Conceptual Fiction: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Conceptual Fiction is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on major works of fantasy, science fiction, magical realism and alternate history. These books are celebrated in recognition that literary experimentation with ways of conceptualizing reality has been as important as experimentation with language in creating fiction of lasting value. Dismissing these books as genre or escapist works has created a blind-spot in literary studies that this feature aims, in some small part, to rectify.

If there were ghettos in the literary world, they would be occupied by science fiction writers, the most scorned and marginalized players in the whole realm of fiction. All you need to do is look at the covers — I’m embarrassed to be seen holding these gaudy realizations of adolescent wish-fulfillment — to know what the publishers think about these books and their intended audience.

Yet somehow Ray Bradbury crossed over from sci-fi to mainstream fiction. And no book did more to secure his passage out of the ghetto than this compact volume, which is now routinely assigned in high school and college classes and was recently selected by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for its “Big Read” program. What a great choice — to promote reading with a book that showed the dangers of a bookless society!

Bradbury’s crossover success is well-deserved. Of the great dystopian classics about an imagined future — 1984, Brave New World, The Road — this book has the most relevant things to say to us today. Orwell’s classic is bold and chilling in its depictions, but after the Berlin Wall came down (in 1989, five years after the symbolic title date), the political situation which gave rise to the novel no longer seemed quite so current. There are fewer "Big Brothers" in positions of power these days, but the book-free (and newspaper-free) society seems just around the corner.

But the brilliant move in Fahrenheit 451 was Bradbury’s co-opting the firefighters to become the censors in his dystopia. Instead of putting out fires, they start them ... in order to eradicate books from society. The novel’s title is simply the temperature at which paper burns. The functionaries who once protected us now enslave us. This would be a masterful touch of irony if we didn’t have so many historical examples of precisely this type of corruption of once benevolent institutions. The Hegelian concept of things turning into their opposites in a dialectical process may sound like philosophical mumbo-jumbo, but Bradbury's key insight here is that these reversals are now a recurring phenomenon in contemporary life and represent a dangerous juncture — a danger amplified by the powers conferred by modern technologies.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool. You can follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tedgioia.

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