Here’s an interesting instance of a controversial problem in literary studies. Via Pandagon, it’s being reported that Ray Bradbury denies that Farenheit 451 has anything to do with government censorship and McCarthyism. Apparently the fact that it’s been read that way is just wrong, he claims. It’s all about how watching tv destroys the appreciation of literature.
John Quiggin recently posted about his re-reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. (Is it about Becky Sharp?) In comments I talked about the authorial voice in one of my favourite writers, Trollope, and how it tries to frame and disrupt at the same time. Trollope makes us conscious that we’re reading a novel, with conventions, and comments wryly on them, and often indicates he’s not playing along. I suspect that Thackeray and Trollope were way stations in the transition from the open and rollicking form of the eighteenth century novel (think Richardson or Sterne, or the complexity of a novel like Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer which completely escapes the author’s control) to the classic modernist novel.
It’s interesting to ponder the irony that some (now) canonical novels were written in such a way to disrupt conventions about the omniscient author but any argument that authorial intent isn’t some sort of golden key to interpretation is dismissed as dangerously postmodern and relativist. Derrida argues that we’re not the same person moment to moment, and that memory is always partial and oriented more to the present and the future than the past. It would be reasonable to conclude that Bradbury is as much responding to the tendency to interpret as recalling what was in his mind decades ago. And it’s surely undeniable that whatever his conscious intention in writing Farenheit 451, the controversies which he now denies are readable in the novel were part of his cultural landscape at the time. Intention isn’t at all a simple concept.
I agree with this, and I think intention is a huge problem for the acceptance of critical interpretation in our culture, and instances like these, when an author is clearly responding in terms of how he positions his thinking in the present, seem to feed that.
I mean, even down to the creative writing process, which involves what novelist Sue Woolfe refers to as loose construing (a concept from neuroscience), the idea of the intention of the author falls apart. Not to mention that our language is never ours to begin with it, it precedes and shapes us.
There is value in Bradbury’s interpretation as an interpretation, though. It can be argued or disputed in terms of the text and the context alongside every other reading that has been produced: Bradbury should be expected to provide evidence for his reading! It is only as a seal of authenticity that it is problematic.
Here’s someone who’s checked Bradbury’s reading against the evidence in the text:
http://sideshow.me.uk/sjun07.htm#06041943
It’s also worth noting that many authors don’t re-read their own work.
Except for revisionary rereadings and editing, this seems true to my experience of the authorial process. Not that I’m a published fiction writer, but I know a few, and I’ve written my fair share of short stories. I’ve been quite surprised on occasion about the places I end up or the images that I ‘create’ in the text.
Thanks for the link.
I think most writers have that experience, Adam. Including non-fiction writers!
One of the interesting things in this particular controversy, I think, is the fact that the received interpretation has been taught in high schools over the decades.
Pandagon et all show all the signs of a cosy group of like-minded people cranky that their accepted reading and interpretation of the book has been challenged! I can certainly see how Bradbury could make the argument he does, since his concerns seem to be less to do with politics and more to do with humans and technology. Is the book-burning in Fahrenheit 451 simply about censorship? How about the sacrificing of past cultures in favour of tawdry modern sensationalism?
Perhaps it’s about both, and more than that, Tim?
Which begs the question: why now with authorial intervention? And that leads to the clear possibility that it reflects his current cultural politics.
Perhaps it’s about both, and more than that, Tim?
Yes and yes!
The problem as I see it is more about the way that these authorial interventions feed into prevalent, and distinctly anti-intellectual, ideas about the authors intention being the last word – the end point for criticism and interpretation.
While I accept that Pandagon et al could well be feeling and doing what you suggest, Tim, the reason that it is such an issue – as opposed to, for example, another critic producing that challenging new interpretation – is that it feeds into the conservative tendency that values authorial intent above all else.
Yes, me too.
I have written extensively about Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury is embarrassed and distressed by the ways his book has been read as a straightforward political allegory. He tried to stop Michael Moore from calling his doco Fahrenheit 911. So there’s that.
I also think (with not much evidence, just a hunch) that he was rendered deeply unhappy by the scripts circulating in the late 1990s for the remake that Mel Gibson was going to do.
Setting aside the complexities of Bradbury’s possible motives for denying that the novel is political, I think he is absolutely right to insist that it’s mainly about the threat to book-transmitted culture posed by tv and other flowing electronic media. The evidence is internal and has to do with how the novel hangs together metaphorically. We don’t need to go to questions about intentionality.
