|
When
I was at school, the minimal number of science fiction books in the
library were divided into two classes: those that boys liked to read
and those that school librarians would rather boys read. In
other words, if the school library is analogous to the cafeteria, then
Ray Bradbury (1920- ) was the boiled asparagus. School librarians loved
Bradbury. They somehow imagined that his florid, overwrought
prose had something to do with literature and that all of his musings
about Ohio as transplanted into outer space was a bit more seemly than
all those aliens rushing about with blasters. Never mind that
his books were always the easiest to find among the battered,
dog-eared copies of Heinlein, Asimov, and Burroughs because the
Bradbury dust jackets were always in pristine condition and the pages
uncut.
 In
Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, books are the
enemy and firemen exist to burn them rather than put out fires.
A bit like plumbers foregoing unblocking drains in favour of giving
people anal probes. They're certainly a busy little clutch of
bees, though; heading out every night to ignite another bonfire of
illicit tomes with a frenzy that wouldn't be rivalled until the record companies
started going after Napster. This anti-literate state
isn't just into censorship of the odd political tract or Scandinavian
porn, but the outright banning of all books of every sort. In
the 1966 film version
by Francois Truffat this is due to out and out political oppression
that eviscerates the soul from society, but in the original book
version Bradbury put the blame on a vulgar populace that turns its
collective back on philosophy and literature in favour of cheap
entertainment, bland broadcasting, and condensed books. Who
needs Hitler when you have the Reader's Digest?
At any rate, the inhabitants of this bookless state live drab,
emotionless lives where they spend all their waking hours watching television
that covers all four walls with time off for the odd suicide attempt.
How they manage to keep their society going without technical,
medical, or law books is never addressed. Perhaps their
engineers are phenomenally good at rout learning, or it's only Tolstoy
and Dickens that's for the chop. Or maybe the whole police state
exists solely as an allegorical example of what happens when the
humanities are underappreciated by a crass consumer society of the
sort that Bradbury held in obvious distaste.
 |
|
Ray Bradbury |
Bradbury is clearly a man who is down on
censorship, especially when it is done for the sort of trivial yet
collectively sinister reasons that we know today as political
correctness. In the afterword of recent editions of
Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury tells of one book that he is particularly
annoyed about because it is constantly being tampered with by
publishers in new editions to make it less controversial.
Its
title? Fahrenheit 451. |
