Review of "Fahrenheit 451"

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.

(Farhenheit 451, p. 83)

 

The issues of authoritarianism, cultural censorship and the discontents of consumer society remain as relevant now as they did during the last century. They hold a prominent place in the dystopias that have been written by many science fiction authors throughout this period, ranging from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine to the nightmarish visions of authors such as George Orwell and Margaret Atwood. It is our modern-day equivalent of the tragic vision, transmuted as it is to the spectacle of the rise and fall of democratic societies, those that are sabotaged by internal pressures and by the weight of a political and economic structure that is corrupted by the imperatives of security, comfort and scientific rationality. One may well say that it has ancient roots, grounded as they are in Thucydides’ account of the rise and fall of Athens during the classical period, but one that is nuanced by the ultimately more pervasive and powerful tools available to the modern state. Our shining technological deliverance of course can’t help but seem to be a brief ephemera, one that devolves along familiar lines (plagues, totalitarianism, degeneration and war).

This vision is evident in Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451. Published during the 1940s, it is a science fiction work that reads like a thriller, delivered at a breakneck speed. It details the story of Guy Montag, a Fireman of the future whose job it is to form part of a crew in charge of burning any and all books that are discovered. He does this with immense glee and enjoyment, something that strikes us quickly as puzzling as we compare our society to his.

One of the intellectual pleasures involved in reading these dystopias resides in this parallels that the reader is able to establish with their own society. If these are invariably seen as cautionary tales, admonitions against possible outcomes that are grounded in modern-day trends, then part of the thrill of these novels resides in identifying the line of development. Such is the case with the vision of social evolution that is dictated by predatory economic pressures, leading to the advent of two human species, the Ewoks and the Morlocks, in H.G. Wells’ famous novel, for example. Or, we can see it in the nightmarish vision of totalitarian societies that come to hold sway in the aftermath of World War II, in Orwell’s 1984.

In this case, we have in Bradbury’s novel a society that seems familiar in many ways. It is a consumer society, with citizens who rely on credit to assure a decent standard of living. The Fireman burns not only books but also houses, but also returns to a comfortable house, with a wife who is firmly esconsced within the three walls of what appear to be interactive television panels. They eat familiar foods, ,they drink, they argue, they form families (although in this case Montag appears to be childless) and, bewilderingly, they are self-destructive in a singular way, one that suggests strong suicidal impulses.

What struck me as I read this novel was the way in which it was structured as an awakening on the part of the protagonist. The seed of this awakening is a painful one, because it leads to a questioning of the certitudes of self and society that had seemed to hold sway before. He is influences, of course, by his contact with Clarice McClellan, a teenager who lives nearby and would seem to have been an object of desire. Perhaps the sexual attraction is muted because she is underage, but one can’t help that, as with the psychoanalytic interpretation of Don Quixote and his interaction with his own niece, Montag may possible have “sex on the brain”. This is evident all the more so when we reflect on the sterile relationship he has with his own wife, Mildred, who has tried several times to commit suicide.

Why are books so dangerous in this society? What possible threat may they represent for  the members of this society? It is popularly assumed that this novel represents a vision of the dangers of censorship, but this would be too simplistic. Censorship is an issue in this novel, but in this book it seems to come from what we could term an elitist conception. In the conversations between Montag and his nemesis, the fire captain Beatty, we have references to what we may term the canon of Western literature, to the bible and, specifically, to the Book of Ecclesiastes, to ancient Greek (Plato’s Republic) and Roman works, to Alexander Pope and his “Essay on Man”, to Shakespeare and to other classics. These are somehow the repository of a type of experience that is multifaceted and has, what Bradbury’s spokesperson, the character of Mr. Faber, a “quality of information”, a texture or porosity that is dynamic, elastic, multi-layered and full of vitality.

This passionate defense of books seems to be one that echoes the arguments that were made by conservative scholars of the 1980s, especially figures such as Leopold Bloom who famously railed against the supposed “closing of the American mind”. While undoubtedly all constituting seminal works, it makes this argument seem to be one not of censorship, but instead a lamentation against the onslaught of popular culture. This culture is present, of course, in the form of the programming that may best be described as an amalgamation of reality television and the internet, a genre and a medium that hold sway over much of the modern imagination. Is it, indeed, an argument against the success of commercial formulas and mediums? Did it really take censorship to guarantee this success?

