TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Is Mars Heaven? The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and Ray Bradbury's Landscape of Longing
Ray Bradbury's 'theater of the morning'
Being Martian: Spatiotemporal Self in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles
'I'm Being Ironic': Imperialism, Mass Culture, and the Fantastic World of Ray Bradbury
The Dark and Starry Eyes of Ray Bradbury
Martian Legacy: Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles
The Thematic Structure of 'The Martian Chronicle.'
Politeness in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction: Social Interaction, Language, and the Body
Flannery O'Connor's Religious Vision
The Theology of Flannery O’Connor:
Biblical Recapitulations in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor
Grace Versus the Glamour of Evil in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”
BRADBURY
Is Mars Heaven? The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and Ray Bradbury's Landscape of Longing
Author(s):Eric S. Rabkin
Publication Details:Visions of Mars: Essays on the Red Planet in Fiction and Science. Ed. Howard V. Hendrix, Eric S. Rabkin, and George Slusser. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2011. p95-104.
Source:Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 333. Detroit: Gale. FromLiterature Resource Center.
Document Type:Critical essay
In the fall 1948 issue of Planet Stories, Ray Bradbury published a short story that the editor didn't even mention on the cover, yet this story, with the exclamatory title "Mars Is Heaven!", went on to become one of the most famous science fiction stories of all time. The first Earth expedition, comprising white men from Ohio, lands on Mars in 1960 on a "lawn of green grass" before a Victorian house in the midst of a small Midwestern town. Their instruments tell them the atmosphere is just like Earth's. The men want to run out to explore what one calls "Good old Mars!" (322). Captain John Black cautions his men against this impossible reincarnation of their youth, but nostalgia cannot be long resisted. They run off to what Black recognizes as Green Bluff, Illinois, his own childhood town. (Bradbury's fictional setting, which perhaps reflects his own native Waukegan, Illinois, exists in no real atlas but turns out to be a green bluff--that is, a verdant deception--indeed.) Even before they meet people and hear voices, through a window the crew see an untended piano on which sits the sheet music for "Beautiful Ohio." Then the people appear, all departed loved ones. The crew reel with joy, dismiss their own puzzlements, and scatter to the homes of those they had once mourned. Even Captain Black retires to his family, incredulous that Mars could possibly realize all their hopes, but seduced nonetheless. As he finally settles down to sleep in a bed shared with his now undead brother, Black thinks, just perhaps, this is all a mind trick, a ploy by telepathic Martians to disarm invading Earthmen. He looks up just in time to see the Martian impostor stab him to death. The narrator informs us that elsewhere the whole crew is slaughtered.
Is Mars heaven? Bradbury's clear reply in 1948: No. Heaven, or the vision of heaven shaped from our own longing, is a fatal snare. And Mars is a landscape of longing.
According to William G. Contento's Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections, Bradbury is the single most reprinted science fiction short story writer in the world. Bradbury's most reprinted story is "A Sound of Thunder"(1952), the fictional source for the name of the real-world phenomenon called "The Butterfly Effect." In that story, a time-traveling tourist barely steps off the path in the Jurassic and irrevocably changes all the millions of years that follow. As in "Mars Is Heaven!" we see here Bradbury's recognition that while the past may lure us, stepping onto the lawns of the past may lead to our destruction in the present. His next most reprinted story is "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950), an ironic elegy in which household mechanicals, both built-in systems and mobile robot appliances, mindless of the sudden death of humanity by atomic war, try to perform their programmed functions until, bumping into each other and misperceiving their environment, they, the last vestige of our ingenuity, fail miserably, bursting into flame, finally consumed like the rest of Earth civilization by fire (Martian Chronicles 166-72). No matter how loyal and well designed our technology may be, Bradbury seems to say here, our faith that our technology reliably maintains the world we want cannot be sustained. Bradbury's third most reprinted story is "Mars Is Heaven!"or, more accurately, that story and a version of it that appears in The Martian Chronicles (1950).
The Martian Chronicles, published May 7, 1950, is a milestone in the history of science fiction in specific and American literature in general. Today's readers may not appreciate the widespread ignorance and disparagement of science fiction then. About eight months before the book's publication, on August 28, 1949, pioneering SF writer and editor Donald Wollheim published a full-page essay in the New York Times called "The Science-Fiction Novel." Most of it is devoted to basic definition, starting with distinguishing science fiction from "say, a fictionalized biography of Marconi or Pasteur." About ten months after Bradbury's book's publication, on February 17, 1951, James B. Conant, erstwhile chemist and revered president of Harvard University, complained in that same newspaper, "It is a great reflection on us teachers of science at the university and the high school level that we have apparently been unable to put across to students, who have not majored in the sciences, just what science is about. ... The public acceptance of science fiction or fiction disguised as science is our indictment." The Times did print capsule reviews of newly published science fiction novels from time to time, but began doing so only on September 18, 1949, when movie critic A. H. Weiler first bothered to give a brief review of Jack Williamson's 1948 novel The Humanoids, along with reviews of another novel (The Big Eye, by Jack Ehrlich) and an anthology (The Best Science Fiction Stories--1949, edited by E. F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty). But The Martian Chronicles was something special.
On August 5, 1951, Harvey Breit published "Talk with Mr. Bradbury." As far as I have been able to discover, this is the very first interview that the Times ever ran with an acknowledged SF writer who interested the newspaper precisely because he was an SF writer. It begins by noting, "There is this genre, getting quite a play these days, known as science fiction." After a bit of joking about how Bradbury did not arrive in New York "in a space ship," Breit asks his first question. He could not have known then that Bradbury's resistance to some technologies would become so famous that Time magazine would spread the news that at the age of sixty-two (1982) Bradbury quite nervously took his very first airplane ride ([untitled notice]). "First off, before defining the field," Breit wondered back in 1951, "how did Mr. Bradbury come to be writing science fiction? 'I'm not only a science fiction writer,' Mr. Bradbury replied." Bradbury claims to work in three fields: "smalltown [sic] life, ... science fiction and fantasy." He distinguishes SF as being somehow possible, and uses his own story "The Pedestrian" as an example. In that story's future America, in which machines have made life relentlessly easy, a strolling man wanting just to breathe unconditioned air and see the world without an intervening television screen is accosted by robot traffic cops who are so incapable of understanding the man's desires that, as Bradbury says, "the pedestrian gets taken to an insane asylum." Fantasy, on the other hand, Bradbury calls "the improbable," such as "a dinosaur appearing in the streets of New York." Bradbury doesn't define small-town life as a genre, but when asked about the influences on his own writing, the first artist he cites is Sherwood Anderson.
Like Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Martian Chronicles is a composite novel (Rabkin, "Composite"). The chronological ordering of Bradbury's chapters, the creation of eight new chapters woven among the seventeen previously published pieces, and some subtle yet significant revision, including that for what had been "Mars IsHeaven!" demonstrate that the book is no mere collection. Taken as a whole, it traces symbolically powerful episodes in Earthlings' migration to Mars. The book is profoundly American. "The Green Morning" chapter, for example, is a version of the story of Johnny Appleseed. Here, though, the counterpart of that legendary hero is not merely planting trees but, by their presence, enriching the air with oxygen. That the Appleseed character could walk the Martian landscape without breathing apparatus even before planting the trees is just as improbable as a living dinosaur in New York. That the trees grow overnight like "gigantic beanstalks" (76) doubly suggests that the story, clearly not SF, is not only fantasy but in particular the variety of fantasy we call fairy tale (Rabkin, "To Fairyland"). The chapter called "Way in the Middle of the Air" tells how American blacks escape from racism by taking a rocket toMars, leaving their excess belongings behind like a Civil Rights version of the "Gone to Texas" sign people once tacked to their doors when they would "light out for the Territory," to quote from the last paragraph of the memoirs of Nigger Jim's companion, Huckleberry Finn (Twain 539). In the "Usher II" chapter, an "Investigator of Moral Climates" (107), the bluenose agency that bans imaginative authors like Poe, is welcomed to a fantastic "masque" (a dress-up ball as in Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death") in which the guests on Mars and finally the investigator himself succumb to literary devices that fans of Poe have all seen before: premature burial, immurement in the cellar, being stuffed up a chimney, and finally the whole "house" and scene collapsing into a "tarn" like that in the last paragraph of Poe's precursor story, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (Poe 268).
Near the beginning of The Martian Chronicles, when the first Earthman, Nathaniel York, comes to Mars, he is sensed far off. A Martian wife named Ylla begins unaccountably to sing "Drink to me only with thine eyes" (5). Her husband, disturbed to see her moved, takes a weapon that fires "golden bees," meets the descending ship in the next valley, and kills York. When the second expedition arrives with four men, a Martian crowd traps them by telepathy in an insane asylum. The third expedition, called in The Martian Chronicles simply "The Third Expedition," is Bradbury's revision of "Mars Is Heaven!". In each of these chronicle entries, science is left behind; the imagination wins. Then, between the third and fourth expeditions, a childhood disease, supposedly carried unwittingly by the Earthmen, all but destroys the Martians. Thus the rest of the novel considers the attempts at an American frontier expansion without the American original sin of land theft and genocide. There are a few chapters that remind us of the West's (that is, Mars's) relation to the East (that is, Earth), as when retirees move to Mars. We have critiques of capitalism, as in the chapter called "The Off Season." But the novel's main complaint is aimed at technology itself.
Ultimately Earth consumes itself in atomic war. Those few pioneers who do not return to fight for their countries now wander a depopulated Mars. The penultimate chapter is "There Will Come Soft Rains," a critique not only of atomic weaponry but, like "The Pedestrian," which is not in this novel, a critique of turning our lives over to robots, to technology. Something different happens in "The Million-Year Picnic," the very last chapter of this composite novel. An Earth family comes to Mars in a private rocket. The father had planned this escape from the expected atomic conflagration, and as he leads his wife and sons inland on a canal boat, by remote control he destroys their rocket so that "evil men" (179), should they come to Mars again, will not be able to find them. They await another refugee family, this one with daughters. Around a campfire, the sons clamor to see the Martians their father had promised to show them. He takes them back down to the canal and asks them to look into the water. "The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water ..." (181). Thus the novel ends, as Crèvecoeur had said European emigration to America ended, by the glorious transformation of the sinful individual into "this new man ... who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced" (34). Then, an American; now, a Martian, which is to say an American who has a second chance untainted with imperialism and having escaped the 1950s' technology-branded fear of nuclear self-immolation.
It is little wonder that a book like this was the first to gain a putatively SF author extended treatment in the New York Times. In 1954, when the National Institute of Arts and Letters honored Bradbury for his contributions to American literature, the work cited was The Martian Chronicles. It won, that same year, the second annual gold medal of the prestigious Commonwealth Club of California. While one might argue that Bradbury was only occasionally a science fiction writer, undoubtedly Conant had Bradbury's seductive fantasy, and those works it represented, in mind when he called science fiction his own professional indictment. For an American audience in the early 1950s, The Martian Chronicles offered literary continuity and mythic redemption without any real science at all.
The Martian Chronicles also confirmed the mythic grounding of American culture in small-town life. In the opening chapter, "Rocket Summer," an "Ohio winter" in a "small town" magically turns to summer through the heat of a rocket rising from its nearby launching pad. "The rocket made climates" (1)--that is, charged the very air shared by everyone. From that chapter on, we see small towns as the models of community in the chapters called "The Third Expedition" (which is the revision of "Mars Is Heaven!"), "The Settlers," "Night Meeting," "The Martian," "The Silent Towns," and "The Long Years," among others. It is no wonder then that this suddenly lionized writer of fantasy but called a writer of science fiction, when he served as a consultant to Walt Disney in the design of Disneyland, approved the main entrance to "The Happiest Place on Earth" going through an old railway station to the foot of "Main Street U.S.A.," the portal to "Frontierland," "Fantasyland," and "Tomorrowland." Disney's fantasy small town with its main street anchored by the train station nearly reproduces the map opposite the title page inWinesburg, Ohio, the first great American composite novel and one that Bradbury admired.
Young Bradbury was christened a Baptist, but was "a self-confessed agnostic in his teens" (Dimeo 157). Still, in his middle years, he acknowledged a continuing moral concern. What did that mean to Bradbury? "Now," he wrote, "very late in the scroll of Earth, phoenix man, who lives by burning, a true furnace of energy, stoking himself with chemistries, must stand as God. Not represent Him, not pretend to be Him, not deny Him, but simply, nobly, and frighteningly be Him" (quoted in Dimeo 159). Steven Dimeo calls Bradbury "clearly pantheistic" (159). Bradbury lists himself in Contemporary Authors Online as Unitarian Universalist. One may have moral concerns, of course, without recourse to any god much less a Christian god, but given Bradbury's upbringing and interests, it is surprising that theModern Language Association Bibliography, when queried for Bradbury and religion, returns only one hit.
Works like Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" demonstrate that science fiction can explicitly and powerfully explore the relations between science and religion. Bradbury does not do that. On his own website, Bradbury notes that Farewell Summer (published in 2006 but begun in 1944) "was a response to my ganglion and my antenna. I do not use my intellect to write my stories and books; I have a gut reaction to the things that my subconscious gives me. These are gifts that arrive early mornings and I get out of bed and hurry to the typewriter to get them down before they vanish" ("In His Words"). Statements of faith can be written this way, but reasoned theology cannot.
Bradbury ended his formal education with high school. Of course, this hardly means that his education ended. Quite the contrary. His avid reading, and particularly his affinity for American letters, shows everywhere in his writing. Naming the Martian housewife "Ylla," for example, may be one of those subconscious gut reactions Bradbury says drives his writing. "Yillah," with its slightly different spelling, is the unreachable white maiden, a would-be religious sacrifice, the quest for whom motivates the episodic action in Herman Melville's novel Mardi (1849). I don't know that Bradbury ever read this now little-read precursor to Moby-Dick (1851), but the character fits, the spelling is off enough to suggest little intentional scholarship, and we know Bradbury has an artistic affinity for Melville since Bradbury wrote the screenplay for the award-winning film of Melville's masterpiece.
On the other hand, Bradbury, whose lyric control of language always astounds, may have been playing a conscious word game by alluding subtly to Mardi. Mardi means "Tuesday" in French. Mardi is the weekday named for the Roman war god, Mars. In "The Earth Men," the chapter of The Martian Chronicles recounting the second expedition, when Captain Williams tells the first native he meets that he has come from Earth to Mars, she snappishly--and telepathically--replies, "'This is the planet Tyrr ... if you want to use the proper name'" (17). Tyr is an Old Norse god of war (Davidson 238). The Old English version of that god is Tiw, from which we English speakers get "Tuesday," which the French call mardi.
Whether or not consciously, Bradbury's imagery, like his allusions, clearly draws from his passionate reading yet stamps his work as his own. In all of Western culture, from the book of Genesis to the present, imagery of light and sight has referred to knowledge and intellect. I'm sure you see what I mean; this is a useful perspective; my vision is not cloudy but clear; put aside those rose-colored glasses if you seek true insight. Do I have to draw you a picture?Too much knowledge is overwhelming, be it the light that blinds Saul of Tarsus and leads to his transformation into Saint Paul or the terrible anagnoresis of Oedipus that leads him to blind himself. Plato's parable of the cave equates light with knowledge. And we must remember that when the former cave-dwellers return with new insight to share with their stationary fellows, they are thought to be insane and are killed. Light and sight are knowledge, and too much can cost us our identities, our minds, even our lives. At the end of Frankenstein, the monster vows to go make himself a "funeral pile," the tragic bookend to the lightning strike that first animated him, so that "soon these burning miseries will be extinct" (223).
If light imagery reflects intellect and Bradbury reports that his writing comes from the gut, it fits that the imagery inThe Martian Chronicles, although it certainly includes light, much more strikingly features music. Intellect works on the knowledge that comes through the eyes, precise knowledge that can be seen or shut out. Music is atmospheric, climatic if you will. Yes, the rocket in "Rocket Summer" launches, but rather than show the light, the narrator shows us people shucking off their heavy clothing. What we hear as music, at least its point of origin, is much less precise than what we see. Bradbury's Ylla has no idea where the song in her mind originates. In "The Summer Night," the chapter just before four humans arrive on Mars for the second expedition, the lives of the Martians' "little towns" (14) are disturbed by what we recognize as Earth songs that erupt unbidden from the throats of children and adults alike. In "The Long Years," someone believing himself the last man on Mars is drawn awkwardly toward the character who may be the last woman by the strains of "Genevieve, Sweet Genevieve." Even when music is unmentioned, the language is lyric (like the sound of a lyre), and details like the sheet music for "Beautiful Ohio" remind us of music. Music makes climates, but it does not make logical arguments.
