Almost by chance, I picked up Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to read the same day that I finished Bleak House by Charles Dickens.
The choice was serendipitous, for reasons only obvious to the restless wanderings of a mind wearied of the hyped-up buzz of today’s post-literate society. (I am being coy, of course; one might trumpet their intellectual capacities for literary perception, their inquisitive exploration of themes, their noble defiance of today’s technologically-driven culture, the kind of culture prophetically envisaged by Bradbury. And now I appear both coy and brazenly boastful. Guilty as charged!)
The serendipity lay first in discovering the dates of their publication. Both are books of the early ’50s: Dickens of the 1850s, Bradbury, the 1950s. The books were published 100 years apart, to be exact – if one takes the date of the final parts of Bleak House to be published, as it was released serially between 1852 and 1853. Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953.
Nevertheless, what else might be serendipitous about the connection? Many books were published 100 years apart from each other, with not a sniff nor a whiff to connect them. What connection is there between Bradbury and Dickens? Little to speak of; F451 is concerned with books, yes, but if Dickens is made reference to, it is passingly. Dickens was not a master of science fiction; Bradbury not of the Victorian novel.
What then? What struck me in the juxtaposition of these two that so registered a connection to my mind?
Well first, here’s a thing: Bleak House took me nearly four months to finish. It was a slow summer, filled with work, rest, and other books too. So it took a little while.
I read Fahrenheit 451 in one day. I started it the same day I put down Bleak House and finished it the next day. It pulled me along through its 200-odd pages at breakneck speed, the wind whistling in my ears. It was startling, awful, prophetic. And so fast.
And in that respect, so unlike Dickens. After a 100-year span.
And it got me thinking. (A dangerous pursuit according to F451.) Thinking about acceleration, and speed – the kind of relentless pace envisaged within the novel itself, revolving around the Machines that Bradbury somehow knew were at the centre of Man’s relinquishing of thought.
What was interesting also was to discover that Pace itself defined the very creation of the novel: it seems to have emerged in a kind of frenzy over a period of just nine days. Bradbury discovered a room filled with rentable typewriters in the basement of a campus library, and hammered out the work there with barely a moment’s pause, it seems.
Acceleration. What else characterises the descent, the gravitational plunge we have taken into the twenty-first century? Technologically-saturated, and yes post-literate, and everything faster, instant, immediate. Who would have the patience to write as Dickens did, pen in hand, bent over paper with a candle? Few have the patience to read him these days, and those that do discover a world more like that which Clarisse describes to Guy Montag in F451, in which people actually think, and talk to each other, not past each other, and we the readers feel like Guy, discovering that world to be increasingly alien.
To summarise, this serendipitous comparison seemed to show me this, that in the space of just 100 years, the rate of technological change – ignited of course by the industrial revolution, about which Dickens himself had his own, not necessarily charitable thoughts – was felt to be increasing, and bringing out not the best but rather the worst in our humanity, and the artistic community stood (and stands) at the break-points of the age, a signpost of where we’ve come from (Dickens) and where we’re headed (Bradbury), a bulwark for humanity against our worst tendencies and instincts.
If anyone is interested, you can find me on Goodreads, where I’m attempting to keep a fairly good track of what I read.
Ben David Trigg 