Category: Books and Reading Page 7 of 16

May 2007 Reading/Watching Recap

In May I was home for a few weeks, and took advantage of the amazing St. Louis library system to knock several films off my 2007 Goal list. Then I got burned out on that and just watched some random old stuff. After the jump, reactions to Spider-Man 3, The Great Dictator, They Were Expendable, Taxi Driver, Unforgiven, The New World, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and more.

I have a Music post in the works, but I was focusing on getting this thing finished. Tomorrow.

April 2007 Reading/Watching Recap

Guess what! I finally finished April’s recap! I know, right? April was the month in which I rediscovered Turner Classic Movies during a few weeks of relative dead time at school and, between that and an active month of Netflixing and theatre-going, watched a total of 24 movies. I think that’s a record. And that’s not even including the four or five rewatches. So without further ado, here are my reactions to Marie Antoinette, Band of Outsiders, Kiss Me Deadly, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, The Lives of Others, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Through a Glass Darkly, Hot Fuzz, and many others. Plus some books.

Bradbury and Censorship

In the comments to my post about Bradbury and authorial intent, Evan pointed out that Ray Bradbury wrote an afterword to Fahrenheit 451 against censorship:

The most important reason Bradbury can’t get away with this re-interpretation is that a few years back he wrote a postscript to the novel in which he talked about how bad censorship was. He made some very good points. I don’t know why he would back away from it now.

Curious, I looked back at my copy of the book, and sure enough, it’s in there. Bradbury states clear as day:

Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel with, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony.

And if you wonder how he really feels about it:

The point is obvious. 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 feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

Yet Bradbury is still mostly concerned with his rights as an author, not the right of readers to read the text (either at all, or as written). From the end of the brief essay:

The tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. […] All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m out again, giving it the old try.

Here he clearly feels his books are his own territory–which is true as far as the writing goes. Nobody should be editing his books for content. However, the attitude here is strikingly similar to his recent attempts to reclaim power over the interpretation of his novel. Interesting question: If he decided to edit his book now and try to destroy previous editions, would he be a censor? Would such changes be acceptable, after the book as it stands has been available for so long? I tend to think they wouldn’t–certainly literary scholars would do all they could to hang on to the original text. :)

So in this 1979 postscript, Bradbury says the novel is about censorship, at least partially, and decries censorship of his work, but via a claim to authorial superiority–at this point, explicitly only applying it to the text itself, but now he’s applying his superiority to interpretation also, to promote an interpretation which contradicts his apparent 1979 opinion (although perhaps he is only focusing on the censorship angle because that’s what he’s struggling against at that particular moment–even so, that would suggest opportunism). Interesting. Thanks, Evan, for pointing that out. I don’t know if I’d read it before.

Ford Madox Ford on Joseph Conrad’s writing style

This is the greatest description of Joseph Conrad’s writing style ever. From Ford Madox Ford’s 1911 essay “The Critical Attitude” (Ford and Conrad were close friends and sometime collaborators).

Mr Conrad is much less concerned [than Henry James] with spiritual relationships and much more with a sort of material fatalism. For him every one of the situations of a book must be rendered inevitable. The actual situations thus set up he is less careful to define. In that way he is an impressionist. If he had to describe, let us say, a murder, he would give his story the true tragic note. The motive for the murder would be overwhelming, the circumstances in which it was brought about would be so described that we should imagine ourselves to be present at the actual time. But not only this, Mr Conrad would find it necessary to describe minutely the knife with which the murder was committed, the manner in which it fitted into the murderer’s hand. Nay, more; supposing the murderer to be an individual of a wild or an excited appearance, Mr Conrad’s conscience would make it necessary that he should minutely describe the man who sold the murderer the knife. He might provide us with the genealogy of the seller in order to prove that owing to the idiosyncrasies of his father and mother he was predisposed to the selling of lethal instruments to men of wild appearance. Or he might give us an account of the vendor’s financial ups and downs for the preceding two years in order absolutely to convince us that the vendor was inevitably forced by destiny to dispose of the knife. In the former case the cap of the vendor’s mother and the photographs over her parlour mantelpiece would be carefully described in order to render her real; in the latter, the knife-seller’s account-books would be sedulously projected before us, and at the moment when he was hesitating whether or not to sell the knife there would float before his eyes, written in red ink, the amount of the balance against him at his bank. But these digressions, if they serve to take up time, do give to Mr Conrad’s work its extraordinary aspect of reality. Without them we should not feel that we are experiencing–at least to the extent that Mr Conrad would experience them–the actual scenes that he describes for us. Without them, indeed, it is very likely that Mr Conrad’s impressionism would fail of its effect. For having minutely described the purchase of the dagger, Mr Conrad would go on to render for us the journey of the murderer in a four-wheeler through a thick fog. We should be conducted to the door of a house where the crime was to be committed, the rust of the knocker would be felt, not seen, because of the thickness of the fog. The door would open upon a black hall and there the episode would end. The point would be that Mr Conrad would by this time so entirely have identified us with the spirit of the expedition that we should take up the tale for ourselves. We should go up the creaking stairs which Mr Conrad beforehand would have described for us with such intimacy that we should feel ourselves simply at home; we should push open the door and in the shadow of the bed-curtains we should perceive a sleeping form. But Mr Conrad, having dropped his story with the knocker upon the front door, would begin his next chapter with an observation from Inspector Frost, of the Secret Service. He would describe the room in which Inspector Frost sat and he would give us the inspector’s biography, with an episode of his school life which would go to prove how inevitable it was that the inspector should pass his days in the detection of crime. And so once more Mr Conrad would take up the story of the murder with the inspector’s description in colloquial English of what the corpse’s hands looked like.

