With Hope, In Spite Of Fear: Fahrenheit 451

In his novel The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov tells us, “written-on paper burns reluctantly”. Bulgakov wrote these words in 1940, in the Stalin-governed Soviet Union. The time we are going to talk about has taken Bulgakov’s words as a challenge and has created a proper system to burn such paper that, proud of being written-on, commits the sin of refusing to burn.

It is a time when the work of fire-brigades is not to put out fires, but to burn books. Where firemen are actually bookburners. Where the TV is not only a source of information and entertainment, but also the only socially acceptable means of thought. This progressive and prosperous society does not tolerate books. It has understood that books are dangerous. Possessed of life and power and personality. A power that grows in the hearts of their readers. Which themselves can change, and can change the reader too. This society has prospered enough to be able to rid itself of such dangerous things and keep itself happy. And, for the information needed in order to enjoy the fruits of such prosperity (what products are being sold at what prices in which mall), there is always the TV. Hundreds of channels, 24 hours a day!

Like our present society, the TV in that one not only provides information, it also provides solutions. To be sure, it also creates the problems it provides solutions for. You only have to select the solution that suits you from the provided problem-solving set. The system, bent on keeping you “happy” has made sure that you’ll never have to do anything as useless, troublesome and “politically incorrect” as thinking. When there are no books, it’s obvious that there is no memory. Memory means only this much – what you ate yesterday, or what happened in your favorite TV-series or reality-show the day before. When there are no books, there is no imagination. You are not even permitted to imagine yourself reading and recreating with you imagination the form a writer has, with words, given to his imagination.

The feeling of not being alone even when alone that a book can give is obviously proof of antisocial individualism and arrogance, and any type of thought is the expression of such arrogance. Anything that has any meaning lies outside. Books force you to tangle with the meaningless inside. They are dangerous and it is the system’s duty to protect you from them.

To keep you thought-less, memory-less and “happy”, the system has been made so efficient that if some antisocial elements try to return society to the backward time of books, they will not escape. People have become “politically correct” to the extent that if someone dares to behave “incorrectly”, the people who inform the system and collaborate with it to punish such a criminal are the criminal’s own kith and kin! And they have to do only this much – phone the fire-brigade if they see a book in someone’s hand or house. The firemen (bookburners) will come. In their hands will be hoses that throw fire, not water. The book will be burnt. The book-reading criminal will be sent away for treatment.

This “happy” society was imagined by Ray Bradbury in his 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451. He turned the suffocating, anti-intellectual atmosphere he was living in, during the Cold War, into the future dystopia of his novel. If Orwell’s 1984 was a dystopia of totalitarianism, Bradbury’s dystopia was one of consumerism and the information-revolution. At the time, this book was read as science-fiction. The title Fahrenheit 451 signifies the temperature at which paper starts to burn. That “happy” society is known by this temperature because it has identified the real reason for all the unnecessary problems in human life and has been able to drive it out and create an “ideal society”.

Bradbury wrote his novel in the form of science-fiction. There are mechanical dogs in the novel that run and “bite” escaping criminals. Their teeth can administer two kinds of drugs – one to render unconscious, the other to kill. They can be programmed according to the criminal’s level of dangerousness. The heroics of firemen (bookburners) and policemen chasing after criminals are telecast live. In the novel, there is also the ever-present threat of a nuclear war. The end of this “happy” society comes about in a nuclear attack. Speed, too, plays an important role in Bradbury’s dystopia. If one of the signs of society’s happiness is omnipresent television, the other is extremely fast cars. The root cause that makes all these pleasures possible, you already know – the complete annihilation of the enemy of happiness. Books.

In 1966, Francois Truffaut made a film based on this book. The film was, of course, a warning against totalitarianism. But it also emphasized Truffaut’s personal faith. I watched it in December 2004, at Linda Hess’s home in Berkeley. It is impossible to forget the film. These times, when books are increasingly being attacked for having “hurt sentiments”, or to protect “national interest” or “correct” thought, where news-channels deal with serious matters in 15-second bites and telecast, live, police skirmishes and hangings… these times will not let me forget Fahrenheit 451.

