Ray Bradbury by David Seed

Author:David Seed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2015-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

PASTORAL APOCALYPSE

In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury removes Montag from the city, which is emblematic of the regime, to an alternative rural landscape. Indeed, the last phase of the novel replaces quasirealist narration with a symbolic sequence of scenes suggesting rebirth. Montag crosses a river into a new life; after his “execution” on TV, he is welcomed “back from the dead” by the Book People. The significance of the phoenix’s regenerative life cycle is now made explicit.75 Throughout Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury has insistently linked books, birds, and people. It is therefore consistent with this symbolism that in the last section of the novel people should become books. Collectively, the Book People represent a metaphor made flesh. As Eller and Touponce have rightly pointed out, the Book People imply a notion of textual production, which continues from authors to readers in an open-ended continuum.76 Even more importantly, they enact the reappropriation of language and the reconstitution of memory common to dystopian misfits and rebels.77 Geoffrey Hartman has argued cogently that the exclusion of authors’ and readers’ names alike “shows what ideally happens in the act of reading: if there is a sacrifice to the exemplary, it involves the aggrandizement neither of author nor of reader but leads into the recognition that something worthy of perpetuation has occurred.”78

It is an important detail that Montag should be welcomed into the group by Granger, whose name recalls the populist movement of the 1860s and 1870s, dedicated to improving the lot of U.S. farmers. Like them, the Book People are rural, anticentralist, and loosely communitarian. Montag’s first encounter around a campfire recalls the imagery of one of Bradbury’s favorite novels—The Grapes of Wrath—and suggests that the movement reflects a populist response to hardship. As Granger explains to Montag, the movement took place spontaneously: “thousands on the roads, the abandoned railtracks, tonight, bums on the outside, libraries inside . . . over a period of twenty years or so, we met each other, traveling, and got the loose network together and set out a plan” (146). The evocation of hobo camps carries historical resonances with the 1930s and through a “metaphoric time-travel,” while Montag recaptures lost childhood memories like the scent of leaves.79 Though referenced through the past, these fireside discussions represent an unmediated communication lost in the dystopian world of the novel. Despite the consistency of this fire motif, John Huntington has argued that Bradbury ignores the implications of his “idealized hobo mystique,” never considering the hardship that could lie behind the Book People’s lives or the possibility that books themselves may have contributed to the novel’s dystopian present.80 In that respect Bradbury’s allusions to history are selective in being heavily determined by the needs of his symbolic polarities.

The multiple meanings of fire, so central to Fahrenheit 451, are also exploited, more austerely, in Walter M. Miller’s 1959 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. Here, a massive nuclear war, mythologized as the “Flame Deluge,” brings about a rupture in Western culture, and the novel retraces history as a rediscovery of technology, which ultimately leads to yet another nuclear war.

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