Ray Bradbury wasn't condemning censorship in "Fahrenheit 451"

[jobycom]

"The novel is frequently interpreted as being critical of state-sponsored censorship, but Bradbury has disputed this interpretation. He said in a 2007 interview that the book explored the effects of television and mass media on the reading of literature:

Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most famous literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953... Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.<5>

Bradbury went even further to elaborate his meaning, saying specifically that the culprit in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state—it is the people.

'There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist / Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist / Women's Lib / Republican / Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse….Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451#Themes
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Apparently Ray Bradbury passionately hates the Internet, cell phones, and personal music devices, too.

[Chan790]

1. Marking this for later.

I have a lot of thoughts on the subject as a writer and as a (auto-didactic) student of comparative literature. Alas running late for work already. (Yes, sadly...there is a day-job. Writing doesn't pay the rent.)

Briefly though, this is part of why I'm a deconstructionist and a literary relativist. What the author meant or intended-upon in his text is ultimately less important than the litany of interpretations of that text in imagination of the reader...it is the reader, not the author, who give meaning to the work in interpretation.

I am definitely with Derrida and not Foucault. What Bradbury meant is interesting, but ultimately unimportant. Sometimes as writers we are blind to what we're actually saying caught up in what we mean to say. Upton Sinclair remarked of The Jungle that he "aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Bradbury never intended for Fahrenheit 451 to be interpreted as a work upon censorship, and Orwell wrote Animal Farm as warning for his countrymen about getting cozy with Stalin. How much poorer literature would be today if those interpretations had taken hold?!

[MicaelS]

2. Youu statement reeks of preteniousness

...... why I'm a deconstructionist and a literary relativist. What the author meant or intended-upon in his text is ultimately less important than the litany of interpretations of that text in imagination of the reader...it is the reader, not the author, who give meaning to the work in interpretation.

What Bradbury meant is interesting, but ultimately unimportant.

This is a perfect example of why I dislike deconstructionism and literary relativism. Deconstructionists only care for their interpretation of works. So you think you know better than the person who wrote the work? If the reader fails to grasp the author's meaning, then that is the fault of the reader.

[JCMach1]

13. The ghost of Authorial Intent rises from the grave...

If I may borrow some T.S. Eliot

...Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow...


Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow...


Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

[jobycom]

6. Maybe yes, maybe no.

As a writer and historian (neither professionally), I'm interested in what the writer was trying to say as well as how people interpret a text. The writer's intent reveals a lot about the writer and his or her time, and how the story is interpreted (or misinterpreted) reveals a lot about the reader and the reader's time.

Olivia Newton John's song "I Love You" was often dedicated to lovers and spouses as a message of eternal devotion, but it was about an unrequited love as it was ending. It is significant that many people got the song wrong altogether, since the intent was in the lyrics.

I have a much longer lecture about context and understanding a text, in which I agree and disagree with you. :) But I too have a job to get back to.

[pinboy3niner]

3. Bradbury disagreeing with his readers' interpretations doesn't surprise me

Decades ago, I attended the screening of a film made up of several Bradbury short stories (all of which I'd read), followed by a Q & A with Bradbury himself. But hearing him discuss the meanings of his stories was a real disappointment. Bradbury's interpretations bore no resemblance to my own, and I couldn't understand how the guy who had created such wonderful stories could get it so wrong. :)

[jobycom]

7. He once walked out of a university symposium because students told him that his interpretation

of his own book was wrong. He reminds me of an old film about an actor who thought he was doing drama, but whose films were marketed as farce.

[pinboy3niner]

10. LOL!

His take on '451' is laughable. Regardless of how he imagines censorship originated, his novel clearly depicts the STATE as suppressing dissent.

Bradbury is a great writer. But I learned, long ago, not to trust his after-the-fact explanations of what he was thinking whlie writing.

[jobycom]

16. A lot of writers start off intending to write one type of story

and the story takes over and becomes something else. A good writer sticks with the new path, and lets the story develop naturally, instead of trying to force it into an original mold that maybe the writer instinctively knows isn't working. So I can see him starting one type of story, and not completely seeing how it changed as he wrote it.

[jmowreader]

27. Apparently that kind of thing isn't uncommon

An example from fiction (?) was in Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School, where the professor told "Thornton Melon" she was flunking him, in part, because the ghostwriter who did his Vonnegut paper didn't know anything about Vonnegut--and Thornton had hired Vonnegut to write the paper.