The influence of the book and the film can be seen in Satyajit Ray’s The Kingdom of Diamonds. Although Ray’s film has been sculpted as a folktale, rather than science-fiction or fantasy. It depicts a society ruled by an eccentric king, not by futuristic technology or TV. But the king also knows this – “Read more, know more. Know more, respect less. Therefore, no schools!” The society in Truffaut’s film was not ruled by an eccentric king, but by an extremely efficient and meticulous system, which reminds us not of kings from folktales, but the modern and scientific systems all around us.

December 2004. Meaning the year of George W. Bush’s reelection. Linda and I were discussing the matter. Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” was bound to crop up, leading on to Bradbury’s novel and Truffaut’s film.

Incidentally, Bradbury (now 88) is rather angry with Moore for having ripped-off his novel’s name… He was unhappy with Truffaut’s film, too, because it left out many elements from the novel. For example, the film does not have the mechanical dogs that run after criminals and inject them with poison. Nor does it have those frighteningly fast cars. On the contrary, the film begins in a beautiful, peaceful little town. The threat of nuclear war too has been turned into that of traditional war.

The filmmaker has taken liberties in the matter of characters too. Some roles have been shortened. Among the most interesting changes is that Clarisse, the woman who turns the protagonist of the story, Guy Montag, from a bookburner into a booklover and Montag’s politically correct wife, Mildred, who complains about him to the government, are played by the same actress – Julie Christie. In the novel, Clarisse dies in a car accident but, in the film, she is with Montag till the end. Montag is played by Oskar Werner. The fact that the story could attract stars like Julie Christie and Oskar Werner was instrumental in financing the film.

The most important difference between the novel and the film has to do with the role of television. Like the novel, television has taken over the lives of people in the film, but it is not, in itself, the source of all evil. The film is much more sensitive to the complexities of surveillance states than the novel.

The role of television in life did not seem as fantastic to Truffaut in 1966 as it had to Bradbury in 1953. How quickly the differences between fantasy and reality have disappeared, in the case of television. Viewers in 2008 might well ask what’s so strange about the TV providing live-coverage of a husband and wife’s domestic quarrels. To be sure, the role of TV and information technology cannot be said to be entirely negative, for the present. Yes, these things intrude on human life but, at the same time, they disturb the government monopoly on information. The race for TRPs and for providing breaking news 24 hours a day means that some channels end up flashing the “mobile numbers” of ghosts, but there are channels that contribute to a better understanding of the government machinery too.

Bradbury was not pleased with the changes, but maybe he understood – like Tarashankar Banerjee understood when, after watching Ray’s “The Music Room”, he went up to Ray and said, “But Mr. Ray, this is not my story!” only to hear the retort, “Precisely. This is my film!”

Truffaut’s film Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of that “happy” society with greater sharpness and with greater effect than Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451. The novel, with all its trappings of science-fiction, at least carries a measure of relief, nay carelessness, that this dystopia, however frightening, is somewhere far in the future. Truffaut’s film leaves us no such escape. He turned the dystopia of a distant future into a much more immediate one, one being created in our present, everyday conditions. A film that in 2008, 22 years after it was made, suddenly does not seem so fantastic after all.

A formal machinery for bookburning might still seem fantastic, but in these days when we see the treatment meted out, in our own country, by representatives of various ideas and identities to books, authors, artists who have “hurt sentiments”, while the government stands by and watches helplessly, one is forced to ask – how long before we too have such a formal bookburning machinery? The people who burn books in an unruly manner might, if they want, take inspiration from the “efficiency” depicted in the film. In a way, they already are. Because ultimately, the aim of all the riot and ruckus, the chorus about hurt sentiments, is so that this disorderly way of burning books becomes unnecessary. So that bookburning, saving people from books and from the antisocial activity of thinking for themselves, can become demonstrations of the system’s efficiency. So that Fahrenheit 451 turns from fantasy into reality.

Truffaut’s fantasy and our everyday experiences have become quite similar – frighteningly similar.

In fact, each of the changes Truffaut made underlines this frightening similarity. The nuclear war of the novel might seem like fantasy, but the world has never, not for a moment, been able to free itself of the “traditional” war depicted in the film. The action does not play itself out in some dehumanized, mechanical and fast-paced city but in a town which would, in Europe, be considered a “serene neighborhood”. The machines in the movie might have seemed like science-fiction in 1966, but in 2008 we have gadgets that far surpass their capabilities. The time Truffaut depicts does not even have computers or cell-phones! We might thank our stars, then, that the firemen of our time are firemen still and not bookburners.

