FAHRENHEIT 451

Author: Ray Bradbury
Year: 1991 (1953)
Publisher: Del Rey Books
Language: English

Imagine a world ablaze with flickering screens either plastered onto the walls around you wherever you turn your head or in every man’s, woman’s, and child’s clinched fists. Imagine the barrage of banal messages spewed onto satiated eyes and ears, overwhelming them with manufactured desires and spurious identities. Imagine a society where contemplation and knowledge are scoffed at and the written word is relegated to the fringes of the public sphere while the mainstream agenda is determined by the illiterate and the benighted who by the sheer force of numbers successfully equate opinions with facts in the public discourse on the state of affairs.

Are you imagining a future dystopia?

Or are you picturing the world of today?

To Ray Bradbury this was the future he envisaged in his iconic novel “Fahrenheit 451”. In an unspecified post-world-war America, the protagonist Guy Montag works as a fireman. His job is to burn books. Whenever, the alarm sounds, he and his colleagues at the fire department scramble into their vehicles, called salamanders, and, armed with flame-throwers and kerosene, rush to the place where books have been sighted to purge the community of yet another secret stack of the threat to humanity which is literature. He enjoys his work, is on good terms with his colleagues and manager, and after his shift, with the gratifying sense of having done a good job, he returns home to his wife Mildred in their modest but comfortable house, equipped, like all other houses, with huge screens on the parlour walls which broadcast a carefully crafted mix of news, propaganda, and easily digested entertainment around the clock.

Life is easy, predictable, and delightfully pointless. Until the day Guy runs into their new neighbour, the teenage girl Clarisse McClellan. She is bizarre and she does bizarre things and talks about bizarre topics. Like walking for pleasure, for example. Loitering outdoors is against the law. Or thinking. What is the point of that? And most bizarre of it all, she tells Guy that in the old days, of which a teenager could know next to nothing, firemen were supposed to extinguish fires, not to start them.

The meeting with Clarissa opens Guy’s eyes and, in various forms, he begins to ponder upon the world. Like tasting the rain. Or taking an interest in what it is he is burning on the job every day. And why.

Futuristic dystopias are usually supposed to serve as warnings. They take aim at a certain phenomenon that the writer observes in society and extrapolate from there into the grotesque in order to unveil the peril that the phenomenon is posing to humanity. George Orwell focused on the control of language and history (see review of “Ninety Eighty-Four” from July 2021), Karin Boye on the consequences of the ultimate invasion of privacy (see review of “Kallocain” from June 2021), Margaret Atwood on Evangelical fundamentalism and misogyny (see review of “The Handmaid’s Tale” from November 2020).

Bradbury chooses to challenge the assault on knowledge, culture, and information. And he does it in a most powerful way by pitting two of the most critical inventions in the history of our species against each other: writing and fire. In a highly technological world with floor-to-ceiling tv screens, earbuds, mechanical hounds, advanced vehicles, communication devices, and ultimately the atomic bomb, Bradbury singles out the use of the most primitive technology available to humankind as the final solution to the main enemy of the state. The kind of technology that at 451 degrees Fahrenheit permanently destroys books.

In lieu of books, the government floods the population with the instant gratification of information snippets that are tailored to the recipient in order to create an echo-chamber of reaffirmation and pacification.

“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”

This is the second genius of Bradbury’s dystopia. The ultimate perfection is complete emptiness. The immaculate void. Utter nothingness. Mildred lives her life through the images on the screens and the messages in her earbud, which she wears even in her sleep. But when she is asked what programme she has watched or who the characters are that she is listening to, she cannot answer. They have form but no content. They do not fill her void; they perpetuate it.

This is how the government maintains order and compliance while simultaneously reproducing the illusion of freedom, happiness, and perfection. This is also why books become so dangerous. In a smooth world, they seek out and highlight the pores, the imperfections, the abrasions. That is what Bradbury considers quality writing.

“The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That is my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”

It is often said that it is irrelevant what you read as long as you read. Bradbury seems to disagree. Quality matters. Literature that does not challenge you, does not develop you.  

Of the dystopias I have read so far, “Fahrenheit 451” is undoubtedly among the better. It is very well written and thought through. For the warning signals that Bradbury picked up on in 1953, 70 years later have evolved to a blaring horn. No books are burned in Europe yet, but banning books is rapidly becoming a thing in the United States. School boards, church groups, and concerned parents go out of their way to dictate what others are supposed to read and existing literary works are bowdlerised by their publishers to cater to the fragile minds of the few.

This, in the end, drives home the third and final genius of “Fahrenheit 451”. It does not even have to be a leviathan that burns the books. It may very well suffice they plant a seed, sit back, and watch us do it ourselves. After all, there is more than one way to burn a book.