Ray Bradburys Fahrenheit
451 and the Dystopian Tradition
Paul Brians
February 21, 2006
Revised October
31, 2007
Ray Bradburys Fahrenheit
451 is one of the most famous and popular
novels ever written belonging to the literary genre known as dystopias. This
term is derived from Utopia, the word that Thomas More used for the title of
his sixteenth-century novel depicting an ideal society; but the earliest work
of its type is generally considered to be the 4th-century BC Platos
Republic, which has in common
with the government of Bradburys novel a deep suspicion of literature as
disturbing and subversive. Plato suggests that if the great epic poet Homer
were to arrive in his ideal city, he should crown him with laurels,
congratulate him on his achievements, and send him on his way—much less
harsh than burning him to death, but depicting a similar determination to
control the thoughts of citizens and ban the free play of the imagination.
Thus we see that
one persons idea of an ideal existence is anothers nightmare. Utopias
proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
and it is not surprising that dystopias began to appear then as well, including
the earliest well-known example, Evgeny Zamiatins We, published in 1927 as a scathing attack on the
increasingly repressive Soviet state.
The same year the
German silent film Metropolis appeared,
depicting a mechanized, rigid society with a mindless, self-indulgent upper
class benefiting from the brutal exploitation of the working-class masses. This
is one of the great films of all times, though it was subsequently edited
almost to incomprehensibility. A relatively complete beautifully restored
version was released in 2010. Ironically, the screenwriter of this hymn to
equality and love, Thea von Harbou, went on to work with the Nazis as they
implemented their own real-life dystopia, while her Jewish husband, director
Fritz Lang, fled to the West.
The first
dystopian novel commonly encountered by American readers today is Aldous
Huxleys 1932 Brave New World. It depicts a society in which human
beings are treated like different model cars trundling off the Ford assembly
line, bred in bottles for designated roles in society comparable to those
depicted in Metropolis, as
drudges or as self-indulgent but loveless upper-class mindless twits hooked on
orgies and drugs. (It is often noted, however, that Huxley himself was
ultimately to embrace psychedelic drugs and took LSD while he was dying.) Societal control is enforced by among
other means the suppression of
literary classics. In this society Shakespeares plays are a revolutionary
force. In its opposition to modern technology and science, Brave New
World is a deeply conservative reaction
against the innovations of the first two decades of the 20th
century.
By far the
best-known dystopia is George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1948 and published in June of 1949, in the
early days of the Cold War. Although revisionist literary critics have tried
for decades to portray the book as being as much a critique of the West as of
the East, it is difficult to ignore the many obvious images reflecting aspects
of Stalinist Russian society, including censorship involving the rewriting of
history, the near-deification of the dictator, and the encouragement of
children to spy on and betray their parents. Whereas Huxleys citizens were
amused into mindlessness, Orwells are treated much more brutally, with torture
and murder of dissidents being commonplace. In this novel, unlike Huxleys,
loveless sex is a means of protest; and endless, inescapable television
propaganda broadcasts have replaced reading. Although television had been
developed in a crude form as early as the mid-1920s, its commercial spread was
delayed by World War II, and it had really erupted into public consciousness
only in 1948, the year in which Orwell was writing his novel.
In his culture
television is a two-way tool which watches the citizens even more intently than
the citizens watch it. Orwell never really explains how everyone can be spied
on so intently without at least one half of the population watching the other
half. The improbability of this arrangement is typical of dystopias, which
seldom strive to create plausible portraits of a degraded future culture, but
instead exaggerate certain tendencies in order to isolate and highlight them.
