The Invisible Library

So, Ray Bradbury now says that his famous anti-censorship novel, Fahrenheit 451 isn’t actually about censorship, but how TV rots your brains and pop-culture is the torch lit under literature’s legacy. Or some such nonsense.

Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, is now supposed to be about the evils of Television, a device not widely available until the mid nineteen fifties? Man, he really was ahead of the curve, wasn’t he? So how’s that Martian colony coming along?
As I said over at Making light, The man’s 87 years old. If he has any hills left to go over, their little ones at best, maybe speed bumps.

A novel, like a child, becomes it’s own entity once it leaves your desk and enters the world, bound and printed for everyone to read and decide what it means for themselves. What he wanted it to mean while he was writing it fifty years ago is different then what it meant when he finished it, which is different from what it means now. He had a say in the first instance, an opinion in the second but the third instance is completely out of his hands.

It’s our book now, Mr. Bradbury. Thanks for writing it but we’ll take it form here.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Writers, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.