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To Be Shocked to Life Again: Ray

Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451
a
Sunjoo Lee
a
Kyung Hee University
Published online: 22 May 2014.

To cite this article: Sunjoo Lee (2014) To Be Shocked to Life Again: Ray Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451,
The Explicator, 72:2, 142-145, DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2014.905433

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2014.905433

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 The Explicator, Vol. 72, No. 2, 142–145, 2014
Copyright 
C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0014-4940 print / 1939-926X online
DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2014.905433

SUNJOO LEE
Kyung Hee University
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To Be Shocked to Life Again: Ray Bradbury’s

FAHRENHEIT 451

Keywords: Theodor Adorno, Ray Bradbury, censorship in literature, mind–body problem

in literature

In her noteworthy study of the “dialectics of the body” in Theodor

Adorno’s thought, Lisa Yun Lee remarks, “The body is where domination
and suffering are made manifest” and “yet at the same time, [it is] the site
that offers the hidden promise of happiness” (83). To Adorno, the reification
of society—in other words, the reification of human relations and human
reason itself—goes hand in hand with repression of the senses, without the
recovery of which that of the reason cannot be accomplished. Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451 presents a compelling dramatization of this line of thought.
In the totally administered world Bradbury’s novel depicts, human be-
ings are “made identical to one another through isolation within the com-
pulsively controlled collectivity” (Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of
Enlightenment [DE] 29). In the words of Captain Beatty, spoken to Mon-
tag as justification for their profession—much of which sounds like inge-
nious riffs on Adorno and Horkheimer’s disturbing theses in Dialectic of
Enlightenment—making everybody the same is a precondition for happi-
ness for all: “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the
Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every
other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower,
to judge themselves against” (Bradbury 58). Beatty’s sly remarks, meant to
vindicate the work of firemen, only add to the reader’s horror of a society
built on this vision—for the troubling nature of equality and happiness in
such a society has already been made abundantly clear by the point in the
story that Beatty makes these comments to Montag.

142
 Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451 143

A persuasive scene in this regard is that of Montag’s wife Mildred’s

stomach pumping and blood transfusion, following her overdose on sleeping
pills. The way two impersonal fellows in overalls perform the operation is
not much different from “digging of a trench in one’s yard” (Bradbury
14). To Montag’s protest about not having a medical doctor perform the
procedure, they respond, “You don’t need an M. D., case like this; all you
need is two handymen, clean up the problem in half an hour” (15). Where
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“society is reducing life into a chemical process,” its members have to “mold
themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul” (DE 196, 23). When
Beatty lauds the equality and happiness of their society, Montag has already
had glimpses of all this. Through witnessing the horror of a living death
in his wife, and through his meeting with Clarisse McClellan, a seventeen-
year-old free spirit and one among those few who kept intact their ability to
think, Montag has awakened from his stupor and begun seeing the “insanity
and nightmare,” the “evil,” of the society in which they live (Bradbury 24).
Ray Bradbury himself has characterized his novel as a “social com-
mentary . . . hidden in an adventure story” (qtd. in Weller 124). Critical
consensus takes censorship as the focus of the novel’s social commentary,
but censorship in its usual definition falls far short of describing the total
institutionalization of the abolition of thinking tout court, an “insanity” the
machinery of Firehouse embodies. Among other scenes in the novel, Faber,
the ex-English professor, gives a long talk about what his civilization has
lost by burning books, which demonstrates that the novel’s concern goes
beyond the issue of censorship as thought control to probe the question of
what thinking is in the first place. Surprisingly, perhaps, Faber notes that
we do not need books—that we only need “some of the things” books used
to have, which can be found elsewhere, for instance, in musical records,
movies, nature, or in friends and ourselves (Bradbury 82). What all of them
may have in common, for which books are a particularly great receptacle,
are “quality,” “texture,” “the pores in the face of life” (83). A “literary” per-
son, in Faber’s definition, is one who sees “more pores . . . more truthfully
recorded details of life per square inch . . . on a sheet of paper.” What’s at
stake in reading books is to “touch life” by capturing “[t]elling detail. Fresh
detail,” by reliving the “infinite detail and awareness” to be found there (83,
82). Faber’s view, that any real thinking should involve a sensitive response
to qualities, chimes with that of Adorno’s (see DE 9; Negative Dialectics
[ND] 44–47). Montag himself provides a case in point here in that, under
the unusual tutelage of Clarisse, he becomes more thoughtful by becoming
more aware of his senses and of his senses’ experience of the physical world.
 144 The Explicator