In science
fiction, the dystopia became immensely popular during the 1950s as writers
protested against what they saw as the overwhelming tide of conformity and
cultural emptiness typified by mass-market television and other powerful forces
in the postwar world. Many of them could be called stories on the theme If
This Goes On— which was the title of a 1940 story by Robert A. Heinlein—not in itself a dystopian
tale, but the phrase sums up the technique used by numerous authors: take a
social tendency, extrapolate it to an extreme degree, and describe the
consequences. Clifford D. Simak extrapolated the post-war flight of people from
the cities to the suburbs in his moving but wildly improbable series of stories
assembled into City (1952). Individuals
not only isolate themselves on remote country estates in a rapidly depopulating
world, but eventually abandon their human forms and leave Earth altogether.
In the next
decade, authors would more plausibly imagine an overpopulated future in such works as Make
Room, Make Room by Harry
Harrison—later drastically reworked as a film titled Soylent
Green—and Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. Even with increased attention paid
to believability, such works tend to strike contemporary readers as exaggerated
because they ignore natural brakes on population which have led in our own time
to a leveling off in the birth rate in most regions of the world.
Such catastrophic
futures have since been commonplace in popular culture, especially in films
like Mad Max and Escape from
New York. This sort of dystopia is often no
longer an anti-utopia—but simply a failed society in full collapse. It
often ceases to function as what is called an awful warning (the formal
literary term is cautionary tale) because the reader is encouraged to
identify with the violent adventurers who enjoy the anarchy created by the fall
of civilization. Macho thrillers set in post-holocaust radioactive wastelands
became very popular in the 1980s, and decayed urban dystopias are common in
contemporary video games.
In contrast to
these macho fantasies, women authors began increasingly to write feminist
dystopias in the 1970s. Especially notable is the sharply satirical and
hard-hitting The Female Man by Joanna
Russ, and the fiercely misogynist culture depicted in Walk to the End
of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas. But
most interesting of all is Margaret Atwoods novel, The Handmaids
Tale, which like Bradburys deals with the
repression of literacy. Fundamentalist pro-life militants have taken over
society and severely repressed women, using a peculiar interpretation of the
Bible to justify their actions. Women are forbidden to read, presumably to
prevent their developing their own interpretations and ideas. In the novel the
desperate but witty narrator makes a major breakthrough into literacy,
introduced at first as an illicit
thrill by her master, who like Beatty in Fahrenheit 451, enjoys tasting forbidden fruit while still upholding
the values of the repressive dominant order.
In 1955, Frederik Pohl wrote a seminal
story titled Tunnel Under the World, which depicted a nightmare experiment
where a miniaturized city lived through the same day over and over again to
test the effectiveness of various advertising campaigns. It was turned into a
radio drama broadcast the next
year. The same sort of artificial reality was depicted in the 1960
Philip K. Dick novel Time Out of Joint,
and the even more closely related 1963 novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye (though the theme was only
briefly alluded to in the 1999 film version, The Thirteenth Floor). This
sort of fiction in which the audience of mass media winds up inhabiting it is
of course best known from The Matrix
and its sequels. Although the modern versions employ computer technology rather
than video, the tradition has its roots over anxiety about the mesmerizing
power of television to manipulate and transform its audience.
1950 was the year
that television became a truly mass-culture phenomenon in the United States.
People would visit friends simply to sit—or stand, if there werent
enough chairs to go around—and stare mesmerized at the glowing little box
for hours. To some people it seemed to portend the death of civilized
discourse, literacy, and individualism. Among these was Ray Bradbury.
Bradbury had begun
his career writing mostly stories in the weird tales tradition, spooky horror
stories of supernatural and uncanny events, often with shocking endings. The
best of these are collected in The October Country, and many were adapted for television in The
Twilight Zone and other venues. But
gradually he became more and more a science fiction writer, finally becoming
famous for his best-selling 1950 story collection, The Martian
Chronicles. Many of the stories included
had been published in the 1940s, and one can see in this work a complex and
sometimes contradictory mixture of horror, science-fictional wonder, and
sentimental nostalgia which was to become characteristic of his mature writing.
