Making order out of chaos

Title: Fahrenheit 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Pages: 190 (incl. afterword and interview)
ISBN: 0-345-34296-8
Price: $7.99 (CDN)

When I first read Fahrenheit 451, I was in grade nine, and though I liked it, I was too young and inexperienced a reader (and person) to get much more than the basics of the plot from it. When I tried again in university, I abandoned the protagonist, Guy Montag, and his wife, Mildred, in their parlour, hashing it out over the books Guy had been secreting away in the duct work. Finally, in October of last year, while visiting with my grandparents in Stratford, Ontario, I saw a copy of the 50th anniversary paperback of Fahrenheit 451 sitting on the shelf in Fanfare Books and I bought it (my previous copy was lost in one of my many moves all over Ontario) and tried reading it again.

The third time was the charm; this time, I really read it. I didn’t just skim it, I didn’t turn the pages and let osmosis do the rest, I really read it. I really thought about what I was reading, and the more attention I paid to the words and ideas, the more I felt like I was seeing pieces of our present and glimpses of our future.

This books gave me the chills.

The plot is still more or less as I remembered it from grade nine: Guy Montag is a Fireman, and his job is to start fires. He burns books that have been banned, because their contents make people think, and that makes them unhappy. It isn’t until he meets Clarisse McClellan, a young girl considered crazy because she enjoys thinking and imagining, that Montag begins to question the world he lives in, but when he does, his world falls apart pretty quickly.

As the story moves forward, as I met all  the characters and really listened to what they were saying and thinking, I kept being surprised by the parts that were so much like our own world. Consider this passage from the book:

Montag’s wife has overdosed on sleeping pills, and Montag has called in help to rescue and revive her. Two machines are brought in by two operators: one to pump her stomach clean, the other to replace her pill-saturated blood with clean blood.

The operator stood smoking a cigarette…”Got to clean ‘em out both ways,” said the operator, standing over the silent woman. “No use getting the stomach if you don’t clean the blood. Leave that stuff in the blood and the blood hits the brain like a mallet, bang, a couple thousand times and the brain just gives up, just quits.”

“Stop it!” said Montag.

“I was just sayin’,” said the operator.

“Are you done?” said Montag.

…”We’re done.” His anger did not even touch them. They stood with the cigarette smoke curling around their noses and into their eyes without making them blink or squint.

“That’s fifty bucks.”

…”Neither of you is an M.D. Why didn’t they send an M.D. from Emergency?”

“Hell,…you don’t need an M.D., case like this, all you need is two handymen, clean up the problem in half an hour.”

It’s as if an overdose is no more problematic than a leaf-clogged gutter. Just clean it up, and bob’s yer uncle. No need for a doctor, or personalized attention at all. Just send in a couple of guys with a machine.

While I sincerely hope that our health care system will never get to this point, I can relate to the impersonal treatment that Montag’s wife receives. I know not all doctors are like that: bored, indifferent, and kind of rude – but too many of them are. I’ve had appointments with doctors who spent the entire appointment staring at a laptop and barely even glanced at me. I would have bet money that if you’d put me in a line-up five minutes later, they wouldn’t have been able to pick me out.

This passage about schooling in Montag’s world (as spoken by his boss, Beatty) caught my attention too:

“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected…Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright’, and did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.”

Sounds like our modern ideas about social promotion to me. And given that classes are getting larger and that teachers have very little authority over their students, I could see there being a proposal to shorten the school day, lighten the homework requirements, and forego discipline altogether – and I could see that proposal getting some serious consideration, too. I know, and have known, teachers – even English teachers – who have overlooked poor spelling and grammar because “the ideas were good”. They didn’t want to fail a student and deal with angry parents, hurt feelings, or the possibility of having what little authority they do have undermined by an unsupportive administration who passes the kid anyway. I could talk for pages and pages about the bullying epidemic going on in our schools today – and it’s not just the “bright boy” who is being bullied either, there’s a lot of kids who get tormented everyday by their so-called peers for a lot of different reasons, or no reason at all.

And Beatty says this to Montag in regard to books:

“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right?…Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book…Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information…And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”

We still – still! – ban books because the subject matter is upsetting in some way; because the book might bring to light or trigger our less than savoury characteristics and beliefs:  racism, homophobia, cruelty, murder, greed, corruption, religious intolerance, cowardice, rudeness, selfishness, and any number of other flaws. We seem to prefer that the uncomfortable bits of books be taken out, or cleaned up and sanitized. We would rather speak incomprehensible, ‘politically correct’ gibberish to each other than speak plainly, because we don’t want to risk upsetting anyone. We’d rather ban a book (or burn it) than explain it or learn from it.

Montag and Beatty, their observations and explanations, the similarities of their world to mine…this book raises so many questions for me! It makes me wonder, is Ray Bradbury right – are there too many machines now? Are we in the process of building Montag’s world for ourselves? Is our technology helping us, or holding us back?  Are we getting further away from each other despite all the technology that is supposed to make it simpler to come together? Have we developed too many ways for us to escape real life and forget how to be truly human? Are there too many false things to lose ourselves in? Are we going through life with our eyes shut? Do we ever really see anything, or are we just taking a quick glance at things because that’s what everyone else is doing? Are we becoming more stupid, more insipid, more greedy and entitled and remorseless?

