Since finishing The Glass Castle, I have picked up another book on the 9th and 10th grade list of literature at Richmond High School. Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is another text I didn't read in high school. It's the story of our society several generations in the future, when a sort of Orwellian Big Brother has outlawed all books and has installed wall-sized screens dubbed "family" that alternately talk to people and bombard them with frenetic colours and jarring sounds in order to prevent them from slipping into a reverie which may engender realisation, and thus revolutionary thoughts.
The book was published in 1953, and not surprisingly has several passages that ring true of alarmist opinions today.
The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman, charged with responding to calls reporting book-sightings or non-conformist behaviour among neighbours. There is not Big Brother camera in homes; instead neighbours and friends are the vigilant enforcers. In the below passage Guy reflects on a burning, the night before, of a home allegedly containing books.
In another example, Clarisse, a Luna Lovegood-type whose whimsy wards off the anaesthetising culture of consumption and thrill-seeking, describes the school where "they don't miss me" when she skips class.
The book was published in 1953, and not surprisingly has several passages that ring true of alarmist opinions today. The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman, charged with responding to calls reporting book-sightings or non-conformist behaviour among neighbours. There is not Big Brother camera in homes; instead neighbours and friends are the vigilant enforcers. In the below passage Guy reflects on a burning, the night before, of a home allegedly containing books.
Montag looked at the cards in his own hands. "I-I've been thinking. About the fire last week.
About the man whose library we fixed. What happened to him?"
"They took him screaming off to the asylum"
"They took him screaming off to the asylum"
"He. wasn't insane."
Beatty arranged his cards quietly. "Any man's insane who thinks he can fool the Government and us."
"I've tried to imagine," said Montag, "just how it would feel. I mean to have firemen burn our houses and our books."
"We haven't any books."
"But if we did have some."
"You got some?"
Beatty blinked slowly.
"No." Montag gazed beyond them to the wall with the typed lists of a million forbidden books. Their names leapt in fire, burning down the years under his axe and his hose which sprayed not water but kerosene. "No." But in his mind, a cool wind started up and blew out of the ventilator grille at home, softly, softly, chilling his face. And, again, he saw himself in a green park talking to an old man, a very old man, and the wind from the park was cold, too.
Montag hesitated, "Was-was it always like this? The firehouse, our work? I mean, well, once upon a time..."
"Once upon a time!" Beatty said. "What kind of talk is THAT?"
This kind of writing feels heavy handed to me. I'm trying to imagine a line of questioning for a class of tenth graders that would challenge them. It seems to me everything is a bit too spelled out here.
Beatty arranged his cards quietly. "Any man's insane who thinks he can fool the Government and us."
"I've tried to imagine," said Montag, "just how it would feel. I mean to have firemen burn our houses and our books."
"We haven't any books."
"But if we did have some."
"You got some?"
Beatty blinked slowly.
"No." Montag gazed beyond them to the wall with the typed lists of a million forbidden books. Their names leapt in fire, burning down the years under his axe and his hose which sprayed not water but kerosene. "No." But in his mind, a cool wind started up and blew out of the ventilator grille at home, softly, softly, chilling his face. And, again, he saw himself in a green park talking to an old man, a very old man, and the wind from the park was cold, too.
Montag hesitated, "Was-was it always like this? The firehouse, our work? I mean, well, once upon a time..."
"Once upon a time!" Beatty said. "What kind of talk is THAT?"
This kind of writing feels heavy handed to me. I'm trying to imagine a line of questioning for a class of tenth graders that would challenge them. It seems to me everything is a bit too spelled out here.
In another example, Clarisse, a Luna Lovegood-type whose whimsy wards off the anaesthetising culture of consumption and thrill-seeking, describes the school where "they don't miss me" when she skips class.
"An hour of TV class, an
hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting
pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they
just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-
teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the
spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by
the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people
around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker
place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close
you can get to lamp-posts, playing `chicken' and 'knock hub-caps.' I guess I'm everything they
say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I
know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice
how people hurt each other nowadays?"
Again, nothing here will require teasing out. The moral fairly screams at children, not allowing them to draw connections to their world themselves - they are already drawn.
Things have gotten more interesting in the past 40 pages however, mostly because of the writing. I'm not saying (how dare I?) that Ray Bradbury is ever ineffective, but some of the passages in which he compares the smouldering, dystopian landscape to romantic natural images, are magnificent.
As the first passage foreshadows, Montag eventually finds himself at odds with the fireman's task. He is on the run, one leg a burnt stump, his lungs "like burning brooms in his chest".
"The house fell in red coals and black ash. It bedded itself down in sleepy pink-grey cinders and a smoke plume blew over it, rising and waving slowly back and forth in the sky. It was three-thirty in the morning. The crowd drew back into the houses; the great tents of the circus had slumped into charcoal and rubble and the show was well over."
