[Infowarrior] - Is It Time To Burn This Book?

[Richard Forno]

Is It Time To Burn This Book?
When Fahrenheit 451 becomes a comic book, it's time to worry.By Sarah  
Boxer
Posted Sunday, Aug. 16, 2009, at 8:08 AM ET

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2223495/
As the end time for printed books draws near, Fahrenheit 451, the 1953  
novel that envisioned it all, has just been published, again. And this  
time it reads like a joke—an extended, ironic, illustrated joke.  
Because this time, Ray Bradbury's novel about firemen who burn books  
instead of putting out fires is—oof!—a comic book.

Think back to the original novel. Comic books are the only books  
shallow enough to go unburned, the only ones people are still allowed  
to read. Beatty, the fire chief, who seems to have loved books once  
and whom Bradbury has called "a darker side of me," explains it all to  
the hero, Guy Montag, the reluctant fireman. When photography, movies,  
radio, and television came into their own, he says, books started to  
be "leveled down to a sort of pastepudding norm." Burning them isn't  
so tragic, he suggests, because they are already so degraded.

"Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. … Classics cut …  
to fill a two-minute book column. … Speed up the film, Montag, quick.  
Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down,  
In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop,  
Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, Digest-digest-digests! Politics? One  
column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all  
vanishes!" (Sounds like the Internet, doesn't it? News articles become  
blogs, blogs become tweets.) "School is shortened, discipline relaxed,  
philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling  
gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored." (Texting,  
anyone?) "More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less  
and less."

Fast forward 56 years to a condensed, comic-book version of the very  
novel in which comic books and condensations are presented as pap.  
Surely this is black humor, a resigned joke about the imminent eclipse  
of books on paper by images, both digital and analog. Except that it  
isn't. The graphic novel of Fahrenheit 451, with pictures by Tim  
Hamilton and a condensed text authorized by Bradbury himself, seems  
quite earnest.

It's hard to know what on earth Bradbury was thinking. Did he just  
give in to the enemy? And what was the artist, Hamilton, thinking,  
when he illustrated the fire chief's rant with his own tableau of  
degraded books: Hamlet for Dimwits, Time magazine, and, yes, two  
Classic Comics editions, Moby Dick and Treasure Island. (Hamilton  
himself illustrated a comic-book version of Treasure Island before  
taking on Fahrenheit 451.) It's as if author and artist were  
vigorously waving a white flag and shouting, "We couldn't beat 'em, so  
we joined 'em!"

Maybe there's another explanation, though. Maybe Bradbury sees the  
comic book as a kind of life raft, a salvation, for books. At the end  
of Fahrenheit 451, an underground society of persecuted book lovers  
picks volumes to memorize before burning them. They recite them to  
others. It's back to the oral tradition to save the literary world.  
Today a similar thing (minus the burning) is happening in reality, as  
graphic novelists pick out classics to retell in their own way.  
Fahrenheit 451 is but one of many. This year alone, there are new  
graphic novel versions of Moby Dick, The Trial, Crime and Punishment,  
The Great Gatsby, and the Bible. Is Bradbury saying that it's back to  
pictographs to save the literary world?

I don't think so. Graphic novels may win some new readers, but the  
text is almost always shortened to make way for pictures, and what  
survives of it is radically different: It's mostly dialogue, like a  
screenplay. In the graphic-novel version of Fahrenheit 451, almost all  
of the words are spoken. Even the pictures confirm that the novel has  
become a script.

Montag is drawn in deep, spooky shadow, as if he were telling his tale  
out loud, by a bonfire or with a flashlight under his chin. And this  
only deepens the irony, for Fahrenheit 451 seems to be just as much  
against movies, theater, and television as it is against comic books.

In the novel, insipid housewives spend their time memorizing scripts  
for soap operas starring themselves that are piped into their homes  
and projected onto room-size screens (like reality TV, except more  
interactive). Montag's wife, Mildred, is addicted to these "parlor  
walls." She explains the attraction: "When it comes time for the  
missing lines, they all look at me out of the three walls and I say  
the lines." She calls the walls her "family." Her only complaint is  
that she doesn't have a "fourth wall." (Yes, that's what she calls  
it.) Then she could be both audience and actor. Home theater would  
become real life.

And so, it seems, we are back to the first hypothesis: The comic book  
is more surrender than salvation—white flag, not life raft. Bradbury  
appears to have decided to hurry the apocalypse for books, or at least  
to announce it, by helping transpose Fahrenheit 451 into the perfect  
anti-book (in Fahrenheit 451 terms)—both theatrical script and comic  
strip.

But there's yet another possibility: Maybe Bradbury really does not  
feel about books the way the fire chief, Beatty, does. Beatty seems to  
have loved books once, but only the weighty classics, whereas  
Bradbury, in his many introductions to the original Fahrenheit 451,  
has professed his love for all kinds of books, high and low, and all  
kinds of magazines. His two early publishers were Playboy and the sci- 
fi magazine Galaxy. He loves movies. (He was thrilled with Truffaut's  
movie version of Fahrenheit 451, and he was friends with Fellini.) He  
helped turn Fahrenheit 451 into an opera. He made a screenplay out of  
Moby Dick for John Huston. And, yes, he loves comics; he's always  
loved comics! (Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were his boyhood favorites.)

Bradbury is no Beatty. He's a pluralist. He loves high and low,  
literature and comics, opera and movies. He's adapted his novel for  
just about every medium. Given this, perhaps the message of the comic- 
book rendition of Farenheit 451 is that the elitist, nostalgic, black- 
and-white thinking of a Beatty is part of the problem and leads to  
black-and-white solutions like censorship and book burning. Beatty has  
a love-hate relationship with the paper he burns. Bradbury does not.

It turns out that Bradbury has another alter ego in Fahrenheit 451—a  
scholar named Faber, who helps the fireman Montag leave the book- 
burning business. And here is his take on printed books: "Books were  
only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were  
afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all." Pow!  
Take that, books! If we want to hold onto books in some form, we have  
to let go of the idea that there is an ideal form for books.

It's tempting to say that Bradbury, speaking through Faber, was  
foreseeing the great shift from print to pixel 56 years ago. Maybe,  
maybe not. But I'm guessing that Bradbury might not mind seeing a  
nonprint, totally digital edition of Fahrenheit 451. If and when  
Fahrenheit 451 does come out in a Kindle edition, then the progression  
from printed book to condensed script to comic book to kindling will,  
at last, be complete. Beatty and Faber will both be right.

Sarah Boxer is the author of Ultimate Blogs and In the Floyd Archives:  
A Psycho-Bestiary.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2223495/