Some days, the pessimistic and melancholy days, I think we are up the creek as a species and I simply assume that this vision of ourselves will one day be a reality. Other days I feel hopeful that we’ll be OK, that’ll we’ll stop before it’s too late to take it back, and that we’ll avoid forcing ourselves to live in Montag’s world. But, most days, I wait to see what happens, and I try to keep from becoming part of the problems we have, I try to avoid the things, and behaviour, and stupidities that could lead us to Montag’s world.

I don’t always succeed in this, but I always try.

Next in the Tortured Breakfast Food series, I give you…burnt toast.

Butter *is* bad for burns, but what about apricot jam? Is that bad?

I actually like my toast a little burnt; it tastes crispier, and the butter and jam are less likely to make the bread soggy.

I recently read an article about two parents who complained that Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved was of no value in the curriculum, and they wanted it – along with Waterland by Grahame Smith – banned. Their complaints centre around the sex, violence and crude language in Beloved,  and that the novel has a Lexile score of 870 (apparently, if a book is simple to read, it must not be very educational or mature – I have no doubt that the authors of  Brave New World, The Hunt For Red October,  To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Sound and the Fury – to name a few – would agree. They all have the same Lexile score as Beloved).

Protests like this never fail to sadden me. I cannot wrap my head around the idea of banning books for the supposed audacity of showing all facets of human life and behaviour – as though not reading about the bad parts of ourselves will somehow insulate us from those bad parts in real life. It astonishes me that we are so eager to ensure that kids, even the college bound ones, never encounter anything bad or upsetting.

I was thinking (and fuming) over this whole book banning nonsense last night as I was getting ready to sleep. I loaded up my toothbrush with some Colgate and grabbed the copy of Fahrenheit 451 ( amusingly, this Bradbury classic has a Lexile rating of 451), from the toilet tank, and opened it to a random page (though now, it hardly feels random at all).

This is what I read (Faber to Guy Montag):

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless…”

A little further on, Guy and Faber have the following exchange:

 “That’s the good part of dying; when you’ve nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.”
“There, you’ve said an interesting thing,” laughed Faber, “without having read it!”
“Are things like that in books? But it came off the top of my mind!”
“All the better. You didn’t fancy it up for me or anyone, even yourself.”

Faber hits it right on the head.

I think this is why people hate and fear books like Beloved, and all the other books they ban; these books show us as we really are. A good book doesn’t “fancy up” human behaviour or thought, it shows it, warts and all. As humans, we are capable of acts of great kindness, empathy, sympathy, bravery and outright heroism. But, we are also capable of being miserable, selfish, petty, murderous and cowardly – and these traits, these bad things about ourselves, about us a species, are mixed in with the good and finer things about us, and they cannot, and should not, be separated.

It is my belief that when we ban books, we are trying to cast out the worst parts of ourselves, and it’s a strange and wasted effort. I don’t suggest we fully embrace the darker aspects of ourselves by murdering and stealing with wild abandon, but I do think that when we try to deny these parts of our human nature via book banning, we’re just giving into another bad thing within ourselves: we’re refusing to learn anything about what it means to be human, we’re being stubborn and denying that the bad things depicted in books often come from the good lives we endeavour to lead.

Beloved, for example, is based on a true story, and I feel that whatever embellishments or liberties Tony Morrison might have made or taken with the actual story, her telling is a window into that first story, a piece of our history – actual, emotional, and spiritual – demanding to be seen and heard. I’ll never have to go through the things that Sethe goes through. I’ll never flee slavery with my children, and I’ll never be driven by despair and fear to kill my own child rather than see her taken back into slavery. But through Tony Morrison’s words, I can read about it. And because she writes so well, because her writing is so accessible, I can feel it – the anger and fear that might drive a mother to keep her child out of the hands of slave owners, anger toward the very foundations of thought that allowed slavery to happen in the first place, the way in which such a life and desperate act must alter the mind and degrade the soul; how open it leaves a person to being haunted – actually or mentally – by their deeds.

When I read the book for the first time in university, these were some of the thoughts I had: the character of Sethe was driven to terrible things by her circumstances. I believe that she is essentially a good person, an innocent person who was stripped of her rights and freedom as a human being, and in being denied the same rights as her “masters”, she gave her child the only freedom she could provide, in the only way she could think of in that moment. Do I agree with her actions? Hard to say from the safety and freedom of the 21st century. But whether I agree with her actions or not isn’t the only point of the story. Do I feel for her? Do I sympathize and empathize, and wish that I could reach through the pages and rescue her? Did the story make me think about the darker moments of our history? Did it make me examine my own beliefs, and poke around in the deep and dusty corners of myself rather than ignoring them? Yes. Very much so; and that is the point of reading any good book.

Books should not be banned on the basis of being difficult, or because of the awful and uncomfortable truths they may contain. Books are about us, about our lives, about our history, about how high we can rise, and how far we can fall. We need to read these things, we need the experience of being human in all circumstances – and especially those which we are unlikely to encounter. We need to think critically while we imagine ourselves in the character’s shoes. Books are a safe way to experience everything, they are a great way to learn about ourselves and others. The experiences we read about may even better prepare us for having to go through them ourselves.

We must all be allowed to read without restrictions so that we can develop emotionally, morally and creatively. These are worthy goals that reading can help us accomplish.

This is what books are for. This is why we cannot ban them.