THE READING RHEUM: FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953)

 

I liked most of Ray Bradbury's early works in my younger years. but on subsequent re-readings, certain works have struck me as somewhat precious and/or pretentious. For instance, I reread SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES a while back, but I found the novel too much "a thing or shreds and patches" for my taste. I even thought the 1983 film felt more coherent.

I didn't have that problem with FAHRENHEIT 451. Because the book is one of Bradbury's most popular works, there are ample articles talking about how the author wove together elements from several earlier narratives, abortive or otherwise. Yet even the few elements that didn't seem to work that well, such as the mechanical Hound at the fire station, were subsumed by the strength of the master trope: firemen who set fires.

In one commentary, Bradbury described 451 as a romance between not male and female, but between readers and their reading-materials. That's probably why there's no hint of an erotic relationship between the main character, book-burning fireman Guy Montag, and his wife Mildred, or between Montag and "the other woman" in his life, Clarisse McClellan. Both Guy and Mildred have been effectively neutered by their future-world culture: by a world that insists on the blandest possible entertainment. Mildred has fully embraced that escape from life's harsh realities, which is certainly one reason they have no children (though I don't remember small kids even making any appearances in 451). When Guy meets Clarisse, she kindles in him not romance but his submerged desire to be a father to such a vivacious young thing. Clarisse incarnates all the uncertainties of natural life, the things that the future-world represses. But since her primary importance is to force Guy to embrace incertitude in the form of reading materials, Bradbury writers Clarisse out of the novel in such a way that Guy never truly knows what happened to her.

Two other characters take over from Clarisse. Fire Captain Beatty projects the possibility that he may be covertly sympathetic to Guy's forbidden love affair with books, though this turns out to be an illusion. An older intellectual, Faber, is able to succor Guy to a new level of covert disobedience, but he too fades from the latter half of 451. In the justifiably famous conclusion, Guy finds his way to a community of people who memorize books, in a sense returning humankind to the oral tradition. Bradbury may have thought that Guy's pursuers might eventually discommode the book-commune, for on the last page Bradbury throws in a nuclear war that conveniently eradicates the repressive culture but leaves the commune free to rebuild.

Bradbury's poetic diction is never better than it is in 451, and anyone who loves reading will feel the passion the author brings to the seemingly endless possibilities of human art.