Tuesday, March 14, 2006
JUST FINISHED: Farenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Wow, another book involving books. What a honkin' big surprise. Ray Bradbury is one of the 1950s science-fiction writers which needs no introduction (another is L Ron Hubbard, but we won't go there), back when the genre was becoming as much about the implications of ideas as it was about the hardware. Farenheit 451 was his second novel, and the one that everybody seems to know.
Guy Montag is a veteran fireman in a world where the job description is signifigantly different: he's part of a crew that tracks down outlawed books--meaning all of them--and burns them along with the houses they're found in using tanker truck-fed jets of flame. By chance (but maybe not), he strikes up an acquaintance one night with Clarisse McClellan, a seventeen year old girl whose searching questions profoundly unsettle Montag. Maybe this is why when a woman decides to go up in flames with her library, the implications of her act sets off a hornets' nest in Montag's head...and makes him slide a book up his sleeve.
(minor spoiler here, but maybe not...)
The most chilling part, which makes this story especially relevant now, is the explanation why the books went away. In Truffaut's film version, reading as a whole has evaporated, insinuating a government that produces an illiterate, doped-up population and wants to keep them that way. The book draws a more esoteric line: the people, not the government, are the ones that turn away from books, the government just taking advantage of what's a grass roots movement. While the people in Farenheit still read, it's such mentally untaxing material as technical manuals, comic books, and "true confessions" garbage. In a climate of anti-intellectualism, the humanities dwindled and sputtered out in favor of technical classes, the newspapers went out of business, and the population became addicted to cheap thrills and the most undemanding types of entertainment. In such a climate, padlocking the libraries and sending them up in flames is just a formality.
In an age where the routine response to upholders of The Canon is "who cares what they read, as long as they read," it's a little bit too plausible, the type of thing that would give Harold Bloom nightmares, and probably does. Maybe if I had read this in school, with its message that "ideas have consequences," it would've counteracted all that Kurt Vonnegut, where the message seemingly was that "no matter what life you lead, eventually the universe will slap a 'kick me' sign on your ass anyway." Sure, both are valid, but one gives you a bit of hope. Not that the other isn't entertaining, of course...
Still widely available, but by all means avoid the edition prepared for schools in the late 1960s, which in an irony even Bradbury appreciates was censored for language. There was also a limited edition prepared during the first printing made from a form of asbestos, not only making it unburnable but producing the first book which is literally unhealthy to own.
Guy Montag is a veteran fireman in a world where the job description is signifigantly different: he's part of a crew that tracks down outlawed books--meaning all of them--and burns them along with the houses they're found in using tanker truck-fed jets of flame. By chance (but maybe not), he strikes up an acquaintance one night with Clarisse McClellan, a seventeen year old girl whose searching questions profoundly unsettle Montag. Maybe this is why when a woman decides to go up in flames with her library, the implications of her act sets off a hornets' nest in Montag's head...and makes him slide a book up his sleeve.
(minor spoiler here, but maybe not...)
The most chilling part, which makes this story especially relevant now, is the explanation why the books went away. In Truffaut's film version, reading as a whole has evaporated, insinuating a government that produces an illiterate, doped-up population and wants to keep them that way. The book draws a more esoteric line: the people, not the government, are the ones that turn away from books, the government just taking advantage of what's a grass roots movement. While the people in Farenheit still read, it's such mentally untaxing material as technical manuals, comic books, and "true confessions" garbage. In a climate of anti-intellectualism, the humanities dwindled and sputtered out in favor of technical classes, the newspapers went out of business, and the population became addicted to cheap thrills and the most undemanding types of entertainment. In such a climate, padlocking the libraries and sending them up in flames is just a formality.
In an age where the routine response to upholders of The Canon is "who cares what they read, as long as they read," it's a little bit too plausible, the type of thing that would give Harold Bloom nightmares, and probably does. Maybe if I had read this in school, with its message that "ideas have consequences," it would've counteracted all that Kurt Vonnegut, where the message seemingly was that "no matter what life you lead, eventually the universe will slap a 'kick me' sign on your ass anyway." Sure, both are valid, but one gives you a bit of hope. Not that the other isn't entertaining, of course...
Still widely available, but by all means avoid the edition prepared for schools in the late 1960s, which in an irony even Bradbury appreciates was censored for language. There was also a limited edition prepared during the first printing made from a form of asbestos, not only making it unburnable but producing the first book which is literally unhealthy to own.
|| Eric 11:50 AM#
