Last month, legendary science fiction author Ray Bradbury received a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize committee for his lifetime of work. He didn’t give a speech then, but he did speak with an L.A. Weekly reporter and gave a far different interpretation of one of his classic novels — and one of the great novels of science fiction — than you might have gotten from reading it.
The novel in question is Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens and Tolstoy.
Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.
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?Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,? Bradbury says, summarizing TV?s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: ?factoids.? He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.
His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television?s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day?s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.
?Useless,? Bradbury says. ?They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.? He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He?s now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled ?Bradbury on censorship/television.?
Now, some, including this blogger, will dismiss Bradbury as a cranky old man for the simple reason that his statements contradict their own idea of what his book was really about, but it is Ray Bradbury’s book, and who are you or I to argue with him over what the theme of it really was ? Moreover, he does have a point to make:
[Bradbury] says the culprit in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state ? it is the people. Unlike Orwell?s 1984, in which the government uses television screens to indoctrinate citizens, Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate. In the book, Bradbury refers to televisions as ?walls? and its actors as ?family,? a truth evident to anyone who has heard a recap of network shows in which a fan refers to the characters by first name, as if they were relatives or friends.
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Bradbury imagined a democratic society whose diverse population turns against books: Whites reject Uncle Tom?s Cabin and blacks disapprove of Little Black Sambo. He imagined not just political correctness, but a society so diverse that all groups were ?minorities.? He wrote that at first they condensed the books, stripping out more and more offending passages until ultimately all that remained were footnotes, which hardly anyone read. Only after people stopped reading did the state employ firemen to burn books.
In an era where the more people watch American Idol than read a daily newspaper, it’s hard to argue against Bradbury’s hypothesis.
If nothing else, Bradbury’s comments makes me want to read the book again.
June 5th, 2007 at 1:49 am
[...] 451 hacked to pieces by a generation of shoddily-written high school essays, Bradbury is now speaking out about what the book means: ?Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,? [...]
June 5th, 2007 at 5:33 am
Well, there’s only two things wrong with that. One is that if writer writes something and readers don’t understand what the writer meant, that suggests that the writer did a lousy job of communicating - and communicating is the point.
The other is that there has never been a time when most people read books and newspapers regularly. More people used to go to a public hanging than had read a book. A lot of people used to go out to popular live entertainment instead of reading a book. There was a lot less time to sit around reading way back when, too. And literacy was not even remotely universal in the west until relatively recently.
What’s happening right now is that fewer people are subscribing to newspapers because the management of newspapers has stopped treating readers like their customers. Readers are just “end users”, and the real customers are the advertisers. A lot of news junkies have cancelled their subscriptions because they don’t like being treated that way, but they are still reading news - on the Internet. Books are still selling, though, and being read - by the same kind of people who always liked books, and a lot more besides.
When I was in school as a child, our English teacher once went off on a rant to the class about how they all watched television and didn’t bother to read. She then used me as a contrasting example of someone who didn’t waste time in front of the TV and actually studied and read. I assume she got this silly idea from the fact that I always aced all her assignments, but the class could barely keep a straight face - every one of us knew that no one in that class spent more time in front of the television than I did. This old meme has been clunking around since broadcasting was invented and it has always been wrong.
And the fact remains: Bradbury wrote a book about a government censor, and he never made a convincing case that radio and television would cause the kind of censorship he described to occur. If the book had at least focused on that case, readers might have believed that was what the book was about, but he didn’t; he wrote about the government burning books.
June 5th, 2007 at 11:00 am
Bradbury wrote a book about a government censor, and he never made a convincing case that radio and television would cause the kind of censorship he described to occur. If the book had at least focused on that case, readers might have believed that was what the book was about, but he didn?t; he wrote about the government burning books.
No, he wrote a book about a society where the government, with the support of the people, burns books. I am definiately going to have to read Fahernheit 451 again, but I don’t remember getting the impression that this was a dictatorial society Bradbury was writing about.
Unless, of course, you are referring to the dictatorship of mob rule.
June 5th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Avedon, I have noticed a trend that many people read what they want to read (or hear what they want to hear, and so on). They either excise some of the context of a story or imply additional information to justify their own belief system. Bradbury had an intended meaning in Fahrenheit 451, and he reclarified that. Even if he did not convey it as well as he should have, that does not mean that Fahreneheit 451 follows as a book about government censorship.
If anything, I think this all proves his point. So much is stripped away that all that is left is footnotes. And let’s face it; there are less people reading books today than in the past. Perhaps, indirectly, what Bradbury wrote is happening.
August 8th, 2007 at 1:55 am
Isn’t the following article saying that reading is declining worldwide?:
http://starbulletin.com/2007/06/03/editorial/commentary.html