The second most famous book by this nominal science fiction writer is Fahrenheit 451 (1953). A "fireman" named Montag, whose job in this dystopian future is to burn all books, begins to wonder if books, which some people willingly die for, actually may be worth preserving or even reading. His wife, a drone, lives for those television screens, here a sham interactivity and part of the thoroughly mechanical environment that Leonard Mead, Bradbury's "Pedestrian,"shunned. Clarisse, a vibrant girl who admits to reading, captivates Montag, as eventually does Faber, forty years retired from his post as the last English professor.
This is how the book begins:
It was a pleasure to burn.It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.[3-4]
One reads of burning here, of a fire extinguishing the light that could have shone from books, but that light is absent and the fire here is less light than the heat of passion, with the nozzle in Montag's frenzied fists and his hose a great python. Pythons, by the way, are not venomous, any more than all varieties of paper ignite at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. The gut guides Bradbury's writing brilliantly--that is, his writing shines--but the shining writing, as he said himself, at bottom does not reflect intellect, no matter how learned his prose may sometimes be. Even in this opening description of burning, Montag is a "conductor playing all the symphonies" and, like the cold distant atomic conflagration of Earth barely seen from Mars in The Martian Chronicles, such light as there exists made "a wind ...dark with burning." Montag imagines seeing himself not as a fireman but as a black-faced "minstrel man." While light and sight imagery are powerful in most science fiction, in Bradbury's two most renowned works, sound and music dominate, not intellect but the gut.
Bradbury's writing, whether consciously or not, connects with the wide world of writing, not only in the maps of Disneyland and Winesburg, or the composite structures of Winesburg, Ohio and The Martian Chronicles, but in systems of symbols and bits of plot. Nathaniel Hawthorne's short piece called "Earth's Holocaust" (1844) recounts a future--or a parable, the narrator will not commit--in which all "accumulation of worn-out trumpery" (179) is to be immolated. First come signs of rank, then office, but finally books, and all are heaped onto the fire. As the viewpoint character watches it all go, the last to burn is the Bible. Indeed, when the ashes are combed, we find that book singed, the marginal notes burned clear, but the glorious text itself still present. The word "Holocaust," we should remember, before its association with Nazi death camps, meant "burnt offering." It is cognate with "cauterize," to heal with fire. Hawthorne's viewpoint character is told not to fear, for the real gems live on in the human heart (196).
At the end of Fahrenheit 451, Montag, for having kept and been attracted to some books, must flee for his life. He decides to join an exile society Faber has told him of in which each person is a book, that is, each person has committed a book to memory. "We're nothing more than dust jackets for books," (153), Montag is told. Although someone says Montag "look[s] like hell" (154), someone else chides that you "don't judge a book by its cover" (155). Montag chooses to be parts of Ecclesiastes and of Revelation (165). The outdoor community of book people is led by Granger, a word that means farmer. An alert reader might recall the imagery of the novel's beginning, with the "great python" perhaps standing in for the serpent and the burning "flapping pigeon-winged books [that] died on the porch and lawn of the house" perhaps predicting the ascending dove of the Holy Ghost. "[T]he books went up in sparkling whirls," and at the end Montag is the book, just as Bradbury has said that "phoenix man" must be God. Did the sparks fly all the way to Mars?
Montag is German for Monday, the day before Tuesday, Mardi, Yllah's domain. Montag is also the brand of typewriter paper Bradbury used for writing Fahrenheit 451, and Faber & Faber the pencils with which he edited his manuscript. But whether these name choices were truly "subconscious," as Bradbury has written (Afterword 173) or not, it is clear that Faber, meaning "craftsman" in Latin, whether or not coincidentally, here honors the making of a book, and the environment in which books live is managed by Granger, the farmer just outside town.
Whether from gut or from intellect, Bradbury made crucial changes in transforming the short story "Mars Is Heaven!"into "The Third Expedition" in The Martian Chronicles. In addition to dropping the original title and moving the time forward forty years (a symbolic number; just ask Noah or the Hebrews in the desert), he changed the text. Consider the last three paragraphs. Those in italics are from the 1948 original, those without from the 1950 composite novel.
The coffins were lowered. Somebody murmured about "the unexpected and sudden deaths of seventeen fine men during the night--"The coffins were lowered. Someone murmured about "the unexpected and sudden deaths of sixteen fine men during the night--"Earth was shoveled in on the coffin tops.Earth pounded down on the coffin lids.After the funeral the brass band slammed and banged into town and the crowd stood around and waved and shouted as the rocket was torn to pieces and strewn about and blown up.The brass band, playing "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," marched and slammed back into town, and everyone took the day off.
Bradbury has, of course, made the language more lyric. In addition, he has modified the psychology. In the free-standing original, the Martians are joyful in their destruction, joyful, we imagine, in a Martian way. In the novel, this early chapter occurs after two earlier expeditions. As the balance of Earthmen to Martians becomes more even, the Martians not only work their telepathy on the Earthmen but the Earthmen unknowingly taint the Martians, as we have seen in the Martians' unwitting enthrallment to human song. Where before there had been seventeen dead men, which included a man who died in transit and never walked Martian soil, now there are only sixteen, the ones the Martians themselves killed. Where before the Martians cut loose in their final destruction of material from Earth, now they continue to be shaped by Earth ideas of work schedules, bands, and music. No, Mars is not heaven at the end of the third expedition because it is becoming, even if only musically, shaped by Earth.
By the end of The Martian Chronicles, we find a family from Earth that has given themselves up to Mars. "The Million-Year Picnic" (1946), the short story used as the last chapter in the book, was published first. One may guess that, in Bradbury's own way, he wrote the other pieces aiming to culminate with this one. The father destroys the rocket not only so that "evil men" cannot find the family but because on Earth "Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness ... that way of life proved itself wrong and strangled itself with its own hands. ... [However, i]t would have been another century before Mars would have been really poisoned by the Earth civilization" (179-181). At that point the father directs his children to look at the Martians, themselves, reflected in the canal water.
In both The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, war cleanses. Does this burn our sins and bring us a new Eden? I think not. Granger was the right name for the leader of the book people. The consequences of the Fall are childbirth, labor (particularly including agriculture), and death. Bradbury's Mars finally welcomes boys and girls so that there will be childbirth; he expects there to be labor, but labor only with appropriate, scaled-back technology; and as for death, well, that comes for the dust jackets, but not for the books. In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury will live forever and generations will say, reading him in whatever form, that there the American myth comes clean again, small town life welcomes us all, and his Mars, undoubtedly, is heaven.
Works Cited
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. Reprint, New York: Viking, 1969.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451: The 50th Anniversary Edition. New York: Ballantine, n.d. (orig. pub. 1953).
------. "In His Words." Web. September 1, 2007. http://www.raybradbury.com/inhiswords02.html
------. "Mars Is Heaven!" (orig. pub. 1948). The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. New York: Orb, 1990.
------. The Martian Chronicles. New York: Bantam Books, 1950.
------. "The Pedestrian" (orig. pub. 1951). Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
------. "A Sound of Thunder" (orig. pub. 1952). Bradbury Classic Stories 1: Selections from The Golden Apples of the Sun and R Is for Rocket. New York: Bantam, 1990.
Breit, Harvey. "Talk with Mr. Bradbury." New York Times, August 5, 1951.
Clarke, Arthur C. "The Nine Billion Names of God" (orig. pub. 1953). The Nine Billion Names of God: The Best Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. New York: New American Library, 1967.
Contento, William G. Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections.http://www.philsp.com/homeville/isfac/0start.htm
Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters From an American Farmer. Belfast: James Magee, 1783. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Web. http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/3203876
Davidson, H. R. Ellis. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1964.
Dimeo, Steven. "Man and Apollo: Religion in Bradbury's Science Fantasies." Ray Bradbury. Eds. Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander. New York: Taplinger, 1980.
"Dr. Conant Decries Science Fiction Rise." New York Times, February 17, 1951.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Earth's Holocaust" (orig. pub. 1844). Ed. Alfred Kazin. Selected Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Fawcett, 1966.
Melville, Herman. Mardi and A Voyage Thither: An Allegorical Romance. 1849. Reprint, New York: Capricorn, 1964.
------. Moby-Dick or, The Whale. 1851. Reprint, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.
Miller, Walter M., Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz. New York: Bantam, 1959.
Plato, Republic. Trans. Paul Shorey. Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher" (orig. pub. 1839). The Portable Poe. Ed. Philip van Doren Stern. New York: Viking, 1945.
Rabkin, Eric S. "The Composite Novel in Science Fiction." Foundation 66 (1996).
------. "To Fairyland by Rocket: Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles." Ray Bradbury. Eds. Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander. New York: Taplinger, 1980.
"Ray Bradbury." Contemporary Authors Online. May 2, 2008.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Ed. M. K. Joseph. 1818. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Portable Mark Twain. Ed. Bernard DeVoto. 1884. Reprint, New York: Viking, 1968.
[untitled notice]. TIME. 8 November 1982: 53.
Weiler, A. H. "Out of This World." New York Times, September 18, 1949.
Wollheim, Donald. "The Science-Fiction Novel," New York Times, August 24, 1949.
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Rabkin, Eric S. "Is Mars Heaven? The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and Ray Bradbury's Landscape of Longing." Visions of Mars: Essays on the Red Planet in Fiction and Science. Ed. Howard V. Hendrix, George Slusser, and Eric S. Rabkin. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2011. 95-104. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 333. Detroit: Gale, 2013.Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Jan. 2014.
Document URL
Ray Bradbury's 'theater of the morning'
Byline: Cassina, Beatrice
Volume: 116
Number: 1
ISSN: 00439517
Publication Date: 01-01-2003
Page: 26
Type: Periodical
Language: English
When his characters come talk to him, he listens
FOR RAY BRADBURY, one of the most celebrated American authors of the last 50 years, the writing day starts in the morning when he's still in bed-"half conscious and half still in contact with my inner voices." Then, rather like an episode of The Twilight Zone, the visitation begins.
"At that point of the day," Bradbury explains, "all kinds of thoughts and stories come to my mind. Many of those are metaphors. It is like all my characters come to me and talk to me. What I have to do then is wake up and start writing what these voices are suggesting to me. I let them write the story! I call it the theater of the morning.
"You know, there are some characters that have been following me since I was a child. You know them but there is always something new to learn from them. In those moments, I just free all my thoughts and ideas. When two of those ideas meet and suddenly create a third one, well, that is the moment when I wake up and I start writing. I am done before noon.
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"I do not plan," he adds. "Everything has to be written in that precise moment, when it comes to my mind. It is my instinct that takes care of everything. Otherwise, it means that I am not involved enough from an emotional point, and what I am writing is not that good."
Bradbury's instincts have carried him a very long way. In his early 20s, Bradbury, whose formal education never extended past high school, sold newspapers on street corners while reading fanatically and making his first attempts at writing. Today, still in love with life and with writing at age 82, Bradbury has published more than 30 books, in addition to some 600 short stories, many poems and essays, and work for theater, television and film. (Small wonder Bradbury has said he literally has been writing every day of his life for 65 years.) In 2000, the National Book Foundation awarded him its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Bradbury builds his stories on metaphors, and in his hands, a simple idea or question can be transformed into a wonderful, emotional novel. This is perhaps the reason why his books are so appreciated around the world.
His first book, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947, followed by The Martian Chronicles (1950), in which Martians become the victims of human colonization, and The Illustrated Man (1951), in which the exotic tattoos on a wanderer come alive to tell some chilling tales. His most famous novel is Fahrenheit 451 (1953), a tale of censorship, defiance and totalitarianism that has sold more than 5 million copies. The origins of Fahrenheit 451 lay in a simple question: What would the world be like if people were no longer allowed to read? The novel describes a world in which firemen are supposed to burn books.
Bradbury's oeuvre also includes Dandelion Wine (1957), a semi-autobiographical recollection of a magical small-town summer in 1928; Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), a nightmarish tale-which has been called "a masterpiece of Gothic literature"-about two boys and the darkness that grips their small town when an evil carnival arrives; and murder mysteries like Death Is a Lonely Business (1985) and A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990). He won an Emmy in 1993 for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree and wrote the screenplay for John Huston's classic film treatment of Moby Dick (1956). His latest books are a collection of stories called One More for the Road (2002) and a mystery due out this month titled Let's All Kill Constance.
Bradbury's approach to so-called science fiction is rather unusual: In his writing we meet people like us; people who are not all that involved with futuristic machines; human beings who cry, love and sometimes live in doubt.
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We read about people who are emotionally involved with their lives, and about places and times that everybody can, in some way, recognize and relate to.
In an article for the online magazine Salon, James Hibberd wrote of Bradbury: "By mocking the electronic shortcuts and distracting entertainment that replace human contact and active thinking, Bradbury shows his science-fiction label is misplaced. He cares little for science or its fictions ... Bradbury is a consistent champion of things human and real.
"There is simply no ready label for a writer who mixes poetry and mythology with fantasy and technology to create literate tales of suspense and social criticism; no ideal bookstore section for the author whose stories of rockets and carnivals and Halloween capture the fascination of 12-year-olds, while also stunning adult readers with his powerful prose and knowing grasp of the human condition."
Hibberd's August 2001 article was headlined "Ray Bradbury is on fire" because, at the time, five films based on his work were all going into production.
I met Bradbury in Los Angeles, where he lives and where he was signing a new edition of Fahrenheit 451. Encountering his deep voice, shining eyes behind big glasses and warm, energetic manner was a little like meeting an old friend you haven't seen in a long time. Earlier, we had talked by phone about his writing life.
What are you working on right now?
Many projects. Lately, I have been focusing on my third murder mystery. It is exciting! I want it to be perfect, perfect to me. [A later phone chat with Bradbury underscores his productivity: By then, he has finished the murder mystery, written two new plays, begun preparing a collection of his short stories, helped ready a new Los Angeles production of his stage version of Fahrenheit 451, and begun preparing for the L.A. opening of a ballet for which he has written the story.]
What do you mean by wanting something you have written to be "perfect to me"?
It means that when you write something, you do not really have to care about what other people think about it. Your voice is unique.
The best thing is writing what you need, what you feel, and doing it your own way. It's just you, only you, who can say if something is worthwhile. Basically, I think it is a huge mistake to write trying to please whoever's expectation. You just have to let yourself talk. There is no chance it can work if you are speaking with a phony voice. Anybody can tell it is not genuine.
Are you also working on a science-fiction book?
Everybody has always considered my writing like science fiction. You know what? I do not feel like a science-fiction writer at all. I just write what I see, through a different lens, the lens of my heart. I have always written with the power that love and life give me every day. This is the only thing I need every morning when I sit down and I start my creation. Love is what you need in life and being in love [with what you do] is what all writers should need and start from.
Not a science-fiction writer? But you've also written about life on Mars ...
Yes, but I do not really know anything about technology. I just try to imagine impossible things-of course, impossible in this given world we are living in!
Technology is a little depressing. I have never written about complicated tools, machines, things that an everyday man can't really use.
I have always focused, first of all, on feelings, passions, things that are available to everybody. It is like I want and need to tell stories that I see behind the curtains of what people in general see.
One short story I do still love is one I wrote many years ago. It tells about a dinosaur that falls in love with a lighthouse. He sees it at night, shining in the dark sky and he thinks that is just a beautiful lady-dinosaur. When he finds out that she is just made of stones, he cries, like anybody else could do. He was in love, you know.
Writers read a lot. What can you tell us about your own reading life?
My passion for reading, therefore for writing, has been with me since I was a kid.
From the age of 9 through 14, I was a voracious reader. I never went to college; I'm a library graduate. When you're that young, you eat everything in sight.
I used to read many comics at that time. Since I was 8, I started collecting those comics and I still have some of them. It was my introduction to writing. Some years ago, I had the pleasure to publish The Ray Bradbury Comics and The Martian Chronicles Comics. See? What you really love keeps coming back to you. You never forget anything. And I do think comics are the best way to bring children into the reading room and make them feel the wonderful power of words.
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What do you think about contemporary writers?
I do read a lot, but not really any contemporary writer. I can go on and on with those I consider the classic writers. Alexander Pope, Loren Eiseley, all the great playwrights, all the writers of history. Once you can read Shakespeare, you can receive a lot just from that, maybe all you need. I learned from Steinbeck and Hemingway, from Melville, Edgar Allen Poe. I always learned from people in the past; there are no people alive today who I learn from.
