Fahrenheit 451

If you haven't read any Ray Bradbury lately, right now is a fantastic time to read Fahrenheit 451.

Published nearly 70 years ago, when computers still filled rooms and were the provenance of the military and large universities, 1953 saw an armistice in Korea, the Rosenbergs executed for stealing the atomic bomb for the Soviets, Chuck Yeager set a speed record in the X-1, Elvis recorded his first album, and TV Guide was published for the first time, featuring Lucille Ball on its cover.

And yet, Bradbury seemed to see our day in so many ways.

Ostensibly, Fahrenheit 451 is about burning books, and the motif of burning them carries throughout. Montag is a fireman, but not one who puts out fire. Instead, his work is to put to flame the show more illicit and illegal: books.

"It is a pleasure to burn," he says. "It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history."

Talk about "cancel culture."

And yet, the flamed consumption of books is only the beginning of Bradbury's prophetic vision, and not the main thrust of his argument. Instead, as he later confirmed in interviews, it is about the dumbing down of people and "being turned into morons by TV." Yes, McCarthyism was in the water when Bradbury wrote is Fahrenheit 451, but television was the greater threat, according to Los Angeles Weekly's Amy E. Boyle Johnson in 2007 interview with Bradbury. It would give factoids, tell you when Napoleon lived, but it could teach you nothing about him.

“They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.”

Mildred, Montag's wife, plays the role of the empty and compliant citizen, who spends her days watching "parlor walls" or wall televisions that run 24 hours a day, eerily predicting modern reality television (and maybe virtual reality, too). Mildred is also addicted to pharmaceutical relief from life without feeling or meaning, even overdosing without realizing or caring. As Montag recognizes the emptiness of his life and begins to seek it from the books he is burning, the strain and the distance begin to show a world where technological instant gratification and mass media controls and suppresses creative and independent thinking.

But wait, there's more that Bradbury predicted:
- Mildred wears "seashells" or "thimble radios" in her ears that could easily be earbuds.
- People talk to their "digital" friends through their wall screens, and while these are actors, it isn't far from the same terminology that Facebook uses for it's platform (and where this message you're reading is posted).
- Social isolation, even while people are glued to their screens. Clarisse McClellan is the 17-year old neighbor that first sparks awareness in Montag because of her interest in the world, in rain, in the world's potential for beauty.
- Self-driving cars. Bradbury has an almost palpatable disgust for the speed of mechanical vehicles, whether it is the jets carrying death that screech overhead or the cars that speed by threatening death to any daring to be a pedestrian.
- Electronic surveillance. He wasn't alone on this point. George Orwell saw it, too.
- Abusive and manipulative media. Whether writing for short attention spans, or controlling and manipulating narrative, Bradbury did not think highly of constant sensationalized news.
- E-books. I kid you not: Bradbury once said that e-books “smell like burned fuel” to him, and would not allow it to be published until almost 2012, when he allowed digital publication because it wouldn’t be possible to have a new contract without e-book rights.

Also, war: I don't see this mentioned in a lot of the stuff written about Fahrenheit 451, but Bradbury seems to worry about the arrogance of America and the ease with which war will be conducted when we can drop a bomb from a supersonic jet from tens of thousands of feet in the atmosphere. Americans will not care about war when it costs them nothing and when they cannot see the impact of war on those around them, on their own family, on themselves. Indeed.

I'm to beginning to ramble, to follow tangents, so let me circle back to where I began: why now is a good time to read Fahrenheit 451.

Simply, if the internet has shown us nothing it is that we are none of us as aware of how we got to the present moment. If we are really to solve the problems that are facing us--whether it is pandemics, racism, political polarization, and social isolation and mental health and finding meaning...and so much more, we won't find it in mass media and 280 characters of snarky social media or the constant scrolling of images and memes (though I'll be the first to tell you that I've shared a few good ones in my time).

No, we need books. We need the outdoors. We need quiet. We need creative thought. We need independent thought. We need to be able to have the freedom to think and assess and argue and debate and discuss and, maybe, find compromise, agreement, disagreement, and, even, tolerance. But tolerance only happens when we can understand and grapple with ideas.

I don't know that I hold with all that Bradbury predicts: I can find myself challenged, moved, provoked, or inspired by something on that probably-too-large-television screen on my wall, and I'm not the Luddite that I probably seem. Also, I really like my earbuds, I like the books and the music and the podcasts I listen to through them. But I also recognize that they disconnect me from others and that when i want to connect with others--my daughters, especially--I've got to take them off and make eye contact, hug, listen, and communicate. But, it's worth it. It feels me with meaning when I connect.