I don’t know if this is applicable to all of Conrad’s stories–certainly Heart of Darkness isn’t quite this detailed–but it is EXACTLY how Nostromo is arranged. He gives the background on the fictional South American country, its political history, its geography, the political and personal backgrounds of some fifteen characters, and lots of detail of the events of the beginning of a revolution, and then just at the climax when the title character is heading off to save the day, he stops, jumps forward in time, and has a minor character relate how the revolution came to an end. It frustrated me a lot, but various other people in class came up with acceptable reasons for him bypassing the climax (like, he didn’t want the revolution itself to take on undue importance, he wanted to continue his practice of using suspect secondary narrators, etc.), so I’m okay with it now. I can appreciate Conrad, and a lot of his prose is lovely and evocative, but I find his narrative style maddening. I think Ford was rather delighted with it, by contrast.

Bradbury and Authorial Intent

It’s been around the web for a while (and I guess the regular news, too, but I’m not a regular news person), but Ray Bradbury has spoken out against the common interpretation of his book Fahrenheit 451 as an anti-censorship novel. Instead, he says, his intended target was television, which he believed would destroy interest in reading books. So now that we know what he meant, there shouldn’t be any more problems “misinterpreting” it, right?

I’m sorry, maybe I’m becoming too entrenched in contemporary literary criticism mental patterns, but I have a problem with this. Now, I don’t have a problem with Bradbury saying what he intended to write. I don’t have a problem with people taking another look at the book in light of an anti-television theme. What I have a problem with is Bradbury’s apparent desire to eliminate the anti-censorship reading altogether in favor of an anti-TV reading. I’m still working on my thoughts on authorial intent versus reader’s interpretive role, but I’m pretty sure I’m not in favor of an author shutting down any alternate views of his work that are clearly supported by the work.

I can’t go very deep into the topic without rereading the book, but here’s a few off-the-cuff thoughts.

  • As I said, his statement holds very little water with contemporary critical theory–Roland Barthes declared “the death of the author” over twenty years ago, and the importance of authorial intentionality has been steadily eroding since at least the 1950s. He has as much right to interpreting his own work as anyone else, but no more. Now, that’s a critical position that can be agreed or disagreed with–so let’s move on.
  • Millions of people have read Fahrenheit 451 as an attack on censorship since its 1953 publication. My copy of the book proclaims it “the classic bestseller about censorship” right on the cover in type as big as Bradbury’s name. If that’s not what Bradbury intended, why has it taken him fifty years to speak up?
  • If Bradbury did originally intend a polemic against television rather than censorship, he obviously did a crappy job of communicating his point, since almost nobody has read it that way. I figure an author’s chance to express himself is when he writes the text; if they fail to communicate what they mean, they’ve lost control over it. Crying “but that’s not what I mean” after the fact is far less effective, and rightfully so, than communicating clearly in the first place.
  • I don’t have a problem with an interpretation that sees an anti-television attitude in the text–I’m sure that’s there, though I haven’t read the book in a while. I remember the walls of television screens broadcasting mindless drivel. I remember the sense of Montag being freed from a life of enslavement to the mollifying screens (something his wife was subject to, I believe) through his involvement with the book-saving community. In the article linked above, Bradbury claims the book-burning wasn’t censorship because the people had already turned away from books in favor of television–that the government wasn’t imposing screens for brainwashing purposes as in Orwell’s 1984. However, and I’d probably need to read the book again to see how this plays out, why would the government start burning the books at all if it were merely an issue of the people giving up books in favor of television? It seems that if no-one were reading books, the mere existence of books would become a non-issue. Since the government IS burning books, that leads me to believe that the government feels that in some way televisions are less dangerous than books, and thus preferable to them, whether or not it was the people or the government that began the migration from books to television. And the book is, after all, titled after the temperature at which paper burns, thus focusing on the book-burning itself rather than whatever social changes led to it. It’s more than the government following the people, too, as Bradbury seems to suggest in the article…it’s against the law to read or keep books around, which would be stupid and pointless if the government didn’t have some interest in mandating the move from books to television. Book-burning by an authority is censorship, whether Bradbury likes it or not.
  • I’ve seen a few people really take to Bradbury’s anti-television polemic, but I’m not concerned about which interpretation is correct. I think both are possible readings, even at the same time. The question of “is he right” to me isn’t a question of “is he right about the dangers of censorship” or “is he right about the dangers of television”, but “is he right to try to mandate the way his book is understood.” And I think in this particular case, at least, he is not. In fact, if I wanted to be really cynical, I would suggest that he’s seen the growth of television’s ubiquity over the past fifty years and latched onto that, making himself seem extremely prophetic. But that would be overly cynical.

Now I want to reread the novel. But I don’t have time. So, someone who’s read it more recently than I have, if you’d like to help me understand how a government burning books isn’t censorship, and how a book whose very title evokes book-burning doesn’t foreground censorship, that’d be great.

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