I would argue that on the face of it, the justification for book burning seems to be rather mysterious. As described by the character of Faber, a reclusive old man who is part of a dying generation of readers, it was the culmination of a gradual process, one that is never explicitly detailed. One can only imagine a period of increasing political turmoil, of extreme partisanship and social displacement, but of course I realize that this was the intent behind the author’s assigning any specificity to these circumstances. The reader, of course, will fill in the gaps with his or her interpretation of the steps it would take to achieve this outcome, and I can’t help but insert my own social analysis by pointing to factors and phenomena that, in 2013, strike me with concern. Perhaps that is part of the reason why the book doesn’t feel dated, at least in terms of the fundamental thesis that a democratic society can devolve into a totalitarian structure in which agencies monitor individuals for supposed nonconformist and idiosyncratic behavior (such as the girl Clarice McClellan whose family is fits this mold too well, or the man at the end of the novel who is prone to taking walks, and proves a convenient scapegoat for the imperatives of an entertainment medium that is obsessed with chase sequences and the need to portray the capture and punishment of all offenders). That this is a totalitarian society is abundantly evident in the reliance on informants to press what seem to be omnipresent “alarms” that trigger the involvement of law enforcement agencies, and in the use of robots whose symbolic association with persecution is all too evident (the infallible mechanical “hound” that relies on biometric data to chase its prey).

What does seem dated, though, is the formulaic chase sequences in a novel that reads like a thriller by Dan Brown or Michael Crichton. Guy Montag will make the transition from agent of order to a hunted and in many ways isolated protagonist, one whose anguish will be propelled by a series of calamities that serve, at the same time, to confuse and disorient him. The thrills begin with the shock over the death of the teenager Clarice, and they ascend until they culminate in the sequence in which he is called to burn down his own house, having been turned in by his wife Mildred and one of her friends. It is a classic formula in which the changed man falls through the cracks, so to speak, in a matter of days (or hours), and can never crawl back up to reclaim his position.  The downward motion is also one which can also be taken as an expulsion, and this is precisely what happens to Montag, who will be chased out of the city and who will join up with a band of fellow outcasts, the humans who live on the open land, living repositories of the books that they memorize.

In the end, I can’t help but wonder about the plausibility of this scenario. We also live in a society in which political figures and movements resort to stoking fears about national security, living as we do in a permanent state of war against “Terrorists”, one that forms an ongoing narrative in this post-911 climate. It has been going on for far too long, and it is accompanied by the continual reliance on a bloated national security structure that is becoming ever-more intrusive, signaled by the calls for more effective FBI surveillance and the supposed need to monitor against the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, this last having led to the current scandal that is overwhelming the Obama administration, that relating to the subpoena of phone records for API reporters. And, while we aren’t quite there when it comes to the spectacle of jets screeching by overhead regularly, we do live on what seems to be a permanent war-time footing. At least the rhetoric is more muted than it was during the presidency of George W. Bush, who inveighed against the “Axis of Terror”.

It doesn’t take Firemen to censor ideas and to keep control over a subservient population. I would affirm, instead, that this is more likely to result from the growth of an ever more extensive consumer culture that leads to an atomizing of personal identity. If pores are to be symbolic of texture and density of information, they may also be taken as symbol of how contained we are, in the sense that pores don’t coalesce, don’t aggregate, and are instead separated from each other. The great majority of the common people don’t read the classics, don’t  read Ortega y Gasset, don’t read Voltaire, don’t read Bertrand Russell, but the view that essential features of our culture reside only in this literature is an elitist conception.

Our cultural debates seem very active even in the mediums that encapsulate modern-day identity. Perhaps the real danger is the institutionalization of certain expressions of our culture in ways that are dangerous, as in, when they assume official form by becoming allied with the state apparatus of justice administration or adopted by economic entities that operate in accordance with authoritarian strictures, such as corporate culture.

In the dytopias of the future, we may very well have books, but control will operate by the more insidious mechanism of “buying” hegemony, that is, buying our willing assent. That is one of the many tradeoffs that beckon us, and we most certainly see the seeds for this in our modern day culture.


Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013

Review of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"

 

It has been remarked that we live in a period of religious revival, evident in many parts of the world. This may not necessarily be the case in Europe, where religious observance has declined notably and where church attendance is at an all-time low, but the rest of the world paints a different picture. It may well be that religious movements cloak other grievances, and that they may well point to political or ethnic or economic conflicts that have been resolved, but it is certainly true that religion has served as a rallying point. It serves as the backbone of a program of protest against global economic development throughout many parts of the world, and it serves as one of the markers for ethnic conflicts taking place in countries such as Nigeria. It has also been conflated with a whole program of agitation and resistance to what is perceived as cultural and economic domination, and has been demonized as part of a dangerous wave of fundamentalism.

We in the United States have seen how dichotomies have been created that use religion as a marker. We are especially attuned to this in the wake of the tragic events of September 11^th, 2001. This event shocked us into the realization that we were also vulnerable, and not as inviolable as we had thought. (Were we perhaps guilty of arrogance?) It brought about a reaction that played into the hand of a group of policy experts who were categorized as neo-Cons, who it was taken, were at the vanguard of a program that sought to shatter the status quo in the Middle East and other regions in the hope that they could remake those countries in our own image. Or, as cynics would decry, as least make them more pliable to US interests. Needless to say, this didn’t work out.

We still live with the specter of terrorism, of violent action directed against innocent civilians in the name of fundamentalist movements that derive their rationale behind an appeal to history and to institutions that are based on a fundamentalist reading of religion. A common term by which to refer to these groups would be “Islamist”, and this proves to be unfortunate because it imposes a reading that fails to take into account how fractured this movement is, and how culturally heterogeneous these regions are. This is a fact that has to be stated over and over, but is seems to escape popular understanding especially in the wake of events such as the Boston Marathon bombing that was, apparently, perpetrated by two brothers of ethnic Chechen origin who had been seduced by these violent extremist ideologies. It need be asserted, over and over, that the appeal to religion masks underlying root causes. It is too simplistic to speak of “Islamism” as threat, because it is an abstraction, emblematic as it is of an impulse to demonize an immense group that can't be treated as a monolithic whole, nor dismissed as an "Other" that must be contained. (It makes me return, once again, to Edward Said's famous critical study, Orientalism, that was published several decades ago.)

It was in this context that I recently saw the film by Mira Nair, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”. It was released in 2012, and unfortunately I had not read the novel by Mohsin Hamid upon which it was based. It is a story that is compelling, one of a journey of return and re-affirmation, but also, of compassion and the wish to preserve a sense of dignity and humility. It is a compassionate story, in which we see what may be termed the taming of mercenary impulses in an effort to highlight the power of ideals. It was not, perhaps, the story I was fearing I might see, one that seems to be part of a formula popularized by Hollywood in which the brush strokes are, inevitably, very broad. It was a subtle story that was characterized by unexpected symmetry. It was all the more liberating because of this.

We see the story of Changez, a Pakistani immigrant who is the son of a famous Punjab poet who is falling behind the times in the New Global Economy. He arrives in the United States to study in an Ivy League school and, to all intents and purposes, he becomes “one of us”. He is seduced by America, seduced by the dream of unlimited opportunity and the appeal of a meritocracy that dispenses (supposedly) with all forms of inherited privilege. How could he not be? He is passionately aware that his family, espousing as they do a very modern liberal outlook, is coming under siege by aggressive ideologies, whether they be the coming of the information economy or the expression of public anger on the part of those that feel left out. He decides to follow the line of the new global entrepreneurs, the economic pioneers who are akin to modern-day mercenaries, the analogues to Mitt Romney and his firm, Baines Capital.

He manages to secure a position with a capital firm that is invested in “the fundamentals” of economic liberalism, and by liberalism I am referring to the classic conception of economic organization that eschews regulation and is instead more akin to “laissez-faire”. What happens, of course, is that they are in charge of taking over struggling companies and streamlining them to make them more efficient and profitable. It is all in the name of efficiency and the maximization of value, and Changez is very good at it. He would seem to have a natural born talent.

This lays the groundwork for an epic of struggle that one imagines would have ended with his being a spectacularly rich global financier. It takes a turn, however, with the advent of the terrorist attacks of 911, which spark a change in him so that he comes to question his pursuits.

