According to this article, Ray Bradbury says that pretty much everyone has misinterpreted his classic SF novel, Fahrenheit 451. He says it wasn’t about government censorship, as is generally believed - its message was that television is bad for you.
To which I say - maybe and maybe not. An author is inherently biased about his own works and isn’t always the most reliable source of information about them. Especially when he’s talking about a work he wrote decades earlier. So I have to question whether Bradbury really wrote Fahrenheit 451 as an anti-television warning in 1953 (a time when televisions were still uncommon) or whether it’s a case that he wishs in retrospect that he had written an anti-television book back in the fifties and is now claiming he did.
I’ll admit I’ve always gone with the standard interpretation. If Bradbury actually meant that the people had been dulled by television and chosen to ignore books, then wouldn’t books just be rotting away in dumpsters? The fact that there was an active program to seek out and destroy books seems to indicate that there was an interest in books and they were perceived as a danger by some and an attraction by others - not apparently consistent with the idea that books were being ignored.
But I haven’t read the book in several decades myself and I’m no Bradbury scholar. Was the book burning in the novel really a metaphor about television that I missed? Is this something Bradbury has been saying for the last half-century and I’m just hearing it now?
Nah. Ray’s just trying to be relevant to today. He didn’t give this interpretation 20 years ago. I’ve been talking to the dude for 30 years. His approach to things has gotten…different as he has gotten older.
Does it even matter? Whether or not Bradbury meant it to be one, the book has become known as a great anti-censorship work. It’s taught as one in high schools, it’s read as one, and I’ve no doubt it convinces many to value freedom of the press as the foundation of a free society. To be blunt - it’ll probably continue to do so long after Ray Bradbury is dead. What he says about the book - it might be interesting, but I doubt it matters very much.
I always thought it was more about not thinking then it was about censorship. Censorship was just one of the many tools they used to ensure that people didn’t think. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but didn’t people also use drugs in addition to zoning out in front of the television? Really, you don’t need censorship to produce a society that doesn’t think.
When I read it, I felt it wasn’t so much the government but the people who censored themselves. And I felt they passified themselves with tv and music. I can’t help but think of the ‘buzzing bees’ that Montague’s wife always in her ear when he want’s to talk to her when ever I put on my iPod headphones.
Bradbury wrote a short story about a guy who was arrested for going for a walk at night. This was a suspicious activity in the story, and Bradbury mentioned that the normal, law-abiding citizens were at home with the blue glow of their televisions showing through the windows. So decades ago he was implying that sitting inside watching TV was more acceptable than getting out. (I don’t think the story was The Door, but another one.)
The Twonky was made in 1953. In it an alien disguises itself as a television and takes over a college professor’s life. Coach Trout, who is oddly philosophical for a sweatshirt-wearing coach, opines that one day if they’re not careful everyone’s life will be ruled by the Twonky. How often have you heard someone say ‘Oh, I have to rush home. Survivor is on tonight!’ or ‘I’d like to go with you, but there’s a game on I want to watch.’? And the film did show a forest of TV aerials on the houses.
So I’d take Bradbury at his word based on his other stories that mentioned televisions and depicted people who would rather go outside than stay in as abnormal or suspicious, and because a film based on the ‘invasion’ of televisions into homes was released in 1953.
I’ve always thought that the short stories “Usher II” from The Martian Chronicles and “The Exiles” from The Illustrated Man expanded upon/played around with the anti-censorship themes from Farenheit 451. Given that the focus of both of these stories is outrage at bureaucratic and government-enforced censorship, and that
I’d say that Farenheit was decidedly anti-censorship, and not anti-tv. Was The Twonky set in the Farenheit/Martian Chronicles universe? I seem to recall other stories from The Martian Chronicles that reference the censorship/book burning, but I don’t have a copy here with me to consult.
The short story is called “The Pedestrian” and was first published in 1951. It’s set about 100 years later, in 2053. It’s based on Bradbury being stopped and questioned by the police while merely taking a walk. Certainly he could foresee that television would be everywhere by then.
I got the feeling from Fahrenheit 451 that books were banned for being so unusual and simply presumed dangerous. Books were first ignored, and then anyone who read would be viewed with shock, then suspicion. Eventually the government would have enough people in it who disliked books and the people who read them that they’d simply be banned outright. It’s not a perfect case - by that point there’d be little need for ‘firemen’ - but of course those elements are intended to affect the person reading it today.
Bradbury often went back to the idea that being different is often perceived as a threat - some of the stories already mentioned from The Martian Chronicles are good examples.
The Twonky was based on a short story of that name by Kuttner. It’s a bit darker in tone than I’d expect from him (and I understand that the movie, which starred Hans Conreid and which I still haven’t seen, was lighter in tone than the story.) Oboler was the famed radio scripter (who among other things did that piece onm the Giant Chicken Heart that Bill Cosby parodied) who undoubtedly contributed his scripting skills (He wrote SF moviesm, as well, like Five.)
There’s an explicit passage in the book where the fire captain is explaining to the protagonist how things work. And he explicitly says that the government didn’t care about books…it was the* people* who complained that the books. So instead of a government censor deciding that Huck Finn is dangerous, you have yahoos who complain that it’s racist and should be banned, and eventually they complain loudly enough that everyone else goes along just to shut them up. The principle was that offending people or disturbing them was rude, and you didn’t have the right to offend people. And so Huck Finn gets burned, and soon enough on general principles every book is burned.
Except those are the people that treat television as a social activity and that have viewing parties and discuss the shows later at work or on message boards such as this.
And how is someone’s life ruled by television if what they want to do is watch television? If they wanted to go out, they’d go out. Does that mean their life is ruled by a bartender?
But I’m talking about the very real complaint that some anti-TV folks have that television will take over your life. And I’m just saying that I think such a thing sounds ridiculous. Especially coming from someone like Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451 was a great censorship novel).
Yeah, I never viewed it as an anti-censorship screed as much as an anti-anti-intellectualism screed. There’s the entire scene where the wife gets sucked into her television show that pretty much screamed it out to me. I used to teach it to my freshmen, and the point I always made was that the people let themselves get lazy, not that the goverment forced it on them.
silenus, can you provide any cites that show he said different things 20 years ago? This seems pretty consistent with his added scenes for the play and his writings that I’m familiar with.
It’s the same BS that people once reserved for reading novels (a couple of hundred years ago, they were trash, not serious things worthy of reading). And how is racing home to watch a TV show any different than racing off to watch a play or the opera?
I read this claim a while ago and I happen to have a copy of Fahrenheit 451 sitting next to me as a result. Flipping to the “Author’s Afterword” I find that, shockingly, it’s about censorship. Not necessarily government censorship, but in general a fear of saying certain things.
