Fahrenheit 451.

• Author: Smolla, Rodney A.
• Position: Book review

FAHRENHEIT 451. By Ray Bradbury. 1953. New York: Del Rey Books. 2003 ed. Pp. 190. $6.99.

1. THE FUTURE IS NOT WHAT IT USED 70 BE

   The future is not what it used to be. Ray Bradbury's classic novel, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, is a cultural time marker, helping us to locate the past, evaluate the present, and imagine the future. Fahrenheit 451 still vexes our conscience and consciousness, just as other imaginative time markers do--George Orwell's novel 1984, (1) or Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, (2) or the lyrics from Prince's 1982 funk classic 1999:

   Yeah, everybody's got a bomb, We could all die any day But before I let that happen I'll dance my life away So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999[.] (3) When filmmaker Michael Moore chose the title for his muckraking movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, a scathing attack on President George W. Bush and the war on terrorism, he deliberately conjured a play on the title of Ray Bradbury's classic novel and evoked the novel's status as a cultural time marker. (4) The temperature 451 degrees Fahrenheit is, for Bradbury, the temperature at which books burn; for Moore, according to his movie tagline, it is "[t]he temperature where freedom burns." (5)

   Fahrenheit 451 still speaks to us, vibrantly and passionately, still haunts and vexes and disturbs. The novel has sold millions of copies, was reset for a fiftieth anniversary printing, and continues to be assigned reading in middle school, high school, and college courses. (6) That power to endure is well worth contemplation, both for what it says about Ray Bradbury's literary imagination, and, more powerfully, for what it teaches us about our recent past, our present, and our own imagined future. First Amendment jurisprudence has taken giant leaps since Fahrenheit 451 was written, and American society has managed to avoid the worst of the censorship horrors the novel described. Yet we have not been so fortunate in overcoming many of the other demons of modernity that Bradbury revealed. Overwhelmed by the frenetic speed and hypnotic appeal of digital and virtual realities, we neglect genuine human relationships; we rush past the precious physical and sensory moments that bring substance to our being; we struggle to find the quietude for genuine reflection, peace, and a life of the mind.

   1. A Tale of Apocalypse and Redemption

      The novel is presented through the point of view of its central character, Guy Montag, whose occupation is "fireman." Though we are never told the precise year in which the action takes place, Bradbury hints that it is the late twentieth or early twenty-first century. The menace of war and nuclear conflagration permeates the novel. "We've started and won two atomic wars since 1990" (p. 73), the narrator explains. Now the bombers are in the air at all times (p. 73).

      But while the bombers are always in the air, and the firemen are always on alert, the firemen of Fahrenheit 451 do not put out fires. Instead, they set them. Homes have all been fire proofed; the only fires now are the ones the firemen ignite (p. 34). They start them to burn books, which have been banished from society. Books are now contraband, like marijuana, cocaine, or counterfeit currency; when the fire department is alerted that some book-loving criminal is secretly holding a volume or two or twenty, the firemen are dispatched to incinerate the offending material. As Montag describes it: "It's fine work. Monday bum Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan" (p. 8).

      Many advances in technology aid the firemen in their task. Surveillance and monitoring devices blanket the city. The Mechanical Hound, a robotic beast with prodigious powers of detection, speed, and destruction, sniffs out offenders for the burning. The Mechanical Hound is ruthless and insentient, all wires and circuits and electricity, but it still seems to have acquired consciousness of some kind--a malevolent will that is more than merely mechanical--and is seemingly invincible (pp. 24-26).

      Commercial advertising and political propaganda are as ubiquitous as the screeching bombers. Roadside billboards are two hundred feet long because the cars race by so fast they had to be stretched out to be read (p. 9).