Bradbury’s novel makes television and technology the anti-thought regime in themselves – the root of all evil. Whereas Truffaut’s film recognizes them as the tools of an anti-thought social system. A system that, with its complexity, omnipresence and meticulousness, not only functions as an “internal(ized) sensor” in the hearts of people, but also has been able to effect “changes of heart” and successfully create the new sort of human being it wants. Obviously, it is essential to be freed from this technological dictatorship, but it hardly follows that such freedom would necessarily mean freedom from an unthinking, unfeeling lifestyle.

Truffaut made another change – a very meaningful change, one rich with cultural significances. I will discuss this at length later.

If we compare Fahrenheit 451 with 1984, we see that even though George Orwell’s “Big Brother” is never seen, his voice is everywhere. He is invisible, but not absent. Despite being invisible, he is ever-present (sitting right in front of you, in fact!). The anti-thought, anti-human-consciousness regime of Fahrenheit 451 is not present in this manner. It does not need to be seen, or even heard. It has made its home in the consciousness of people. It may not be visible or present, but in this horrifying dystopia it is omnipotent and omnipresent like God. An interesting fact – unlike Orwell, Bradbury didn’t link his dystopia to any particular year, although at one point you seem to feel that the events must be taking place sometime after 1990. Truffaut, eager to underline the similarities to the present, does not let you feel that the film is taking place in any specific year or decade.

An interesting coincidence – Truffaut died in 1984.

The film starts with the goings on at the fire-station. The firemen (bookburners) set off with the same despatch as required by an emergency. A law-abiding citizen has seen some antisocial element with a book in hand – dealing with him and burning the book is the firemen’s job. And it is to do their job that they set forth with such alacrity. Fireman Guy Montag is, like other firemen, an expert in burning books and, with his wife Mildred and his TV, he is also “happy”. A meeting with his new neighbor Clarisse leads him to question his “happiness”. Talking to her is not like talking to a programmed machine, i.e. a “happy” citizen. Clarisse is among those “antisocial elements” who have kept alive their relationship with books, although Montag does not know this yet. For now, he is excited by and confused by how strange and different Clarisse is.

Montag’s wife Mildred is bored and depressed despite all the equipment for happiness. She is really an ideal citizen – she has nothing to do with books, she is free both physically and mentally from the sin of thinking bad thoughts about the system. But she is still distressed. Returning from his meeting with Clarisse, Montag finds Mildred unconscious – she has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Doctors come from the hospital. Their behavior toward Mildred is like a car-mechanic’s toward a car. In a matter of minutes, they change all her body’s blood – imagine the level of sophistication their science has attained! Blood transfusion at home, as if it were a simple matter like administering an injection. And this work is done in the same tone and words someone cleaning out the interior of a car in a workshop would employ. The expertise of the doctors is obvious – but what of sympathy for Mildred and consolation for Montag?

What are these things? Such signs of backwardness have already been discarded by that “happy” society. Even Montag had forgotten them but now, having met that strange woman for the first time, he sees how strange the behavior of these “health technicians” is. Today is the beginning of a new journey for him.

And the most affecting moment in this journey comes soon.

Montag is with a team that has arrived at an old woman’s house to burn books. This politically incorrect woman is a bit different from other booklovers. She puts up immense resistance to the bookburning. Instead of silently letting the firemen take over the house and books, she self-immolates. Before letting her books be burned, she burns herself.

Montag is troubled. He “steals” one of the books that belonged to the woman who sacrificed herself. Now, there has necessarily come into being an unbridgeable divide between his individual and social life. He needs to know what there is in these useless books of stories and poetry that would lead to someone burning themselves to protect them. Stealing books and trying to find ways to read and understand them becomes Montag’s habit. In about a year, he has stolen lots of books and hidden them away in his house. And, here, the movie starts emphasizing the fact that, while all books are important but, even in the world of books, instead of books which merely state facts, creative literature that talks in strange ways holds a special place. After all, didn’t his interest in books arise from an illogical line like, “Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sun.” He came across this line in the house of the same woman’s who burnt with her books.