Many contemporary writers tell stories about things we already know. Any time you turn on the TV, you can see sad stories happening all around the real world. So the reality is just out there, waiting to be seen on TV. I like writers who can tell stories from a very peculiar point of view, stories that are not written yet. I like reading stories that can open my mind to new perspectives on reality or make me dream of wonderful things like love. By loving fiction and reading intensely and writing and experimenting, I grew into becoming a writer of short stories and novels. Nothing's worth doing unless you love it. If you don't love school, get the hell out and do something else. If you don't like your job, get out and do something. But for christsake, stay in love.
What about contemporary science-fiction writers?
Those, most of all. I do not read those writers. [He laughs.] Well, first of all, I don't read them because when you're working on a novel, you are always a little worried that somebody else has already had that same idea. And then also because I can't really find any love and passion in what they write.
If you were a young writer today, what do you think you would do?
Probably the same things I did many years ago. The most important thing, to me, is never losing my personal passion and my inspiration. You see, too often publishers and people in the business try to teach you what you have to write and how. I just believe that if one is a good writer, he or she will [be published] some day. If you work on given rules, you lose yourself and everything you say is no longer sincere. Being a writer takes a lot of patience, a lot of strength. But the best you can do is not pretend to be different from what you really are.
I would start, again, with short novels, short stones. It is the simplest way to get in touch with your way to create. And the plot does not need to be too long, so you can have every part of your writing under control.
I think everybody knows what he or she needs to tell. Maybe it takes a little time, but constancy is the best way to go. Every day, every single day, a writer or a writer-to-be needs to spend some time on his creation. just to keep in exercise, to be every day more confident in what one is doing.
This is not a lesson; this is just the way I have spent my entire life. Whatever fascinates you deserves to be told, always in your own way. Do not think about what people are expecting from you. Do it just because you love it.
So you write every day?
Oh yes, still. It is not that I have to. It is just that I feel I need to. Every day, every morning when I wake up. It is nice to be in the 21st century. It is like a new challenge.
It is really a good and threatening new century to create for!
How were your very early days as a writer?
Well, my family wasn't rich. And I did not have enough money to go to college. So to make some money, I started selling newspapers on the corner of the street. When somebody asked me what I was doing there, I used to answer that I was becoming a writer. That job started at 4 p.m., and by 6 p.m. I was done. This way, I had the money to pay my bills-I got paid 10 dollars a week-and I had time to go back home and write my stories.
Besides novels, stories and comics, you also write poetry, don't you?
It took me 40 years to learn to write poetry and now, after all this time, my big book of poetry has been published with 400 poems: They Have Not seen the Stars: The Collected Poetry of Ray Bradbury.
Poetry is one of the most exciting arts. You can really tell your feelings, what really counts. You can evoke life in thousands of shades. This makes me recall simple but very important parts of my life. You know, when you write, everything you need to know is already inside of you and outside in the world. You just have to listen carefully to what your heart is telling you. Nothing more, nothing less!
Everything you have been writing is based on a very sharp observation of the world, isn't it?
I'm not an observer; I'm a sponge that takes in what it's seen, and then later it all comes out. It's in my subconscious. I don't observe; I feel, without knowing it, and later these things become stories and books.
Can you offer an example of a metaphor that runs through one of your writings?
I was vety young, 12 years old. One day I was in the car with my parents, coming back from a funeral, and I saw a carnival that had just arrived in town. I ran down and met a man named Mr. Electrico, and he told me to live forever and he introduced me to all the carnival freaks, including a man with tattoos. All of a sudden, I thought: What if these drawings, the images on his skin, would turn to life? Well, this was the reason why I then wrote, years later, The Illustrated Man.
See, you meet many things in your life. Sometimes you ask yourself many whys and hows. Sometimes you can find answers, your personal answers.
When you start a new novel, how do you work?
At the beginning, I just have a very vague idea. I start and keep going. Sometimes it happens that I do not really know what the hell I am writing. I just know that in what I am writing, I can find myself. And it is a lot. You have to be very brave to be one person.
How do you feel about your own writing life?
I am simply in love with it.
How do you judge your work?
It's simple. When you read what you wrote and can be emotionally touched from that, if you can cry reading it, well, then you know you actually did a good job. I have cried many times reading my writings.
I remember a very short story I wrote when I was very young, "The Lake." When I was a child, a little girl used to play with me at the lake where we used to spend our vacations. One day, the waves of the lake took her away and she never came back. I was deeply touched by it. When, years later, I wrote that story and read it afterwards, I started crying like a little child. At that point, I felt it was a good story.
SIDEBAR
When you read what you wrote and you can be emotionally touched from that, if you can cry reading it, well, then you know you actually did a good job.
SIDEBAR
You know, when you write, everything you need to know is already inside of you and outside in the world. You just have to listen carefully to what your heart is telling you.
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The Ray Bradbury file
Born in Waukegan, III., in 1920, he soon moved to Los Angeles with his parents. He graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1938.
Last April he received the 2,193rd star on the world-famous Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to literature, science-fiction films and television.
In addition to his National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2000), Bradbury's many honors include the O. Henry Memorial World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement and the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America.
His work was included in the Best American Short Story collections in 1946, 1948 and 1952.
His work has been adapted for television in a number of series, including The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery and The Ray Bradbury Theater.
He lives with his wife, Marguerite, in Los Angeles. They have four daughters and eight grandchildren.
He has been acclaimed in particular as a science-fiction writer, yet he doesn't know how to turn on a computer or drive a car.
Singer Elton John's tune "Rocket Man" was based upon Bradbury's story of the same name, and an Apollo astronaut named a moon crater Dandelion in honor of Bradbury's book Dandelion Wine.
A common writing problem and its solution, according to Bradbury: "People try to force things. It's disastrous. Just leave your mind alone; your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way." (From a 1990 interview with Robert Couteau.)
Being Martian: Spatiotemporal Self in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles
Author(s):Walter J. Mucher
Publication Details:Extrapolation 43.2 (Summer 2002): p171-187.
Source:Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 235. Detroit: Gale, 2007. FromLiterature Resource Center.
Document Type:Critical essay
Full Text:
[(essay date summer 2002) In the following essay, Mucher examines elements of The Martian Chronicleswhich exemplify his phenomenological interpretation of the novel.]
... the ego constitutes itself for itself, so to speak, in the unity of a [hi]story.--Edmund Husserl
During the Late Modern1, the question of identity has been more of a psychological program than a physical one. It has questioned the realm of the Absolute and its transcendental nature as adjudicated by the ideas of Time and Space proposed by Early Modern thinkers such as René Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton. Early empirical scholars, such as John Locke and David Hume, questioned the process by which all sentient beings acquire knowledge of the external. Others, like Immanuel Kant, proposed the idea of truth on an a priori reality known by humans given its all-encompassing design. What is somewhat clear is that for the Late Modern, identity is, in some manner, a mental construct of those experienced spaces and those experienced times brought into review post-experientially by the mind (Henri Bergson, William James and Edmund Husserl). And, in such a review of experienced moments (i.e. the mental combination of particular experiences of Time and Space), there is an expected end, the phenomenological construction of an identity to be brought to fulfillment, not by nature, but by choice. Still, one must somewhat contend that the program might be p/re-written, as Edmund Husserl notes in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness [PITC] and that the conscious individual follows course until finally reaching the telos of his self.
In this spirit Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1958) can be understood as the historical reading made by the protagonists as they re-create a "diary" of their lives and loves in their quest for Mars. It reflects the Late Modern's incursion into a psychological and phenomenological humanism in which, in their search for a new self, the protagonists re-create a world of multiple readings which re-trace their exploits, moving forward while continuously looking back over their own experiential shoulders. Bradbury's overall structure posits each story as an entry of a universal consciousness, which retains the memory of a world gone by as well as the prophecy of a world to be.2 His narrative represents the temporality of Martianness, that is, in a Lacanian sense, it represents the space in which Martianness may be attainable, for it opposes a "thing," the "Martian self," as "one that has not yet been made a symbol ... [but] has the potential of becoming one" (Lacan 46). Furthermore, as David Carr may declare, one could conclude that in Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles," to be a human individual is to instantiate a special sort of relationship to time" (94). This is because the diary-like narrative reminds us that "at the bottom it is, to be sure, to be always 'located' in an ever changing now, and thus to be subjected, like everything else, to temporal sequences" (Carr 94). Key to this is that Bradbury's protagonists do not just "undergo or endure or suffer this sequence as it comes, one thing at a time" (Carr 94). But, in fact, what is central to my discussion is that the protagonists, eventually, will come to realize that "Whatever else it is, to exist as a person is to experience and to act" (Carr 95).
This idea of spacetime incurred during the period of the Late Modern is reflected especially in Edmund Husserl's phenomenological proposal that knowledge of our world is determined by our psychic interpretation of the experienced world. Husserl would come to see time as an inner sense of ordering and understanding the world as given in first impressions. For Husserl, time structures the constituting synthesis of perceiving the phenomena, itself a step toward re-establishing a crucial link between Being and Time. As such, being is defined, by all accounts, as the end result of a subjective act of self-definition, one located in space by its differentiating time sequence. This means that the subject of the Late Modern is determined by the very act of reading its own history, which, eventually, is imposed upon the events in question by the protagonist/reader him-, her-, and/or it-self. "History," according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, "has replaced mythology and fulfills the same function" (43). With it, historic narratives ensure and maintain the proper relation between man's past, present and future within space, a space which, in its narrative, temporally contains the "unity of life." As Helga Nowotny notes, the Late Modern "was rather a question of defining time and space anew for the greatest possible--and for the first time democratic--variety of perspectives and points of views, of positions and subjective experiences" (20). And, in that experience, of life itself.
The creation of a self during the period of the Late Modern, a period that could well be defined as an industrially and early technologically centered age, required total dominion of the ego over spacetime. Preluding Jean-François Lyotard's work. The Postmodern Condition, Lewis Mumford defines this pre-occupation of the Late Modern as an empowerment over spacetime:
The new bourgeoisie, in counting house and shop, reduced life to a careful, uninterrupted routine: so long for business; so long for dinner: so long for pleasure--all carefully measured out, as methodical as the sexual intercourse in Tristam Shandy's father, which coincided, symbolically, with the monthly winding of the clock. Timed payments: timed contracts: timed work: timed meals: from this period on nothing was quite free from the stamp of the calendar or the clock. Waste of time ... one of the heinous sins.(34)
As Mumford notes, for the bourgeoisie experiential spacetime had to be useful. Like Jules Verne's Phinneas Phogg (Around the World in Eighty Days), man began to set their lives to the beat of a watch's second hand. Between 1880 and 1918 "technological, artistic and scientific achievements ... converged to break down the well-rehearsed spatial and temporal structures of social perception and transform them into a broad experiential field ..." (Nowotny 19). The Late Modern deemed it necessary to exteriorize and reify the internal wants and needs of the self by rewriting its history, and with it the way man interacts with his and/or her historical self.
Husserl's phenomenological concept of "internal time-consciousness" represents the essence of this historical spacetime. "The idea of an 'event,'" writes David Carr, "is already that of something that takes time, has temporal thickness, beginning and end; and events are experienced as the phases and elements of other larger-scale events and processes" (Carr 24). As Carr notes, it is in his Cartesian Meditations that Edmund Husserl proposes "that the ego 'constitutes itself for itself, so to speak, in the unity of a Geschichte'; or, as one could say, in one possible translation of Geschichte, the unity of a life" (74; my emphasis). Furthermore, "The idea of a purely phenomenological psychology," writes Husserl, "does not have just the function ... of reforming empirical psychology. For deeply rooted reasons, it can also serve as a preliminary step for laying open the essence of a transcendental phenomenology" ("Phenomenology" 27). Husserl's claim against empiricism lies in redirecting his inquiry toward the intentionality of the world, as understood by Descartes. Husserl reminds us that for Descartes the world presents itself as existing "for us, [it] exists only as the presentational content of our presentations" ("Phenomenology" 27). As such, the world exists because we exist.
Husserlian time-consciousness basically argues against the precariousness and uncertainty with which the sequence of events were described by empirical psychologism of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, such as that of John Locke and David Hume:
When we speak of the analysis of time-consciousness, of the temporal character of objects of perception, memory, and expectation, it may seem, to be sure, as if we assume the Objective flow of time. What we accept, however, is not the existence of a world-time, the existence of a concrete duration, and the like, but time and duration appearing as such.(PITC 23)
Husserl points to the false assumption of Locke that our perceptions are the impressions upon our minds of a real, static and absolute world, which lies outside of ourselves. Empiricists such as Locke and Hume, according to Husserl, had argued for this "Objective flow of time" which confidently expresses the "concrete" world as given by the repetitive sensory perceptions of causal events from the external world. But for Husserl, this time perception is truly the intentional perception of our internal senses. "To be sure," adds Husserl, "we also assume an existing time; this, however, is not the time of the world of experience but the immanent timeof the flow of consciousness" (Husserl 23). In a word, all consciousness is, eventually, the content or object(noema) of the consciousness of something. And for Husserl this something was our own perceptive act, and not an original perception in itself. "Thus," Joan Stambaugh remarks in her introduction to Martin Heidegger's On Time and Being, "there is no such thing as a worldless subject (exemplified by Descartes' res cogitans), nor is there a world in any meaningful, phenomenological sense of that word without human being" (viii). That is, a world independent of our own conscious act of perceiving and describing what we perceive.
Husserl lays claim to two creative principles of perception which make up the perception of the now: that is (1) retention, or the just-pastness of an event, and (2) protention, that is, the just-future of an event. Husserl's celebrity consists in describing how retention and protention differ from recollection and expectation of the future respectively.3
Consider Husserl's example of the hearing of a sequence of tones, that is, "we hear a melody ... we perceive it. ... While the first tone is sounding, the second comes, then the third, and so on. Must we not say that when the second tone sounds I hear it, but I no longer hear the first, and so on?" (PITC 43) For Husserl, though, this act is not so simple. For though it is true that the particular tone expires as the next arises to take its place, its objective reality is still maintained due to primary memory, and to the expectation of its successor (PITC 43).
Perception of a melody demands, first, that there be present a "primal impression" which constitutes the tonal now, that is, the immediately sounding tone of the melody. Secondly, there is at the same time as the perceived tone, an existing peripheral tonal experience active in the constituted conscious act of perceived tonal now. This "fresh" or "primary memory" which holds near to the perceiving now the just-past tone in consciousness is known as retention. As such "when the tonal now, the primal impression, passes over into retention, this retention is itself again a now, an actual existent. While it itself is an actual (but not an actual sound), it is the retention of a sound that has been" (PITC 50).
Retention constitutes the living horizon of the now; I have in it a consciousness of the "just past." But what is originally constituted thereby--perhaps in the retaining of the tone just heard--is only the shoving back of the now-phase or the completed constituted duration, which in this completeness is no longer being constituted and no longer perceived. (PITC 66)
Finally there is the expectation, or protention expressed by the tonal now as it opens into receiving its tonal successor in the melody. With it a new tonal now is poised, pushing the "present" tonal now back into the no-longer (that is, the just-pastness) of the tone. Husserl referred to it as projected phantas:
... every act of memory contains intentions of expectation whose fulfillment leads to the present. Every primordially constitutive process is animated by protentions which voidly [leer] constitute and intercept [auffangen] what is coming, as such, in order to bring it to fulfillment.(PITC 76)
The foreground is nothing without the background; the appearing side is nothing without the non-appearing. It is the same with regard to the unity of time-consciousness--the duration reproduced is the foreground; the classifying intentions make us aware of a background, a temporal background. (PITC 78)
Furthermore, Husserl states that an "expectational intuition is an inverted memorial intuition, for the now-intentions do not go 'before' the process but follow after it" (PITC 79). Thus, the perception of the totality of the melody depends on the capacity to consciously pre-perceive the following tonal now as a protentive constitutive reality of the "present" tonal now and of retentive tonal now.
This sequence of tonal experiences constitutes "modes" or a "continuous flux" of sequential now-points:
Every temporal being "appears" in one or another continually changing mode of running-off, and the "object in the mode of running-off" is in this change always something other, even though we still say that the Object and every point of its time and this time itself are one and the same.(PITC 47)
For Husserl, spatiotemporal being, as David Carr notes, follows this relation between retention and protention by which they are taken together to make up what may be referred to as a "field of occurrence," that is, where the present may stand out from amidst its surroundings (23).