And that may be the most important message from Ray Bradbury--we are social creatures that need each other to find meaning, and technology can risk cutting us off from each other, even as it flips the serotonin switches in our brain.

"It is a pleasure to burn." But oh! The empty, black ashes that are left behind when we burn! show less

'Fahrenheit 451' (1953) is deservedly a classic although a reading nearly three quarters of a century later cannot but see its flaws. Bradbury's determination on a polemic about the conditions of his time undermines its literary coherence and gives us an ending that has too much hysteria embedded.

The book is one of several that the liberal intellectual community has sanctified as dystopian science fiction and which embody its anxieties about technological and populist modernity - Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' (1931/1932) and George Orwell's '1984' (1949) being the most obvious.

In their reactions to their contemporary worlds, such novels are, in fact, deeply conservative while still belonging to the patrician progressive world that show more would inspire Harper Lee to deal with race relations as courtroom drama in 1960. Anxiety could then shift to 'hope' again.

What is remarkable about the book is just how much of the future world (if you remove the more specific Cold War aspects of the case) chimes with our world. The material and social environment, allowing for caricature, is uncannily like ours in most respects other than book burning.

Does it tell us much more than that liberal-minded intellectuals were becoming genuinely terrified of democratic totalitarianism in the age of the 'Red Scare'? Does it tell us that they actually had something to fear rather than that such a fear had to be expressed regardless of reality?

When the book was written, it was reasonable to believe that radical anti-communist purges and enforcement of Cold War conformity might result in serious threats to liberal freedoms. Nuclear war was also a reasonable anxiety. The book reflects these concerns.

In fact, the crisis blew over and nuclear war diminished as threat over time although never absolutely off the agenda. Intellectual fears were both genuine anxieties and proved to be exaggerated. The real threats were to come much later in the eventual collapse of regard for the intellectual.

Liberal intellectuals can often be defined by their anxieties. Literature (or rather narrative as we move into a streamed world) is their way of expressing their anxieties. Their claim is that narrative reflects truth or at least some deeper 'inner' truth that 'writers' have access to.

I am not so sure. Telling stories and telling truths about the world are different categories of experience just as religion and scientific enquiry are different categories of making sense of the world. We can judge a text separately on its narrative skill and on its meaningfulness then and now.

In this case, Bradbury's narrative skill is undoubted, at least until his fireman (a burner of books) sets himself free, ends up with a peculiar community of book memorisers and watches the burning of the city he has left from a nuclear strike. This just gets silly in its aspirational liberalism.

This idea of the world burning and having to be created anew was not uncommon in science fiction of the 1950s - Walter Miller's 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' (1959) might be regarded as its most complete expression - but it does seem over the top now and a parable for its time and not ours.

Bradbury's solution to civilisational collapse (old intellectuals memorising texts) is a form of class self-love and a loss of nerve after a solid story that deserved something more than the wet dream of a liberal with no solution to the problem he had set himself of post-nuclear recovery.

Indeed, this may be the central weakness of the book. 'Fahrenheit 451' is supposed to be about a culture in which knowledge is trivialised into non-existence, with book-burning making this process material and visceral. We are only two decades away from Hitler's 1933 PR stunt.

By switching tack to the theme of civilisational destruction as a result of nuclear war, Bradbury makes that classic mistake of trying to sell two ideas and so not selling either fully. OK, so he sold the book as iconic but the meaning of both themes is weakened to the simplistic.

This is a shame because Bradbury has integrity. He fairly puts the case for book burning articulately in the mouth of cynical realist Captain Beatty. Montag (the protagonist) resolves his situation on that occasion with violence not argument and against the pacific core liberal values of the author.

Much of the rest of the book is about trying to get away from the problem that there are arguments for cultural trivialisation based on the depressive effects of intellectualism and that such arguments can perhaps only be resolved through power struggle, organisation and violence.

Bradbury has to scuttle from Montag's gut position somehow because it threatens to turn liberalism into violent liberation that is too damn close to the expectations of Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy which would in turn justify the repression that Bradbury is trying to stand against.

This leads us to his weak 'memory' solution and the attempt to make it meaningful through the pessimistic negativity of assuming it would work (which is unlikely) in the event of some inevitable nuclear war (intellectual pessimism proving itself to be highly depressive).