That Montag and other people can read makes it obvious that it is not a society of “illiterates”, but one that is anti-literature. After all, to live life one does need to be literate and possess practical knowledge. For technical expertise, one has to study science. But literature? Art? History? Philosophy? These are the real villains that spoil people’s minds – most of all literature.

In our own time, how much importance does the state give to literature in information-media, in universities, in other institutions? Keeping this question and its answer in mind, we can see again how Fahrenheit 451 is less a fantasy of the distant future and more a reflection of current reality.

Soon, Montag comes across more such lines. How will he understand their meaning? How will he talk to Clarisse about them? Sitting down to talk with the book between them would be unimaginable… What then? What can he do besides memorizing the whole book? Montag tries to commit books to his memory for all time. Besides Clarisse, he now comes in touch with Faber who, in the backward past, used to be a professor of literature. For him, teaching literature to Montag, and for Montag, studying literature become articles of faith. Montag is now officially a part of the antisocial elements. Reading books, especially literary books, and talking about them to Clarisse and Faber have become incurable habits.

And how can habits stay secret? The fire-chief Captain Beatty himself tries to make Montag understand. All firemen steal books. Attraction to the forbidden is only natural. But while stealing a book and reading it once is alright, making it a habit is a different matter entirely. And trying to save books! That’s an unforgivable act against society. Montag should return the books he steals so that they can be burned – the way other firemen do. Books are truly dangerous, because what one book says, another contradicts. Instead of showing a clear and dependable way to live life, they plunge humans into confusion. Which is why the regime was good enough to save people from all the confusion and gave them a clear guideline – this is how to live life.

What right does Montag have to go and side with the antisocial elements and create confusion once more in this society that is functioning perfectly?

The system is “social” to such an extent that not only humans, even machines become uncomfortable around Montag. It was bound to happen in a society founded on the ideal cooperation between men and machines. His front-door, which is programmed to open on hearing Montag’s footsteps, now doesn’t open for him. He has violated the basic tenet of his relation to the door, having gone and sided with the books. Why would the door welcome him?

Not only the door, but his wife Mildred too becomes uncomfortable around Montag. After all, despite her depression, she is a politically correct citizen possessed of unshakable faith in the system. Montag had somehow managed to convince fire-chief Beatty that the books he could not bring to the fire-station he has disposed off himself. He is astonished to find out how many books Beatty himself had read so as to be able to warn people like Montag of their dangers. Mildred tells Beatty the truth – complete with the location of the books in Montag’s (and her own) home. So when the firemen set out one day, it is only when they reach their “target” that Montag finds out that it is his own home. Mildred has performed her civic duty and has left Montag. Mad with anger, Montag wants to burn not only the books, but everything in the house, indeed the house itself – he wants to remove all traces of this social identity of his.

Beatty is now searching for Montag’s accomplices Faber and Clarisse. He is adamant that they must be brought to justice. And when he expresses his adamancy to Montag, Montag burns him down with the fire-hose, the way they had burnt so many books together.

Can it be that Beatty was trying to get relief from his own life by purposely angering Montag? Can it be that the dangerous books had affected his mind too? Can it be that he had begun to understand the horror of this “happy” society? To the extent that he wanted to escape not just the system but life itself? And when he didn’t have the courage to do it himself, he made Montag the medium?

The narration gives no answers to these questions. Unanswered, these questions stay with the viewer longer and more compellingly.

Now Montag has to run. Towards that parallel underground society of booklovers about which he has heard from Clarisse and Faber. Montag runs, the police is after him, as are the cameras that telecast all these events live. Clarisse is with him. Faber has been killed. And in the end, both of them manage to shake off the police and the cameras and reach their destination – the society of booklovers. Some of these people have escaped from the “official society” with their families. Others have come here escaping their politically correct family members.

These people have figured out how to save books from Fahrenheit 451. In a society bent on removing all traces of memory, these people have made a conscious and systematic effort to preserve memory. They too burn books, because, god forbid, they get caught or someone finds a book in the colony – in which case no one will be spared.

