“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury

First posted: 23 september 2009

Science Fiction: I had a conversation, with ups and downs, with a professor because we didn’t share the same idea in defining this wonderful world. In his opinion, it is inextricabily linked to the robot, like Asimov’s works, indeed I think it is like the creation of an alternative world and that it shouldn’t be necessarily connected to the new high tech discoveries, like Ballard’s works for example.

This discussion focused on a specific book that I liked very much: “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury.

Some time ago I tried to talk with a girl about this book but the answer to my question (how much did she appreciated it, what kind of interest did she find reading the book itself) was disappointing: “I prefer Truffaut’s film.”

The fact is that I didn’t care to know whether she liked it or not, but what she thought about this book, which was her viewpoint about that work, if something in it amazed her, if the text itself had inspired any kind of empathy, mental involvement, intellectual stimulation, aspects that could turn out to be  similar to a clockwork mechanism of orbiting spheres, mirroring the structure of her mental disposition and intellectual “ontology”.

The problem is that, currently, all tended to support evasive answers without substance; i wish that someone could try to do one more little step of the normal tendency to superficiality, trying to struggle to an higher degree of analysis towards a comprehension, in this case about a textual level, so people will stop rambling about nothing and and their brain will start to collapse under the pressure of the concentration.

The nowadays trend works just with mindless people, who revolt against the plesure of thinking; Marcuse’s “one-dimensional man” and Eliot’s “Hollow” man, that is human beings not capable of free thinking and personal reflections.

The same book, that I just mentioned, is, more or less, based on this concept and extends it to an higher Will, represented by a totalitarian state which attempts to stifle the born of any form of independent thought, because it is judged too dangerous and unmanageable.

In this form of politics, the enemy is represented by books (my lifeblood) because they’re the only media able to give us the opportunity to be active and, so, to use our reason and comprehension to understand what we’re reading and, also (why not?), to use our precious imagination.

In this fictional world the firefighters’ work isn’t to extinguish fire but their quest is burning books.

What i liked when I started to read “Fahrenheit” was the “cinematic” writing style, I mean a dry and clear way of writing  with a wide use of adjectives that can evoke images, creating the sensation of watching a series of film sequences and not reading a book.

We can find this feature also in the story, easy to read, fluid, even if it hides, in the unsaid undergrowth, a world apart: the beauty of a girl who attracts a firefighter thanks to the strange things she said, about some books told her by her uncle, her unusual vanishing and what this event causes in the man’s mind, who starts to understand his need of reading books and, so, of thinking autonomously; couple problems regarding the fact that the wife is addicted to television broadcasting, idleness’ symbol, and she can’t understand her husband with his need of escaping from that prison built in order to make humans pawns (their will is not just subdued by external events but they force themselves to serve and to live as slaves) because she likes this type of life, because in her opinion the lack of thoughts is the only possibility to be happy, that is, to avoid every type of self-emotion.

The reading act, that is the authentical profound message of the text, is the explosion of free will, breaking the chain of servitude, when can shine the fear and the shyness, the privacy, of self conscious people, who the fear and the shyness of who, in secret, reads without having the courage to rebel against this state of things, standing aside; and who is waiting for the right moment to return from a forced exile to teach again how to live a real life with thoughts because a totalitarian state cannot hold out forever.