Ray Bradbury has given a disappointing speech in which he claims that his inspirational novel Fahrenheit 451 has nothing to do with censorship — as has long been held. Bradbury says that the book was intended as a jeremiad against television.
Fahrenheit 451 was seminal for me, the book that turned me into a believer in free speech, a cause I've devoted my life to. It's pretty heart-breaking to hear Bradbury repudiate the political subtext of the book.
On the other hand, I've had my own books subjected to critical scrutiny in which critics pointed out symbolisms and subtexts that I wasn't aware of when I was writing. These critics make good points, though, and I can't deny them with a straight face — I think that there's a lot going on while writers write, and we're not always entirely conscious of all of it.
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.
"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.
(via Monochrom)
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