The book thus becomes a classic because it raises its problem 'safely'. School teachers and liberals could satisfy themselves that just raising the problem in a free society and persuading through education would unravel the crisis. They were right ... but only up to a point and inauthentically.

'Fahrenheit 451' (like '1984' and 'Brave New World') are 'conservative' liberal polemics that represent 'warnings' based on radical extrapolations of things being seen to happen around the reader. They instil fear in order to offer coded corrections to trends that intellectuals have become anxious about.

From this point on, such texts have to change thought and behaviour but to do so safely so that liberal values are not lost in excessive acceptance of what is after all only a story and not reality. No liberal writer actually wants people to do anything but only not to do some things.

These books should be respected and judged as literature but we should be cautious about their meaning both in the world in which they were created where they acted as mythologising texts about contemporary reality and as retained iconic status. They simplify material and social complexity.

As art, Bradbury offers us a classic with narrative flaws (derived from the drive towards an obvious polemic). As truth about the world, it is religion more than science, an expression of class anxiety that mythologises to persuade. It is of its time albeit with potential uses in ours.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the book is that the book burning is the bit that gets the attention but Bradbury equally explores another aspect of cultural politics that has been placed second by the book's iconisation - the political determination on happiness through entertainment.

It is here that Bradbury has something important to say that is far more concerning than book burnings that never took place place and never were going to take place even under Edgar and Joe - that is, that being happy and thinking may require a political choice between them.

Of course, some people are very happy thinking but any serious form of thinking will create questions. Questions eventually mean questions about our condition and that of society. 'Education' has, in our culture, ceased to educate along these lines except as ideological oppositionalism.

Captain Beatty helps to articulate the essence of the problem. For most people, most of the time, the right to happiness, apparently guaranteed in the US Declaration of Independence, is extremely elusive. If happiness is such a right and the State can deliver it, who is to say that the job is not being done.

This is not a simple case of right and wrong. The liberal intellectual has a class interest in associating thinking with happiness. The rest of humanity may not. The real issue in Fahrenheit 451 is the loss of having choice on which path to take. Bradbury is raising a question but avoiding its implications.

The risk is that, in demanding free thought and adopting a moral position against mass media and the cult of happiness, the liberal intellectual might be arrogantly placing the majority in the oppressive position of having to be depressed and anxious in order to ensure a 'freedom' pleasurable to few.

Of course, the ideal is the freedom to choose to be happy or thoughtful and this would be the liberal value worth preserving. Bradbury is noting here that politics is forcing a choice for the first at the expense of the second but an oppressive position would equally be to force the second.

And there is another factor in the book that needs teasing out - the worship of texts and even of narrative itself when we have noted that texts (such as the Bible which plays a significant role in the book) and narrative cannot be assumed to be consonant with the truth of existence.

Bradbury's assumption here is that the liberal canon - what would become Bloomism later - offers a superior status and understanding of the world. This is dubious even if the attitude appealed to generations of initially liberal but now conservative school teachers, professors and writers.

What the canon offers (whether Don Quixote or Dosteoevsky) are arcane pleasures, class cohesion for the intelligensia in a culture, a contribution to social cohesion (now largely lost, a process which in itself is worth studying) and a way of training cadres in a liberal society. I read, therefore I rule.

Much of liberal angst then and now is terror that a complex and networked system of cultural and so political rule - covering academia, publishing and media as much as governance, judiciary and executive powers - will be unravelled into barbarism or the mob by abandoning 'liberal values'.

We can guess Bradbury would have been as horrified as any liberal intellectual by Trump and populism (as British equivalents are by Farage and Brexit) for this reason. The complexity of society requires simplification and the liberal requires it to be simplified in the direction of narrative.

Narrative, of course, is complex and so necessarily exclusive of those not prepared to study according to its dictates but the idea of the superiority of narrative is the simple idea. Language is channelled into approved texts that offer 'ideas' with a history and the whole becomes 'culture'.

'Fahrenheit 451' thus becomes an interesting text about the importance of texts in a definition of civilisation that comes to be couched in radically hysterical and anxious terms in order to protect it from caricatured opponents whether presented as Big Brother or salamander trucks.