But it would be wrong to say that retention and protention are just empty forms of experience. They are not to be considered as mere crucibles to be filled by recollections or dreams, as empiricists might claim. It is impossible to conceive an act which is devoid of a past or of a future, that is, of retention and protention.
David Carr correctly translates this relational act between retention, protention and the primal now to mean that "to be conscious temporally is to 'constitute' these phenomena from an ever changing now-perspective through our protentive-retentive grasp" (Carr 95). But it is clear that this "constitution," as Carr proposes, is still just a cognitive act reminiscent of the empirical perceptive acts Husserl himself condemns. "As these notions are understood by Husserl," writes Carr, "without past and future there can be no present and thus no experience at all" (Carr 29). It is evident that Husserl, and Carr, believe in a world ruled by sequential spacetime: that is, by causal events. Husserl's perceptive act presupposes that the world is a sequential given, such as in a film strip or a musical score, where each event is followed eventually and necessarily by its following successor: for example, as in a movie where each film cell is followed by its succeeding film cell, or in a musical score where each tone is followed by its successor, all in a pre-scribed order. As such, Husserl's phenomenological spacetime maintains league with the transcendentalism of Newton, the rationalism of Descartes and empiricism of Locke and Hume. Its only difference lies in treating and establishing the perceptive act of consciousness as an active constitutive event itself.
Bradbury's narrative in The Martian Chronicles, on the other hand, questions not these theories, but, rather, questions the Late Modern's influence upon the self's social journey of hope into the future, especially as it parallels the colonizing and expansionism of the Americas, and the socio-ethnic problems in said act by an industrial and post-industrial community which had no regards for the other. This is compounded by the need to re-invent a self-identity that could be harmonious to these new possibilities, a shucking of the old in search for a new and improved self (such as that represented by Nietzsche's superman in Also Sprach Zarathustra and the nihilistic process exposed in Der Wille zur Macht).
Three moments in The Martian Chronicles are focal to the phenomenological reading of spacetime that I propose, and that may even hint at the cyclical self-reflective nature expressed by a Late Modern conceptualization of spacetime. They are: 1) "February 1999: Ylla," "August 1999: The Summer Night,""August 1999: The Earth Men," and "April 2000: The Third Expedition"; 2) "August 2002: Night Meeting"; and 3) "October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic." These moments are focal in understanding my argument that, as laid out by the Late Modern, man's re-collection of spacetime is retentive/protentive, rather than presentive. Spacetime is still a collection of Aristotelian "now-moments." But, instead of being recognized at its surfacing, they are reflexively construed as conscious remembrances of the "just-past." What is more, the game of self-identity played out by Bradbury is one pertaining to the future as the horizon of the expected. As I stated before, the text, a diary-like narrative, basically asks who or what is the Martian. It is only in retrospect, by reaching the last entry of the chronicle, that one can see how the solution to this problem follows Husserl's concept of time-consciousness. As Husserl contends about the perception of time-consciousness, the solution was always there, in the horizon, like a melody, waiting to be played out fully before providing the answer. Like a musical score, diaries or chronicles contain all the scores ready to be played.4
In The Martian Chronicles, each entry in the colony's diary leads, ultimately, to revealing the historical score of Martian identity, as it becomes obvious once one reaches "The Million-Year Picnic." It is by realizing each entry, and by recollecting such entries from the perspective of their succeeding entries, that the full value of Bradbury's narrative is realized. Each entry is a date in a calendar, as each musical note is a tone in a musical score, or each cell is a scene in a film; they all follow a prescribed sequence which, in retrospect, reveals a given whole.
In "February 1999: Ylla" Mr. K's implicit hatred toward the arrival of the first Earth expedition to Mars is fueled by his fear of loss of identity, as a (Modern) male and as a Martian. The Earthmen bring with them a decentering lust--in the form of the industrial and technological marvels of the Late Modern--as witnessed by Mr. K's wife's dreams (3-4, 8). But this un-eventful arrival is of a double nature, for it occurs only in the wantonness of Mrs. K's dreams. In reality, the objectified knowledge of this arrival is covered and denied by Mr. K's murder of the Earth crew. Mr. K's actions are fueled by a need to safeguard himself and the Martians from losing their idyllic--Victorian--identities as Martians, After all, his wife was lusting for foreigners that, by all accounts, contradicted Martian (Modern) norms, and especially his own self.
But the damage had already been done. The Martians had been infected telepathically by the overriding intentions of the Earthmen's self. The Martians found themselves singing rhymes in languages they did not know ("August 1999: The Summer Night" 15). The premonition, or, rather, the fulfillment of the end is given early, when the Martian women wake-up with screaming fear.
[Martian women] "Something terrible will happen in the morning."[Martian husbands] "Nothing can happen, all is well with us."[Martian women] A hysterical sobbing, "It is coming nearer and nearer and nearer!"("August 1999: The Summer Night" 16)
This dialogue between the Martian women and their husbands forms the essence for what Margaret Lee Zoreta identifies as the "monologic attitude toward alterity," that is, "the obliteration of the other" (57). Zoreta identifies this attitude as standing against Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic, that is, as Zoreta states, as
a polyphonic coexistence of "understanding as the transformation of the other's into 'one's own/another's'"(57)
This imperialistic attitude against the other fuels the fear of not only the Martians, as noted above by the cry of the Martian women, but also the fear of the Earthlings of not succeeding in their quest for Mars.
As the narrative of the next two expeditions reveals, the Martians, in an act of preserving their sanity and, eventually, their identity, decide to eliminate the threat to their identities by eliminating the expeditions. In particular, the second expedition, "August 1999: The Earth Men," deals with the psychic stability of the Martian self. Arriving in a world wracked by mass psychosis, the Earthmen are shuffled from one Martian to another, to end locked-up in a mental institution. In the same manner that Mrs. K suffered from the maddening illusiveness of her dreams, the Martian population has been infected with an unexplainable telepathic psychosis of an other which threatens their society: Martians now believe that they are Earthlings (25). Their only recourse is to eradicate the source of such deviations from the established societal norm.
Yes. You know, such cases as yours need special 'curing'. The people in that hall are simpler forms. But once you've gone this far, I must point out, with primary, secondary, auditory, olfactory, and labial hallucinations, as well as tactile and optical fantasies, it is pretty bad business. We have to resort to euthanasia.("The Earth Men" 27-28)
Reality is a construction of primary and secondary sensory perceptions that the human mind orders into a working reality. Thus the description made by the Martian psychologist, Mr. Xxx, of the psychosis suffered by the Martians can be defined simply as cognitive experience. The experiential act is basically the collective sum of what British empiricists, such as Locke and Hume, have described as "primary, secondary, auditory, olfactory, labial, tactile and optical" perceptions. The Martian psychologist could have been reading either Locke or Hume, for he describes the mental faculty of forming the real, as British empiricists in the seventeenth and eighteenth century proposed. But, in this case, these perceptions are the perceptions of an other's reality, and, at that, one menacing to the stability of Martian reality. For a people who have found a sounder form of living, these intruding multiple sensorial acts merely complicate the Martians' definition of being. Not because they are real, but because they are somebody else's "real." The Late Modern, somewhat founded on these empirical tenets, embodies the same definition for reality as that offered by the Martian psychologist. But the Industrial Modern, represented by the Earth expeditions, endangers the continuance of these simple tenets of Martian living. Eventually, the Martian psychologist falls victim to the same insanity of which he accused the Earthlings. And as indicated, his only recourse is to eradicate the source of his infection by killing himself. It is here that the consequence of the industrial world merges with the surfacing of the new dangers of the global world as reflected in the last chapter of The Martian Chronicles: "The Million Year Picnic."
In "April 2000: The Third Expedition" Bradbury extends this idea of an identity based on memory and imagination, and plays upon a sense of telepathy and hypnosis as a constitutive act between experiential subjects, and not merely as an individual act. As Captain John Black tries restlessly to sleep he wonders how a Martian city can be so similar to an Earth town.
Suppose all these houses aren't real at all, this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis through the Martians, thought Captain John Black.What if the Martians took the memories of a town exclusively from my mind?("The Third Expedition" 46)
Reminiscent of Descartes' argument of an evil genie, introduced in his First Meditations, Captain Black questions the reality that surround him as an illusion created for his benefit, in his, and his crew's, minds. But, after the Earthmen are killed by the population, the Martians still hold Earth forms, and as their masks melt, one must question: what is the reality that Bradbury wanted the reader to see (47-48)? For the psychosis seems to have greater hold on the Martians this time around. No longer is the Martian's psychosis a mere psychosis, as in the second expedition where the Earthmen were a mental sickness, now it is a physical virus that eats away at the physical as well as the mental self of the Martians.
It is the last chapter of The Martian Chronicles, "October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic,"5 which offers to the reader the open closure of being by retrospectively questioning, as well as answering, the beginning of the ordeals on Mars as well as the end of the true lunacy on Earth. It also reflects back to the fears expressed by the Martian women in "The Summer Night." The story deals with a family that goes to Mars for a picnic. But it will reveal itself as the last hope for the race, for Earth, in its narrow mind, has destroyed itself. Faced with the horrors of the past, the father's last act is one of defiance against what he had held as true: he burns copies of texts which once defined the human race and the individual self.
I'm burning a way of life, just like that way of life is being burned clean of Earth right now. ... Science ran too far ahead of us quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines.(179-180)
Fire is the purifying element of creation. But left to the incapable hands of man, it becomes a dangerous toy. For such reasons one remembers a shooting star, the first conscious viewing of electricity at work, or the simple act of viewing a movie. When the father destroys all links to the past he is burning all that was burned before him: "All the laws and beliefs of Earth were burnt into small hot ashes which soon would be carried off in a wind" (180). The father is looking back one last time, looking up at the remembrance of what is, and must be, lost for his family to continue. It is that spirit of annihilation and re-birth that he takes a last wistful glance toward the Earth, an intense search "for Earthian logic, common sense, good government, peace, and responsibility" (173). All the virtues of the Modern. But the father knew that in its enthusiasm to be heralded as the great hope of a technological driven society, the world sent itself aflame in nuclear smoke.
Bradbury's last piece is in fact his first piece. Written well before all the other stories included, or not, in TheMartian Chronicles, it becomes the motivating telos of the collection. The narrative's theme seems to become clear: to establish the identity of the true Martians. Until now the narrative had demonstrated the "colonizing" process that identity suffers by denying, to break its links with the past, in this case its identification with Earth/Old World. But "The Million-Year Picnic" attempts to break with the past, as the father burns the last physical links with the Old World (i.e. the rocket they came in and the documents). Here "Earth," writes Gary K. Wolfe, "has become less a planet in his mind than a way of life to be rejected" (47). In a Heraclitean move the father takes his family down one of the Martian canals. When asked by his son, Robert, how far down the river they have to go, the father answers "a million years" (172). Time and space are brought together in their being on the river. It is not enough just physically to go down the river, but they must also denude themselves of their "past."
This transposition of time over space reflects how one must deal with their "new" identity. A total annihilation of their past self is demanded for them to carry on, as Nietzsche would expect. To establish the new self, all ties to the past must be broken.
The truth is that neither the past nor the futures are unlinked, as it would seem. For the opened ending of"The Million-Year Picnic" is not only a view forward toward a new Martian self, but it is also a retrospect of the Martian past. A million years is to travel back to the Martian beginning and to the apocalyptic dreams of the Martian women in "The Summer Night." Foreseeing the end of the Martian civilization, the women had unknowingly foreseen the coming of the Earthlings, and the end of their civilization. What Ylla had lustingly foreseen in her waking dreams earlier, in those strange forms and sound, had become the feared nightmares and psychotic experiences of a dying Mars. A waking dream, as the oracles would call it, for it foretold the end of the old civilization and the beginning of the new.
In a similar fashion, the father of "The Million-Year Picnic" foresees the coming of his Earthlings, the family with which he expects to repopulate Mars. "Now we're alone. We and a handful of others who'll land in a few days. Enough to start over" (180). But these Earthlings would not be the menace that Mr. K and the Martianwomen dreaded. Bradbury comes full circle by linking this last hope with Ylla's vision of the Earthmen's first coming. Interestingly, the end of the Martian race becomes the subliminal catalyst that foresees the end of the Human race.
In the "Night Meeting" ("August 2002"), Tomás Gomez meets with a Martian, Muhe Ca. This piece is central to this idea of joining ends, for it ties together the nature of time and space played out in the chronicle. It is the meeting of past and future, somewhat similarly to Husserl's meeting of the horizons in the present. But just whose past and whose future are we talking about? For both characters are as real to each as they are phantoms to the other. Like Husserl's time-consciousness of music, each character is the other character's next tone. Each one reflects the just pastness of the other's reality. And each has a future horizon, to which they can lay claim, as the becoming of the other's past: "Tomás put out his hand. The Martian did likewise in imitation. Their hands did not touch; they melted through each other" (86). Not only do their physical bodies melt through each other's, but their identities as well. Concrete opposition within givens establishes identity, and at this point all empirical givens have melted away with their hands.
Past and present do not meet. Rather, they melt into a present without really touching each other. What is cannot come into contact with what is not. In theory, the meeting of matter and anti-matter produces the annihilation of all. And in a sense, the present can be seen as this annihilation, for it loses all sense of past and all sense of future. As Spender had discovered earlier, it just is:
The Martians discovered the secret of life among animals. The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life.("June 2001:--And the Moon Be Still as Bright" 66)
Spender's sympathy toward Martian life is echoed by the old man to whom Tomás had spoken at the gas station before meeting up with the Martian Muhe Ca.
You know what Mars is? It's like a thing I got for Christmas seventy years ago--don't know if you ever had one--they called them kaleidoscopes, bits of crystal and cloth beads and pretty junk. You held it up to the sunlight and looked in through it, and it took your breath away. All the patterns! Well, that's Mars. Enjoy it. Don't ask it to be nothing else but what it is.("Night Meeting" 79)
And what "it" [Mars] is, is the simplicity of being. The multiple colorings of the self as one attempts to describe the soul through its own body. The Martians had supposedly understood the kaleidoscope effect of life. But Earthmen had opted for the complications of explaining away, and, eventually, of controlling the real through science and technology. As such, it is not the Martian who is the Other, as Earth would have us believe. Rather, it is the intruding Earthness, which shows its otherness previously concealed by its imperialistic superiority.
Simplicity in being, as the Martians discovered, seems to be what the human identity lacks. In the need to reflect and create an identity, the truth of the human being denies its own simple and uncomplicated self. Spender understands the totemic representations of "primitive" people. In adopting the image of animals, the spirit is free to commune and enact its primal being. But more than that, Spender's act, as sympathetic identification with the Martian, reflects the secret of phenomenological spacetime, that is, it is not simple. Rather, phenomenological spacetime avoids the simplicity of just being by continuously emphasizing the relation between past and future, or just-past and just-future.
Tomás and Muhe, Earthling and Martian, are the two poles of this identity dyad. Each represents the other's reality by projecting its negation unto the other. But this reality is not to be taken as an objective reality. Rather it proposes a subjective power, which establishes each other's experienced reality. Descartes would have described it as a divine power. But Bradbury's protagonists follow empiricist modes and, as such, mirroring somewhat Husserl's phenomenological act of perceiving, they establish a less divine source for their perceptions.
Realities, then, are memories projected into our conscious being. As Captain Black had earlier predicted in"The Third Expedition," the Martians had tapped into the unconscious chamber of memories creating, thus, "the ability to keep me under this dreaming hypnosis all of the time" (46). These memories are what sustain our very own self, for they are the contents of past as well as future being, as Tomás and Muhe would come to argue later. And Time will somehow be key to this being:
[Muhe Ca] "This can only mean one thing. It has to do with Time. Yes. You are a figment of the Past!""No, you are from the Past." said the Earth Man, having had time to think of it now."You are so certain. How can you prove who is from the Past, who from the Future? What year is it?"("Night Meeting" 85)
Not surprisingly, neither wants to be the past of the other, so they accuse each other of being his past. The fear of not being translates into each one's desire to be the other's future. Existentially, it is easier to be the other's future, rather than his past, for without this illusion of futurity, they would no longer find a reason in living. And resorting to dates offers no solution for each has his own arbitrary way of keeping time. "The result of the meeting," according to Edward J. Gallagher, "is a distinct feeling of simultaneous reality, mutual fate, and mutual (spiritual) communion" (68). Intentions aside, whether figments of our past or figments of our future, the present is the meeting place of all our hallucinations, both those that we expect, as well as those that invade and contradict our every sense of reason.
