Following the same path as critics Russell Lynes and Dwight Macdonald, Bradbury was intent on creating and then policing the boundaries between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow: fuddy-duddy terms that, once upon a time, before the leveling effect of postmodernism, carried considerable cultural weight. This perspective places his most famous novel squarely in the middle of the Cold War’s anxiety about the status of culture. We’ve moved in to this period of history that I described in Fahrenheit 50 years ago.” It’s about the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news, the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the author declared that “ Fahrenheit’s not about censorship. (The theme was emphasized in the recent film version, directed by Ramin Bahrani, broadcast on HBO in May.) But Bradbury himself never took this line. After all, the back cover copy declares it to be a “classic novel of censorship and defiance” and it’s generally taught this way in high schools.
You might be forgiven, then, for thinking that Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 is about fighting the evils of censorship.
In his highly readable A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, Fernando Báez grimly observes that humans have been burning books and papyrus scrolls, (or smashing clay and stone tablets) since the invention of writing as a means for repressing ideas and asserting cultural dominance over a conquered society. It never occurs to Ray Bradbury that, by just championing the great works of Western Civilization and consigning pop culture (notably science-fiction) to the flames, he’s exercising his own pernicious brand of censorship.īook burning has been going on for a surprisingly long time.
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