Ficlets

You know how you were always told that Ray Bradbury’s book Fahrenheit 451 was an allegory about censorship and the government managing our thoughts? Here’s Ray Bradbury to tell you that you (and your high school English teacher) are wrong about that

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

My immediate thought on this is: Can’t it be both? My less immediate thought on it is that I suspect Mr. Bradbury is being disingenuous. At the very least he’s wrapped his distaste of TV in a narrative structure that clearly suggests government-approved censorship (when government workers burn books, you’re mining a cultural loadstone that has top-down repression and thought control as its elements); moreover, I think it’s a little funny that Bradbury’s waited 50 years – allowing the book more than enough time to become fixed in the reading public’s consciousness as an anti-censorship book – to tell us all it’s really about TV.

Which is to say I don’t believe Bradbury on this one. I certainly believe it’s a satire on how TV could be used to suck people away from reading; I don’t believe that Bradbury used censorship tropes without knowing what he was doing, and how it would be seen.

In any event, this is one of those times where an author’s intent is swamped by a communal readership interpretation. Bradbury may or may not have intended to write a book on censorship, but that’s how it’s been read – and that’s why it’s famous. In that respect, it certainly is a book about censorship. There is irony there, to be sure.