1950 also marked
the beginning of the Red Scare period most memorably exemplified by Senator
Joseph McCarthys vicious, irresponsible crusade against supposed communists
and communist sympathizers which included attempts to remove suspect books from
public libraries. This was also the period of the Hollywood blacklist, with
many actors, directors, and screenwriters being banned from working on
Hollywood films or television. Although Bradbury has said that the book-burnings
in Fahrenheit 451 were inspired by the
1933 Nazi book-burnings, he was much more likely inspired by the censorship
that accompanied the Red Scare of his own era.
He experimented
with the theme of censorship in the story Usher II, which appeared somewhat
awkwardly in The Martian Chronicles,
where it seemed arbitrarily put into a Martian context. Fantastic fiction has
been banned, and is burned wherever it may be discovered. A fanatical admirer
of the works of Edgar Allan Poe invites the censors to his monstrous castle, to
be murdered one after the other in imitation of grisly deaths depicted in Poes
writings. The hero argues eloquently for the importance of the imagination,
revealing among other things that Bradbury was an ardent fan of L. Frank Baums
Oz books; but his bloody-minded
behavior would seem to lend credibility to the censors fears of fantastic
fiction rather than plausibly advancing the cause of the freedom to read.
But Usher II is
also dark comedy, and one of his most memorable stories on that account.
Dystopias have often been most successful as literature when they have
incorporated humor. One of the most effective modern works of dystopian satire
is Terry Gilliams Brazil, which
incorporates themes and images from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but is all the more frightening for its fierce comic
touches. Today it seems much less dated than Orwells novel or either of the
movies based on it.
At the end of The
Martian Chronicles the kindly father-hero
of The Million-Year Picnic protects the next generation from repeating the
mistakes of a violent Earth civilization by ceremoniously burning books from
the past. This marks only one of the many inconsistencies that run through this
loosely linked collection of stories. However, it is notable that the works
destroyed in this story are nonfiction volumes relating to politics and that
the works eulogized in Usher II are fantasy and gothic horror.
Bradbury seems to
have had second thoughts about the wisdom of erasing past knowledge by fire when
in 1950 he wrote The Fireman, the story which became the kernel of Fahrenheit
451. In this story and the ensuing novel he
imagined a nightmare society in which reading has become all but banned:
pornography, comic books, and television scripts seem to be the only print
material allowed. A secondary target was the popular Readers Digest condensed books, which boiled down bestsellers for
impatient readers, and which Bradbury portrays as a transitional stage to the
annihilation of books altogether.
Caches of books,
when discovered, are burned by firemen whose job is eradicating print.
Socialization has been reduced to group television viewings, and creativity
narrowed into brief moments in shows when the audience is prompted to respond
to the virtual events they are witnessing, and which absorb them far more than
the real world around them.
The novel was an
immediate success, and has been widely read ever since, being made into a
memorable film in 1966 by the famed French New Wave director Franois Truffaut.
It is a peculiar
work in Bradburys oeuvre. He is best known as a short story writer, and his
most characteristic books, such as The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine, are really compilations of stories. Fahrenheit
451 is his only fully successful novel. In
addition, much of his popularity can be attributed to the perfumed sensuousness
of his imagery, the often extravagant sights, sounds, and smells he deploys to
engage the reader. Fahrenheit 451
lacks the evocative descriptions that characterize his other works, being set
in a sterile, artificial world. Even when Clarisse speaks of her enjoyment of
nature at night the language is abstract and general.
Once again the
books most treasured by the literate characters are fiction, though religious
and philosophical works appear as well. Works of science are entirely
unmentioned. Bradbury is famously a science-fiction writer not particularly
fond of science. One wonders how the technocrats who create the wallscreens and
originate the broadcasts gain the knowledge they need to do their jobs if they
too are illiterate. Orwell had depicted a civilization in decline, unable to
innovate anything but new tortures; but Bradbury seems to imagine that
technological advances can be carried out in the absence of knowledge gained
from print.
