i wonder if it’s readable after applying a cutting torch.
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I have been thinking about your statement all week.
Which Bradbury?
Bradbury as a young man when he wrote it? When he was struggling to feed his family?
Or the elderly Bradbury who was the the same curmudgeon amplified?
I can’t say, even though I met and spoke with him a few times. What I can write is that I am sure that the young man was different than middle aged man, and he was different that the elderly man- except when he was reading from his works. Shortly before his death I saw him do a reading. He was wheeled in and sat behind a table. I was saddened at first, but as he read he became younger and younger. As he neared the end, his energy waned and returned to his actual age, but for a brief time he was a much younger man.
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Gee, I did not expect to be so provocative. It just struck me as exactly the sort of thing you’d find in the book’s dystopian world. “Look at this, and see how pretty it is when I move a flame over it! Read it? Oh, heavens no, it’s not for reading, nobody reads anymore; let’s look at more of my pretty things instead!”
But your comment does remind me that despite ranting about the awfulness of the Internet in his later years, at the time of its release Bradbury looked favorably on the 1984 interactive fiction “sequel” that someone else wrote. (I can’t seem to find the quote at the moment.)
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I don’t think anyone doubts that. Obviously this is meant to be taken as a symbol… but a symbol still needs to have some meaning. To use the book as an example, the protagonist’s job is to burn books. Okay, fair. This is all dressed up in a mockery of a fire department though, complete with firehoses that spew actual fire. On a literal level, this is all very silly. There’s no good, logical reason why bookburners should behave like firefighters. But it works on a symbolic level because there’s a certain amount of twisted irony to the concept of firefighters burning down houses that helps immediately set this up as a world that’s a bit missed up, one where the priorities are backwards. It also works because they are trying to fight a fire, it’s just not a literal one, but rather the spread of controversial ideas. Etc, etc, many other different interpretations I’m sure.
Running a lighter over the pages to make them readable… well there’s a irony there, but I don’t see what purpose it serves. Or… any other way this helps reinforce the ideas, themes, settings, or characters of the work. So far as I can tell they’re doing it because it’s a neat trick they can do. So… it’s a gimmick.
Given that my dwelling is NOT covered in a fireproof plastic coating that makes accidental fires impossible, I’m gonna pass on this one.
Also, I’m a little hesitant of going back to this book at all. I love Bradbury, and I loved this book when I first read it, but I’m afraid if I read it in this day and age, it’s going to feel more like an internet troll’s overblown example as to why we shouldn’t try to shut down hate speech. I’m actually really surprised that this book hasn’t been co-opted yet, except for the fact that Nazis are probably turned off from the book because it depicts burning of books as a bad thing.
Maybe it’s bad art. but it’s art and you aren’t require to understand or agree with the artist’s intentions.
I interpret the work as how the meaning of books have changed to our now digital society. And the idea of burning of books is now only a metaphor and may eventually become meaningless. But when Fahrenheit 451 was written, burning of books was something done in a very real way.
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