The novel’s preoccupation with hands also corroborates the reading that
Fahrenheit 451 seeks to rescue the senses as a vital organ for thinking.
When Montag steals a book on his assignment, with an abrupt yet extraor-
dinary passion to possess it, it is his hand that “turned thief,” “with wild
devotion . . . with a brain of its own, with a conscience and a curiosity in
each trembling finger” (Bradbury 37). As one critic has noted, Bradbury’s
novel repeatedly makes a point of the hand’s feeling, thinking, and acting
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in its own way.1 When Beatty, in his final attempt to keep Montag on the
book-hating side, bombards him with quotes about the dangers of reading,
he feels as if this attack on his mind is a physical one and dreads that if
Beatty’s alcohol-inflamed stare touches his hands, they might “wither, turn
over on their sides, and never be shocked to life again,” to be “buried the rest
of his life in his coat sleeves, forgotten” (105). Fahrenheit 451’s “adventure
story” is one of Montag’s reclaiming this nearly “forgotten” body of his, of
his (hands’) being shocked to life again, in the process of which he will take
back his freedom to read and think.
It’s an arduous journey for Montag, following his murder of Beatty, to
elude the police manhunt and get to the countryside to join the intellectuals
in exile, but it is interspersed with episodes of great sensual happiness, both
newfound and regained. Reaching the river, he strips to the skin, wades in,
and splashes his body with the “raw liquor” of the river, snuffing some up
his nose too (Bradbury 139). The newness of stars in the night sky, “[f]or
the first time in a dozen years . . . coming out above him,” enchants him
(140). It is as if “the seven veils of unreality,” a lifting of which he recalls
occurred in his childhood visit to a barn, were once again drawn away and
left him “so fully aware of the world that he would be afraid” (142–43). He
anticipates the near shock of experiencing “the small miracle,” one of “[a]
glass of milk, an apple, a pear” waiting for him in the morning at the bottom
of the steps of a barn he will visit. Bending to touch this “incredible thing,”
he will know he is given “the long time he needed to think all the things that
must be thought.” A nuclear war crumbles his city to dust, but Montag and
the intellectuals he joins do not despair. Their optimism, their willingness
to have trust in a future where civilization’s self-destruction comes to a full
stop, has to do with their shared belief in the changed relationship between
humans and their world. In the new civilization they will build, thinking will
be done in the full awareness of “[a day’s] thousand details of putting foot
after foot and hand after hand” (Bradbury 162). In this staking of utopian
hope on the reclaiming of the sensual as an integral element of thinking, on
the revocation of a false division of mind and body, one hears an echo of
 Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451 145

Adorno’s assertion, “what hope clings to . . . is a transfigured body” (ND

400).

Note
1See Refeeq McGiveron’s essay on the hand imagery in Fahrenheit 451, which traces the ways the novel
grants ethical and epistemological agency to the hand.
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Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. A. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973. Print.
———, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stan-
ford UP, 2002. Print.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine, 1996. Print.
Lee, Lisa Yun. Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philosophy of T. W. Adorno. New York:
Routledge, 2005. Print.
McGiveron, Rafeeq. “Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.” Explicator 54.3 (1996): 177–80. Print.
Weller, Sam. Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews. New York: Melville House, 2010.
Print.