It is easy to see
why the book was warmly received when it was published in 1953. The prosperity
of post-war America created a mass culture of vast complacency which valued
conformity and blandness. The edginess which Bradburys beloved science
fiction, horror, and fantasy featured was suspect. There were plenty of voices
raised in protest, celebrating nonconformity, individualism, and creativity;
and a large number of these voices belonged to science fiction writers.
The book probably
continued to appeal to readers for the same reason that a great deal of science
fiction has always appealed to certain readers. It portrays as heroes those who
disdain sports, who like to read— in short, unathletic nerds like
Bradbury—like me and my friends—who were swallowing science fiction
in huge gulps in the 1950s. The masses are stupid, brutish, uncaring. Anybody
who loves books is likely to be cheered by a tale in which depicts writers not
only as the unacknowledged legislators of the world, as Shelley had called
them, but as the keepers of the flame of civilization itself. Most people enjoy
a story in which the underdog comes out on top. Imagine: Napoleon Dynamite
saves the world!
One of the most
striking characteristics of the novel to be frequently overlooked is its
setting in an era of recurrent atomic war. In 1950, when Bradbury was writing,
the Russians had just the previous year exploded their first atomic bomb,
making real the nuclear arms race that had only been fantasized before. The first
thermonuclear weapon was not to be tested for another year, though Bradbury
depicts a society which has already weathered two atomic wars. As in Orwells
novel, there are suggestions that this state of war is designed to preserve the
supremacy of the tyrannical regime which governs this dystopia. A final
apocalyptic nuclear exchange at the end of the novel marks its fall, but it is
so briefly and distantly described that most readers entirely forget about it,
as they forget about the much more vividly depicted annihilation of Earth by
nuclear war in The Martian Chronicles.
Both of these are
instances of what I like to call muscular disarmament, in which one final cataclysmic war is depicted
as preparing the way for an era of peace and enlightenment. One of the earliest
examples was H. G. Wells 1914 novel The World Set Free in which—as the title suggests—atomic
weapons clear the ground for the emergence of a utopia. Bradbury doesnt go
that far, but clearly the holocaust at the end of the novel is meant to be more
cheering than horrifying. We are also expected to sympathize with Montags
murder of Beatty with the flamethrower, just as we had been encouraged to be
amused by the grisly deaths of the
censors in Usher II. Stories like these are the intellectuals equivalent of
gory computer games in which players can take out their frustrations on
imaginary foes by blasting them to bits. When we think about the essential
image of Bradbury we remember the scenes he evokes of sitting on the porch
sipping lemonade and listening to the hum of cicadas and forget the fictional
mayhem he sometimes inflicts on the people he disdains.
It is also easy to
see why Fahrenheit 451 would seem
especially timely today. Thanks to the Patriot Act, government agents secretly
track the reading habits of citizens based on the books they borrow from
libraries. Web technology makes it possible to go even further, and determine
what sites people are browsing. It is not uncommon to hear of the electronic
trails left by Web browsers being introduced as evidence in trials.
We have robot dogs
and execution by lethal injection, though we have not yet combined the two. But
we identify criminals by their unique DNA signatures much as the Hound of the
novel identifies them by their unique smell.
Reading,
particularly of fiction, has continued to decline in popularity. In Bradburys
day there were dozens of popular general-audience magazines read by a broad
public, and most of them published fiction. Bradbury himself published stories
in Colliers, The Nation, Macleans, Good Housekeeping, McCalls, and The Saturday Evening Post. Now fiction is rare in mass magazines, and there is
little of it.
Despite the vast
success of isolated titles like the The Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter books, Americans read very few
books once they leave college, and those are largely confined to sensational
memoirs, diet books, and books about business and religion. The reality shows which draw a mass
audience today are the equivalent of the mesmerizing serials in the novel.
Of course the
notion that before the age of television people sat around chatting and
enjoying each others company is a fantasy. I grew up in the waning days of
radios golden age, when families sat in their living rooms transfixed by the
same sorts of tales of horror and crime and family situation comedies that
would later be televised. And before that most of what people read was junk.
