In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the antagonist, Beatty, delivers a memorable villain-monologue to the novel’s protagonist, Guy Montag. Montag has begun to have doubts about what they do as firemen–i.e. burn books, which are illegal in Bradbury’s dystopian future. Beatty attempts to set him straight with brief cultural history.
The entire speech, which goes on for several pages, is a tour de force that’s well worth reading in its entirety. (Go on, you know you have an old copy from high school somewhere on your shelves. It’s pages 51-59 in my 2013 Simon & Schuster edition). But here’s one excerpt from Beatty’s speech that knocks my socks off:
Speed up the film, 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! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!
Captain Beatty
Fahrenheit was published in 1953.
1953!
You’d be hard pressed to find a better description of the media culture of 2019.
I’m not one to get caught up in how well (or not) science-fiction predicts the future. That’s not the point. But if Bradbury is prophetic here, it’s not because he’s predicted anything; it’s because he has as sharp an insight into human nature as any writer of the Twentieth (or Twenty-First) Century. Like any good prophet, his words cut deep with painful truths that the culture doesn’t want to hear about itself.
By my count, this passage is 473 characters long, or about four Tweets. The novel itself is relatively short, clocking in under 50,000 words (shorter than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). I hope it’s not too long for people to keep reading it.
Our screens certainly don’t want us to. Guy Montag’s screen-addicted wife, Mildred, has her screens on the parlor walls; we have them on our walls, on our laps, in our pockets, under our pillows. It might turn out that paper doesn’t burn at 451-degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe it just combusts into nothingness at the temperature of a warm lithium-ion battery.