Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451
© 1953 Ray Bradbury
158 pages

Like 1984, I suspect Fahrenheit 451 is famous enough that its basic details have seeped into the cultural consciousness of people who have never read it. Here we have a fireman whose job is to burn books, because so few people read them and the few that do are rendered unhappy by their contents. He’s fighting a losing battle, however, for despite the veneer of prosperity and the abundance of entertainment, the world the Fireman inhabits is a deeply unhappy one. Work is light, goods are cheap, travel is fast, and televisions can encompass entire rooms – but there is something wrong with a world where so many people try to commit suicide that stomach-pumping technicians are as routine as garbage collectors.

Our fireman, Guy Montag, is not like all the rest. While his wife buries her malaise by ensconcing herself inside her television stories, he finds the meaningless noise a distraction. The slight imperfection in his character that makes it impossible for him to simply sink into the soporific covers and ignore the sense of alienation widens into an outright fracture after he encounters two women with upraised heads. The first is a teenager reared without television, whose childhood curiosity has never been squelched, who looks to the heavens in wonder and asks the Fireman questions he has never heard before, or thought to ask. The second is an old woman who, threatened with the destruction of her house and books, takes the match from the firemen and sets the house and herself ablaze, staring in defiance all the while.

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing."

So the fireman  takes home a book, wondering -- is there really something he's missing?  But this isn’t the first time. It’s just the first time he’s admitted what he’s done to himself, the first time he’s dwelt on it enough to take out the other books he accidentally didn’t burn and then hid away – the first time he’s dared to read them, to confront what they have to say. His wife and coworkers can’t help but notice he’s not the same – and apparently unpracticed at guile, he’s terrible at it, sinking into bed with depression and quoting lines of poetry he could have only encountered through the forbidden fruit of books.

It’s when his boss arrives to put him back on the wide and winding that the book really reveals its substance. This is a book about the decline of literacy, yes. Books declined not because of a conspiracy but because people tended to gravitate toward easy entertainment, shorter synopses, that sort of thing. They failed to challenge themselves and became vapid creatures living for soma. But the book-burnings themselves were deliberate, created by a government that sought to minimize disruption and the loss of a happy-clappy world. Anything that could be offensive to anyone was purged. Anything that might start a mind to thinking about the world, to doubting, to unsettle everything was likewise burned. The chief’s case covers a couple of pages and is mesmerizing in its condemnation – not of his world, but of ours.  Our lives are saturated in sensation -- news, politics, action-and-sex movies, dissent is filtered out through  our will and the design of search engines, and language and history are the stuff of clay, to be molded to fit the conceits of the day.

"Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Bum the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he's on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man's a speck of black dust. Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean."

Bradbury!  thou shouldst be living at this hour:
  America hath need of thee.

Related:
1984,  for the widespread anomie and the total loss of history and language.
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

The Martian Chronicles

The Martian Chronicles

© 1950 Ray Bradbury

222 pages

As the 1940s began giving way to the 1950s, Ray Bradbury began penning a series of stories about the future human exploration of Mars -- stories that he thought of as fantasy in his letters, but which were called science fiction by everyone else. The stories were re-published as an integrated novel, the result is more of a mosaic than a straightforward tale.

Th Chronicles do not present a rosy, optimistic view of Mars exploration -- or of the future in general. Although arriving on Mars safely is a considerable challenge for the Earthmen, eventually Earth triumphs in the same way it survived a Martian invasion in H.G. Wells' earlier work, and the same way Europeans came to posess a widowed continent. One of Bradbury's characters, Spender, could be an Ed Abbey in space -- gazing at the ancient beauty of Mars, of the sad ruins of a once-great civilization -- and lamenting that one day settler would arrive like locusts and devour all of this, plonking down hot dog stands. "We have a way of ruining big, beautiful things," he says, shortly before going on a shooting spree against those who would chuck wine bottles into the pristine Martian canals. Mars is settled, and emptied, as Earth's cold war finally waxes hot and all colonists are called home to fight -- an odd and tragic development, considering the war's nuclear nature.

There's more to the Chronicles than environmental concerns and nuclear dread, however. In another story, "Usher II", Bradbury introduces a theme later expanded in "Fahrenheit 451", when a man builds a house of horrors inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe. The house is a tower of rebellion, for on Earth all works of fantasy and politics were long burned and their ashes buried, in the hopes of burning and burying imagination and discontent with them. The political police catch up to the house's architect, but he invites them to tour the house just once before they burn it. The vengeance then wreaked through recreations of Poe's stories testifies to a delicious anti-authoritarianism, a contempt for those who would control the lives of others for them. Many people came to Mars to escape conformity, bureaucracy, the sterile life -- but found it came following after them, like the Alliance in Firefly.

And yet there is more to this little volume of stories. Needless to say, after spending an evening with it, I now know why it's held in such high regard.