The culling process that operates over time glamorizes the writing of the past,
isolating the few authors we can still enjoy.
Modern
anti-depressants are often more effective than the tranquilizers taken by
Montags wife, but her zombie-like state is all too familiar. Depression is so
common and widely discussed today that she no longer seems as bizarre as
Bradbury probably intended her to be.
American popular
culture has always been profoundly anti-elitist and anti-intellectual, and that
has not changed. A president who tells us students must be held to higher
standards himself makes no effort to exemplify intellectual curiosity or
profundity. Rather a folksy, unthreatening populism is celebrated by almost all
modern politicians. John Kennedy could never be elected today—hed be
viewed as an intellectual snob. The slogan is no child left behind—not
encourage exceptional brilliance.
All these are
reasons that Bradburys novel resonates with contemporary readers. However, it
is worth noting the ways in which our world differs from that of Fahrenheit
451.
We have our
big-screen TVs, some of them approaching wall size; but increasingly we refuse
to be passive recipients of what the networks want to hand out. We Tivo our
favorite shows and skip past the commercials, infuriating the sponsors. DVD
technology lets us view the films we want when we want. The mass quality of
mass communications is eroding, and the television network executives and
advertisers are growing frantic as they see the impending end of an era.
Television viewing, though still consuming a huge amount of our leisure time,
is actually declining as people spend more time playing video games or using
the Web. The Internet is notoriously the greatest innovation that science
fiction failed to anticipate, and it is far more anarchic, individualized, and
unregulated than the mass media which preceded it and which shaped the
nightmares of earlier dystopian writers.
The Internet has
also helped to reverse in some measure the decline in reading. The classics
Bradbury cites as endangered in his novel are all available for reading or
downloading via the Web—though the foreign ones are usually available
only in dated public-domain translations. On the Web the classics are more
accessible than contemporary fiction and poetry, which remain locked in
limited-circulation books and magazines.
The seashells
that people insert in their ears today are earbuds through which people listen
to highly individualized playlists of songs on their iPods, and they can even
listen to an audio study guide for The Martian Chronicles, though the novel itself doesnt seem to be available
yet for downloading from the iTunes Store.
We now see a
generation of young people who have grown up text-messaging, blogging, and
creating Web sites online for whom reading and writing are constant, natural
activities. Much of the prose they generate and read is appalling by
traditional standards, but it is not just the passive consumption of images
that Bradbury envisioned. Increasingly I encounter students entering college
who think of themselves as both readers and writers, and who are interested in
using these skills in the workplace. The number of English majors at Washington
State University has climbed in the last three years from 200 to 230 to 282,
with no signs of the rate of increase diminishing.
E-books have been
slow to catch on. The paper and hardbound book is not yet in danger of
extinction. Ironically, fat airport novels and huge science fiction and
fantasy trilogies are more popular than the comic books Bradbury deplored,
which in 1950 filled racks in stores all over town and now have to be sought
out in specialty shops. Magazines have narrowed in focus, but they have
proliferated wildly.
Attempts to censor
fiction, like the fundamentalist attacks on the Harry Potter books, are largely
doomed to failure—are greeted with contempt or indifference. And the
much-criticized Federal government has granted a large sum to Seattle to
support the study of a book that criticizes government opposition to the
freedom to read. It reminds one of the Athenians paying Aristophanes for
creating plays which fiercely attacked their foreign policy.
The problem with
dystopias and other cautionary forms is that their exaggeration can cause us to
become complacent because things just arent as bad as the novels predicted.
But so long as we read them thoughtfully, understanding that they are meant to
point us toward problems rather than accurately foretelling the future, they
can still inspire us to work for a world which, if not utopian, is a lot better
than our worst nightmares.
Afterthoughts
During my time in Enterprise I
developed the following thoughts in discussion with the folks there, which may
be useful things to think about.
