If classics are the books that we read during the vague years of our secondary education and leave behind as soon as the mortarboard tassels brush our shoulders, then they are no different from the broken hearts and neglected hobbies of adolescent development. They are in the same category as the textbooks we search for on secondhand websites and store "just for now" in our parents' basements until the boxes are slowly devested upon us over a series of holiday celebrations. Perhaps such educational detritus holds bearing on the adult artifact, like the bristles of a paint brush left behind on the canvas it helped to produce, or perhaps it is just the noise in the background as we are crafted into fully grown humans. Of course, those whose jobs hinge on the genuine impact of education hope for a different outcome.
Did we even read what was assigned to us? Or was that the week of a game or a show or an illness, or just a regular month of the school year in which the books were simply not going to be read? No reason other than that the cover looked obscenely boring and the moon wasn't in the right phase. Or perhaps it was the deluge of information, so much that our brains revolted against the introduction of anything new. I can recall at least one undergraduate literature course that involved about seventeen assigned texts, of which I read maybe half.
I, for my part, cannot sit here and claim linguistic superiority based on an ironic romance with crumbling tomes. I have a tradition of summoning a sense of disgust for literary slogging through said dusty paperbacks, as they (amusingly) kept me from the novels of my choice. Oh, I am a "reader," alright! But maybe not in the marketable sense. Before the trope of the manic pixie dream girl, there I was, biking to the library every three days in the summer, carrying a red backpack bulging with paperbacks. Nothing romantic about the picture, my friends. Merely a girl and her method of entertainment, escape, education, engagement, and any other "e" word that you can produce. The classics, for the most part, struck me as a necessary evil. Some classics are such because they are representative of their origin-they unfold the traditions and contemplations of their time. To achieve this ambition, they were unfortunately required to sacrifice a few accoutrements that I deemed essential, brevity and liveliness among them.
But then, one is struck by the likes of Fahrenheit 451. The fire-spewing hoses, weaving salamander vehicles, and 6-legged canine assassin robots-the stuff of a high school boy's fever dream. The gentle romance between a man locked in a derelict marriage and the books he recovers from the turbulent flames of his own creation. Clarisse, the seventeen-year-old beating heart at the center of the story. Ray Bradbury achieved what C.S. Lewis lauds in his treatise on writing for children: we get the sense that he wrote the sort of story he would have liked to read as a child, and still enjoyed reading into his adulthood. He told a story, in all of its simplicity, with interesting characters and an engaging plot. Bradbury did what is so rare in the fiction of new and old. This novel teaches readers a small part of what it means to be a watchdog for learning, creativity, independent thought, and the preservation of history, but in doing so, he does not neglect the form. If there is an argument to be made about the validity of creative work-specifically that of the literary persuasion-that argument is often severely undermined by shoddiness within its own mode of communication!
Perhaps it is cliché to manifest an obsession with a book affirmed as a work of "especial magnitude." But I've never made a high ground out of being intentionally unique. I do, however, stand on the authority of lists:
Should you read Fahrenheit 451?
1. "How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know that refracted your own light to you"(8)?
Character. From the stilted maturation of Guy to the indiscreet thoughtfulness of Clarisse, the characters are shockingly human. Their motives are not always clear, and the reader will not see the logical underpinning of every action. Bradbury will not be elected to over-explicate himself. For better or for worse, their frustrating convolution tosses ourselves back into our faces. Beatty, a masterful villain, inundates us all with the gaslit manipulation of an expert fireman. Do we feel his false affection for his underlings? Do we bow at his hefty literary arguments? Then he has been shaped into our worst enemy. And if Clarisse is the heart of the novel, then Faber is the stalwart cricket. He becomes a conscience for Guy, in all of their simultaneous imperfections, as he rises to life after decades of dormancy.
2. "Someone somewhere will give me back the old face and the old hands the way they were. Even the smile, he thought, the old burnt-in smile, that's gone" (74).
Plot. When Fitzgerald set out to compose The Great Gatsby, he wanted the work to be clean and simple, to write a story with only the most essential elements. Bradbury conquered this form of writing, leaving not an unnecessary plot point or expository explanation in the crevices of any chapter. The impact of this clarity and modesty of prose is greater than a novel twice its size with half a dozen extra characters battling their inner voices. Perhaps it feels bare to those of us who are used to the unabridged content dumped on us by the entertainment industry, but it is a rare author who knows when there is just enough, when to leave the consumer alone and let him digest what little he can handle at once.
3. "So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life" (79).
Theme. Ray Bradbury loves to burn. He thrills to see the provocative flames of a destructive fire spread across his cautionary dystopian tales. Just as in his short story "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains," when the blaze creeps up the stairs to devour Picassos, a nursery, and the windows all alike, F451 forces us to grapple with the disturbing disappearance of history, culture, and innovation. But you can almost see the glisten in Bradbury's eye as he typed the lines about the warmth of the fire Guy expected "to burn and glitter with the knowledge" the Rememberers carry (147-8)! To invert the narrative, that is what a clever author does. Should we have seen it coming all along? Well, of course. But we were too busy cursing the fire to see its purifying qualities and the importance of our own intentions.
4. "The street empty, the house burnt like an ancient bit of stage scenery, the other homes dark" (114).
Symbolism. Again and again Guy observes the stage of his world, the prop that is his house and all of the myriad screens within it, the governmental stage masters who declare this character obsolete and that one necessary. Pulling us out of our own Truman Show nightmare, Bradbury directs our attention to what is important. He doesn't need to wax poetic about Clarisse, because when her role is complete, she steps into the wings. The ending doesn't need to satisfy our emotional vacancy, because the book itself is only a rehearsal-a display of the possible, so that we can get up from our stupor and live. Not act, but live, with the memory of such stories prodding us onward.
So, should you read Fahrenheit 451? I will leave that you. But if you are curious to know what the kindling of a dictatorial regime looks like, you will find it here.
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