[Dragaera] OT: Ray Bradbury

[Maximilian Wilson]

On 7/18/07, Davdi Silverrock <davdisil at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> There was a post to Making Light which points out that Bradbury's own
> afterword to F451, more than a couple decades ago, states that the
> tale is indeed about censorship.
>
>   http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009076.html
>
> I shall leave it to others to speculate on the possible reasons for
> the more recent contradictory assertion.
>

This seems to me to be not a contradiction. The LA Weekly article says that
Bradbury envisioned a myopic kind of society which censored its own
perceptions, i.e. whites rejecting Uncle Tom's Cabin and blacks rejecting
Little Black Samba. This is exactly what he describes in the afterward you
cite:

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people
running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian,
Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day
Adventist, Women's Lib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feel it
has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the
fuse….Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel *Fahrenheit 451,* described how the
books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a
paragraph from the book, then that, until the day came when the books were
empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.

Not state-sponsored censorship, then. Self-censorship by the community. This
is interesting to me because I see a certain amount of this in my own
community (I live in Utah) as well as in the United States at large
(political correctness). There are very few thoughts which are so horrible
that they ought never to be expressed--perhaps none. That doesn't make all
thoughts correct, but you should be able to talk things over.

On 7/18/07, Konrad Gaertner <kgaertner at tx.rr.com> wrote:

"What I want to emphasize is this: anytime an artist says, 'The whole
> point of this piece is--' he's lying."
>
> _The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars_
>

I like that a lot. Never read the book.

-Max


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