Fahrenheit 451: An Increasingly Relevant Challenge

Cover of the 1991 edition.

I am against censorship.  I have felt this way for as long as I have been informed enough to have an opinion on the matter, and this sentiment has only solidified with the passage of time.  In addition to having reservations about censoring any ideas, I also believe it to be pointless.  When I was a college student I took a class in Public Speaking and had the assignment to participate in a debate about censorship, I of course was on the side against it as I could not possibly have effectively argued in favor of the issue.

As part of my presentation, I argued that one reason censorship is wrong is that it unjustly represses the work of various artists who merely have an idea that they want to share with others.  I expressed this sentiment in part by reciting a work by the Irish poet William Butler (W.B.) Yeats called “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” which reads as follows:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

After reciting this poem, I apologized to the class and told them that I now believed that what I had recited was inappropriate and tore up the piece of paper on which I had written the poem.  After a pause for effect, I told the class that I knew that my attempt at censorship had only inspired them to wonder why I would say that about the poem I had earlier recited and that they now had a curiosity, if not outright desire, to remember the poem or to find and read it for themselves.  I believed then, and still do today, that this was an effective illustration of the pointless nature of censorship.

Rather than tearing up the paper on which I had written the poem, I had originally thought of burning it.  I thought of this for two reasons, the first was historic in nature as the image of book burnings is indelibly linked with the practice of censorship.  I decided against burning the paper because I thought that could be a safety hazard in a classroom, distract from my presentation, and it lacked the dramatic tearing sound of the method I ended up using.  The other reason I initially wanted to burn the paper was as a direct reference to one of my favorite books, “Fahrenheit 451” by the American writer Ray Bradbury.

The novel was published in 1953, well into the period of Anti-Communist hysteria known as McCarthyism in the United States.  Similarly to Arthur Miller and his classic play “The Crucible”, Bradbury drew inspiration from that widespread mania.  A lifelong lover of books and learning, who largely educated himself in public libraries as a boy, Ray Bradbury also took inspiration from the images of Nazi bookburnings that horrified him as a teenager and the devastating tragedy of Stalin’s “Great Purge” in the Soviet Union.  Fearing similar actions in his own country, Ray Bradbury wrote what many consider his magnum opus about a world where books are banned and firemen are no longer put out fires.

The novel takes place in a distant future in an unspecified city of the United States.  The novel’s protagonist is a man named Guy Montag who works as a fireman.  In the world of the novel, buildings have been made out of flame retardant material for a long time and the role of firemen has become that of the hammer in the toolbox of the censors.  The title of the novel is given as the temperature at which books burn, the task appointed to Montag and his colleagues.

The story of “Fahrenheit 451” is of Guy Montag’s journey from a participant in the oppressive system, to someone curious about one of the dangers to it, and finally an opponent of that system.  To me, the system in this case is censorship.  There are a couple of major catalysts that take Montag from start to finish in this process.  The first one is a series of conversations that Montag has with a freethinking seventeen-year-old girl named Clarise McClellan, one of his new neighbors.  These conversations, and what they inspire in Montag, are best summed up by two questions that Clarise poses to him.

When she learns of Montag’s profession, she asks “Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?”  This simple question is enough to make Montag question his job and what it has become.  It also explains the type of person that Clarise McClellan is by informing us that she is not blissfully entangled in the mind-numbing entertainment that society heaps onto the masses in order to placate them while thinking for herself and being aware of the past.

The other question she asks Montag is simply, “are you happy?”  A simple and direct question that initially causes Montag to answer that of course he is, but wrenches him inside as he thinks on it and is forced to acknowledge that the true answer is much more complicated than he initially thought.

The other event occurs when Montag and his crew are called to a house to do their despicable job of destroying a house whose owner has committed the heinous crime of keeping books.  When they arrive, they are surprised to find the owner at home.  This is unusual as typically the police arrive before the firemen to remove the owner, leaving the firemen to do their work unopposed.

On this occasion the homeowner, an old woman, is at home and the following events are described as such:

They crashed the front door and grabbed at a woman, though she was not running, she was not trying to escape. She was only standing, weaving from side to side, her eyes fixed upon a nothingness in the wall as if they had struck her a terrible blow upon the head.  Her tongue was moving in her mouth, and her eyes seemed to be trying to remember something, and then they remembered and her tongue moved again:"Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out."

In what will be her final words, the woman quotes the Anglican Bishop Hugh Latimer speaking to his friend and colleague Nicholas Ridley, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, before they were burned at the stake as heretics during the horrific persecution of non-Catholics that characterized the reign of Mary Tudor, also known as “Bloody Mary”.

After speaking these words, the woman strikes a match and sets the kerosene-soaked home ablaze herself without moving, choosing to perish with her beloved books.  Montag can’t help but think, as anyone would in this situation, what would inspire someone to do that.

These events lead Montag to start reading a few books that he has smuggled out of homes that he has helped to destroy.  When he is eventually given up to the authorities by his wife and some of her media-obsessed friends, he is able to elude capture and join up with a small group of people who have chosen exile from society in order to preserve the precious works of literature that have been banned.

Montag learns that the exiles have figured out how to unlock photographic memory and meets individuals who have memorized partial or entire works.  Montag learns that he himself can recall much of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes.  While with this group of exiles, a looming war finally occurs, and abruptly ends, when a group of bombers destroy the city with nuclear weapons.  After surviving the shockwave, Montag and the other exiles walk toward the city to begin the process of rebuilding.

I feel that the true substance of the novel revolves around Montag and three other chief characters that embody different levels of commitment to the society of the novel and its embracing of censorship.

Faber

Not long after Montag begins reading books, he realizes he needs help understanding them.  He remembers a man that he has heard of named Faber who might be able to help him.  It turns out that Faber was an English Professor before books, and effectively education, were banned.  Faber is the embodiment of someone who has never been on board with censorship, but who also recognizes that there is not much he can do to change what he refers to as the “terrible tyranny of the majority”.

His implied involvement with the exiles, and the professor in him emphatically coming out when he has a willing person coming to him to actually learn, makes him an integral part of the story.  Through his discussion with Montag, he also becomes the primary means for Mr. Bradbury to express his own views about the value of education and knowledge, as well as the greatness of books.  Mr. Bradbury, through Faber, excellently states the latter point thusly.  “The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.”

In the course of his conversation with Montag, Faber puts in a lot of plugs for knowledge and books.  Some of the main points that he makes are that the quest for truth and knowledge doesn’t need to be limited to books.  Faber tells Montag to “take it where you can find it”, and cites phonograph records, movies, friends, nature, and one’s self as other sources for the “infinite detail and awareness” needed to acquire the aforementioned truth and knowledge.

Faber also counsels Montag, and by extension all of us, to not be afraid of making mistakes and allowing them to make us stronger through the process of us being corrected and refined by them.  Possibly most importantly, after Captain Beatty has had his own conversation with Montag where he espouses the values of censorship, Faber tells Montag, through an earpiece he has given to him:

All right, he's had his say. You must take it in. I'll say my say, too, in the next few hours. And you'll take it in. And you'll try to judge them and make your decision as to which way to jump, or fall. But I want it to be your decision, not mine, and not the Captain's. But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority.  [Emphasis added]

I don’t recall the novel explaining how Faber has been able to stay alive and off the radar of the depicted society.  But, I believe that he represents the resistance that always accompanies oppressive regimes and eventually overcomes or defeats them.

Captain Beatty

When I was a post-graduate student earning my Master’s Degree in Professional Communications I learned about a theory called the Elaboration Likelihood Method (ELM).  The ELM basically states that an individual or group is more likely to favorably process persuasive messages they receive if they already agree with them, and be dismissive of similar messages with which they don’t initially agree.

Guy Montag becomes sick in the wake of the burning of the old woman’s house.  While recovering at home, Montag is visited by his Fire Chief, Captain Beatty.  The two of them have a conversation in a manner that, similar to his earlier mentioned one with Faber, defines Beatty’s character and establishes him as a certain type of person when it comes to censorship.

Beatty is interesting to me in this respect because he admits to Montag that he was once an avid reader.  He downplays this by saying that he “had to read a few” books in the past to “know what [he] was about”.  But, as Beatty continues on it becomes apparent that he is one of the people who, when it comes to the ELM, likely went into reading books with the preconceived notion that they were an affront to society and was unlikely to change that opinion.

Captain Beatty further derides books by opining that they:

…say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They're about nonexistent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction. And if they're non- fiction, it's worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another's gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost.

He further praises the society in which he lives by claiming that the censorship removes conflict by suppressing potentially derisive ideas that can result in conflict.  Beatty himself summarizes this view by stating:

You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war.

There is an account in The Book of Mormon of a great war where one side is invaded by another.  The leaders of the invaders select people who used to be part of the other side, and formerly shared their faith, to lead the invading armies because they know that they will be the most effective leaders due to their hatred of those they are invading.  Captain Beatty, who clearly had shown interest in the past but was likely never a “believer”, demonstrates this by having exposure to books and choosing to become their vicious enemy.

Beatty also attempts to flaunt his supposed knowledge at different points in conversations with Montag by quoting various works in an impressive-sounding way.  To an informed reader, Beatty instead displays a malicious ignorance by either quoting material out of context or outrightly misquoting it (“All’s well that is well in the end”).  Beatty demonstrates that there is no enemy more dangerous than a jilted former follower or adherent.

Guy Montag

Montag begins the story as someone, like Beatty, who is tasked with destroying books but has a curiosity about them.  This makes me remember the point I made in my college presentation about censorship where I knew that the students would want to read that poem after I claimed that it was inappropriate and destroyed it.  Montag is obviously more open minded than his boss, because he starts reading books but rather than casting them aside when he can’t completely understand them, he seeks out someone who can help him understand them.  He considers both sides of the issue, and makes his own decision.

This decision is shown in a subtle, yet dramatic, way when Montag’s wife has some friends over to watch mindless programs.  Montag is not interested in this entertainment and turns it off in an attempt to engage in a meaningful conversation with his wife and her guests.  Montag is no doubt attempting to engage in the kind of challenging and meaningful activity that he enjoyed with Clarise McClellan (who at this point has died after being hit by a car).  Appalled at the lack of anything resembling substance that comes from his attempts at conversation, he recites a poem that elicits an emotional response from one of the guests.  This act effectively labels him as a traitor to society.

The knowledge of Montag’s “treachery” is revealed to him when he and his colleagues respond to a call at Montag’s own home.  Montag is ordered to destroy his house and does so, piece by piece.  What would have happened after that in ordinary circumstances is unknown as Beatty discovers the earpiece Faber gave to Montag and threatens to bring down Montag’s mentor.  Montag responds to the threats and taunting by incinerating Captain Beatty with a flamethrower.

Montag demonstrates that he is now a full-on opponent of the oppressive society by eluding capture and following Faber’s council to meet up with a group of exiles from that society who pass on true knowledge and culture to their own posterity while awaiting the inevitable collapse and/or destruction of the oppressive society ready to rebuild it.

Mildred

Guy Montag is married to a woman named Mildred who is the embodiment of someone who has emphatically accepted and bought into the society of the novel, with its characteristic censorship.  When we first meet her it is hard to believe that she has ever had a thought in her head that wasn’t put there by the mind-numbing entertainment that radiates from the Parlor Wall of her home.

Mildred barely seems to even be aware that she is married as she obsesses over what comes to her through the Parlor Walls.  While Montag is sick Mildred only passively cares for him as she prefers to be immersed in the sounds and images provided by the screens throughout her home.  Montag calls her out on this indifference to reality when, during an argument where she tells him “Let me alone” he answers:

Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

Interestingly, the only time in the novel that Mildred shows any kind of initiative or interest in anything beyond the Parlor Walls is when she and her friends, upset over Montag switching off the walls in an attempt to have a meaningful conversation, report him to the authorities.  When Montag and his colleagues arrive to destroy her home, Mildred doesn’t even acknowledge her husband’s arrival and is more distraught over losing her “Parlor Family” than her home or marriage.

She is an embodiment of what can happen when someone checks out of reality in favor of a fabricated one.  When someone cares more about what the Kardashians or some “Real Housewives” are up to than what is happening with their own family or community.

Warnings

“Fahrenheit 451 is often spoken of as being a warning to the world of the dangers of censorship and the oppression of ideas.  Different aspects of this warning have stood out at different times since its arrival in 1953.  There have been a few aspects of this story that have been standing out to me lately.  One of which is what appears to be the at least somewhat fulfillment of Ray Bradbury’s concern that mass media was in his time, and even more so now as far as I can tell, reducing interest in reading literature.

There is a moment in the popular TV comedy series “Parks and Recreation” where a teenage girl complains about receiving an unsolicited package in the presence of friends that contains novels by Virginia Woolfe.  She is appalled at receiving this and expresses her alarm by stating “Now Miley and Hailey know I like to read!  What if they tell Evan?!”  Accepting that hyperbole is an integral part of comedy, the sentiment expressed here still concerns me as it seems that youth are borderline obsessed with mindless television programs and movies, or Internet videos, and just about any kind of media other than literature.

The downward trajectory in quality of mass media, and a growing culture obsessed with immediate gratification reminds me of something that Captain Beatty says to Guy Montag during their initial conversation when he is describing the culture in which they live:

School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?

This philosophy is largely embodied by the Parlor Walls mentioned earlier.  These are a series of TV screens that cover entire walls of homes in the novel, with the Parlor of the Montag’s home being emphasized.  Myself and many other admirers of the novel couldn’t help but think of the “Parlor Walls” when flatscreen TVs gained popularity and as they continue to increase in size. 

Captain Beatty also talks about media being watered down to accommodate short attention spans.  I see the embodiment of this in the popularity of TikTok and similar kinds of media platforms where users hardly even have to browse but are just continually given brief videos devoid of substance, that are often experienced on portable “Parlor Walls” that conveniently fit inside clothing pockets.

Books in the world of “Fahrenheit 451” are condemned as sources of confusing or depressing thoughts that needlessly complicate people’s lives.  Essentially, anything with the potential to offend anyone or challenge them is forbidden.  As an American, I see the disconcerting level of polarization in my country and the efforts of many within my country to suppress ideas, especially in book form, that aren’t the same as what they profess to believe.  Oppressive political correctness especially leads to the aforementioned watering down.

These practices are particularly appalling because, going back to Montag’s confrontation with Mildred, we need to be really bothered once in a while.  Being really bothered about things forces us to confront ourselves and what we believe.  Being bothered by things makes us ask ourselves why they bother us and challenges us to see another point of view and weigh it against our own.  This is necessary to prevent a very dangerous banality which it seems for which some people in the world are alarmingly striving.

There is a moment in “Fahrenheit 451” where Guy Montag is talking to one of the Exiles who tells him:

There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ: every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we'll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.

The Exiles proclaim that their purpose is to remember.  They are remembering what humanity has learned and achieved, things that they have learned because those who experienced that learning and achieving took the time to document it.  One of the chief messages of “Fahrenheit 451” is that we have access to the accumulated knowledge of those who went before us, but that it is useless if we don’t take the time to read it, learn from it, and do our best to apply those lessons as we strive to improve on the achievements of our ancestors while also documenting our own.

“Fahrenheit 451” is one of my favorite books because it not only tells a compelling story, but gives a very strong challenge to its readers.  I will do my best to accept and complete that challenge, and I hope that civilization as a whole will choose to do the same.