Fahrenheit 451’s most accurate prediction

Having just read a book I hated in high school and found it, as an adult, a masterpiece, I decided to revisit a book I loved in high school but certainly haven’t read in more than twenty years: Fahrenheit 451. To be brief, it holds up.

Not to be brief, it is a commonplace of literary conversation to pit rival dystopias against each other. The two most frequent combatants are Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World. Questions of literary quality aside, people debate which of the two better predicted the present. Leaving aside as well that “the present” is a moving target and neither author really intended to predict anything, Orwell is usually praised for imagining the modern surveillance state and its dog-eat-dog culture of denunciation and ideological purity and Huxley for his vision of a technocratic, efficiency-obsessed state that placates the masses with entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and hedonism and—in starkest contrast to Orwell—for depicting the oppression of his dystopia as self-imposed, even embraced.

I happen to agree that Huxley’s insight into the willingness of the masses to be oppressed as long as they can enjoy themselves marks Brave New World as more likely than Nineteen Eighty-Four, if not a better novel. But I think even Huxley misses a piece of the dystopian picture that Bradbury nails in Fahrenheit 451.

First, note that Fahrenheit 451, per Bradbury himself, is “not about censorship” but “the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news and the proliferation of giant screens.”

Bradbury’s book aligns with Orwell’s in the mobilization of the masses as part of a program of surveillance—the scene in which a news program orders everyone in a neighborhood to look outside at the same time in an attempt to catch Montag and the people robotically obey is chilling, one of the most memorable in the novel—and with Huxley’s in the self-imposed nature of that surveillance. Rather than monitor everyone, all the time, the unseen, unnamed authorities who dispatch the firemen rely on informers. Why would people go along with that, especially as enthusiastically as the informants in the novel do?

Because they don’t want to be bothered, upset, or offended. Bradbury makes this point several times. Literature goes away because it’s too challenging, people are too likely to read things that upset them, and when they drift instead to easy, bland, mass-produced visual entertainment the government doesn’t even have to ban books, the people simply stop reading them—all except a few weirdos whom it is easy to crush as dangers to placid minds of the compliant.

But the most accurate, realistic detail of the entire Fahrenheit 451 scenario is not the surveillance or the ease with which the public can be offended or even how easily they can be manipulated, but just how embarrassingly tawdry the people’s entertainment is. Huxley imagines a world in which people have given up freedom—even the freedom to make their own families—for drugs and orgies. Bradbury correctly intuits that people will sell their freedom much more cheaply. The people of Fahrenheit 451 want interactive daytime TV, nonstop music piped directly into their ears, constant affirmation, and the biggest, brightest, most immersive screens possible. Then they sit there, existing.

If you want an eerily accurate prediction from one of these books, the zoned-out, enervated, and completely empty minds of Mildred and her friends—who even, based on the question “Did you see that Clara Dove five-minute romance last night?” enjoy short-form video content!—should meet all requirements.

Montag’s wife Mildred is pathetic not because she is unfree and infuriating not because she rats Montag out, but because she has bargained away her soul for a mess of pottage. Less than that, actually—pottage would at least be nourishing.

The Butt-Covering Chronicles

Simon & Schuster has just published a new 75th anniversary paperback of The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. This edition includes a short essay by Bradbury detailing his process of drafting and revising the stories that make up the Chronicles and expounding some of the philosophical assumptions behind them. It’s an interesting short introduction to the book—especially for anyone interested in a writer’s process and craft—but even more interesting is the “Editor’s Note” that precedes it.

The note begins with some information about the provenance of the essay, which was written shortly after Bradbury submitted the manuscript for The Martian Chronicles in the fall of 1950 and was rediscovered in his papers in the 2000s, but concludes with this, where the real purpose of the note becomes clear:

“How I Wrote My Book” refers to cultural touchstones (e.g., authors, books, music, politics) that may not resonate with today’s reader. Perhaps more disturbing will be some of the words and phrases Bradbury uses. Simply put, the language of the 1950s was not politically correct. Yet “How I Wrote My Book” offers fascinating insight into Bradbury’s creative process and is, at the same time, a powerful, at times urgent, commentary on Bradbury’s beliefs, thoughts, and fears about humanity and our world. And while expressions used by Bradbury in this essay may be anachronistic, his message is timeless and rings as true today as it did seventy-five years ago.

After reading it with mounting contempt I told my wife about it. Had I misunderstood? she wondered. Maybe the note was referring to the stories, not Bradbury’s essay. So I checked again today and, no, the note is very specifically getting defensive about Bradbury’s introductory essay.

And what shocking material in Bradbury’s essay prompted this note? Having gone through the essay twice, I’m still not actually sure. One reads a note like this expecting to run into racial slurs, but there is nothing obviously offensive in anything Bradbury writes. He even goes out of his way to condemn fascism, Stalinism, and Joe McCarthy and to praise imaginative freedom in the kind of stirring, well-intentioned liberal peroration formerly beloved of English teachers.

My best guess is that Bradbury’s frequent use of “man” and “mankind” in discussing human exploration of space, the use of “his” as a generic pronoun (as opposed to now, when every imaginary writer or student is always pointedly “she”), a hypothetical “Mr and Mrs Joe Smith from Ashtabula,” and one sympathetic comparison of his Martians to Indians are the “disturbing” language the editor wants to prepare us for.

(Also, how can expressions you use in your own time be “anachronistic”? Bradbury didn’t slip into Old English or some future Anglo-Martian creole. This is just silly.)

At least the publisher didn’t censor or rewrite Bradbury’s essay. The irony of past attempts to censor Fahrenheit 451 probably ruled that out. But I was left wondering what kind of mealy-mouthed weenie wrote this, or even thought using up a whole page for it was a good idea in the first place. Notably, while an “editor’s note,” there is no editor named anywhere in the book. No one wanted to put his name on this—or, more likely, hers.

Last year I looked at some publisher’s notes and copyright page notices in recent reprints of Agatha Christie as a way to chart the hopeful trend away from “updates” and the “removal of offensive terms” toward their unexpurgated publication. Such notes are an improvement over stealth edits and censorship, but as long as this butt-covering instinct remains the work of authors who are no longer here to defend themselves will be in danger.

I ran across this new copy of The Martian Chronicles in Walmart. Just around the corner on an endcap were boxes of those cheap, faux-leather reprints of public domain classics. (Curiously, these are also published under the Simon & Schuster umbrella.) After reading this note I picked up a few of those that were likely suspects for censorship—Treasure Island, a fat volume of Lovecraft—and saw this in 8-point type at the bottom of the copyright page:

These works have been published in their original form to preserve the author’s intent and style.

Exactly right. Simple, to the point, and all the explanation necessary. More of this, and less of the editor’s note above.