The task of projecting your psychotic image into the mind of another via telepathy and keeping the hallucinations from becoming sensually weaker is almost impossible.("The Earth Men" 29)
But it is done. The Earth Men's perceptive act, reminiscent of Husserl's cognitive act as I described earlier, is a continuous hallucinatory act. And the narrator, as a psychotic genius, is responsible for infecting us with the virus of imagination. To tell a story is to make one feel the story, the place, and the time. These acts illustrate phenomenological spacetime. Sensory hallucinations are the basis for our known selves. Who we are and who we pretend to be are just figments of a long movie script. In the narrative act, these hallucinations are transferred, transformed and eventually adapted into our very own being. The world that surrounds us is a conscious confection of our interpreted world. Who or what surrounds us become definitions of our comprehension. And as such, they form part of the sound stage and supporting cast which help narrate ourself.
As I stated above, "The Million-Year Picnic" ends with an open closure. In their plight to escape the savage destruction of Earth, the father promises his boys that he will show them Martians. What the boys do not expect is how familiar those Martians will seem to them.
They reached the canal. It was long and straight and cool and wet and reflective in the night."I've always wanted to see a Martian," said Michael. "Where are they, Dad? You promised.""There they are." Dad said, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down.The Martians were there. Timothy began to shiver.The Martians were there--in the canal--reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad.The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water. ...("The Million Year Picnic" 181)
This is the Father's startling revelation to his children in "The Million Year Picnic" which marks a new phase, by accentuating the father's assertion that they are the Martians, both by choice and by accident. This "desire" which, from a beginning, is represented as a desire to impose Earthness upon Mars, has now been transformed into a desired fulfillment of abandoning one identity for another. Similar to Lacan's description of the three mirror phases of an infant's self-cognization, the Earth family now look upon the waters of the Martian canal to reveal a new diverted reality: the Martianness in all of us. Looking back at "--And the Moon Be Still as Bright" we can identify the first mirror phase of self awareness when Spender's neurotic identification with the sought "Other" (the Martians) leads towards the desired fulfillment of being safe expressed in the Earthmen's desire mimed by the "blankness" of the Earth (Martian) town of "The Third Expedition." This desire becomes a mimicked reality in its second mirror phase as the first Earth colony battles its fears fulfilling their desires upon the shape shifting form of the "last" Martian in "The Martian." As Brenda K. Marshall notes in Teaching the Postmodern, "The subject's identity is the image of itself that the subject forms by identifying with other's perceptions of it" (93). This opened form shifts its site of being as it runs from center to center (the different desires of the people of the town, as projected upon the Martian's chameleonic form) until, in its final act of decentering, it becomes all and none of the sites, breaking its veil and washing away any recognizable form from the sight of the colonists. A new reality is now a must, for the colonists desired safeguards, their constructed realities, now are shattered pieces of their othering mirror.
"The Million Year Picnic" tries to pick up the pieces without recreating it. It is the third mirror phase of self-cognization, when the infant sees itself as the self that sees its reflection. The family, seeing their reflecting forms on the waters of the traversed canal, passes from desiring the "Other" towards an understanding of its own "Otherness." It is this new Martian identity that allows the family to be present with it/self.
The transcourse of time and the change of space have led these remnant beings to re-establish their self-identity. They had a choice, and, in retrospect, their choices were forced upon them. Yet the question of spacetime brings out the reality of how the chronicle brings to light the creation of the self, as did Greece and the religious books in the Middle Ages. The epic as well as the religious story trace, in their own ways, the beginnings of a people and of a society. In the same way, they explicate the process by which the individualself, as well as the collective self, is molded. Santayana once said that those who did not learn from their histories were condemned to repeat it. As the future is open, yet restrictively expected by a past that "prophecizes" its coming into fulfillment, so the identity of the self is openly desired, yet somewhat preconditioned by the body's alterity
The future follows a text to its "conclusion," temporally, since it recycles itself, as Bradbury seems to allude by leaving the ending suspended by an ellipsis (181). "One key to the story ["The Million-Year Picnic"] is the children. Mars will be given to the children who are still capable of wonder ..." as we are foretold earlier by the old man in "Night Meeting" (181). Optimistically, through the father's eyes Bradbury sees a hope for a better future. As in Genesis, Mars is the new land of the twenty-first century Adam and Eve, who with their sons await the daughters from Nod, as well as the birth of their future sister. Such children are not continuations of the Old Order, or so Bradbury seems to hope. As Heraclitus once stated, "Time is a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is in the hands of a child" (in Freeman frg. 52). In this manner, these "new Martians" could be the inheritors of a new playground free of any legacy. Like the kaleidoscope, the dead cities light up the children's faces with the splendor of the new unknown.
Bradbury's narrative represents the temporality of Martianness, that is, it represents the space in which Martianness may be attainable for it opposes the Martian self to a "thing as one that has not yet been made a symbol, ... [but] has the potential of becoming one" (Lacan "Desire" 46). In this sense, the desire demonstrated by Spender to be a Martian, and the desire of the boys to see a Martian are themselves two opposing desires of the fulfillment of the Martian. This "presence" in the desire, or the desired, is outside time. "The fantasy of perversion (of Martianness) is namable. It is in space. It suspends an essential relationship. It is not atemporal but rather outside time" (Lacan "Desire" 17). Furthermore, this desire "creates the space of discourse, the possibility of dialogue ... and in so doing engenders (or represents) the space of temporality" (Schleifer 880). But, as hopeful as this project sounds, these children are not yet the children of the postmodern, and even less the children of Nietzsche. For Bradbury hides them from that important transition through which the self has to reveal itself: to face the future, as Heidegger would probably say, in one's death. This transition is the transitional relationship between the individual and death expressed as an "in-between" that operates as a spatiotemporal constitutive of the self. And that is theme for another Time and another Space.
Notes
1. For the sake of argument in this essay I identify the Early Modern as that period between the 1500s and 1850s and the Late Modern as that period between the 1850s and the late 1960s.
2. Look especially in such stories as "The Summer Night," "The Meeting" and "The Million-Year Picnic."
3. Husserl lays claim to two creative principles of perception which make up the perception of the now: that is (1) retention, or the just-pastness of an event, and (2) protention, that is, the just-future of an event. For Husserl the distinction between recollection and retention is one of proximity to the event (the same applies to the distinction between expectation of the future and protention). Recollection of the past is to remember an act or an event that is no longer occurring: but retention is maintaining "present" the just-pastness of the act in relation to its successive act. Of import is that contrary to empiricists, Husserl proposes continuity in the succession of perceptive acts. Consciousness of the present (the perceptive act) presupposes the consciousness of its "comet trail of retentions," that is, of the trail it leaves behind. In the same way, protentional act differs from expectation of the future in that the expectation of the future is one's intentionality towards some far future act or event (one plans for it, dreads its coming, or looks forward to its becoming), while protention is the implicitly anticipated immediate future envisioned as the horizon of the present. Protention, then, is the conscious knowledge that an act occurs only to be replaced by its succeeding act. In this manner, human time-consciousness is understood as "past-retention-event-protention-future."
4. Bradbury wrote another possible ending which could be seen as complementary yet oppositional to this one. See "Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed." First published as "Naming the Names" in Thrilling Wonder Stories (August 1949). In this story the transformation of the family into Martians is due to the environment, and not by choice.
5. In Jacques Lacan Anika Lemaire explains: During the [first] mirror phase of the child's development it "recognizes" itself as distinct from the outside world. The term "mirror phase" refers to the awareness of the subject of itself as separate from the mother, for example ... [it is] an identification with an imaginary (because imagined) ... autonomous self. [Second phase] the child recognizes him/herself as separate in the mirror phase, but at this phase also identifies him/herself with equal-age peers, reimagining these peers as they replicate the image he/she has seen in the mirror "of the human form" (91).
Works Cited
Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958.
Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. (1986) Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991.
Freeman, Kathleen. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Gallagher, Edward J. "The Thematic Structure of The Martian Chronicles." In Greenberg and Olander 55-82.
Greenberg, Martin Harry, and Joseph D. Olander. "Ray Bradbury." Writers of the 21st Century. Edinburgh: Paul Harris Publishing, 1980.
Grudin, Robert. Time and the Art of Living. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1982.
Guffey, George R. "The Unconscious, Fantasy, and 'Science Fiction': Transformations in Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and Lem's Solaris." In Slusser, Bridges of Fantasy 142-159.
Heidegger, Martin. On Time and Being. (1969). Trans. by Joan Staumbaugh, NY: Harper Torchbooks [Harper and Row], 1972.
Husserl, Edmund. Husserl: Shorter Works. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston, editors. Foreword by Walter Biemel. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press; Great Britain: The Harvester Press, 1981. 18-35.
------. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. [PITC] Edited by Martin Heidegger. Trans. James Churchill. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973.
Johnson, Wayne L. Ray Bradbury. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.
Lacan Jacques. "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet." Trans. James Hulbert. Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977).
Lemaire, Anika. Jacques Lacan. Trans. David Macy. Boston: Routledge & Keegan Paul. 1977.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning. New York: Schocken Books, 1979.
Marshall. Brenda K. Teaching the Postmodern: Fiction and Theory. New York/London: Routledge. 1992.
Mogen, David. Ray Bradbury. Twayne's United States Authors Series, 504. Boston: Twayne, 1986.
Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Quoted in Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.Trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Nowotny, Helga. Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience. Trans. Neville Plaice, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.
Schleifer, Ronald. "The Space and Dialogue of Desire. Lacan, Greimas and Narrative Temporality." Modern Language Notes Vol. 98 no. 5 (Dec 1983): 871-890.
Slusser, George E., et. al. Bridges of Fantasy: Alternatives. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992
Wolfe, Gary K. "The Frontier Myth in Ray Bradbury." In Greenberg 33-54.
Zoreta, Margaret Lee. "Bakhtin, Blobels and Philip Dick." Journal of Popular Culture. Vol. 28.3 (Winter 1994): 55-61.
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Mucher, Walter J. "Being Martian: Spatiotemporal Self in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles." Extrapolation 43.2 (Summer 2002): 171-187. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 235. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Jan. 2014.
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'I'm Being Ironic': Imperialism, Mass Culture, and the Fantastic World of Ray Bradbury
Author(s):David Cochran
Publication Details:American Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era. Washington:Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. p55-72.
Source:Short Story Criticism. Ed. Joseph Palmisano. Vol. 73. Detroit: Gale, 2005. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type:Critical essay
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[(essay date 2000) In the following essay, Cochran investigates the defining characteristics of Ray Bradbury's science fiction stories, contending that they reflect the elite cultural view of the postwar period.]
Over lunch one day, a friend asked Ray Bradbury where he got the ideas for his stories. "Anywhere," the author replied, looking at the mushrooms on his plate. "There's a story in mushrooms." To prove his point,Bradbury went home and wrote a frightening tale of extraterrestrial invaders coming to Earth in the form of mushrooms, taking over the bodies of those who eat them. The story appeared as a brilliant episode of the television show "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" entitled "Special Delivery" (1959) and was later published as a short story, "Come into My Cellar" (1962).1
Few artists in the postwar period maintained so childlike a sense of wonder as did Bradbury. Fascinated with the possibilities created by the scientific and technological revolutions of the twentieth century, Bradburycreated a fictive universe where travel to Mars and beyond (even to the sun itself), totally automated houses, and a society that satisfies every physical pleasure are commonplace. Despite his fascination with the possibilities created by technology, Bradbury's work expressed a profound ambivalence. His sense of wonder also contained a strong element of terror and made possible such nightmarish visions as invading mushrooms. In Bradbury's world, complete paranoia is complete awareness, as people constantly find themselves under siege by such forces as totalitarian governments, alien invaders, newborn infants, and the natural elements. To some extent, this theme reflected the official paranoia of American Cold War policy, butBradbury complicated this reductionist reading of his work by occasionally making his invaders benign sojourners who fall victim to the lynch-mob mentality of paranoid Americans and also, in several stories, by turning the tables and making Americans the aliens invading distant lands.
Moreover, Bradbury feared the effects of technology on society and the human spirit. He saw social forces at work actively seeking to crush humans' ability to think critically, both through political suppression of dissent and by means of a culture that satiated less cerebral, more physical desires. In such works as Fahrenheit 451(1953), Bradbury penned a critique of mass culture that reflected the elite cultural view of the postwar period. The supreme irony, though, is that Bradbury made this criticism in the guise of a science fiction novel, one of the most debased forms of mass culture and the literary establishment's equivalent of exile to Siberia.
Bradbury was an outspoken liberal, and several of his early stories and nonfiction writings were self-consciously designed as polemics. After the 1952 election, for instance, he published a full-page advertisement in Variety deploring the Republican practice of tarring Democrats like himself as left-wing or un-American. "I have seen too much fear in a country that has no right to be afraid," he complained. "I have seen too many campaigns ... won on the issue of fear itself, and not on the facts." Finally, Bradbury pleaded, "in the name of all that is right and good and fair, let us send McCarthy and his friends back to Salem and the seventeenth century."2 At the same time, though, many of Bradbury's stories undermine the efficacy of liberal reformism, arguing that where such reforms are not oppressive attacks on the imagination, they often tend to vastly underestimate such unpleasant realities as evil and death.
Despite his avowed liberalism, as an artist Bradbury was not really interested in politics in any traditional sense. Rather, his focus was always on the individual. With Dwight Macdonald, Bradbury could easily have complained, "The trouble is everything is too big. There are too many people, for example, in the city I live in. In walking along the street, one passes scores of other people every minute; any response to them as human beings is impossible. ... A style of behavior which refuses to recognize the human existence of the others has grown up of necessity."3 In his art, Bradbury resisted this modern tendency. He always avoided the abstract level of political language, which, as George Orwell said, is primarily "the defense of the indefensible ... [and thus] has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."4 Therefore, for instance, while Bradbury's stories are filled with images of nuclear holocaust, he never discussed the wars that caused the apocalypse. Bradbury insisted on viewing the world on a human scale. In this way he was able to articulate a wide-ranging critique of American society, from its totalitarian characteristics and cultural pressure for conformity to its imperialist foreign policy, while escaping the censure encountered by many more explicitly political artists.
"Bradbury," wrote Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell, his 1960 study of science fiction, "is the Louis Armstrong of science fiction, not in the sense of age or self-repetition but that he is the one practitioner well-known by name to those who know nothing whatever about his field."5 Primarily on the basis of The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury was the first of those who began writing for the science fiction pulps to attain mainstream commercial and critical success. By the sixties, his books were emblazoned with the unattributed quote, "The World's Greatest Living Science Fiction Writer." But classifying Bradbury as a science fiction writer is problematic. As science fiction author and critic Damon Knight commented, "Although he has a large following among science fiction readers, there is at least an equally large contingent of people who cannot stomach his work at all; they say he has no respect for the medium; that he does not even trouble to make his scientific double-talk convincing; that--worst crime of all--he fears and distrusts science."6 Despite being without honor among many science fiction purists, Bradbury has gained a great deal of respect from artists and intellectuals across the cultural and political spectrum. John Huston asked Bradbury to write the screenplay for his 1953 movie, Moby Dick, and François Truffaut made a film ofFahrenheit 451 (1967). Christopher Isherwood, Nelson Algren, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ingmar Bergman all proclaimed themselves fans, and the enthusiasm of Federico Fellini and Bernard Berenson led to personal friendships with Bradbury. Russell Kirk, the leading intellectual light of postwar conservatism, has stated, "like C. S. Lewis, like J. R. R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury has drawn the sword against the dreary and corrupting materialism of this century: against society as producer-and-consumer equation, against the hideousness in modern life, against the mindless power, against sexual obsession, against sham intellectuality, against the perversion of right reason into the mentality of the TV viewer."7 Harlan Ellison, doyen of the American New Wave science fiction authors of the sixties, wrote in response to criticism of Bradbury: "Ray Bradbury is very probably better than we ever imagined him to be in our wildest dreams. ... Let's face it, fellow readers, we've been living off Ray Bradbury's success for twenty years. Every time we try to hype some non-believer into accepting sf and fantasy as legitimate literature, we refer him or her to the words of Ray Bradbury. Who the hell else have we produced who has approached the level of Bradbury for general acceptance?"8
Part of the problem is that, as many science fiction fans have argued, Bradbury is not really a science fiction writer at all. Unlike Isaac Asimov, for instance, Bradbury is not a scientist and knows little about physics, chemistry, or the other fields that form the basis for science fiction. Other attempts to label Bradbury, such as "fantasist" or "futurist," are similarly inadequate. Though he built his reputation on the science fiction, horror, and fantasy stories he published in the forties and early fifties in such pulp magazines as Weird Tales, Planet Stories, Amazing Stories, and Galaxy, he also published crime and mystery stories in Dime Mystery, Detective Tales, and New Detective Magazine as well as straight fiction in such mass-circulation journals as theAmerican Mercury, the New Yorker, Collier's, Playboy, and the Saturday Evening Post. Like most artists in the underground culture, Bradbury not only openly flouted arbitrary categorization, he consciously sought to break down the rigid definitions he thought limited artists.