They burn books, but after having committed them to memory. Each one of them has memorized one or another book. Now their only identity is those books. That is how they introduce themselves and each other to Montag. “Look, that is Mr. Tale of Two Cities. And meet Mr. David Copperfield. This sweet child is Alice in Wonderland. And there goes Pride and Prejudice. That self-absorbed man there is Critique of Pure Reason, and that old man is War and Peace.”

That is how they live in this society. The book that Montag has saved, he’ll have to make a sacrifice for – a sacrifice of his identity. He will have to get rid of his name and adopt the book’s name. Change his life into the book’s life. The book will have to be burned, but it shall live in his memory. The book’s physical existence can only be possible till Montag has memorized it completely. When Montag finally turns into that book, anyone who wants to have a conversation with that book will come to him and it will be Montag’s duty to recount the book to him. To pass on memory through sound.

Montag starts on this journey of memory and sound. And, as soon as you realize that the book he has saved risking his life is, unlike the novel, not the Bible – that is when the difference between the novel and the film, which at the beginning of the essay I’d called meaningful and rich with cultural significances, begins to become clear.

For Bradbury’s Montag, the Bible carries the faith that must be preserved in a consumerist society. Obviously, for Truffaut, the Bible is not a book that carries faith. In the film, Montag reaches the booklover society with a book about Kaspar Hauser. Truffaut is not only avoiding the religious connotations of the Bible, but is also considering the life of any “ordinary” book the equal of a “special” book like the Bible.

I cannot say whether Truffaut made this change with its greater cultural and historical significances in mind. But these meanings are bound to resonate in the heart any viewer who is curious about European history and knows the history of the Church’s (both Catholic and Protestant) reactions to creativity.

Recalling some instances of bookburning – In 1533, the writer Michael Servetus was burned alive with his books by the Protestants of Geneva, while the Catholics in France had to content themselves with burning his effigy. Ironically, under the Catholic Church, the task of burning books and of executing heretics both fell to the hangman. In the city of faith that the Church had built, burning a book was not dissimilar to executing a sinner. Both things were done in the same manner, with the same efficiency as in Fahrenheit 451. When in Rome, the newly formed Church was trampling upon traditional beliefs, the orator Labienus committed suicide when it was ordered that his books be burnt. And on hearing this, another orator, Cassius Severus said, “Burn me too, for I know all of Labienus’s books by heart.”

I do not know if Truffaut was thinking of all this when he decided to replace the Bible with another book in the film. But on seeing a bookburning society where some people are trying to save books by memorizing them, a knowledgeable audience will be reminded of all this. The same way that Bulgakov’s words (“written-on paper burns reluctantly”) will remind one of the words of Akiba ben Yossef who said that “The paper burns, but the words fly away.”

“Fly away.” The immense stubbornness and power that creative words are possessed of can carry them across national boundaries far from where they started. Which is precisely why those who claim monopoly over Truth – and that such monopoly has been granted them by God himself, or History itself – are scared of such words.

Whether it’s organized religion or schools of thought that claim to change to world – both want to control and contaminate human memory. Independence of thought, and of agencies that make thought possible, is in their eyes the greatest evil.

It is in light of the memory of those crimes against thought wreaked by the Church, which is present in the intellectual unconscious of Europe, that Truffaut’s decision, whether conscious or coincidental, to replace the Bible with another book becomes important and meaningful.

In an affecting scene in the final moments of the film, an old man, knowing his end is near, narrates the “Odyssey” that had been secure in his memory, to a small child. The old man will not live much longer, but the “Odyssey” will – transferred from the old body to the new body. In that dystopia, memories are being preserved through sound. The older Mr. Odyssey may have passed, but look, there’s our new Mr. Odyssey. Memory and sound are what make words words.

I saw the film at Linda Hess’s home on 20^th December 2004. It was the last day of my stay in America. The next day, on the way to the airport I saw a fire-station. We both looked at each other and smiled. At least, for now, the work of fire-brigades is putting fires out, not burning books!

But for how long? How far are we from an efficient bookburning society? Who knows…

But remember that old man in passing on the book, safe in his memory, to the future. One can hope that we will remember such ways. One can hope that we will find other ways as well.

The story ends with the description of a utopia still secure in the very heart of a dystopia.

With hope, in spite of fear.

(Translated by Rahul Soni.)