In this context, it becomes vitally 'true' as cultural mythos because if there is one thing liberal civilisation understands it is that its version of civilisation (not the only one by any means) is extremely vulnerable to loss of narrative control. Narrative becomes the weapon that defends itself. show less

I read the 50th Anniversary Edition of this novel, and at the end of the book there is an afterword by Ray Bradbury looking back at this book 50 later, and then a section titled "Coda." The Coda is what bumped this from a 3 star review to 4 stars. Listen to this:
"There is more than one way to burn a book. And The world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, [...] feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel show more Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever."
In this Coda, Bradbury writes about ways in which we censor or "burn" books every day, by revising them to change the portrayal of women or blacks to better fit with today's times, or editing out certain words and phrases, or in producing abridged versions of wonderful works that strip them of all originality and flavor. "Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story."

Yes, the Coda really got to me.

As for the main story itself, well, I can see plainly why Fahrenheit 951 is a classic and on most lists of must reads. The language is the dry whisper of old pages being carefully turned with shaking, fearful fingers. It's the greasy, heavy stink of kerosene, the whoosh! of igniting flame. More speculative fiction than science, the future Bradbury imagined in 1950 isn't really that far off from where we are today. Look at all the reality TV shows we have, rotting the minds and numbing the souls of America. The description of the parlor 'Family' reminded me so strongly of reality TV that it made me feel a little queasy. And so many times when people say they've read a classic novel, they've really read or listened to an abridged, heavily edited version, stripped of all color and glory and meaning. show less

I found the point about the primary issue being the space to think, not the absence of books, to be interesting. At the end, modern life had filled up people's minds with so much noise that they could not arrive at independent conclusions on anything. That cancellation of human agency was the real problem, not the destruction of texts. Incapacitated by mental static. Under-rated point and interesting that people were already worried about that in 1953. In 2020s we are so shockingly overwhelmed with stimulus in comparison to that time, and do have many diseases of mental overwhelm. Meditation is prescription #1 to keep your effectiveness in an overwhelming world, with the (actually kind of funny if you think about it) purpose of keeping show more you going in it longer. We pay massage therapists to professionally manipulate our nervous systems to relax because we reduced capacity to do it ourselves. We are living in a sci fi world more dramatic than that imagined in Fahrenheit 451 in that dimension. show less

I'm so glad I finally got around to reading this book. Keeping in mind that it was written, in its final format anyway, in 1951, helps with the appreciation of what a true gem it is.

So much has been written about this book: it's a cautionary tale against censorship. It's a warning that the visual arts can never replace the written word. It's a story of the triumph of independent thinking. To it all I say: yes, it's all of this - but even better, even on the surface it's a rip-snorting fun yarn with a hopeful ending. If you don't want to dive deep, you'll still have a blast.

Pick it up and read it, if you haven't already. It's not long, and the last half gallops along after a somewhat wordy, slow buildup.

Good stuff.

In my opinion Ray Bradbury has written some of the best Science Fiction of the age. His use of language is versatile and poetic, his stories are intriguing and intelligent, and this one is no exception.

Like all the best science fiction writers, Bradbury is not just talking about the future. His book is a message for today. It is an error to think that Bradbury is talking here about censorship and control in the manner of, say, 1984. In fact Bradbury is more concerned with a hedonistic society with an increasingly short attention span as we are spoon fed what we need to know through sound bites and adverts.

Bradbury is making a case for the reading of books to enhance critical thinking, and to allow us to understand the bigger picture. He show more was worried about how television was eroding the reading of literature - and he was rightly worried.

This book is a powerful statement, and a good read. Classic Ray Bradbury. show less

Ray Bradbury wrote this book in 1953, at a time when people were best friends with their neighbors because they chatted on their front stoops or across backyards. TV was just becoming available to more families, so people gathered around it instead of the radio. The world was continuing to recover from the fascist regimes central to World War II. He imagined a future that looks so much like my present that it's creepy.

The book's ideas are more deeply etched than the characters. It's as if books themselves are a character when Bradbury writes sentences like this:

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

Another thread throughout the book was whether people show more change, and if so, how do they change. Our main character Montag undergoes much change of circumstance, and yet we also learn he's been on this path longer than we thought. His boss Beatty has a background we never quite grasp, but instead we see the aftereffects of previous change. Montag's wife has a life arc that may not be deep in detail, but it changes the story arc. No matter how much everyone isolates themselves, they still are interconnected.

It wouldn't be a whole review if I didn't shout out to the way Bradbury uses the English language. I listened to this as an audiobook, and that only heightens the effect. Sentences zoom through the air, and hit you square between the eyes. They creep slowly into your soul. Nothing can quite explain the beauty of the prose.

Now that I've finally read this book, I will be regularly rereading it. And I'll appreciate the ability to read, share, and collect books even more. show less