Bradbury was born in 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, a small town on Lake Michigan forty miles north of downtown Chicago. Waukegan would eventually play a major role in Bradbury's fiction as the embodiment of the idyllic, slow-paced life and community values of premodern America. In 1932 the family moved to Tucson and, in 1934, to Los Angeles, where Bradbury has lived ever since. His formal education ended after graduating from high school, but in the late thirties he joined the Los Angeles Science Fantasy society, where he formed friendships with such established writers as Robert Heinlein, Henry Kuttner, and Leigh Brackett, all of whom played major roles in the Golden Age of science fiction.9 While Bradbury was deeply influenced by these early friendships, he largely forged his own literary path. The dominant figure in science fiction's Golden Age was Robert Campbell, editor of such pulp journals as Astounding Science Fiction, who nourished nearly every major writer in the field in the postwar period.10 But Bradbury had little luck selling his stories to Campbell and thus became, as Asimov commented, "the only great writer of the Golden Age to remain outside the Campbell stable."11
To understand Bradbury's career, one must recognize the paradoxes inherent in his worldview. At times a savage critic of mass culture, he was also an unabashed product of American popular culture, listing among his formative influences carnivals, movies, radio, and comic strips, as well as the writings of Poe, Bierce, L. Frank Baum, H. P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. The artist, he has stated, needs to be well versed in both popular and high culture. "From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theater, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka's Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored and used on some later day. To be a child of one's time is to do all these things."12 Bradbury was both fascinated with the prospects of the future and anchored in nostalgia for the small-town past of his youth. He was simultaneously obsessed with and wary of technological progress. For instance, while his stories are filled with rocket and time travel, the author himself never learned to drive and, until relatively late in life, refused to fly.13 Such contradictions form the ideological basis of Bradbury's oeuvre. Like his character in Dandelion Wine (1957), "He was a man who did not suffer but pleasured in sleepless nights of brooding on the great clock of the universe running down or winding itself up, who could tell? But many nights listening, he decided first one way and then the other."14
A Silly, Mad Plot
In his short story "Pillar of Fire" (1948), Bradbury told the story of a twentieth-century man, William Lantry, who rises from the dead in the year 2349 to find a world in which all fantasy has been eradicated. Children are not afraid of the dark, and people do not understand such concepts as dishonesty and criminality. Lantry declares a one-man war on this sterile world, and, as he goes around murdering people, he is convinced he can continue doing so indefinitely. After all, he thinks, "Paranoids were nonexistent in this civilization."15
Within Bradbury's universe, an absence of paranoia is an unhealthy sign, because it reflects a dangerous naïveté. Throughout his stories, people are constantly under attack by forces not only beyond their power to resist, but even beyond their power to comprehend. In "The Small Assassin" (1946), a mother insists her infant son is trying to kill her. Her husband thinks she is losing her mind, and the kindly Dr. Jeffers insists she is suffering from normal postpartum depression. Only too late does her husband come to believe her. When he tries to convince Jeffers the baby murdered its mother, the doctor says, "If what you say is true, then every mother in the world would have to look on her baby as something to dread, something to wonder about." The husband responds, "And why not? Hasn't the child a perfect alibi? A thousand years of accepted medical belief protects him. By all natural accounts he is helpless, not responsible. The child is born hating. ... In later years it would be too late to express its hatred. Now would be the time to strike."16 Similarly, in "The Wind" (1943), a man is being pursued by the world's winds, which are an intelligent force, because he has discovered the remote valley in the Himalayas where the winds gather and plot destruction.17
It would be a mistake, however, to reduce Bradbury's paranoid vision to a mere reflection of the Cold War mentality. In the first place, his paranoia is evident from his writings in the early and mid-forties, before the Cold War. Moreover, it is multifaceted, serving a variety of allegorical purposes. Sometimes he used it to comment on the potentially threatening anonymity of modern life. In "The Crowd" (1943), a man wonders who the people are who immediately show up at automobile accidents. Investigating, he realizes that the same people make up the crowd of onlookers at all disasters, and whether the victim lives or dies depends on the actions of these mysterious people. "It was all a silly, mad plot. Like every accident. ... And that's the way it's been since time began, when crowds gather. You murder much easier, this way. Your alibi is very simple; you didn't mean to hurt him." With evidence in hand, the man heads to the police, only to find himself in an accident, surrounded by the mysterious, omnipresent crowd.18
Whatever its origins, Bradbury's vision dovetailed smoothly with the emergence of paranoia as the dominant cultural sensibility in the Cold War period, and in several stories he made this connection explicit. In "Zero Hour" (1947), the world has grown complacent because people believe perfect peace has been obtained through a balance of weapons. Mrs. Morris is amused when the children in the neighborhood begin playing a game called "invasion." As her seven-year-old daughter tells her, they are being aided by an alien only the younger children can see, because only they have the imagination to see into the fourth dimension. The alien tells the children they will be a fifth column, paving the way for the invasion. Only too late does Mrs. Morris realize it is not a game.19 In "Come into My Cellar," Bradbury played on common Cold War science fiction imagery, in which invaders take over the bodies of humans. Arriving in the form of mushrooms, the aliens assume control of the bodies of those who ingest them. Interestingly, as in "Zero Hour," the aliens conduct their invasion by means of children, spreading across the country through an advertisement on the back ofPopular Mechanics encouraging kids to grow mushrooms in their own cellars.20
Elsewhere Bradbury undermined the straightforward anticommunist reading of such invasion stories. In his story "It Came from Outer Space," the basis of the 1953 movie, an alien craft lands on Earth, and the extraterrestrials begin taking over the bodies of humans. When one man figures out what is happening, the aliens inform him they mean no harm and are only borrowing the human bodies until they can repair their ship. They cannot appear in their true form, they say, because humans, who are such xenophobes, would find them too ugly and attack them. Sure enough, upon discovering the aliens, the townspeople form a posse to lynch them. As film critic Peter Biskind has argued, "It Came from Outer Space begins like a radical-right film, but it is gradually transformed into a left-wing film as it becomes clear that the aliens mean us no harm. ... 'Don't be afraid,' they [say] in a disconcerting monotone. 'We don't want to hurt you. We have souls and minds, and we are good.' Not only are we relieved, we feel sorry for them. ... They had struggled thousands of years to reach the stars, only to end up in the middle of a godforsaken desert someplace on Earth harassed by a bunch of dumb yokels."21
Bradbury also deconstructed the Cold War trope of anticommunist invasion films by frequently presenting humans--and specifically Americans--as the alien invaders. In "The City" (1950), a deserted city on a distant planet has waited 20,000 years for its revenge on humans, who had wiped out the original inhabitants by infecting them with a human disease. Highly mechanized, the city has been programmed to murder the crew of an arriving ship, replace them with robot duplicates, and send them back to Earth carrying a deadly virus.22
In fact, several of Bradbury's works form a sustained critique of American imperialism, both historical and contemporary. In "Perhaps We Are Going Away" (1964), two Indians, an elderly man and a boy, sense something in the air telling them their world has suddenly changed forever. They go looking for the cause of this feeling and find it in a lonely-looking encampment of white men along the seashore, the first Europeans they have ever seen.23 And in The Martian Chronicles, a Cherokee astronaut specifically links human destruction of the ancient Martian civilization with the devastating effects of white policy toward the Native American population.24
Bradbury continued his discussion of American imperialism in his Martian stories. Space exploration and the settlement of other planets gave him an opportunity to discuss the continuing importance of the frontier in American mythology. As usual, he was ambivalent about the frontier tradition. "The Wilderness" (1952) focused on a group of women preparing to join their husbands as some of the first settlers on Mars. One thinks: "Is this how it was over a century ago ... when the women, the night before, lay ready for sleep, or not ready, in the small towns of the East, and heard the sound of horses in the night and the creak of the Conastoga wagons ready to go? ... Is this, then, how it was so long ago? On the rim of the precipice, on the edge of the cliff of stars. In their time the smell of buffalo, and in our time the smell of the Rocket."25
In linking the future colonization of space with America's history of expansion, Bradbury was critical of U.S. policy and its impact on foreign lands and peoples. Significantly, these stories were written in the late forties and fifties, at the height of the Cold War. At a time when dissent regarding foreign policy had been largely driven out of public discourse, Bradbury used these allegorical tales to raise troubling questions about America's role in foreign affairs.
As he made clear in The Martian Chronicles, when Bradbury talked about humans settling other planets, he specifically meant Americans.26 The Americans are definitely not welcome, and the Martians kill the visitors at the end of the first three landings. Just as they destroyed the Indians, the Americans end up conquering the planet anyway, inadvertently wiping out the native population by importing alien diseases.
After decimating the population, the Americans begin a policy of desecrating the Martian landscape. One character reflects on the human capacity to destroy nature, specifically blaming "commercial interests."27 The destruction of the Martian culture ushers in a new attitude toward the land, signaled by the names given the natural and man-made features. "The old Martian names were names of water and air and hills. They were the names of snows that emptied south in stone canals to fill the empty seas." But the human names are ugly and functional: Iron Town, Aluminum City, Corn Town, Detroit II.28 Bradbury further developed his indictment of the eco-destruction engendered by American imperialism in his story "Here There Be Tygers" (1951). An expedition to a lush planet is financed by a mining company, whose representative, Chatterton, openly proclaims his desire to mine the planet with no concern for the long-term effects. But the planet has the self-protective ability to mete out rewards or punishments to the settlers, and while the rest of the crew, who love the planet, are granted their every desire, Chatterton sees his expensive drill swallowed up by the earth and is devoured by tigers.29
In addition to his broader critique of American imperialism, Bradbury wrote several antiwar stories in the early fifties, when the Cold War heated up in Korea. "A Piece of Wood" (1952) is the story of a soldier who invents a device that turns all weapons to rust. He is hunted by the military brass, who fear "mass panic." "Each nation would think itself the only unarmed nation in the world, and would blame its enemies for the disaster. There'd be waves of suicide, stocks collapsing, a million tragedies."30 "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950) is a haunting story of an automated house that goes on working for years after its inhabitants are vaporized in a nuclear war.31 In "The Garbage Collector" (1953), the title character tells his wife he is quitting the job he has worked for many years because it has totally changed. Garbage trucks were being equipped with radios so that, in case of nuclear war, they could be dispatched to pick up bodies. His wife encourages him to think his decision over, but he says, "I'm afraid if I think it over, about my truck and my new work, I'll get used to it. And, oh Christ, it just doesn't seem right a man, a human being, should ever let himself get used to any idea like that."32
The Other Foot
Despite his obsession with death and the genuinely terrifying nature of some of his horror stories, Bradburyhas been frequently dismissed as possessing a sentimentalized vision, especially of childhood and small-town life. As Damon Knight correctly pointed out, with success Bradbury increasingly elected to forego straight horror stories in favor of romanticized slices of Americana.33 But beneath his Norman Rockwell-like nostalgia stories there frequently lies a dark underside threatening to subsume the atmosphere of security and quietude. For example, in Dandelion Wine, Bradbury's collection of fictionalized reminiscences of his childhood in Waukegan, the town's geography is dominated by the ravine, a black and threatening abyss that frightens even the adults who have to cross it after dark. Moreover, lurking around the town is the Lonely One, a rapist and strangler who has been preying on young women and is closely associated in townspeople's minds with the ravine.34 Also, Bradbury consistently used his vision of a halcyon age as a critique of American modernization. Faced with the onslaught of industrialization, mechanization, urbanization, and mass culture, he repeatedly emphasized the world we have lost.
To further his criticism of modern society, Bradbury frequently presented romanticized views of foreign cultures or subcultures that he found charming--and sometimes threatening--because of their premodern value system. In a series of stories about Ireland, Bradbury portrayed a society filled with eccentrics that respected its art and music and was centered around the community and camaraderie symbolized by the local pub.35 Another series of stories was set in the village of Guanajuato, Mexico, a culture that Bradburyboth admired and feared for its integration of death into the daily existence of the town's inhabitants.36Bradbury also wrote several stories set in monasteries, showing admiration for the slow-paced, contemplative, and communal lives of priests.37
Throughout his work, Bradbury expressed strong sympathy for those living on the margins of society--minorities, outcasts, and grotesques. Frequently these outsiders are carnival people, witches, warlocks, vampires, or some other type of monster. In "The Dwarf" (1953), the title character goes alone into a fun house every night to stare at himself in a mirror that makes him appear tall and thin.38 "Uncle Einer" (1947) is a vampire who, while flying one night, crashes into a high-tension tower and loses his sense of direction, thus becoming another of Bradbury's victims of technology.39 "The Fog Horn" (1951) tells the story of a lovesick dinosaur, last of an extinct breed, who mistakes the sound of a foghorn for the mating cry of another dinosaur.40
This sympathy for outcasts prompted Bradbury to write several interesting stories focusing on racial and ethnic minorities. "The Big Black and White Game" (1945), for example, concerns a baseball game between the blacks and whites in a small midwestern town. The game degenerates into a riot after a white player spikes the black first baseman. The story portrays the anger, ready to explode in violence, lurking just beneath the surface of black consciousness, which few whites were willing to recognize in the mid-forties.41 In a pair of Martian stories published in the early fifties, Bradbury extended his vision of black resistance. "Way in the Middle of the Air" (1950) opens with all the blacks in the South packing up one morning and boarding rockets to fly to Mars. The whites are stunned and hurt. One white woman moans that she will be lost without her maid. Another white man says, "I can't figure why they left now. With things lookin' up. I mean every day they got more rights. What they want, anyway? Here's the poll tax gone, and more and more states passin' anti-lynchin' bills and all kinds of equal rights. What more they want?"42 In a sequel, "The Other Foot" (1951), Mars, populated solely by African Americans, is visited by white astronauts for the first time after twenty years. Several blacks prepare to lynch the intruders. But the white astronauts tell them Earth's civilization has been destroyed in World War III, and the Earthlings desperately need their help. At first the black Martians refuse, but when the visitors begin listing the cities destroyed in the war, including many of their hometowns, their hearts soften, and they agree to help.43 In these stories Bradbury countered the optimism of white liberals concerning the willingness of African Americans to patiently seek integration into white society.
