{"id":470,"date":"2007-06-18T21:18:11","date_gmt":"2007-06-19T04:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/18\/bradbury-and-censorship\/"},"modified":"2020-10-09T06:38:51","modified_gmt":"2020-10-09T13:38:51","slug":"bradbury-and-censorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/bradbury-and-censorship\/","title":{"rendered":"Bradbury and Censorship"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the comments to my post about Bradbury and authorial intent, Evan pointed out<\/a> that Ray Bradbury wrote an afterword to Fahrenheit 451<\/i> against censorship:<\/p>\n

\nThe most important reason Bradbury can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know why he would back away from it now.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

\nOnly 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.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And if you wonder how he really feels about it:<\/p>\n

\nThe 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.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\nThe 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.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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. :)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[465,466,369,464],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":454,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/bradbury-and-authorial-intent\/","url_meta":{"origin":470,"position":0},"title":"Bradbury and Authorial Intent","author":"Jandy","date":"June 6, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Books and Reading"","block_context":{"text":"Books and Reading","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":116,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2006\/10\/banning-fahrenheit-451\/","url_meta":{"origin":470,"position":1},"title":"Banning Fahrenheit 451","author":"Jandy","date":"October 5, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Last week, the father of a 15-year-old girl near Houston complained to her high school about one of the reading assignments and felt it should be banned from the school. The book? Ray Bradbury's anti-censorship novel Fahrenheit 451. And, last week was Banned Books Week, too. Ironic. Houston Community Newspapers\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Books and Reading"","block_context":{"text":"Books and Reading","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":36879,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2022\/04\/classic-novel-merch\/","url_meta":{"origin":470,"position":2},"title":"Classic Novel Merch","author":"Jandy","date":"April 23, 2022","format":"image","excerpt":"","rel":"","context":"In "Books and Reading"","block_context":{"text":"Books and Reading","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/img_3807.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":835,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/heavy-reading\/","url_meta":{"origin":470,"position":3},"title":"Heavy Reading","author":"Jandy","date":"December 5, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"So I just checked out the reading list for my Victorian Novel class in the Spring. The list of books follows, along with the page number count for each one (taken from the Modern Library paperbacks, accounting for the notes and commentary, so the number given is the text itself\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Books and Reading"","block_context":{"text":"Books and Reading","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":149,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2006\/11\/modernism-and-the-nouvelle-vague\/","url_meta":{"origin":470,"position":4},"title":"Modernism and the Nouvelle Vague…","author":"Jandy","date":"November 25, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"To ponder... The French New Wave is to cinema what the Modernist Novel is to fiction. \"In the novel, writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce tried to evoke 'inner speech' or 'stream of consciousness,' through associative and fragmented forms, omitting verbs, pronouns, connectives, and articles, and leaving sentences uncompleted.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Books and Reading"","block_context":{"text":"Books and Reading","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":35772,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2016\/04\/challenge-week-14-something-new\/","url_meta":{"origin":470,"position":5},"title":"Challenge Week 14: Something New","author":"Jandy","date":"April 16, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Sorry for the delay on this one - combination of Netflix, library, and my own procrastination made acquiring the film take longer than I expected. I am caught up on watching films, but will likely do short writeups of the latest three to catch up. Right upfront, I want to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "2016 Movie Challenge"","block_context":{"text":"2016 Movie Challenge","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/film\/2016-movie-challenge\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/tf-feat.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}