Now this is an interesting article in LA Weekly. Ray Bradbury revisionism from Bradbury himself.
Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.
This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.
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.
Except that, in fact, he does not show television doing that in the story. He shows professional law enforcement agents going around destroying books to prevent people from reading them. In the first place, such agents would not be needed if interest in reading had been destroyed; and in the second place, neither television as a medium nor television networks as organizations can reasonably be characterized as having book burning as an attached function. If you add that kind of repressive organization to television, then you have reenvisioned it as an authoritarian or even totalitarian regime dominating a whole society—and with that redefinition, your theme has become the evils of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
If I wanted to write about the destructiveness of television, I wouldn’t have squads of book burners going out; I would have television programs being so fascinating that everyone who watched became hopelessly addicted and lost all interest in other activities such as reading.
Indeed, some excellent points. I think Bradbury sees TV and the internet as both destroying reading, despite the massive exposure he received from TV, and that any technology has its dark and good sides. But as a far the state… well, that;s another story.
And don’t we have those kinds of TV programs now? American Idol, anyone? Or dare I say, Lost? Yet people still read books.