Even the thumpy, round sound of the words evokes the warm, soft habitat of an infant: bedded, down, pink-grey, plume, blew, waving slowly, back and forth. This time-defying image contrasts with the matter-of-fact "It was three-thirty in the morning" that follows. This paragraph evokes three strains of energy present in the scene: oneiric wonder at a magnificent and objectively beautiful spectacle; a keen awareness of time, and a suspicion that a stopwatch counts down to Montag's death; the presence of other people, who, unlike the mercifully liberated cinders, have to trudge on in this dark universe.
Here is another, describing Montag's view of the city as he evades the police.
Bradbury often employs double entendre to combine benign and violent meanings. The combined images of someone blowing off the head of a dandelion, and someone blowing off the head of an opponent with a weapon, inject this passage with enormous energy. The imagery gets hard to follow at the end of the passage, perhaps evoking Montag's frazzled mental state.
Before I picked up Fahrenheit 451 this morning, I read last week's fiction from The New Yorker, a bizarre story, also of dystopia, in which a company of past-their-prime circus performers, including a dancing bear, a King, a steward and a scout. They search a derelict fairground, encountering evidence of a failed, frightened population that fled.
The setting evokes an alternative to Bradbury's police state: collective disintegration as a society:
The padlock and the chains undone. The gates wide. The whole of the park laid bare. The King of Retired Amusements shuffles across the threshold into his dominion. They are strange places, these abandoned fairgrounds and shipwrecked boardwalks and dry, cavernous water parks. Something more than people has deserted them, made the world turn its gaze elsewhere and not look back. Often they are barren craters, worn and ruined beyond remembering. But Liebling’s Sunday Morning Carnival and Midway is another Pompeii, as preserved and perfect as a fly in amber. The Ferris wheel, still fully erect, regards the party like a cold and distant sun, its carriages creaking in a shovel of wind. Flags still flag on their poles, and bunting still hangs from the ticket booths. Only the main courtyard shows signs of dereliction. The statue at its center, a bronze, top-hatted Gustav Liebling himself, has been toppled, his magnanimity run aground, his outstretched arms now bidding welcome only to a patch of broken flagstones and soft dirt, which, after a few more good rains, will surely swallow him whole.
The image of an abandoned fairground is somehow doubly sad, since even the fairground in full swing presents a depressingly consumerist vision, of fluffy desires only half met by fried dough and oversized stuffed toys. We are not convinced, somehow, that the fairground is abandoned and the earnest search for truth taken up.
One of the toughest images for the 11th graders and me at RFS to get our heads around this year in Ted Hughes poetry, was the one at the end of the final stanza of "The Seven Sorrows", likening a departing year to a tatty fairground, like that described in the story:
And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.
How would the person looking through the year if he sees the departing year in this way? What will his legacy be? One as undistinguished and even embarrassing as that of the fairground?
Reading too many stories of this sort might inspire despair.
I'm also reading an anthology of Quaker Writings. The first is from George Fox's journal. In the famous passage where he recognises that the world is sordid, he seems to be facing a similarly depressing landscape, struggling to stay afloat of despair, which he clearly considers a sin (and I'm inclined to agree with him, from my privileged position of never having experienced true despair).
Now during the time that I was at Barnet, a strong temptation to despair came upon me. Then I saw how Christ was tempted, and mighty troubles I was in; sometimes I kept myself retired in my chamber, and often walked solitary in the chace, to wait upon the Lord. I wondered why these things should come to me; and I looked upon myself and said, "Was I ever so before?"... Temptations grew more and more, and I was tempted almost to despair; and when Satan could not effect his design upon me that way, he laid snares for me, and baits to draw me to commit some sin, whereby he might take advantage and bring me to despair. I was about twenty years of age when these exercises came upon me; and I continued in that condition some years, in great trouble, and fain would have put it from me. I went to many a priest to look for comfort, but found no comfort from them...
As I read the rest of the Quaker writings, I'll be judging whether the tatty fairground of 1650's England was abandoned for better things!
Again, nothing here will require teasing out. The moral fairly screams at children, not allowing them to draw connections to their world themselves - they are already drawn.
Things have gotten more interesting in the past 40 pages however, mostly because of the writing. I'm not saying (how dare I?) that Ray Bradbury is ever ineffective, but some of the passages in which he compares the smouldering, dystopian landscape to romantic natural images, are magnificent.
As the first passage foreshadows, Montag eventually finds himself at odds with the fireman's task. He is on the run, one leg a burnt stump, his lungs "like burning brooms in his chest".
"The house fell in red coals and black ash. It bedded itself down in sleepy pink-grey cinders and a smoke plume blew over it, rising and waving slowly back and forth in the sky. It was three-thirty in the morning. The crowd drew back into the houses; the great tents of the circus had slumped into charcoal and rubble and the show was well over."