Fahrenheit 451 looks incoherent and silly if you read it as a straightforward indictment of McCarthyism, partly because it is in love with so much Cold War paraphernalia – espionage, hitech spy stuff, nuclear bombs etc. It represents totalitarianism as exciting, because it leads to liberal dissent and ultimately to the purifying apocalypse. Its politics are confused.
But it is very lucid and clear and impressive about the contest between what it sees as banal and manipulative electronic media on the one hand, and the quiet, steady, human scale and scope of print culture. Its trump card is that when the media technocracy topples under its own military-industrial weight, the cheap and portable low-tech book will still be around, and it will still work without electricity.
Of course technofear and tv hatred is inextricably bound up with Cold War culture, so it’s not totally disconnected from the contemporary scene. But nothing ever is.
Thanks, Laura, that’s interesting, and it’s a long time since I read the novel.
It still seems to me, though, that analysing the text itself (as you have done) produces a more multi-faceted reading than merely an assertion by the author. What I’m primarily concerned with is what Adam identified – the use of the author’s intention to assert an authoritative reading. That’s a conservative strategy which closes off both other readings, and I’d suggest, also works against nuanced readings such as yours.
Thanks for the analysis, Laura. That’s an enlightening interpretation, and it makes visible the way that the dominant interpretations have their own political resonances.
I think that the media event of Bradbury’s intervention is the object under scrutiny, for me at least, as well as how that event feeds into a wider set of ideas about authorship and criticism. In relation to that, we can’t avoid questions of intentionality alongside the politics of the event. But I suspect that is a different disciplinary agenda than yours.
Ah yes — it’s so very dangerously postmodern and relativist that the classic lit studs texts on this topic were written in 1946 and 1968 respectively: Wimsatt & Beardsley’s essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ and Roland Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’, where many of these issues are teased out. Both essays are disliked by the kinds of poets and fiction writers who couldn’t be bothered reading them and who regard both as some kind of personal attack, rather than abstract discussions about the nature of meaning.
Anyway, as far as Bradbury is concerned, why it does it have to be either/or? Can’t it be ‘about’ both government censorship and television? Reading those links, it’s all coming back to me that there is a lot in that book about TV turning people into zombies, but what readers remember is the drama of the burning books and the great power of that scene where people defiantly memorise them.
Regarding McCarthy, if you get a book like Fahrenheit 451 which is ‘about’ abstract themes like power and censorship and cultural zombification, obviously people are going to use it to ‘read’ the way those issues apply to their own particular time and place, or to a time and place they may be studying (eg the US in 1953). In that sense, you could even argue that Fahrenheit 451 is ‘about’ Google and Wikipedia, in the sense that it helps us understand a population’s voluntary subjection to a mass dumbing-down mechanism. That’s what literature is supposed to do: help people understand the world. Bradbury should be pleased, not annoyed.
No author can have it both ways; the only way to ensure that one’s words won’t be interpreted in ways that one dislikes is not to say anything at all. But to send so much as a sentence (never mind a book) out into the world is to ensure that people will interpret it however they see fit. Look what happened on the *whispers* Ayaan Hirsi Ali threads, where Kim’s measured and scrupulously argued reservations about Ali were immediately (if grotesquely) interpreted by the usual suspects as an expression of approval of female genital mutilation. People create meanings to fit their own world view, project their own concerns onto other people’s words, and generally find a way to believe whatever they want to believe.
I agree that it’s incredibly frustrating to have people misinterpret one’s writing, but the construction of meaning isn’t a one-way street, whether we like it or not.
Adam, I am not a strong intentionalist, and certainly not in the sense of privileging what authors say they are doing above any other hypothesis.
I am nodding vigorously at the idea that what’s interesting here is the media event, not so much the content of Bradbury’s statement. But at the same time, the novel has been so persistently thought of in one particular way for such a long time (it is taught to death as an anti-censorship novel in American schools) that I think Bradbury’s perfectly justified in asking people to look at it differently.
Being reduced to a simple soundbite is a pitfall associated with those texts that are so successful in the marketplace of ideas that they enter the language as a byword for something or other. F451 is a book people are sure they know what it’s about – book burning. But what is book-burning about? The novel loves the book-burning!
Bradbury is entitled to say things that might lead to people reading it a bit more critically, or indeed reading it at all.
I agree that there is a solid justification for shaking up orthodox interpretations, and it seems from your reading that this is very much the case with the text in question. I just wish it could be you that got to do that!
Unfortunately, the main reason Bradbury is heard and that his intervention has the potential to challenge people, as you suggest, is because it is framed by a popular understanding of authorial intent as a ‘final word’ as it were.
