READING GROUP
Fahrenheit 451: Reading the 1950s
Ray Bradbury's dystopia is clearly humming with the anxieties of its times. But how well do we know the decade that made them?
Sam Jordison
Wed 21 Sep 2011
Fahrenheit 451 still resonates. Books censorship has never gone away, after all. But, as many people in the Reading Group have pointed out, it's also a book that clearly reflects its time.
Everythingsperfect, in particular, noted that s/he "would be very interested in looking into how it reflects its time and place, America in the early 1950s. Would it be possible to provide some background, to place it in context? I was just wondering whether the total cultural pessimism of F451 is something that is reflected elsewhere in society, or if it is just Bradbury who is a miserable so-and-so?"
So here we go. In this thread, any and all reflections on the 1950s are welcome. To get the ball rolling, here are a few loose thoughts of my own:
Ray Bradbury says that one of the main inspirations for Fahrenheit 451 came when he was out walking with a writer friend, and "a police car pulled up and the policeman got out and asked us 'What are you doing?'" Bradbury explained that they were out walking ("putting one foot in front of the other" was his first "smartaleck" response.) The policeman didn't like it. "Don't do it again!" he told Bradbury – which sent the writer into such a rage that he went home and wrote the short story The Pedestrian [PDF], imagining a time in which everyone who walked was considered a criminal. Later, he took his "midnight criminal stroller" for another walk around the future city – and Fahrenheit 451 was born.
It probably won't surprise you to learn that the original encounter took place in pedestrian-hating Los Angeles. Even so, it doesn't take too much of a imaginative leap to see it happening in plenty of other places in the US in the 1950s; the decade of the drive-in and the pink Cadillac. Most people were delighted by the automobile frenzy and the advances it brought, but there must have been alarm too. Especially for those such as Bradbury. He may be an SF author, but he writes with the same passion about nature as he does about technology, and the changes in the 1950s must have unsettled as much as they enthused him. Or at least, that's my hypothesis.
It's also impossible to talk about the 1950s without discussion of the Bomb. The book was written less than a decade after Nagasaki and Hiroshima (think about 9/11 to see how raw they must have seemed) and during an ever-escalating arms race. The future, in many ways, looked desperate.
It's also impossible to talk about the 1950s without discussion of the Bomb. The book was written less than a decade after Nagasaki and Hiroshima (think about 9/11 to see how raw they must have seemed) and during an ever-escalating arms race. The future, in many ways, looked desperate.
Concomitant to the Bomb was, of course, the cold war – and clearly that, too, influenced the book. The Soviets were sending writers to gulags and banning questionable books, while in the US McCarthy was persecuting writers and the HUAC was in full swing. And then, of course, the memory of the Nazis still burned all too bright.
So, in (brief) answer to Everythingsperfect's question, it is possible to see plenty of pessimism in the 1950s and to take the view that it must have had an influence on Bradbury's writing. But I'm hoping that we can also provide a more nuanced vision. My notes create a very one-sided picture – and one that could easily be reversed. Yes, there were troubles in the 1950s, but in the US in particular, it's more often remembered as a happy, optimistic time. It would be interesting to hear more about that – and also about how that may be reflected in Fahrenheit 451 in the way most citizens are perfectly content to go along with the destruction of world literature provided they have TV, a few creature comforts, some good drugs and aren't troubled too much …
Over to you.
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