1) Some
people feel just fine about being secretly spied on by the government, arguing
that they have nothing to feel guilty for. This assumes the government is
always trustworthy. Note that 2nd amendment defenders insist they
need their weapons in case the government becomes tyrannical. One would think
that 1st amendment rights would need even more vigilant protection
from government abuse, especially since there are well-documented examples of
government records being abused for political purposes by officials.
2) Bradbury
is notoriously weak at depicting women. One way to view his fiction is to think
of the usual gender relations being replaced by the relations between macho,
brutal stupid males and sensitive, intelligent males.
3)
The novel is least likely to appeal to insecure teenagers who are anxious to
conform to their peers tastes and expectations. Its defense of learning and
peculiar tastes is not calculated to appeal to the average high school student;
and its lack of surface appeal is not likely to draw such readers in.
List of Books and
Stories Referred To
This is not a formal
bibliography but a guide to tracking down titles mentioned above, other than Fahrenheit 451, which it is assumed the
reader already has. Inexpensive paperback editions have been preferred.
Paul
Brians
September 24, 2007
Atwood. Margaret:
The Handmaids Tale, 1985. Anchor.
Bradbury, Ray: Dandelion
Wine, 1957. Spectra.
___: The
Fireman, Galaxy Science Fiction Vol. 1,
No. 5 (Feb. 1951). Reprinted in Science Fiction Origins, ed. William F. Nolan & Martin H. Greenburg.
Popular Library, 1980.
___: The
Martian Chronicles, 1950. Spectra.
___: The
October Country. 1955, Del Rey.
Charnas, Suzy
McKee. Walk to the End of the World, Out
of print but readily available used. Berkley.
Dick, Philip K. Time
Out of Joint, 1959, Vintage.
Galouye, Daniel
F. Simulacron-3, 1964. Jai lu.
Harrison, Harry: Make
Room, Make Room, 1967. Out of print.
Spectra, 1994.
Heinlein, Robert
A. If This Goes On, 1940. Reprinted in The Past Through Tomorrow, Ace.
Huxley, Aldous.
First published 1932. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
More, Thomas. Utopia.
First published in Latin in 1516.
Translated by Paul Turner in 1965. Penguin.
Orwell, George. Nineteen
Eighty-Four, 1949. Though Orwell always
spelled the title out many editions read 1984 on the cover, and thats how youll have to shop for
it. Signet Classics.
Plato: Republic. There are several good translations of this ancient
Greek classic, including the one used in the very cheap Dover Thrift Edition by
G.M.A Grube, revised by CDC Reeve. The old Benjamin Jowett translation, freely
available on the Web, is still quite readable.
Pohl, Frederik.
Tunnel Under the World, Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955.
Often reprinted, notably in The Best of Frederik Pohl, out of print but readily available used, Ballantine.
Russ, Joanna. The
Female Man, 1978. Beacon Press.
Simak, Clifford
D. City, 1952, Ace (out of print
edition, but still readily available used).
Von Harbou, Thea:
Metropolis. The novel version of her
screenplay for Fritz Langs movie by the same name. First published in German 1926. Translated
anonymously in 1927 and available currently from Wildside Press.
Wells, H. G. The
World Set Free, Macmillan, 1914. .
Zamyatin, Evgeny:
We. Written 1920, published in English
1924, Czech, and in the original Russian (My), 1952. Modern editions translated by Mirra
Ginsburg, 1972 and Clarence Brown, 1993.
List of Films
Brazil, dir. Terry Gilliam, 1985. Criterion.
Escape from
New York, dir. John Carpenter, 1981. MGM.
Fahrenheit
451, dir. Franois Truffaut, 1966. MCA Home
Video.
Mad Max, dir. 1979. MGM.
Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang, 1927. The only version to get is
"The Complete Metropolis, Kino International, 2010.
Soylent Green, dir. Richard Fleischer, 1973. Warner Home Video.
Thirteenth
Floor, The, dir. Josef Rusnak, 1999. Sony
Pictures.