Stranger on Earth

Link to Part 1:  http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/12/burn-life-unlived-ray-bradburys.html Bradbury himself once remarked in an interview that Fahrenheit 451 was not a writer’s protest against totalitarianism. [+] The fact that the novel is often interpreted as such speaks volumes about its multi-facetedness. The writer’s intention, however, lies in a different sphere: he aims to alert the reader to the soul-flattening addictiveness of visual media and their threat to the existence of books. When Montag encounters the novel’s chief voice of reason Faber, who has an extensive literary knowledge, he learns from him the true worth of books. In reference to the last surviving copy of the Bible Montag has stolen and kept, Faber says: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture, This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. Yo...

“Stuff your eyes with wonder,” says one of the outlaws to our protagonist Guy Montag before the novel ends, “live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world” (201). Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1958) is traditionally considered a novel about a dystopian society à la 1984 that has made books and the act of reading illegal. But upon closer examination it reveals a message that is even more sweeping than the one above: one of living one’s life to its full capacity. Guy Montag, a fireman who has spent his whole life burning books and the houses of transgressors, has a sudden awakening when he is on the job. Seemingly out of the fiery red (not blue) he develops a sense of guilt, and books, objects he has never particularly cared for, begin to prey on his mind: Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms … A book alighted, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the dim, wavering light, a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, ...

When a totalitarian regime or a theocracy imposes its narrow rules on the written word, dramatic things can happen to a people’s history. This point is touched upon early on – in Book 1, Chapter 20 – by Tengo when he is introducing Orwell’s 1984 to a clueless Fuka-Eri. He tells her how in the novel the regime is constantly rewriting history, distorting it to the extent where no-one can remember the actual past. He tells her that “robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves,” and labels the act a “crime.” “Our memory,” he says, “is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves” (257). Simply put, individuals who live under a totalitarian regime will always have to suppress their true selves – if they do not want to suffer punishment. W...

Here the reader arrives at the junction where Murakami’s work crosses from the metaphysical to the real and tangible, for in the single-moon world we have also had the misfortune of witnessing writers persecuted for their ability to tell a different “truth.” Salman Rushdie’s fate after the publication of The Satanic Verse is well-documented and needs no reiteration. A more discriminate look at literary history gives us several more voices hushed by the Authorities: Turkish author and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk was arrested for comments about the massacres of Armenians in the First World War. Nigerian protest author Ken Saro-Wiwa was tried by a military tribunal and hanged. Yu Jie, author of China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao , a controversial book that cast a critical light on the premier, landed in hot water with the Chinese authorities, and had to emigrate to the USA for his own safety. His close friend and Nobel Prize-winning literary critic Liu Xiaobo called for politic...