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