/ world today news/ This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), a writer who is among the top ten outstanding American masters of words of the 20th century. His novel “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) is on the list of the most famous dystopias, united by the fact that they present the future as a totalitarian system in which a handful of “chosen” dominate the world. And their domination is expressed first of all in the purposeful destruction of everything human in man.
In his novel, Bradbury showed a totalitarian society in which man is destroyed by burning old books. Scholars believe that Bradbury was partly inspired by the burning of books in Nazi Germany. Some believe that it allegorically reflects the events in America in the early 1950s – the time of rampant McCarthyism, the persecution of communists and all dissidents.
The writer himself said at the end of his life that the threat to good books is represented by the enchanting media, which become a means of destroying the remnants of traditional culture.
In the epigraph to Bradbury’s book, it says that the paper has an ignition temperature of 451 degrees Fahrenheit (233 degrees Celsius). The novel describes a society where all books that make one think are subject to destruction. They have been replaced by comics, digests, pornography. Reading, even possessing banned books is a crime. Critical thinkers are suspicious. They have certainly read and continue to read “harmful” books. Sometimes not only the books are burned, but also the dwellings in which the books are located, and their owners end up in prison or an insane asylum. From the point of view of the authorities, the owners of the books are dissidents and crazy: some do not leave the burning houses, preferring to burn with their books.
The author depicts people who have lost touch with each other, with nature, lost their historical roots, cut off from the intellectual and spiritual heritage of humanity. People rush to work or from work, never talking about what they think or feel, they only think about the meaningless and the empty, they admire only the material. At home, they surround themselves with TV monitors, many of which are the size of a wall, they are called just that: TV walls. They are very reminiscent of modern flat screens. And at the beginning of the 50s of the last century, when the novel was written, only the first generation of televisions with cathode ray tubes and a screen diagonal of no more than ten inches were just appearing on the market. By the way, TVs with “Fahrenheit 451” display an image in color and volume. And if color television already appeared in the United States in the year of writing the novel, then Bradbury predicted the appearance of the three-dimensional image system.
Technical facilities provide people with communication with other owners of monitors, immersion in the virtual world. One of the heroines of the novel, Mildred (wife of the main character of the novel, Guy Montag), is almost around the clock in a room whose three walls are television screens. She lives in this world, dreams of turning the last free wall into a TV screen. A very successful image of “voluntary self-isolation”.
In addition to flat screen television monitors, the novel mentions television transmitters with which people can communicate with each other at a distance. Kind of like Skype. The novel’s characters stick earplugs in their ears, reminiscent of modern Bluetooth headphones. Bradbury also has analogues of mobile phones. All people are under the electronic surveillance hood. It is very reminiscent of Orwell’s novel, in which numerous posters warn citizens that Big Brother is watching them.
One of the novel’s characters is Beatty, Guy Montag’s chief at the fire station. Beatty fully understands the importance of his fire activities. He is a cynic philosopher, very smart, knows everything. He is convinced that the purpose of destroying the books is to make everyone happy. He explains to Montag that without books there would be no conflicting thoughts and theories, no one would stand out, become smarter than others. And with books – “who knows who can become a target of the well-read person?” According to Beatty, the lives of the citizens of this society are spared from negative emotions, people just have fun. They even simplify death – now the corpses of the dead are cremated in five minutes, so as not to disturb anyone. Beatty understands where their world is headed, but chooses to adjust.
The main character’s wife Mildred is even more typical of the dystopian society. With the relationship between Guy and Mildred Bradbury shows that the family has already ceased to exist. Husband and wife are immersed in their lives, they are completely alienated from each other. Guy Montag admits: “I have to speak, but there is no one to listen. I can’t talk on the walls, they’re yelling at me. I can’t talk to my wife, she only listens to the walls. I want someone to listen to me.” Guy and Mildred have no children, as Mildred is adamantly against it. She expects only money from her husband to mount a television screen on the fourth wall and finally immerse herself in the illusory world in which neither husband nor children are needed.
Mildred constantly consumes sleeping pills. At the beginning of the novel, she takes a whole bottle of such pills, but saves herself. It turns out that the number of pill suicides in the city has increased manifold in recent years. Eventually, Mildred betrays her husband, who keeps the forbidden books recovered from the fires in a stash and secretly reads them. The fire department responds to her call to burn down Montag’s house, along with the hidden books.
