August 22 was the 100th anniversary of the birth in the U.S. city of Waukegan, Illinois, of the great writer Ray Bradbury. His work, however, maintains an exceptional freshness. He imagines the future through a sharp and devastating critical look at the Yankee model of then and now.
In 1953 he published a revealing novel, Fahrenheit 451, which challenges McCarthyism and the system's repressive apparatus with a denunciation of the reign of stupidity and the persecution and censorship of intelligence, memory, the humanist legacy of Western culture, and all that fascism considers heretical.
The title of Bradbury's novel alludes to the temperature required to burn paper. In Fahrenheit's USA 451, books are banned. According to the official discourse, they are harmful, maleficent objects; they inoculate people with confusing and disturbing thoughts; hinder access to happiness; offer them chaos in the face of the "certainties" of a lethargic daily life.
Anyone who hides a personal library or a few volumes violates the law and must be denounced. After the denunciation, the "firemen" are mobilized, using not jets of water but of fire, and reducing to ashes every book they find before the horrified eyes of its owners.
Twenty years before the publication of Fahrenheit 451, in 1933, the Nazi student leader Herbert Gutjahr led, together with Goebbels, the so-called "Action Against the Anti-German Spirit". More than 20,000 books were burned at Berlin’s Opernplatz. Gutjahr shouted: "I give to the fire everything that symbolizes the non-German spirit". Similar events and speeches took place across the country.
Twenty years after the appearance of Bradbury's novel, in 1973, the most popular book burning took place in Pinochet's Chile, in the Torres de San Borja, in Santiago. Channel 13 television covered the monstrous event. Several analysts have explained that any volume with a title that contained the word "red" in any variant was condemned to be burned. Even books that spoke of the artistic current of cubism were burned by the hordes, since the inquisitors considered that they referred to Cuba.
Montag, the protagonist of Fahrenheit 451, is a "fireman" who goes with his companions to a house that has been denounced. They soak their books and their surroundings in gasoline and demand that the owner (a weeping old woman) step out into the street to be safe from the fire. But the old woman, surprisingly, uses a match and burns, she too, in the fire.
That suicidal act moves Montag and leads him to question the meaning of his profession and his entire life. What inexplicable value do books have that can lead a person to decide to be incinerated with them, he asks himself. And he begins to understand that books are more than paper and letters lined up. Little by little he sees them as a synthesis of personal and collective memory, as reservoirs of thought and spirituality in an empty landscape, populated by the chatter of people with nothing to say to each other and an omnipresent television designed to idiotize the viewers.
"Television tells you what to think, over and over again, all the time," an old literature professor who lost his job almost a century ago tells Montag. "All culture is broken, our civilization is falling apart," he adds.
In the preface that heads the 1993 reprint of the novel, Bradbury gives a few more clues to discovering his message: "You don't need to burn books if the world starts to fill with people who don't read, who don't know, who don't learn…”. This statement has a chilling timeliness.
The hegemonic cultural industry has achieved that there are less and less readers and less and less people interested in going beyond the superficial and frivolous areas and understanding the realities, processes, life, in depth. This dismantling of intelligence, which has been growing rapidly, was already evident to Bradbury in 1953.
In the universe of Fahrenheit 451, free time must be devoted to play, pleasure, childish amusement. Culture has lost its core. Education has ended up based on the most mediocre and flat pragmatism. Studies in humanities have been dismantled. The classics are summaries. The word "intellectual" became an insult. The voters choose the candidate for his or her image, regardless of what their program is - if they have one.
It is an exciting exercise to reread Fahrenheit 451 in this age of pandemic, of unlimited tragedy for the majority and shameless enrichment of the elites, of overflowing police violence and anti-racist revolts, of the grotesque reality show of the US elections, of obscene manipulation of consciences.
"All culture is broken, our civilization is falling apart"
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