Title: Fahrenheit
451
Author: Ray
Bradbury
Publisher:
Harper Voyager
Publish
date: 1953
ISBN: 978 0
00 830369 3
Book Quote:
‘Now let’s take up the minorities in our
civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step
on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants,
chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation-Chinese, Swedes,
Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or
Mexico.’
…
‘But remember that the Captain belongs to
the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the
majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.’
____________________________________________
How can I put it politely? No, I can’t.
This ‘novel’ is a hysterical torrent of man-flu sploshed onto a
climate of cold-war misogynistic terror. However, I’m glad to have read it, as it has
many interesting points. I’m taking antacids now, but it’s a price I’m prepared
to pay.
The
Good
·
Within the mish-mash of words,
there are some nice passages. The stream-of-consciousness, poetic chunks that
rely on iteration and resonance, are pleasurable. Say, the passage where Montag
is trying to remember a phrase from Matthew (they toil not, neither do they
spin) on the underground, when everyone is humming away to a toothpaste ad. Or
quite a few passages describing scenery or setting. It’s interesting that in so
misogynistic a work, the best sections are those in traditionally ‘feminine’
styles. But more of that anon.
The
Bad
Where to start? At the beginning?
- By page 2 we’re choked on the
fumes of so many adjectives and bombastic adverbs our heads are spinning and we
can scarcely hold onto the book. They’re absolutely out of control.
- To have an experimental writing style is acceptable. To toss anything into the pot all in a novella, without a thought to the overall flow, is not. From adjective overload, to impressionism, to film-script, to monologue, to stream-of-consciousness, and then straight into diatribe shoved into the mouths of puppets. If the style differentiation had some reasoning, it would be acceptable. It hasn’t. That’s just how the words hit the page.
- To have an experimental writing style is acceptable. To toss anything into the pot all in a novella, without a thought to the overall flow, is not. From adjective overload, to impressionism, to film-script, to monologue, to stream-of-consciousness, and then straight into diatribe shoved into the mouths of puppets. If the style differentiation had some reasoning, it would be acceptable. It hasn’t. That’s just how the words hit the page.
· - Characterisation is nil. It’s
on the level of Pilgrim’s Progress, and indeed the hysteria, self-aggrandising,
and self-pity ties the two works together convincingly. OK, you can write an
allegory, but don’t pretend it’s a novel in any traditional sense.
-Plot goes no further than the initial idea of a prosecutor having a change of heart and becoming a transgressor. Which is fine. But then the author obviously doesn’t know how to end it all, so blows stuff up and leaves it all down to a plucky band of Harvard bums to re-build the word. Honestly, a blank page would have been better. As it is, it’s infantile.
-Plot goes no further than the initial idea of a prosecutor having a change of heart and becoming a transgressor. Which is fine. But then the author obviously doesn’t know how to end it all, so blows stuff up and leaves it all down to a plucky band of Harvard bums to re-build the word. Honestly, a blank page would have been better. As it is, it’s infantile.
The Ugly
The misogyny. Untrammelled. If the women aren’t idle sponging
ignorant leeches like Millie and her cronies, they’re equally dismissive
constructs like Clarisse or the woman who immolates herself with her books.
Both type’s only function is to spur or spurn males. There is not even the hint
of a notion that something other than procreation or inspiration may come from
a female. When Montag thinks of the book burned, the phrase is that ‘behind
each of them is a man’. Nothing to do with women. The unnaturalness of the female
spongers is accentuated by their unwillingness or dislike of offspring. The
wholesomeness of Clarisse is accentuated by her off-screen family, and her
interest in love. There is no other dimension.
OK, so what are we complaining about, when we’ve just said that the
entire work is an allegory? None of the other (male) characters are clothed in
realistic flesh at all, including the main protagonist. Captain Beatty is a
laughable travesty of improbability, and as for Faber, let’s not even go there.
The difference is the lack of agency. Males are allowed agency,
females are not. It’s not a thought-out thing, it’s taken for granted. The
inspirational agency one could say Clarisse and the self-torching woman have is
not independent. It needs a male vehicle to achieve anything. The spongers need
male vehicles to keep them in their inactive state. The inactive state itself
is highlighted in the anecdote of the memorable grandfather and the hands: the
recollection of all the things the hands had made, and now would not, as
opposed to Millie’s hands, which are still and create nothing. So we can say
that in this novella, the female directly inherits the Aristotelian notions of
being an empty vessel for the agency of the male to work on. OK (deep breath),
let’s work with that. Not the first and not the last to expound this notion. Where
does that lead?
To the interesting part. Their inactivity and lack of agency is both
forced onto them, and is made into their culpability. Apart from Clarisse and
Millie, none of them have a given name. They are all named after their
husbands. There is no option for them to do otherwise than they are doing, yet
it is violently held against them. The other males in the general background
are presumably all also zombies (when they’re not working, which is seems women
don’t), but this is never mentioned. When it’s the zombie population at large,
it lacks a sex. When it’s the individual, it’s female. It’s quite clear that the resentment for the
zombification has found a channel: the female form.
But what is even more interesting, is that this is not merely an
expression of misogyny. The misogyny is simply the most prominent part of a
fundamental flaw in the logic of the notions that purport to underpin the work’s
sociological theory.
The theory is, that the dumbing down (leading to
zombification) came from excessive pandering to minorities. The book was
published in 1953, and we still hear this notion everywhere. No-one was allowed
to be offended, so freedom of speech was silenced. In other words, the
minorities should have allowed themselves to be offended. Or should have been
made to be open to offence.
Yet, when it’s the (male, obviously) residual
intellectuals, who are now in the minority, they are to rise up. They are
inspirational. The women in the book are not a physical but a practical minority,
due to their lack of agency. Nope, that minority is still bad. As per before.
They need to stay down. There is not one instance of a female remembering one
of the ‘books’ in the chain of resistance. It is always ‘a man’, and the term
is not being used as a synecdoche for humankind. It is literally male. When the
intellectual hobos walk off into the distance, fantasising about how they’re
going to build a new world ‘generation after generation’, there are neither
females present at the time, nor any thought given to anything feminine whatsoever. It’s an entirely male creative process. The males both force the fire
onto the females/minorities, and hold them responsible for the resulting
imbalance. And violently fear the state of being a ‘minority’ themselves, and
instantly take on the mantle of the oppressed-in-need-of-adulation-and-support
at the first opportunity.
There is no recognition in the book of the volta performed in the
ideology. The Captain’s ‘minorities’ speech is taken at face value, and there
is no tie-back to him being the later-described tyranny of the majority, and
therefore out of whack. The reason for the zombification is still squarely on
the shoulders of the minorities. The minorities of back then, who are not white intellectual males. The minority now is the right one to rise up.
Rarely have I read a clearer example of the connection between
misogyny and minority oppression, as coupled with fear and abnegation of
culpability. In today’s world, where we are waking up to the statistics of how
male violence against females is directly linked to attacks on minorities in
mob violence and mass shootings, surely this is an important template of
thought to bear in mind. Perhaps for all the wrong reasons, but nevertheless.
Scoring: for pleasure, one moose-hoof up out of five, but read it
nevertheless if you haven’t. It’s an appalling piece, to be visited as one
would visit a holocaust museum.
And can someone explain to me the author's obsession with Marcus Aurelius?
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