Every dystopia has its own dissidents. Bradbury has them too. This is Guy Montag. He is a professional book burner. In translation, Guy is called “fireman”, but he does not put out the fire, but starts it. At first he was convinced that he was doing socially useful work. He is convinced that he is a guardian of order, that he destroys harmful books.
An important place in the novel is occupied by Clarissa McLellan – a 17-year-old girl who does not want to live according to anti-human laws. Guy Mongag happens to meet her and is surprised to see that she is a person from a completely different world. Here’s a snippet of their conversation: “Clarissa, why aren’t you at school?” Guy asks. Clarissa replies, “I’m not interested there. My psychologist claims that I am unsociable, that it is difficult for me to communicate with people, but this is not the case! I really like socializing, but it’s not like that at school. We watch educational films for hours, rewrite something in history lesson, redraw something in drawing lesson. We don’t ask questions and at the end of the day we get so tired that we only want one thing – either sleep or go to an amusement park and break glass in the glass breaking room, shoot at the shooting range or race cars” . She adds: “People don’t have time for each other now.”
Clarissa admits that she is afraid of her peers killing each other (six people are shot in a year, ten die in car accidents). The girl says that her classmates and others consider her crazy: “I rarely look at TV walls, I almost never go to car races or amusement parks. That’s why I still have time for all sorts of crazy thoughts. ” Clarissa tragically dies, but in a short time communicating with Montag, she manages to sow in his soul the seeds of doubt about the correctness of what he is doing. One of the characters of the novel speaks of the deceased girl in this way: “She did not care how something was done , and what is it for and why. And such curiosity is dangerous … It is better for the poor girl that she died.
Under the influence of Clarissa Montag first thinks about what a book is: “And I thought about books too. And for the first time I realized that there is a person behind each of them. A man thought, nourished thoughts in himself. He spent a lot of time writing them down on paper. And it had never crossed my mind. “
The critic of the system is another character of the novel – Professor Faber. This old professor is the antithesis of Beatty. He is also smart, educated, wise. He tells Montag about history, civilization, books. Among the huge variety of books, the professor places above all the Eternal Book – the Bible. However, Faber is forced to adapt to a hostile environment, and alone with himself he feels like an old-fashioned university professor. Sometimes he feels helpless: “… with all my knowledge and skepticism, I never found the strength to enter into an argument with the symphonic orchestra of a hundred instruments that roared at me from the colorful and voluminous screen of our monstrous living rooms … Doubtful is how an old man and a disillusioned fireman can change something now that things have come to this … ”Faber is pessimistic. Addressing Montag, the professor says, “Our civilization is rushing toward death. Move back to avoid being hit by her wheel. “
There are other dissidents in the novel. The author calls them “people-books” or “living books”. They live in a forest far from the city. The group described in the novel consists of five people – three university professors, a writer and a priest. They are rebels. They try to resist the new order, accumulating the wisdom of the past and hoping to pass it on to future generations. Guy Montag also joins this group.
Some Bradbury fans have compared the novel “Fahrenheit 451” to the parable of the phoenix bird, which burned at the stake, but was reborn each time from the ashes. One member of a group of rebel dissidents, a writer named Granger, says, “Once upon a time in the world lived the stupid Phoenix bird. Every few hundred years she was burned at the stake. She must have been a close relative of the man. But after it burns, every time it is reborn from the ashes. We humans are like this bird. However, we have an advantage over her. We know what folly we have done. We know all the stupid things we’ve been doing for a thousand years and more. And because we know this and it’s all recorded and we can look back and see the way we’ve come, that is the hope that someday we’ll stop building these stupid funeral pyres and throw ourselves into the fire. Each new generation leaves us with people who remember the mistakes of humanity. “
Although the legend of the Phoenix bird originated in the pagan world, in Christianity it received a new interpretation, expressing the triumph of eternal life and resurrection. It is a symbol of Christ. Bradbury’s novel tells how books are burned to destroy a person, to condemn him to a fiery hell. The life of the main character Guy Montag is a way to overcome one-dimensional thinking, a turn from internal degradation to the restoration of oneself as a person. In the novel, Montag’s transformation begins, it seems, with an accident – the meeting with the unknown girl Clarissa. Perhaps for someone the same conversion will occur after reading the novel “Fahrenheit 451”.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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