of human progress. 

It is imperative to end the way it did, the way it should, and the way it always will,

“Then there was only the ocean and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark”