I’ll be honest, I’ve never read Farenheit 451. It’s a classic, I know, but I’ve never read it. That’s not the reason I’m writing about it. Recently, Ray Bradbury talked to a reporter about his famous novel and said that it wasn’t about censorship as many of you who’ve read it probably heard from professors or inferred on your own. Surprisingly enough it is “a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.” He explains,
” ‘Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,’ Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.”
Further,
“He says the culpritin Fahrenheit 451 is not the state — it is the people. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, in which the government uses television screens to indoctrinate citizens, Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate. In the book, Bradbury refers to televisions as “walls” and its actors as “family,” a truth evident to anyone who has heard a recap of network shows in which a fan refers to the characters by first name, as if they were relatives or friends.”
Another interesting thing I found in that article is a link to his homepage which has video clips of him talking about different subjects. I watched a couple of them just because I was interested and he related a story of how he was walking down the street, a deserted street, with a friend when a cop pulled up and asked what he and his friend were doing. The cop thought they were up to no good, but they had just gotten out of a restaurant. Anyway, something happened between Bradbury and that cop (I should remember it but I don’t – so go watch a few of those movies) that spured him later to write Farenheit 451.
So, next time you get assigned this book in class, think about what your professor or classmates are telling you and what Ray Bradbury has said about his book.
