I have to put up my Disney vacation post soon but I need to arrange my pictures first, so I figured I would put up this post quickly in the meantime. This is another book from my deck of cards.
A few weeks ago I came across this illustration, which I’m sure is pretty well known by now (it’s actually over a year old). I like the drawing, and it is especially helpful in this case because it almost sums up Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: he imagined all of these things happening at the same time.
Montag is a fireman who has only ever been taught to start fires, not to put them out. In this dystopian novel, books have been banned and are illegal, and any houses suspected or known to have books are burned down. The story follows Montag as he begins to question the reasoning behind the book burning, and as he meets others who teach him that things were very different once. That’s about it for plot, without giving away the ending. It’s a short book and a simple storyline but the significance is in the message. I feel lazy doing what I’m about to do but I love these passages from the book and they portray what Bradbury was trying to get across pretty well, and certainly better than I could. Besides, I think people are already fairly familiar with the book’s message. Like Orwell and Huxley, Bradbury was issuing a warning, for people to not get complacent, to not allow themselves to be lulled, to wake up.
“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, topheavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don’t care. I just like solid entertainment.”
“…when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities in the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved by any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”
“There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them.”
Unlike Orwell and Huxley, however, Bradbury didn't place the blame on the government first, but rather on the people. He saw people's interest in entertainment and television as catalysts for their disinterest in reading and in literature, a movement which government would take advantage of for their own purposes (in the book's case, to wage a long war indefinitely).
In the book, government has taken control of information, the truth can be modified and presented to the people as the government sees fit, and the people are complacent with it all because the ‘truth’ is good and entertainment is always on. The other message here is the harmful effects of a lack of education, either when it's taken away from people or when people don't want it anymore.
It's an interesting take, the idea that people can bring about their own dystopian future, not because there will be supremely powerful governments, but because people will forego their own free will, their own education, in exchange for comfort and pleasure (I'm resisting making aggrandizing comparisons to today's society because I'm not equipped or prepared to make that kind of post but, well, it doesn't exactly sound like science fiction, does it?). The book is more famously known as a warning against censorship and state-sponsored banning, but Bradbury has always emphasized that he was more concerned about people's interest in literature in the first place (though he appreciated the irony of his book being censored by Ballantine editors to remove swear words).
28 down, 24 to go.
The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time . . . Time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt!
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