Elsewhere Bradbury painted sympathetic portraits of other minorities. "The Long Night" (1944) is set in Los Angeles during the zoot suit riots. The story is narrated by a Mexican-American pachuco who discovers the riots are being instigated by a Nazi agent provocateur seeking to stir up racial animosity. But when he tries to warn people, he is set upon by a gang of whites and badly beaten. "Sometimes," he thinks, "they won't let you change sides in a war."44 "I See You Never" (1947) is a touching story, also set in Bradbury's native Los Angeles, about an illegal immigrant, about to be deported, who comes to bid a tearful farewell to his landlady.45 While these two stories present sympathetic Hispanic characters victimized by white society,Bradbury also used Latinos to represent such values as community, which he found lacking in modern culture. In "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" (1958), he painted a romanticized portrait of a group of young, unemployed Latinos who find six men about the same size, each of whom contributes ten dollars to buy a fancy suit. The first night they own it, each one gets to wear the suit for a half hour, and during that time, each has some long-held fantasy fulfilled. In the end, one laments that success will eventually destroy their sense of mutuality. "If we ever get rich, it'll be kind of sad. Then we'll all have suits. And there won't be no more nights like tonight. It'll break up the old gang. It'll never be the same after that."46 In "Sun and Shadow" (1953),Bradbury marvelously satirized a bizarre example of American cultural imperialism. As he would comment, the story grew out of his righteous indignation over a photo spread in Harper's Bazaar. "I came across an issue where the Bazaar photographers, with their perverted sense of equality once again utilized natives in a Puerto Rican back-street as props in front of which their starved-looking mannikens postured for the benefit of yet more emaciated half-women in the best salons in the country."47 In his story, Ricardo, a native villager, keeps following the photographer and models around, standing in the background and exposing himself to ruin the pictures. After the frustrated photographer departs, Ricardo thinks that now he will return to his house and family. "We shall sit eating and talking, not photographs, not backdrops, not paintings, not stage furniture, any of us. But actors, all of us, very fine actors indeed."48
The Concrete Mixer
In condemning a mass-circulation magazine like Harper's Bazaar for reducing the vastness of human experience to a quaint backdrop for a fashion spread, Bradbury articulated a critique of American mass culture similar to that of contemporary elite critics.49 A dominant theme of Bradbury's work was the effect of mass society and technology on people. In "The Concrete Mixer" (1949), for instance, Bradbury parodied the narcotizing and assimilative nature of America's consumer capitalist culture. Set in 1966, the story begins with a Martian invasion of Earth. The Earthlings surrender immediately and warmly welcome the invaders. While most Martians are pleased with this response, the angst-ridden Ettil wonders if it is all part of a plot to "inundate us with banality [and] destroy our sensibilities."50 Meeting a friendly woman, Ettil asks if there is more to life than going to movies and buying things. "You know what you talk like, mister?" she asks. "A Communist! Yes, sir, that's the kind of talk nobody stands for, by gosh."51 In a letter to his wife, Ettil describes "the entire civilization into which we have been dropped like a shovelful of seeds into a large concrete mixer. Nothing of us will survive. We will be killed not by the gun but by the glad-hand."52 When Ettil asks one man why humans have been so nice to their invaders, the man responds in terms of the ersatz populism of mass culture. "This is the century of the Common Man ... and we're proud we're small. ... You're looking at a planet full of Saroyans--everybody loving everybody." He also points out that Mars is a huge potential market for Earth's consumer goods. When he finds out that Martians do not wear shoes, for instance, he sees an enormous potential market as soon as advertisers "shame everyone into wearing shoes. Then we sell them the polish!" As Ettil concludes, "War is a bad thing, but peace can be a living horror."53
Bradbury most fully confronted the dehumanizing nature of mass society in Fahrenheit 451. A dystopian tale of a futuristic society in which reading is prohibited and a fireman's job is to burn contraband books,Fahrenheit 451 is usually read as an anti-McCarthy tract. Though it is that, the novel is more fundamentally a criticism of American consumer culture. Guy Montag, a fireman who starts to wonder what is in the books he burns, begins reading secretly, thereby setting in motion a process that will make him an outlaw and enemy of the state. Montag begins to wonder about his job after meeting Clarisse, an eccentric teenage neighbor, who tells him she has been forced to see a psychiatrist who "wants to know why I go out and hike around in the forests and watch the birds and collect butterflies."54 School too is an enormous machine designed to produce conformity. Clarisse has been kicked out, she says, because she is considered antisocial. "I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this."55 Like elite critics of mass culture, Bradbury connected the culture of leisure with the exhausting but mentally unstimulating routine of work or school. As Clarisse says, "They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the window smasher place or wreck cars in the car wrecker place with the big steel ball."56
Clarisse stands in contrast to Montag's wife, Mildred, who stays home watching the "parlor walls," which cover three of the walls in her living room. Her chief goal in life is to save enough money to buy a screen for the fourth wall. When not watching television, Mildred has small radios in her ears. When she takes an overdose of sleeping pills, paramedics arrive with two nasty-looking machines to purge her blood. Such overdoses are so common--"We get these cases nine or ten a night," one paramedic tells Montag--that there is no need to send a physician.57 A decade before Betty Friedan characterized the suburban home as a "comfortable concentration camp," Bradbury portrayed housewives as narcotized into a false sense of meaning and pleasure in their highly mechanized homes, desperately fending off bouts of suicidal depression.
In his clearest denunciation of masscult, Montag's boss, Captain Beatty, tells Montag that mass culture began with the development of photography in the nineteenth century, followed by motion pictures, radio, and television. "Things began to have mass. ... And because they had mass, they became simpler. ... Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. ... Films and radios, magazines, books, leveled down to a sort of paste-pudding norm."58 Mass culture, then, serves the interest of the state by eliminating differences of opinion and imposing conformity. The chief goal of society, according to Beatty, is to keep people happy. "Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of those."59
Bradbury's dystopian vision anticipated many of the issues that would be raised a decade later by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man. The culture in Fahrenheit 451 is based on what Marcuse labeled "institutionalized desublimation" and the triumph of the "happy consciousness."60 Society's "supreme promise," Marcuse claimed, "is an ever-more-comfortable life for an ever-growing number of people who, in a strict sense, cannot imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse and action."61 At one point, Montag wonders why no one has ever questioned the permanently militarized economy and the country's relationship to the rest of the world. "I've heard rumors; the world is starving but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?"62 As he realizes, such questions have never been asked because the ability to imagine a different state of being has been systematically crushed. Furthermore, Marcuse argued, modern culture is pervasive, invading even humans' "inner freedom"--that is, "the private space in which man may become and remain himself."63 Similarly, while riding on the subway, Montag tries to remember what he has read, but his thoughts are constantly scattered by the piped-in Muzak ad for toothpaste, a catchy jingle that permeates his subconscious and sets the other riders' toes tapping.64
Throughout Fahrenheit 451 and several of his other stories, Bradbury viewed modern culture as a concerted war on the imagination.65 The image of book burning recurs in several stories. In "Usher II" (1950), Bradburyspecifically mentioned the anti-comic-book crusade of the postwar period as the starting point of the movement toward censorship of fantastic literature, culminating in the Great Fire of 1975, when all the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Baum, Lovecraft, Bierce, and other imaginative writers had been burned.66 In this story, Stendahl builds a house on Mars patterned after the one in Poe's "House of Usher." When Garrett, the investigator of Moral Climates, appears to examine the house, Stendahl explains that he is tired of realism and film versions of Hemingway. "My God, how many times have I seen For Whom the Bell Tolls done!" Stendahl is told he will have to tear down his house, because it violates the Moral Climates law. Before doing so, he invites the members of the Society for the Prevention of Fantasy to a party, where he murders them all in Poe-like fashion, finally chaining Garrett to a wall in the basement and bricking him in. "For God's sake, what are you doing?" cries Garrett, to which Stendahl replies, "I'm being ironic."67
In "The Pedestrian" (1951), Bradbury also argued that America's technological society was an assault on authentic experience in favor of pseudo-experiences. A man living in the year 2053 is pulled over by an automated police car and questioned for his suspicious activities, which include walking alone at night. When he explains that he is out to enjoy the air and look at the sights, the car's computer voice asks whether he has television to watch and conditioned air to breathe at his house. For his inexplicable behavior, the man is taken in for psychiatric examination.68
Like Stendahl and the pedestrian, the heroes of Bradbury's stories tend to be cranky, eccentric intellectuals who distrust the modern world. A humorous example is "The Murderer" (1953), in which a man undergoes psychiatric evaluation for having cold-bloodedly killed all the electrical appliances in his house.69 In "To the Chicago Abyss" (1963), an old man in a postapocalyptic future remembers trivia from the prewar era and recites lists of brand names and descriptions of everyday items that no longer exist. For his trouble he is beaten up by people who do not want to be reminded of what has been lost and pursued by the special police. Eventually he is contacted by members of an underground organization, which provides him with a means of escape, warning him, though, to keep quiet. Even then, he cannot refrain from talking about the past. "What did I have to offer a world that was forgetting?" he asks. "My memory! How could this help? By offering a standard of comparison. By telling the young what once was, by considering our losses."70
On occasion, Bradbury's intellectual heroes turn violent in the face of society's institutionalized evil. And each character who strikes out in violence against an antihumanist society gains the reader's sympathy, at least to some extent. Stendahl, in "Usher II," is much more charming than the bureaucratic drones he murders. Similarly, Montag in Fahrenheit 451 turns his flame thrower on Captain Beatty in order to escape.71 Lantry, the living dead man in "Pillar of Fire," carries out his series of murders to reintroduce terror into a world that has lost its imagination.72 And in "--And the Moon Still Be as Bright" (1948), Spender, a member of the first landing team on Mars after disease has killed all the original inhabitants, begins researching Martian culture and develops a deep fascination with it. Convinced that humans will destroy the planet, Spender goes native, proclaims himself a Martian, and begins murdering the other astronauts. He is ultimately killed by the surviving crew members, but his predictions about how humans will treat the planet are borne out.73
Who Wields Me, Wields the World
Though Bradbury remained an outspoken liberal in politics, many of his stories emphasized the deleterious consequences of reformist liberalism. "Usher II," for example, locates the origins of the censorship movement in the campaign to ban comic books, which was led by such prominent liberals as Frederick Wertham. Furthermore, like such intellectuals as Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Bradbury insisted that liberalism must recognize such unpleasant realities as sin, evil, and death. When it does not, he argued, the results could be catastrophic. "The Scythe" (1947) is the story of a man who inherits a farm with a scythe bearing the inscription "Who Wields Me--Wields the World." He discovers on his farm a very curious wheat field, in which, each day, no more wheat ripens than he can cut. Gradually he realizes that he is, in fact, the grim reaper and that every stalk of wheat represents a thousand lives. When he recognizes the wheat that includes his family, he puts the scythe away and vows to cut no more. That night--May 30, 1938--his house burns down, and his wife and children are trapped in a nether world between life and death. No one in the world dies until the farmer, in a rage, goes into the field and begins chopping wheat indiscriminately.
Slicing out huge scars in green wheat and ripe wheat, with no selection and no care, cursing, over and over, swearing, laughing, the blade swinging up in the sun and falling in the sun with a singing whistle! Down!Bombs shattered London, Moscow, Tokyo.The blade swung insanely.And the kilns of Belsen and Buchenwald took fire.The blade sang, crimson wet.And mushrooms vomited out blind suns at White Sands, Hiroshima, Bikini, and up, through, and in continental Siberian skies.74
Similarly, in "A Sound of Thunder" (1952), Bradbury scrutinized Cold War liberal ideology, which viewed freedom and totalitarianism as polar opposites. The story, about a group of men who travel back millions of years in time to hunt a Tyrannosaurus rex, is also a political parable about the thin line between democracy and dictatorship.
The group enters an office bearing the sign:
TIME SAFARI, INC.SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST.YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.WE TAKE YOU THERE.YOU SHOOT IT.
They discuss the recent presidential election, in which the liberal candidate, Keith, narrowly defeated the crypto-fascist, McCarthyesque Deutscher, whom one describes by saying, "There's an anti-everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual."75 As the hunters travel back in time, the guide explains that all steps have been taken to ensure that the past will not be changed. The only dinosaurs hunted are those that would have died within a few minutes anyway. The hunters must stay on a special path floating six inches above ground, for if one strays off the path and crushes even a single mouse, it could have disastrous effects. The guide explains: "For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes, a lion starves. ... Infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a cave man ... goes hunting wild boar or saber-tooth tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the cave man starves. And the cave man, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation."76
When the Tyrannosaurus rex appears, one of the hunters panics and leaves the path, inadvertently crushing a butterfly. Returning to the present, they enter the office, where the sign now reads:
TYME SEFARI INC.SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST.YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.WEE TAEK YU THAIR.YU SHOOT ITT.
To their horror, the hunters discover that Deutscher and not Keith won the recent election. "Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important!" the distraught hunter thinks. "Could it?"77
In this story, Bradbury expressed a worldview that mathematicians and physicists would gradually formulate only in the sixties and seventies and label "chaos theory." The basis of chaos theory is that, in a system with a large number of variables--such as weather forecasting or economics--infinitesimal changes at one point can make vast differences later. A favorite example cited by chaos theorists is that a butterfly flapping its wings in China today can cause gales in New York next month.78 In the same way, Bradbury's butterfly symbolized the tenuous nature of American freedom in a chaotic and unpredictable universe.
Bradbury, then, can be understood as a tragic liberal caught in the fundamental paradox confronting liberal intellectuals in the postwar period. As Irving Howe had pointed out, liberals viewed the world as marked by chaos and a terrifying freedom that, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., had made anxiety "the official emotion of our time."79 And yet, Howe continued, liberals sought to deal with these problems by proposing a modest reform program, woefully inadequate to cope with the world they described.80 Throughout his career,Bradbury skated along this fissure. Sometimes he expressed optimism about the prospects for reform. Other times, his underlying vision of a universe built on chaos, absurdity, anxiety, and alienation emerged, subverting his own professed belief in liberal reform. If Bradbury failed to successfully reconcile the contradictory impulses of his worldview, it reflected the broader failure of postwar liberalism.
Notes
1. "Allegory of Any Place," Time, October 30, 1964, 85-86. "Special Delivery" aired on November 29, 1959. "Come into My Cellar" appears in Ray Bradbury, S Is for Space (New York: Bantam, 1966).
2. The advertisement appeared in Variety on November 6, 1952, and is reprinted in its entirety in The Nation,November 29, 1952, 481.
3. Dwight Macdonald, "Too Big" (1946), in Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1957), 373-74.
4. George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," in In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), 136.
5. Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), 105.
6. Damon Knight, "When I Was in Kneepants: Ray Bradbury," in In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction (Chicago: Advent Publishers, 1967), 109.
7. Russell Kirk, "Count Dracula and Mr. Ray Bradbury," National Review 19, no. 13 (April 4, 1967): 365.
8. Harlan Ellison, "Introduction to Ray Bradbury's 'Christ, Old Student in a New School,'" in Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Ellison (New York: Signet, 1972), 188-89.
9. For a brief autobiographical sketch, see Ray Bradbury, "Afterword: Fifty Years, Fifty Friends," in TheBradbury Chronicles: Stories in Honor of Ray Bradbury, ed. William F. Nolan and Martin H. Greenberg (New York: Penguin, 1991), 324-35.
10. On science fiction's Golden Age, see Lester del Rey, The World of Science Fiction (New York: Ballantine, 1979), 91-157; and Thomas Clareson, Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Formative Period, 1926-1970 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 5-129.
11. Isaac Asimov, "Ray: An Appreciation," in The Bradbury Chronicles, ed. Nolan and Greenberg, 12.
12. Ray Bradbury, "How to Keep and Feed a Muse," The Writer, July 1961, 11.
13. "Allegory of Any Place," 85-86; Asimov, "Ray," 12-13.
14. Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine (New York: Bantam, 1957), 35.
15. Ray Bradbury, "Pillar of Fire," in S Is for Space, 38.
16. Ray Bradbury, "The Small Assassin," in The October Country (New York: Ballantine, 1955), 142.
17. Ray Bradbury, "The Winds," in October Country, 205.
18. Ray Bradbury, "The Crowd," in October Country, 154-55.
19. Ray Bradbury, "Zero Hour," in The Illustrated Man (New York: Bantam, 1951), 39-42.
20. Bradbury, "Come into My Cellar," 127-44.
21. Pete Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 149.
22. Ray Bradbury, "The City," in Illustrated Man, 162-69.
23. Ray Bradbury, "Perhaps We Are Going Away," in The Machineries of Joy (New York: Bantam, 1964), 71-74.
24. Ray Bradbury, "--And the Moon Still Be as Bright," in The Martian Chronicles (New York: Bantam, 1950), 59.
25. Ray Bradbury, "The Wilderness," in The Golden Apples of the Sun (New York: Bantam, 1953), 30-31.
26. Bradbury, Martian Chronicles, 87.
27. Bradbury, 54.
28. Bradbury, 102-3.
29. Ray Bradbury, "Here There Be Tygers," in R Is for Rocket (New York: Bantam, 1962), 97-109.
30. Ray Bradbury, "A Piece of Wood," in Long after Midnight (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 49-54.
31. Ray Bradbury, "There Will Come Soft Rains," in The Martian Chronicles, 166-72.
32. Ray Bradbury, "The Garbage Collector," in Golden Apples, 145-49.
33. Knight, "When I Was in Kneepants," 108-13.
34. Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, 158-76.
35. Bradbury lived in Ireland for several months while writing the screenplay for Moby Dick. For a brief discussion of his period in Ireland, see Ray Bradbury, "The Queen's Own Evaders: An Afterword," in The Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics (New York: Dial, 1963), 151-59. Among his Irish stories are, from I Sing the Body Electric (New York: Bantam, 1969), "The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place," 13-29, "The Cold Wind and the Warm," 100-119, "The Haunting of the New," 133-50; from The Machineries of Joy, "The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge," 142-56, and "The Anthem Sprinters," 203-13; from A Medicine for Melancholy(New York: Bantam, 1959), "The First Night of Lent," 116-23, and "The Great Collision of Monday Last," 141-47; and from Long after Midnight, "Getting through Sunday Somehow," 100-9.
