It was precisely five years ago today that I sat in the back of a bouncy van on the long winding road from Lijiang to Baoshan, deep in the mountainous hinterland of southwestern China, reading from cover to cover Ray Bradbury’s stirring “Fahrenheit 451,” a novel of a futuristic American dystopia in which firemen are employed solely to find books and set them ablaze with kerosene.
For those many who’ve never read the story, but think they’ve heard lots of it, it’s assumed by default that this is another one of those dark, horrifying, Orwellian sci-fi tales of ruthless government oppression.
Not so. This book is satire. Clever, often funny, if dark satire. It’s not about Big-Brother government oppression. No; it’s a cautionary tale of an American public that has grown so shallow, so mentally anemic, so fixated on bland daytime soaps and mind-numbing toothpaste jingles that they simply will not tolerate being made to think, being confronted with their own ignorance.
So America collectively votes to have books banned. All of them. Every last volume in existence. We’ve got TV; we’ve got radio; who needs books? Who needs reading? That’s too much like work.
And firefighters aren’t needed to fight fires anymore, so they’re kept on the government dole to go hunt down people who still have books, and burn the last of their collections. Burn down whole houses’ worth if they must.
Because, warns Bradbury, we fear and resent being challenged. We fear and resent the wisdoms of earlier ages. We fear and resent being offended. We fear and resent being confronted with strong and violent opposing opinions that blow in and unsettle us, that rock us to the soul.
I woke up in the middle of the night last night unable to sleep. Agitated to go find something stirring to read, or to write. On my shelf I found the five-year-old copy of ‘Fahrenheit’ and went digging through it.
Bradbury’s most loathed enemies, you discover, are the educators themselves. The school boards emasculated by political correctness that empty their libraries of Twain and Salinger and Atwood and all things confrontational and opinionated and grittily descriptive. The college committees and city councils bound and gagged by competing special interest groups from letting art be art.
It’s in the coda, the tail afterword-on-the-afterword at the close of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ where Bradbury lets loose in explosive Wagnerian strains against the psychic public vampires who rot the minds of our kids:
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every [special interest], be it Baptist/Unitarian/Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist/Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist/Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feel it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
“… Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?”
This is a piece of writing you must read. This is a man burning over from passion and rage. This is the English language on fire:
Click here to read Bradbury’s rant in full.
The power of individuality. The power of a strident opinion. The power of a ballsy comparison, a ballsy assertion, a ballsy promise, a ballsy guarantee, the ballsy side of a ballsy argument. That is what separates the difference makers from the spineless. The memorable from the wholly forgettable. The winners, the victors, the from the never-cared-to-try.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “to believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.”
He knew, and wrote, that “there is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.”
“God,” Emerson said, “will not have his work made manifest by cowards.”
Live unforgettably.
Bryan Todd
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9 Comments on “Fahrenheit 451? Not Without a Fight.”
The word “minority” clearly meant something different to Ray Bradbury back when he wrote this coda than it does to most of us today.
I want people to deal with the substance of his argument, not get tripped up over some since-evolved word that creates the mistaken notion that he’s raging against blacks and hispanics.
And besides, this is my post, not his. I am my own editor. The people who want to read the unmodified original can click and go do so. After all, I provided the link!
Bryan,
I find it a little ironic that you would choose to swap the original word “minority” for the phrase “special interest”, in your excerpt from Bradbury’s complaint against those that would edit the words of authors…
Gareth
Nice review Bryan, I’ve always meant to read the book, and will definitely check it out now.
I’m reading “Blind Faith” at the moment, by Ben Elton (writer of Blackadder and other classic British comedies), which is similar in tone, but with a more comic, over the top feel.
It’s actually scary how close to modern day London it actually feels like!
Snail’s pace is just about right, the slower the better.
Ah, spooky indeed.
Yes, I get my daily doses of stupefaction reading ‘Zen.’ I’m crawling through it at a snail’s pace, having started in October and only at chapter 19 now, but it resonates deep in the soul like nothing I’ve read in recent years …
Onward to beautiful (and controversial) depth!
Oh goody! :) ZMM is …well …you can’t define quality :)
Abey, that’s real spooky – Bryan has recently been reading Zen after I recommended it to him. It’s one of the most amazing (and terrifying) books I’ve experienced, and left me in a state of complete stupefaction after I’d finished.
I’m sure Bryan will have more to say on it…
“digression is the soul of wit” love that. Unless you digress you wont progress. Counterintuitive but true no? This post reminds me of something Robert Pirsig said in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – something like “our culture is letting of depth and going for breadth, a breadth that is obliterating…” Flat world? More like heading for the desert…
Bryan,
A mighty fine rant.
In my opinion what we’re in danger of is not a lack of dissent, but a lack of listening between those who disagree with each other. I’ve never seen so much shouting and so little listening as I see right now.
Communication is not communication if there is no mutual understanding.
Perry