      Montag begins the novel ostensibly proud of his profession and settled in life, but we soon find that there is disquiet beneath the surface. His marriage to Mildred is less than ideal, notably because she spends most of her time mesmerized by the "televisors"--large fiat-screen televisions that occupy entire walls of the house, creating massive whole-room entertainment centers (pp. 20-22). The Montags have managed to purchase these wall screens for three of their four rooms, apparently going into a bit too much consumer debt to satisfy Mildred's need for this electronic stimulation. Millie and her girlfriends regularly gather for evening martinis to watch their favorite shows, which appear to be forms of reality TV (pp. 93-94). But the conversation between Millie and her friends has no snap, crackle, or sex appeal. Millie is no Sarah Jessica Parker, and the martini hour at the Montags is no Sex and the City. Montag is exasperated at the vacuous quality of the life that Millie and her friends live. Bradbury's brilliant portrait of a society gone plastic seems even to anticipate botox: "The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless" (p. 83).

      Millie also uses an abundance of happy pills, with the apparent blessing of society, and one night Montag comes home from work to find her nearly dead from an overdose (pp. 11-14). He calls the high-tech paramedics. The poisons are pumped out and the restorative medicines pumped in (pp. 14-16). The next morning Millie awakes cheerily ready for another day of chatty televisor fun (pp. 18-20).

      Millie's brush with death causes Montag pangs of doubt and uncertainty about life's meaning. Millie and Montag don't talk much anymore, nor do they seem to touch or connect. Even the memories of their shared life have faded--Montag can't remember where they met. At the same time, Montag feels an incipient creeping of doubt about his job. He is starting to have questions of curiosity and conscience.

      A young girl whom Montag meets on his way home from work one evening, Clarisse McClellan, also spurs much of this self-doubt. She is ebullient, irreverent, alive, and deliciously subversive. Montag is so anesthetized to life's sensations that he barely recognizes what we readers see pretty quickly. He develops an instant crush on Clarisse; there are stirrings of love, of human connection, of talking, and above all, of listening. "Nobody listens any more," Montag complains. "I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling a[t] me. I can't talk to my wife: she listens to the walls" (p. 82).

      Clarisse is a bit fresh about Montag's life as a fireman. "I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames," she chides (p. 8). Clarisse, bucking the culture, is turned on by the stimulations of nature and the joys of the senses. She tantalizes Montag with the smell and feel and color of a dandelion (pp. 21-22). She reveals how old leaves smell like cinnamon (p. 29). She loves to walk in the rain and savor its flavor. "Rain even tastes good," she tells Montag (p. 21). Clarisse wonders why the artifacts of culture seem so disconnected from the senses, from human sensibility, from human stories. The art in museums is all abstract, Clarisse laments. She has been told that once they actually "said things or even showed people" (p. 31).

      Montag's gathering crisis of conscience, however, is not fed only by disillusionment with his empty marriage or enchantment with Clarisse:

      Montag's job is getting to him. Matters become especially rough when his assignments cause him to go from burning books to burning people. The triggering incident is a call to one particularly nefarious book collector, who has piles of volumes secreted away in an attic. The firemen burn the books with kerosene, then burn the house, and then burn the occupant. As this martyr to literature prepares to die, she cries out that "we shall this day light such a candle" (p. 36). As Montag later learns, she is referencing a statement made by the "Oxford Martyrs" (7) as they were being burnt alive for heresy in sixteenth-century Oxford: "We shall this day light a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out" (p. 40).

      With his world in chaos, Montag starts committing the ultimate offense. When called to book-burning scenes, Montag begins to clandestinely rescue books instead of burning them, secreting away the purloined volumes and hiding them in his home.

      Montag's life crisis does not go undetected. His wife is disturbed. So is his boss--the novel's villain--Fire Chief Beatty. Beatty senses what is going on; he's seen it happen before, to other firemen. Beatty seeks to mentor Montag, "Where's your common sense?" Beatty chides. "None of these books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel" (p. 38).

      But Montag is curious about how the book burning began, and Beatty cautiously seeks to satiate that curiosity. It did not begin with the government, he explains cheerily. It began with the people: "It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God" (p. 58). Beatty makes much of the role of factions and minorities, and the need to avoid inciting them with the provocative and offensive ideas that appear in books. "You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred" (p. 59). Beatty is candid in explaining how it all happened, first with photography, then...