Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

First Published: 1953

Censorship History: Funnily enough, the book whose title is now synonymous with censorship was once censored in roughly 75 places by Bradbury's own editors at Ballantine. Conscious of the book's young audience, they sought to remove content that seems mild by today's standards--"all the damns and hells," as Bradbury puts it.

Bradbury says it's not actually about censorship, it's about how TV is killing public discourse; but in his Coda (first published in 1979) he does say that the novel "deals with the censorship and book-burning of the future." In any case, censorship is a main topic of the book, central enough that at least one library (Forsyth County Public Library in Winston-Salem, NC) has chosen it for its annual Banned Book Week public reading project.

Trivia: Men must not walk too late: Clarisse mentions that her uncle was once arrested for walking alone at night. Bradbury's short story "The Pedestrian" describes, if not this exact incident (the last names are different), at least a similar one. For what it's worth, an acquaintance who used to work as a cop in the suburbs of Chicago (around Downer's Grove) once told me that foot traffic was so rare that he and his colleagues would indeed stop any pedestrian they saw.

Though many people consider Bradbury a scifi writer, Bradbury claims this is his only science fiction book. As he sees it, much of his writing (such as The Martian Chronicles) is fantasy.

Eerily Prescient Bits (an important part of any scifi): "If the government is inefficient, topheavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. . . . Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them so full of noncombustible 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without motion."

"We've started and won two atomic wars since 1990! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?"

The "seashell" radio earpieces sound quite a lot like those Bluetooth things, though people don't use them for two-way communication in the book--their media consumption is fundamentally passive.

What Else: The dystopia of Fahrenheit 451, like the one of Brave New World, has not come about because of a totalitarian despot. In the streets of this city, you don't hear the solemn gongs and basso choirs you associate with 1984 or Stalinist Russia. No, you hear ad jingles. This dystopia came about because of the ceaseless pursuit of fun and distraction.

That fun and distraction are not substitutes for joy and substance is clear: There are so many suicides and suicide attempts that, when people overdose, the hospital no longer sends medical professionals, just technicians who know how to pump stomachs. (You'd need more scientific training than I have to find a causal link between the distractions of American society and the rise in prescriptions of antidepressants, but I don't think I'm altogether amiss in suspecting societal causes for much of the ennui I see.)

The connection between distraction and forgetfulness--both short-term forgetfulness and the long-term forgetfulness of Bradbury's ahistorical society--is interesting. Distraction actually does impede certain cognitive processes. In other words, those blinking banner ads for IQ tests will lower your scores on the tests themselves. And distraction is a big theme in contemporary literature and film. Kurt Vonnegut explores a more sinister dystopia of distraction in the short story "Harrison Bergeron," in which people of above-average intelligence are forced down to average by being fitted with radio devices that periodically release squawks of static, so as to prevent the mind from lingering on any one thought too long. Plenty of scifi (Strange Days, The Fifth Element, Minority Report) assumes advertising will rule the future (though in other scifi it's curiously absent: Star Wars is something of a Ren Faire in space).

It's also worth noting that in Bradbury's world the banning of books didn't start out as a top-down decree (at least not according to Captain Beatty; as Beatty's discussion of Ben Franklin shows, though, the official version is not always to be trusted). No, people simply stopped wanting to read books. They're not illiterate; comic books are still allowed. (I'd say that's a rather unjust view of comic books, but unjust views of comics were rampant in 1953.) People simply wanted easier reading materials--whistles and bells. Clearly Bradbury was commenting on trends he saw in society at the time he wrote. If you look at the evolution of newspapers' front pages from 1890 to 1990--particularly if you take USA Today into consideration--you'll see that he was onto something. Why, then, do we read, if we are so resistant to new information?