Ray Bradbury by Eller Jonathan R.;Touponce William F.;Nolan William F.; & William F. Touponce

Author:Eller, Jonathan R.;Touponce, William F.;Nolan, William F.; & William F. Touponce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

This carnival—compared to a movie screen that stages desire—sets itself up in the darkest hours of the night. Why does Bradbury reverse the traditional associations belonging to this literary chronotope? We have to remember that he is writing after Freud, in a culture that has internalized the Gothic to an extraordinary degree. Tzvetan Todorov has indicated, in a statement that has provoked some controversy, that there is no literature of the fantastic in the twentieth century because psychoanalysis has taken over its themes.51 This assertion has been largely confirmed, though inadvertently, by recent studies of the American Gothic, such as Mark Edmundson’s Nightmare on Main Street. Edmundson does not consider the possibility, however, that fantastic literature could take revenge on psychoanalysis for this encroachment by making psychoanalysts figures of fun (or even serial killers themselves; the stories of Clive Barker or films like Brian di Palma’s Dressed to Kill manifest this widespread tendency) in stories that discredit their authority or show their theories to be fictions. That is the cultural process—carnivalization—that is happening in Something Wicked.

Bradbury carnivalizes each genre in which he works. Here it is a question of the horror, or dark fantasy, genre whose themes have been dominated by Freud and based on Oedipal and familial fears. But in Something Wicked Bradbury’s strategy is less direct than in his short stories and poems. There is no psychoanalyst overtly represented in the literal story. But the carnival itself, because it functions by feeding off the desires of people for lost objects, their guilt and sense of debt, and especially their narcissism, is similar to the psychoanalytic machine as parodied in some recent Nietzschean-inspired anti-Freudian polemics: “the psychoanalyst parks his circus in the dumbfounded unconscious, a real P. T. Barnum in the fields.”52

Another interpretative issue to be dealt with, then, is the fact that Something Wicked speaks to us in the language of images derived from carnival that are indirect and often have a metaphorical and even allegorical significance.53 But carnival should not be translated into a language of abstract concepts. Instead, one must investigate how carnival laughter, symbols, and its sense of change can be figured by literature and, through understanding them, again regain some sense of participation in it, the authentic use of the carnival being identified, according to Bakhtin, with our sense of carnival having only just been transformed into literature. Everything in Bradbury’s text, its discourse and themes, strives to achieve this effect.

Here we want to mention that Bradbury conducts his critique of the Freudian view of man (as driven by unconscious desires he can never fulfill and by self-punishment for having those very desires) by the technique of carnivalizing the carnival and by masking his main character as a fool who, because of his “outsidedness,” is able to resist its temptations. Fearful things such as Mr. Dark must also be masked in Bradbury’s aesthetic. This is not to suggest, however, that Something Wicked is purely an allegory. Although his name suggests some such function, Mr. Dark does not represent the abstract allegorical idea of the evil father.

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