Although, now that you’re elaborating some of these points, I’m coming to feel that the saturating effect of that orthodox reading in US public discourse may itself be a reason for this becoming a media event.
Which leads to the question: what platform, other than authorship, could make such a public literary intervention and have it become a media event?
In that sense, the prevalence of the concept of authorial intent has both positive and negative effects.
Stories can have multiple layers & meaning because storytellers are constructing using conventions, ideas, theories, symbols, metaphors etc. that even they may not understand the multiple definitions, meaning & consequences of.
Just because one intends to express an idea concisely & succinctly w/in a specific framework does not necessarily mean they achieve that result…it also depends on what the listener, reader, viewer brings to the interpretation.
They receive a message, but translate it via the tools & experiences they have at their disposal.
Bradbury is entitled to his views…but he does not own the story & meaning persay…he has merely borrowed from well worn conventions…his expression of ideas go thru a dialectical process…they might mix & mutate…the story is as much the Readers as it is the Authors…or shall we say ‘The Constructor’.
I recommend watching Francois Truffaut’s filmic interpretation of ‘Fahrenheit 451′ again, or if you haven’t seen it yet. It puts the horrors in me…everytime I see this Federal Govt. & their Enablers making headway in their incremental move towards the Corporate Fascist state i think of this film…the apathy of the general public…the Narcotic effect of TV…the reasons we need to record History in our minds…use those little gray cells…& spread the word…be the Storytellers…the witnesses…the educator…perhaps the Cassandra…or the Preventor.
Well, you learn something new every day! I wasn’t aware that Fahrenheit 451 was ever read as an allegory for McCarthyism. When I read it the ‘message’ Laura elucidates above (very well, so I won’t repeat what she said) came through loud and clear.
I do know that many authors dislike allegorical readings of their work – Tolkien went so far as to say so he ‘heartily dislike[d] allegory’ in his introduction to the single volume edition of Lord of the Rings. Even authors who set out to write allegory – think Orwell in Animal Farm get cheesed off when that’s all critics see. ‘No-one said it was a beautiful book’, he commented rather plaintively after Animal Farm became a stupendous bestseller.
That said, a lesson I’ve learnt in spades is that no author can control how their work is read. While I believe that what an author intended is important to any literary study, its importance wanes over time, and almost to vanishing point once the author is dead. Even while the author is alive, contemporary notes (ie while you’re writing the bloody thing) are a damned sight more useful than looking at your own work through a retrospectoscope.
I’ve got some yellowing notes around the place that I put together while I was writing The Hand that Signed the Paper. They’re very short – no more than a single par – and mostly focus on style. ‘I was to write a disorienting but effective piece of discontinuous narrative’ reads one line. ‘I want readers to think “there, but for the grace of God, go I”‘ reads another. And finally (hey, I was 20 at the time). ‘I want to weird people out when it comes to pity’. And that’s it.
Everything else – good and bad – my readers brought to the book.
Offered very hesitantly, in the fear it is a tad OTT – this essay by Nicholas Rombes, via Peter Minter’s blog.
Rombes is arguing that in the digital age, the author is more present than ever before… please consider??
Adam wrote:
“Which leads to the question: what platform, other than authorship, could make such a public literary intervention and have it become a media event?”
The fatwah on Salman Rushdie springs to mind – but this same sort of bid for hermeneutic mastery happens all the time in an everyday way in the form of film adaptations and the like.
I think those are very good answers, Laura, although in the case of the fatwah, it is a kind of inverse example of the same principle of authorship. The author’s authority over the text is significant enough to warrant his death. Maybe an attempt to extinguish the perceived intention in the text by extinguishing the author? If only they had read Barthes…
Making Light has a bit up from Bradbury’s ‘Coda’ to the 1979 edition.
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The argument that a work of fiction has multiple themes is a little questionable when applied to literature, because while it’s true that there are books where multiple plot lines and characters will yield themselves up to widely differing interpretations, it’s easy to forget that books are also full of unreliable narratives, characters with conflicting opinions, and so on. (One of the only things I really learned when studying literature at university was that you can’t always trust the narrator.)
This is as true for Fahrenheit 451 as for any other book. It seems as if it’s about censorship. One of the jokes in the book is that people at community fire stations are in charge of creating fires, ie, burning books. Surely this is symbolic of Government censorship?
But when you consider that Bradbury wrote this initially for an American audience, in the context of small-town America, it becomes less clear – since in many of those small towns, fire stations aren’t run or funded by Government, they’re owned by the community. (A clearer example of government exceeding the bounds of authority and becoming authoritarian is that great chase scene with the Robo-hunter-dog-thingy.)