[meegbear]

4. Here's an article about that and some other books like it ...

6 Books Everyone (Including Your English Teacher) Got Wrong

[Fire Walk With Me]

9. Odd...I already knew about the mathematical tie-in of Alice in Wonderland.

[meegbear]

11. That one I didn't ...

I've heard about him telling it to a young girl, using her as the basis, but I always thought that he also taught Logic, and was using that by "turning it on it's head".

[jobycom]

12. That one's a little iffy.

He never claimed he wrote it for mathematical reasons. That was a later interpretation by some critics and scholars, alongside others who thought it was all political satire. I suspect there were elements of satire and elements of mathematical absurdity in it--it would be hard for him not to be influenced by his day job--but claiming those were the primary functions of the work were at odds with history.

Carroll, or Charles Dodgson (his real name), had written other works before, and continued writing afterward, and all of his work fell into the genre of "literary nonsense" which was emerging at his time. The idea for "Alice" came from a story he created for the children of his dean on a rowboat outing. The kids--one of them named Alice--begged him to write it down, and when he started and let others see it, they all encouraged him. Rather than being a careful allegory on mathematics, it was an organically developed series of tales based loosely on events, places, and people around him. He loved a good story, and that's the real explanation behind his work.

Dodgson is one of those figures about whom so little was preserved that future generations had to make stuff up. He's been labeled a pedaphile, a lunatic, a drug user, a political dissident, a grumpy old mathematician, all with little or no evidence to even suggest it. He wasn't helped by his family, who on his death read his diaries and cut out large chunks of them that they found embarrassing to themselves. So later scholars earned PhDs filling in the gaps with whatever they could invent.

[struggle4progress]

17. It's a fun read but seems factually unreliable to me: for example

the claim "Nietzsche .. refused to attend his sister's wedding because she was marrying a Nazi" is a bit strange, given that Nietzsche died pre-WWI, in 1900, while the Nazi party definitely originates post-WWI: Bernhard Förster was apparently a vicious anti-semite but moved to Paraguay in 1886 and committed suicide in 1889

[Curmudgeoness]

28. I really enjoyed that link. It makes me think about books I have read

and what I have thought about them. The Jungle was no surprise, I had always considered it a book intended to highlight the plight of workers. Some surprises though. Thanks.

[DebJ]

5. Interesting timing...I have the movie version coming to my

house today via Amazon. My husband's students are reading it and he wanted to take a look at the movie for maybe some short clips to show. I re-read it myself last year when it was part of our literacy curriculum, and was just amazed at the many different things he spoke of in the book that have come to pass, but were no where near in existence at the time he wrote.

[Fire Walk With Me]

8. A great adaptation, hope you enjoy it!

[hyphenate]

14. It was also a comment

on why ordinary people in Germany became the tools of the Nazis, when ordinarily, they would scoff if they were ever told that they would do those evil things.

[NuclearDem]

15. I thought it was pretty obvious that's what Bradbury meant...

Captain Beatty's speech was pretty clear...it was the people who started burning the books. The people allowed, in fact, encouraged the state to burn books for them. The state simply followed the will of the majority...

I don't understand why people can't grasp the fact that no matter who does it, censorship is just plain wrong. Doesn't matter if the state is burning books or if some idiot is running around ripping the pages out of books because he thinks it's offensive. It's all abhorrent...but Fahrenheit 451 showed how we need to nip the problem in the bulb before it goes too far.

I guess people just don't like being told that they're just as culpable for the state carrying out horrific acts, when they either encouraged or turned a deaf ear to the acts.

[dimbear]

18. Many authors have radical breaks in their thought.

Look at Count Tolstoy, for one, due to a religious conversion, or look at Bram Stoker or de Maupassant, in both cases due to syphilis.

I just think of Bradbury as having vanished from the earth about 1960, and that leaves me no difficulties with him.

[jobycom]

22. He was saying the same things shortly after it was published, though.

So it's not a break. He just wrote it for a different purpose than some see it.

[RandomThoughts]

19. He may not know what it means.

I doubt he knew that the opening paragraph of David Copperfield was about crying angels.

On a side note, what I have found is each 'item' has many pages of information in it, depending how deep you go, and how you choose to see it.

In other words, it shows that what a person writes especially when inspired, may not be completely about the writers ideas. And inspiration can be from many places, I think each person has to decide if it is of good or not.


I posted awhile ago, who is to blame or credit, the person that shows you the painting, the person that paints it, or the person in the painting. I think it is some combination of each. I usually try to remove writer bias when reading story, and hopefully, when possible, my bias also, although what filters you remove when looking at something is part of the person looking.



The Illustrated man shows me he 'sees' things, so he knows what I am talking about when saying there are many stories in images. To say he can define what a story means, goes against the meaning of his story Illustrated man.