Even the thumpy, round sound of the words evokes the warm, soft habitat of an infant: bedded, down, pink-grey, plume, blew, waving slowly, back and forth. This time-defying image contrasts with the matter-of-fact "It was three-thirty in the morning" that follows. This paragraph evokes three strains of energy present in the scene: oneiric wonder at a magnificent and objectively beautiful spectacle; a keen awareness of time, and a suspicion that a stopwatch counts down to Montag's death; the presence of other people, who, unlike the mercifully liberated cinders, have to trudge on in this dark universe.
Here is another, describing Montag's view of the city as he evades the police.
"A great whirling whisper made him look to the sky.
The police helicopters were rising so far away that it seemed someone had blown the grey head off a dry dandelion flower. Two dozen of them flurried, wavering, indecisive, three miles off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, and then they were plummeting down to land, one by one, here, there, softly kneading the streets where, turned back to beetles, they shrieked along the boulevards or, as suddenly, leapt back into the air, continuing their search."
The police helicopters were rising so far away that it seemed someone had blown the grey head off a dry dandelion flower. Two dozen of them flurried, wavering, indecisive, three miles off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, and then they were plummeting down to land, one by one, here, there, softly kneading the streets where, turned back to beetles, they shrieked along the boulevards or, as suddenly, leapt back into the air, continuing their search."
Bradbury often employs double entendre to combine benign and violent meanings. The combined images of someone blowing off the head of a dandelion, and someone blowing off the head of an opponent with a weapon, inject this passage with enormous energy. The imagery gets hard to follow at the end of the passage, perhaps evoking Montag's frazzled mental state.
Before I picked up Fahrenheit 451 this morning, I read last week's fiction from The New Yorker, a bizarre story, also of dystopia, in which a company of past-their-prime circus performers, including a dancing bear, a King, a steward and a scout. They search a derelict fairground, encountering evidence of a failed, frightened population that fled.
The setting evokes an alternative to Bradbury's police state: collective disintegration as a society:
The padlock and the chains undone. The gates wide. The whole of the park laid bare. The King of Retired Amusements shuffles across the threshold into his dominion. They are strange places, these abandoned fairgrounds and shipwrecked boardwalks and dry, cavernous water parks. Something more than people has deserted them, made the world turn its gaze elsewhere and not look back. Often they are barren craters, worn and ruined beyond remembering. But Liebling’s Sunday Morning Carnival and Midway is another Pompeii, as preserved and perfect as a fly in amber. The Ferris wheel, still fully erect, regards the party like a cold and distant sun, its carriages creaking in a shovel of wind. Flags still flag on their poles, and bunting still hangs from the ticket booths. Only the main courtyard shows signs of dereliction. The statue at its center, a bronze, top-hatted Gustav Liebling himself, has been toppled, his magnanimity run aground, his outstretched arms now bidding welcome only to a patch of broken flagstones and soft dirt, which, after a few more good rains, will surely swallow him whole.
The image of an abandoned fairground is somehow doubly sad, since even the fairground in full swing presents a depressingly consumerist vision, of fluffy desires only half met by fried dough and oversized stuffed toys. We are not convinced, somehow, that the fairground is abandoned and the earnest search for truth taken up.
One of the toughest images for the 11th graders and me at RFS to get our heads around this year in Ted Hughes poetry, was the one at the end of the final stanza of "The Seven Sorrows", likening a departing year to a tatty fairground, like that described in the story:
And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.
How would the person looking through the year if he sees the departing year in this way? What will his legacy be? One as undistinguished and even embarrassing as that of the fairground?
Reading too many stories of this sort might inspire despair.
I'm also reading an anthology of Quaker Writings. The first is from George Fox's journal. In the famous passage where he recognises that the world is sordid, he seems to be facing a similarly depressing landscape, struggling to stay afloat of despair, which he clearly considers a sin (and I'm inclined to agree with him, from my privileged position of never having experienced true despair). Now during the time that I was at Barnet, a strong temptation to despair came upon me. Then I saw how Christ was tempted, and mighty troubles I was in; sometimes I kept myself retired in my chamber, and often walked solitary in the chace, to wait upon the Lord. I wondered why these things should come to me; and I looked upon myself and said, "Was I ever so before?"... Temptations grew more and more, and I was tempted almost to despair; and when Satan could not effect his design upon me that way, he laid snares for me, and baits to draw me to commit some sin, whereby he might take advantage and bring me to despair. I was about twenty years of age when these exercises came upon me; and I continued in that condition some years, in great trouble, and fain would have put it from me. I went to many a priest to look for comfort, but found no comfort from them...
As I read the rest of the Quaker writings, I'll be judging whether the tatty fairground of 1650's England was abandoned for better things!
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