 

Which is not to say that he wasn’t feeling any doubts before this point. It takes a great effort to slow and stop when one has been traveling at breakneck speed, and he was achieving spectacular success in his work for this firm. But, it was also the case that he was to slowly appreciate what it felt like to be the outsider, to be the object of suspicion, to be considered redundant and, in a certain way, subject to suspicion. This was what happened to him after the attacks, but the road was prepared for him before, in his interaction with the representatives of the many workers who were abstractions to him before, but he slowly came to see as persons.

Just like redundant workers faced job loss and bankruptcy in the wake of the reorganization schemes he imposed on these companies, producing as he did value for shareholders but also much suffering and despair, the events of 911 prompted a change in the culture that mirrored the impetus of the program that was carried out by his firm. He himself became an abstraction, a “foreigner”, who was subject to suspicion and who was treated with little regard. He was subject to humiliating searches when traveling through airports, and he was taken into custody and subjected to humiliating detention and threats because he, somehow, didn’t fit into the profile of what was considered safe in post-911 America. It is this reversal of fortune, this stepping through the class to see how the other side lived (by which I am referring to those who were powerless, the workers, those that were evaluated according to a merciless calculus). He was an economic buccaneer, but he was also perceived as a Muslim, and the behavior he saw, the urge to portray him as part of some essential whole, served to alienate him.

 

This turnaround reached its apex in Turkey, when he was forced to confront the nature of what he was asked to do, when presented to him through the symbol of the Janissary. These were, of course, the military corps formed by the Ottoman Empire that made use of Christian boys who were kidnapped from their families in the Balkans, and who were converted to Islam, to be used as foot soldiers against those communities from which they had originally arisen.

 

(Modern-day Janissaries)

 

It is an apt comparison, because he has himself become an instrument of destruction, defending an ideology that forced him to forget his own roots. It is also a term that is shared by all communities who have their own parallels, who see this collaboration with an ideological scheme that is destructive of whole communities as a form of collaboration. It is invested in a whole symbolic framework in Mexican history, for example, and in popular culture it assumes the guise of a discourse of “Malinchismo”, this being a reference to the Indian woman Malianali (Malinche), the woman who accompanied the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and who proved invaluable to his pursuit of conquest by serving as a translator and allowing him to lie to the Aztec leaders and deceive them.

In the movie, then, we see a reversal, one that is predicated on the discovery of a hidden symmetry. And this ushers in a new phase, as he returns to Pakistan and becomes a teacher who is known, rightly or wrongly (the audience is held in doubt), as a fiery advocate of fundamentalism. Has he become the ultimate turncoat? Is ne now collaborating with those who have kidnapped an American professor from a local Pakistani university, and is he inciting his students to join fundamentalist movements?

But all of this is predicated on the understanding of the term, “fundamentalism”, and in this way, the film draws a striking parallel. The mercenary capitalism of his investment firm isn’t that different from the fiery return to first principles that is espoused by the leaders of fundamentalism Islamic groups. They both are predicated on abstractions, on an inability to perceive the meaning and value of individual human lives. This comes as a revelation, and it is demonstrated in powerful speeches as well as in lyrics to songs and in images that have both a powerful symbolic logic as well as emotional appeal. The mercenary impulse is revealed at its core, one that bodes protracted conflict because, at its very root, these ideological schemes mirror each other.

There is an accidental shooting that occurs at the end of the film, one that was foreshadowed from the very beginning and that furthermore underscores the employment of a scheme of parallelism. The kidnapped American professor, who was not so innocent after all, is killed, but so is the friend of Changez, he who did seem to be more of an innocent bystander. Losses are symmetric, and it is the cycle of expanding and asymmetric violence that threatens to spiral out of control that seems to be the result of this new rise of fundamentalist values.

The last speech that is given by the Changez as he buries is friend is also a powerful speech, and it leaves us perhaps with an inkling of hope. As a movie, it is an exhausting journey, suspenseful and lyrical but also, one that we have seen before. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, a city that is currently enmeshed in a violent civil war in Syria that shows no sign of being settled and grows more brutal by the day, we also experience a moment of paralysis that leads us to question our fundamentalist impulses. We have our own encounter in the desert, and this movie serves to affirm our most basic humanistic impulses. 

 

 

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013