On a side note, I don't agree with his view of that story either, I see that story differently, as it moves as one of his tattoos :D

Then again, his character in that story ran away when confronted with scary image or fear of death. I think that is not something to run from, since most of that is intimidation.

However I have the greatest respect and love for those authors that are able to sing and write beautiful songs and stories. And I think part of them shines through as part of a bigger whole, but some stories you have to filter out the writers a bit more then others.



In the movie scrooge, there is a statement that some spirits can no longer help people, to pay there debt, not sure if I believe that, but if it was true, it would be an interesting story, and if you share a beautiful song that comforts someone, or write a story that helps society, and it is inspired, might you be also freeing those in turmoil by allowing them to pay their debt by helping people? I think on that a bit, also why I posted that the 'untouchables' in India were not liked by class system, since I figure they were getting help from spiritual stuff since they were mostly more poor and shunned. Hence the name 'untouchable'

In my belief the help is not to pay a debt, but because knowledge of what is best is learned by some, or always has been known by those that help, dependent how you see it. So they try to help the poor, widowed, orphans, prisoners with ideas of compassion and kindness for all people, but I know there are many thoughts on that issue.

[DebJ]

20. Hubby connected "Kindle" and book-burning of Fahrenheit.

I thought that was an interesting thought. And more environmentally friendly........no fires needed, just lack of power, and poof! No more books...........

[KurtNYC]

21. he must have been very conflicted when he did

"Ray Bradbury Theater" and when television brought him his biggest audience.

Did he really get the temperature thing wrong (451 Celsius) or is that him playing with the whole 'dumbing down' of the culture thing?

[lazarus]

23. he got the temperature wrong, too

Just sayin'.

[InvisibleTouch]

24. "Writer's intent."

In my day I had some heated arguments over this sort of thing. The writer may have *meant* to say something in particular, but if he didn't actually write it that way, and others interpret it differently, it doesn't really matter what his intention was. If he didn't have the skill to convey what he really meant to say, then the readers must be forgiven for making their own interpretation, and that interpretation has to be acknowledged as valid.

BTW, I'm not disparaging Bradbury's skill as a writer, and I haven't read this particular book, so I'm speaking in general terms here. There's also lots of room for personal interpretation and reading-in of what each reader wants to see. Myself, I suspect that lots of these "classic" books that are supposed to be steeped in meaningful symbolism, were written by the authors with no such intention at all. They were just writing a good story. They might have been very surprised to hear some scholar in a future decade declare that a certain object in the book symbolizes a certain concept, or a certain character stands for a certain group or type of person, etc.

[Lyric]

25. As a writer myself who's taken many, many creative writing classes in college

I too have had this debate. It comes down to this: does a writer truly "own" the interpretation of his or her work? For example--let's say that T.S. Eliot comes back from the dead, and declares that his poem "The Hollow Men" is actually about scarecrows, and that everyone else who read it as a metaphor for the loss of spiritual purpose, nobility of spirit, etc. were flat-out wrong. Should we toss away a masterwork because the writer wants it to be about something that's much smaller than the interpretation that others give to it? Or do we say, "It doesn't matter what the author intended. What matters is how the larger audience perceives it. The author owns the words, but his or her readers own the experience of reading them."

I'm in the second camp. I believe that an author cannot "own" the experience of reading his works. In fact, I think the worst thing that an author can do is to try and limit that reading experience to an "approved" interpretation. It deadens the work, kills the mystery, and generally screws up the whole experience for the reader.

[InvisibleTouch]

26. In the case of your example I would say...

...that if Eliot had meant his poem to be about scarecrows and had wanted to be *sure* that others read it that way, he should have written it in such a way that this was unmistakable. Otherwise he can't complain that the reader may have taken it differently.

It's also interesting to me how people take different stories to heart, reading into them a deep meaning that the author may never have imagined. I've certainly done that - found great personal significance in things that were written perhaps a bit slapdash as "shallow pop culture," and yet something about it resonated with me and uplifted my life. If that writer later came to me and said, "You know, I was just making a quick buck," that would be irrelevant to me. I know what it meant *to me.* And as you point out, the writer doesn't and cannot own my experience - just like in my own writing I can't own a reader's experience. I'd hope, though, to have enough skill to convey the basic meaning and the emotion that I'm trying to get across, to paint the picture in words that I want the reader to see, and forge some connection to the story and the characters.

[dimbear]

29. It would be more amusing to ask Emily Dickinson just what she meant by

a splendid fellow in the grass.