The Failure Of Fahrenheit 451
The Failure of Fahrenheit 451
By Jeremy Smith
13 October 2003
I.
In 1953, Ray Bradbury published a novel in which the burning of books presages the burning of the world.
In the half century since, Fahrenheit 451 has emerged as a staple of high school and college syllabi and continues to chart best-seller lists. Both Simon & Schuster and Del Rey are releasing fiftieth anniversary editions this year. This past summer it was the number one best-selling science fiction/fantasy paperback in Barnes & Noble stores. While it is most often used as a way of talking about media and censorship, Fahrenheit 451 also represents a literary mode that seeks to prevent a certain future by describing it. This mode is often -- but not always -- dystopian. It is distinguished most by a moralistic and apocalyptic state of mind.
Let's call it Cassandraism, after the daughter of Troy whose prophecies were not believed. Launched with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Cassandraism remains the most socially acceptable branch on the family tree of science fiction, embracing such respectably literary figures as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Margaret Atwood, who with her 1986 novel The Handmaid's Tale became its foremost contemporary practitioner.
In Atwood's new novel Oryx and Crake, digital convergence and genetic engineering are combined and carried to their logical conclusion, a media-filtered apocalypse that the characters (and, one senses, the author) simultaneously yearn for and struggle against. Like the Bible's Book of Revelation, Oryx and Crake should be read not as a prediction of the future, but as a nightmare of the present. It stands in a tradition of novels like Brave New World or 1984 that are vaticinia ex eventu: history disguised as prophecy.
If the imaginative success of a Cassandraist novel as a warning must be measured in direct proportion to its...
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