Ray Bradbury:Fahrenheit 451(1953)

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Future Possiblity of Book hateRay Bradbury:Fahrenheit 451(1953).

FANTASY

Prescient and enthralling

SHWETA SARAN

Fifty-four years after its publication, Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel transcends the framework within which it was placed.


Last year, the American Library Association (ALA) celebrated the Banned Books Week between September 29 and October 6. The Banned Books Week is a hugely popular awareness campaign that began in 1982 and works towards protecting freedom of expression by encouraging people to read or revisit books that have been banned, challenged or restricted in specific countries.

The ALA’s reading list includes J.D. Salinger, Vladmir Nabokov, and Salman Rushdie. It also includes a book that is upheld by the ALA for imagining a future in which all books are prohibited and burned.
When books are banned

Fifty-four years after its publication, this book remains more prescient than George Orwell’s 1984 and equally enthralling. Published unobtrusively in 1953, it has gained a steady following for itself and its writer. This little book was written using a rented typewriter in the library of the University of California, an interesting place to write a novel about the possible anathematisation of reading. The author was Ray Bradbury and the book was Fahrenheit 451.

Ray Bradbury is one of the most popular writers of fantasy and science fiction, having impressed people as diverse as filmmaker Federico Fellini, novelist Christopher Isherwood, Renaissance Scholar Bernard Berenson, popular fantasy writer Neil Gaiman and filmmaker Francois Truffaut, who adapted Fahrenheit 451 into a movie. Bradbury’s body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems and essays. His other famous books include The Martian Chronicles, The October Country, and Dandelion Wine.

Fahrenheit 451 is often misinterpreted as a book attacking the evils of censorship when in fact Bradbury wanted to portray the danger of reading being phased out by television and the sense of apathy that will prevail in such a society.

In Bradbury’s future, life is reduced to signals, sensations, useless information and the perverse leaps and thrills of technology. Books are regarded as unnecessary. Firemen do not put out fires but burn books instead. A fireman named Montag is quite happy with his job, until he discovers that his colleagues burn a woman who refuses to give up her books.

Montag is drawn to the unknown power of books. He tries to start a rebellion but is forced to flee and hunt for other book lovers, even as his city is thrown into a nuclear war.
Unsettling

There is something unsettling about Bradbury’s novel. It is equivocal about whatever little hope it displays and the literature that it references. On touching and reading a book for the first time, Montag feels an acute sense of fear, not only because the other firemen will be out to get him, but also because there are so many years to catch up with and so much to understand and accept. The chasm is large.

Bradbury’s depiction of technology replacing thought and memory is especially evident in Montag’s wife Mildred, who always has a radio tamp-on plugged to her ear, transporting her on waves of sound, music and talk. This sense of desolation and disconnection is echoed in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”, a poem that Montag reads out to Mildred and her friends, much against their wishes.

Critics have derided his choice of material for many years but fantasy and science fiction have been Bradbury’s best loves. His fantasy world is so natural and believable that his readers are unassumingly drawn into its mythologies and its rich emotional, atmospheric and verbal textures. In his short stories, Bradbury pushes boundaries and extends over areas as varied as literature, travel, anthropology and history. For instance, in “The Parrot Who Met Papa”, a parrot is kidnapped when people discover that it had spent a lot of time with Ernest Hemingway, having memorised his manner of speaking and even the draft of his last book. The assailant is a fictitious character named Shelley Capon, who seems delightfully similar to Truman Capote. In the story, Bradbury gives us an astonishingly believable sense of Hemingway’s Cuba.

The “The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse” combines dark humour and social satire. There are hundreds of other stories, all equally ingenious, varied and engrossing.

When interviewed for the 50th anniversary of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury stressed that the problem today was not censorship as much as it was about people’s growing disdain for reading. Bradbury also discredited news channels and their negative impact on reading and education, a sense of mistrust that is evident in Fahrenheit 451.

Interestingly, Bradbury has observed that in future, the forms of censorship that writers will have to contend with will be the world’s obsession with being politically correct and the editing of books intended primarily to accommodate the businesses of a fast-paced world.