36. Among Bradbury's Mexico stories are, from A Memory of Murder (New York: Dell, 1984), "The Candy Skull," 175-92; from October Country, "The Next in Line," 16-51; from Machineries of Joy, "El Dia de Muerte," 83-92, and "The Lifework of Juan Diaz," 183-92; and from Long after Midnight, "Interval in Sunlight," 124-52.
37. Bradbury's stories set in monasteries or dealing with priests include, from Machineries of Joy, "The Machineries of Joy," 1-13; from Illustrated Man, "Fire Balloons," 75-90; and from Long after Midnight, "The Messiah," 55-66.
38. Ray Bradbury, "The Dwarf," in October Country, 3-15.
39. Ray Bradbury, "Uncle Einer," in October Country, 191-98.
40. Ray Bradbury, "The Foghorn," in Golden Apples, 1-8.
41. Ray Bradbury, "The Big Black and White Game," in Golden Apples, 77-87.
42. Ray Bradbury, "Way in the Middle of the Air," in Martian Chronicles, 89-102.
43. Ray Bradbury, "The Other Foot," in Illustrated Man, 27-38.
44. Ray Bradbury, "The Long Night," in Memory of Murder, 67-82.
45. Ray Bradbury, "I See You Never," in Golden Apples, 69-72.
46. Ray Bradbury, "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit," in Medicine for Melancholy, 27-50.
47. Ray Bradbury, "The Joy of Writing," The Writer, October 1956, 294.
48. Ray Bradbury, "Sun and Shadow," in Golden Apples, 125-31.
49. Dwight Macdonald, for instance, made a similar criticism of Life in his essay "Masscult and Midcult," inAgainst the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (New York: Da Capo, 1983 [1962]), 14-15.
50. Ray Bradbury, "The Concrete Mixer," in Illustrated Man, 144-45.
51. Bradbury, 148.
52. Bradbury, 150.
53. Bradbury, 152-55.
54. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Ballantine, 1953), 24. Throughout Bradbury's oeuvre, psychiatry is viewed as a tool of the state to impose conformity on heretics and eccentrics.
55. Bradbury, 31.
56. Bradbury, 31-32.
57. Bradbury, 15-16.
58. Bradbury, 58.
59. Bradbury, 63.
60. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 79.
61. Marcuse, 23.
62. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 79-80.
63. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 10.
64. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 85-86. Compare Kurt Vonnegut's 1961 short story, "Harrison Bergeron," in which in the future everyone has been made completely equal, so that no one is smarter or more beautiful or more athletic than anyone else. To prevent intelligent people from having an unfair advantage, small sirens have been inserted in their ears to go off periodically to scatter their thoughts. Welcome to the Monkey House(New York: Dell, 1970), 7-13.
65. Christopher Lasch has made a similar point regarding contemporary education, arguing that "the censorship of fairy tales, like the attack on 'irrelevant' literature in general, belongs to a general assault on fantasy and imagination." The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations(New York: Warner, 1979), 261.
66. Ray Bradbury, "Usher II," in Martian Chronicles, 105.
67. Bradbury, 103-18. A similar story is "The Exiles" (1950), in The Illustrated Man, 94-105.
68. Ray Bradbury, "The Pedestrian," in Golden Apples, 9-13.
69. Ray Bradbury, "The Murderer" in Golden Apples, 56-63.
70. Ray Bradbury, "To the Chicago Abyss," in Machineries of Joy, 193-202.
71. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 129-30.
72. Bradbury, "Pillar of Fire," 27-67.
73. Bradbury, "--And the Moon," 48-72.
74. Ray Bradbury, "The Scythe," in October Country, 175-90.
75. Ray Bradbury, "A Sound of Thunder," in Golden Apples, 88-89.
76. Bradbury, 91.
77. Bradbury, 98-99.
78. For a good introduction to chaos theory, see James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987). On the so-called butterfly effect, see 9-31.
79. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 52.
80. Irving Howe, "Our Country and Our Culture," Partisan Review 19, no. 5 (September-October 1952): 580.
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Cochran, David. "'I'm Being Ironic': Imperialism, Mass Culture, and the Fantastic World of Ray Bradbury." American Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. 55-72. Rpt. inShort Story Criticism. Ed. Joseph Palmisano. Vol. 73. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Jan. 2014.
Document URL
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The Dark and Starry Eyes of Ray Bradbury
The ebullient Ray Bradbury often gave the impression that if anyone could defeat mortality, it would be he. Alas, the “poet of the pulps” died in June at age ninety-one at his home in Los Angeles. He left legions of devoted readers and a vast oeuvre that, at its best, combined Hobbesian fears with emotionally resonant hopes for his country and for the human race.
The author of eleven novels and some six hundred stories called his around-the-clock writing habits “my choreography to outwit Death.” And dance he did. His Herculean output included stories, screenplays, novels, radio plays, and theatrical pieces in the fantasy, science fiction, horror, and detective genres, as well as myriad essays and a first-rate 1956 movie adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Bradbury sought the lasting fame and glory that artists want, but seldom has the urgency of that quest comported so well with the subject matter that the artist chose. Or, to put it as he would have, that chose him.
Bradbury made his finest contributions to American fiction early in his career. They include his story “The Night” (1946) and his first and greatest novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), which he built up from an already-published short story. Dark Carnival (1947), The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and Dandelion Wine (1957), all of which contain dazzling interludes, were brought out as novels but were really strung-together groups of new and previously published stories.
Because he was a lifelong reviser, many of these “greatest hits,” or pieces of them, remain in print today in a half-dozen variations. Truth be told, the proportion of greatest hits among his more forgettable works is not high. Yet the effect Bradbury has had is as potent as that of creators like L. Frank Baum, Rod Serling, and Steven Spielberg — probably as potent as all three combined, considering the large swaths of American popular culture he is father to. Filmmakers who cite his influence include Spielberg, David Lynch, James Cameron, and Back to the Future screenwriter Bob Gale. In television, he inspired Serling (and directly contributed ideas and scripts to Serling’s The Twilight Zone) and indirectly shaped such Baby Boom-era touchstones as Star Trek, The Addams Family, and Dark Shadows. Any number of wildly successful books and movies — Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, to name two — are unthinkable without Bradbury. And in the words of the prolific American horror writer Stephen King, “without Ray Bradbury, there is no Stephen King.”
The youthful experiences that made Bradbury into a writer preoccupied him throughout his life. Bradbury’s much-beloved novel Dandelion Wine is a thinly veiled fictionalization of many of his sweeter reminiscences — but even these could take an odd turn. “I loved to watch my grandmother eviscerate the turkey,” he once said, a memory that sums up his most characteristic literary trait: taking homey Americana and bending it in a violent or grotesque direction. His most seminal stories wrung terror out of common occurrences, such as going into a ravine that ran through the residential section of his native Waukegan, Illinois at nighttime. In the story “The Night,” an eight-year-old boy — the author’s alter-ego — simply scares himself. There is no ghost or criminal lurking, only the panic that wells up in all of us when we get lost in a dark, damp place and know we are alone in the universe, in the “vast swelling loneliness,” feeling the presence of “an ogre called Death.”
Bradbury spent his childhood goosing his imagination with the outlandish. Whenever mundane Waukegan was visited by the strange or the offbeat, young Ray was on hand. The vaudevillian magician Harry Blackstone came through the industrial port on Lake Michigan’s shore in the late 1920s. Seeing Blackstone’s show over and over again marked Bradbury deeply, as did going to carnivals and circuses, and watching Hollywood’s earliest horror offerings like Dracula and The Phantom of the Opera. He read heavily in Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, L. Frank Baum, and Edgar Rice Burroughs; the latter’s inspirational and romantic children’s adventure tales earned him Bradbury’s hyperbolic designation as “probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.”
Then there was the contagious enthusiasm of Bradbury’s bohemian, artistic aunt and his grandfather, Samuel, who ran a boardinghouse in Waukegan and instilled in Bradbury a kind of wonder at modern life. He recounted: “When I was two years old I sat on his knee and he had me tickle a crystal with a feathery needle and I heard music from thousands of miles away. I was right then and there introduced to the birth of radio.”
His family’s temporary stay in Arizona in the mid-1920s and permanent relocation to Los Angeles in the 1930s brought Bradbury to the desert places that he would later reimagine as Mars. As a high-schooler he buzzed around movie and radio stars asking for autographs, briefly considered becoming an actor, and wrote and edited science fiction “fanzines” just as tales of robots and rocket ships were gaining in popularity in wartime America. He befriended the staffs of bicoastal pulp magazines like Weird Tales, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dime Mystery, and Captain Future by bombarding them with submissions, and, when those were rejected, with letters to the editor. This precocity was typical. Science fiction and “fantasy” — a catchall term for tales of the supernatural that have few or no fancy machines in them — drew adolescent talent like no other sector of American publishing. Isaac Asimov was in his late teens when he began writing for genre publications; Ursula K. Le Guin claimed to have sent in stories from the age of eleven.
By working furiously on his style, and by following the advice of mentors like the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein and Norman Corwin, the radio writer and CBS programming powerhouse, Bradbury conquered the pulps, but did not stop there. In 1945, when he was twenty-five, his fiction began appearing in the “slicks,” national magazines of mass-circulation like McCall’s, Collier’s, Mademoiselle, and The New Yorker. Upscale readers liked genre potboilers for the same reason that the buyers of cheap fanzines did. Many of us enjoy peeking at the bad thing that happened. The enjoyment lies in the fact that it did not happen to us, who lie tucked in a warm bed reading our genre fiction (by flashlight, if it is past our bedtime).
Bradbury’s efforts to slake the middle class’s middlebrow taste for the lurid took him way over the top at times, into manic word-explosions — attempts to knock the reader’s socks off that are rather impenetrable. At other times his verbal intensity got things just right. Here is the approach of a Tyrannosaurus rex in “A Sound of Thunder” (1952):
It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior.
Bradburian versions of the monster classics could be inspiring. (Bob Gale loved the time-travel story just quoted; his 1985 screenplay no doubt got its title from words found there: “back to the Future.”) But Bradbury blazed his own trail when he developed a way of starting off with the familiar human scenes, then warping them. A rain barrel, that wholesome item of rural or small-town existence, in a Bradbury story is likely to have festering above it an ominous swarm of insects. The floor of the local barbershop is being swept of hair clippings by a boy, and the boy ruminates about the fuzzy piles of hair having gotten there by growing organically from the white tiles. Or, in Fahrenheit 451, Granger’s sentimental reminiscence about his grandfather, a role model dead these many years, is punctuated by this grotesque image: “If you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you’d find the big ridges of his thumbprint.”
This aesthetic, which we could call conflating Waukegan with the weird, produced some of Bradbury’s most accomplished pieces. Creating individual personalities from the inside was not his strong suit. Instead, he excelled at viewing humanity from the middle distance. These glimpses can be all the more lyrical for being tinged with sadness. In the story “Hail and Farewell” (1953), it is summer, and boys are in a field tossing a ball around:
How tall they stood to the sun. In the last few months it seemed the sun had passed a hand above their heads, beckoned, and they were warm metal drawn melting upward; they were golden taffy pulled by an immense gravity to the sky, thirteen, fourteen years old, looking down upon Willie, smiling, but already beginning to neglect him.
This prosaic scene has a twist: Willie looks like a boy but is in fact forty-three years old. He is a loner hiding his freakishness, roaming the towns of the Midwest and being adopted by a childless couple here and there, until his lack of growth draws attention to his secret and he must pull up stakes. An intense awareness of the sands of time leaving the hourglass drives Bradbury to try to capture fleeting moments. He is in love with the sweetness of youth. Yet we see in “Hail and Farewell” that this passion coexists with — is balanced by — Bradbury’s decent, Midwestern sense of moral limits. Willie, through no desire of his own, has gained eternal youth. It is no blessing. It puts him tragically out of step with his fellow human beings. Bradbury further developed this theme years later in Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). Much of the novel centers on a carousel that changes the rider’s age, giving youth to the old and age to the young. At best, those who take the ride end up miserable outcasts. At worst, they become soulless monsters. If eternal youth is no blessing, neither is a return to what has been outgrown, or an impatient leap to what has not yet been grown into. Time is precious, Bradbury believed, because it is fleeting; using science to stop or control aging would be more nightmarish than fulfilling.
Bradbury was not pessimistic about man’s fate, but he was famously leery of technology getting the upper hand and controlling its creators. Human habitations preoccupied him, from the small-town Gothic Victorians of his Illinois fictions to the sleek, appliance-filled suburban homes of his futuristic works. The hyper-modern dwelling of “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950, collected in The Martian Chronicles) functions perpetually, without its deceased owners, until destroyed in a blaze that its automated systems cannot put out. Old Victorian residences, in contrast, radiate a sense of history and family warmth even (or perhaps especially) if they are a little run-down — it was Americans of modest means, not the wealthy, who mattered to Bradbury. Childhood is richest in joys and fears in a tree-surrounded place, worn and crooked and full of nooks and crannies. American Gothic to him meant placing a rather sweet family of vampires in a creaky northern Illinois manse. (They are raising a human foundling in “Homecoming” [1946], his homage to Burroughs’s Tarzan.)
Domiciles matter as well in Bradbury’s masterwork, Fahrenheit 451, a dystopia about a future society where no books are allowed. Its hero, Guy Montag, is a dissident member of the fire brigade that goes around incinerating books, along with the houses in which they are found. Disillusioned with his empty way of life, and with the brutality of his profession, Montag begins illegally reading books and hiding them in his home. He is found out by his villainous boss, the fire chief. With his neighbors looking on, Montag is forced by the fire chief to burn down his own house:
The house fell in red coals and black ash. It bedded itself down in sleepy pink-gray cinders and a smoke plume blew over it, rising and waving slowly back and forth in the sky. It was three-thirty in the morning. The crowd drew back into the houses; the great tents of the circus had slumped into charcoal and rubble and the show was well over.
The novel’s premise — that a community’s helpers, men who quelled fires and saved lives, are now tasked with state-authorized arson — is a perverse joke. Montag wants to recover the suppressed history of his society, for he wonders how things could have come to such a pass. This is of course just what readers wonder. Therefore we get a reference to the advent of new technology, some time ago, whereby “houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world.” That freed up the crews down at the fire stations to be “given [a] new job, as custodians of our peace of mind,” keeping down “well-read men,” intellectuals, and other dangerous types by eradicating their books. If this strikes anybody as a Band-Aid-like contrivance for a tale with a fanciful premise, that’s because it is.
Just as Bradbury was not picky about issues of plausibility, he lacked the high-tech fixation that is typical of the science fiction genre. Obviously he liked gadgets — starting with that crystal radio set back in Waukegan — but their secondary status shows in Fahrenheit 451. One of the men involved in a dissident underground, Faber, invents a tiny device through which to secretly help his protégé, Montag, but when this gizmo is discovered and destroyed, no one in the novel makes anything of the loss. It just goes away. Normally science fiction writers will not casually discard such a marvel. Or if they do, they contrive the precious object’s dramatic reappearance, perhaps in a sequel to the original work (or all too often in a tiresome sequel to the sequel). One of Bradbury’s biographers, Sam Weller, said “the purists, in their myopic love affair with hardware,” fail to appreciate that Bradbury wrote “human stories dressed in the baroque accoutrements of his early science fiction influences.”
For all that, he made his share, along with others from science fiction’s golden age, of great technological guesses. It is astonishing to come across not-yet-invented devices like ear buds (called “seashells”) and 24/7 banking services in Fahrenheit 451. A proto-iPod appears in Bradbury’s 1948 story “The Women.” Such previewed novelties, if we can call them that, are attention-grabbing. Whether Bradbury was the very first in print with any of these is probably debatable; what is not debatable is his wisdom about how they would affect our lives. Uncanny in this regard is the 1953 story “The Murderer.” A man who went berserk later explains to the prison psychiatrist his feeling of being oppressed by his radio wristwatch, which has a telephone in it. “What is there about such ‘conveniences’ that makes them so temptingly convenient?,” he asks woefully. He goes on:
“I love my friends, my wife, humanity, very much, but when one minute my wife calls to say, ‘Where are you now, dear?’ and a friend calls and says, ‘Got the best off-color joke to tell you’.... [a]nd a stranger calls and cries out, ‘This is the Find-Fax Poll. What gum are you chewing at this very instant?’ Well!”
Bradbury intuited that progress would exact a price in personal annoyance, loss of freedom, and alienation. Family disharmony, too — that is clear in “The Veldt,” one of the futuristic vignettes in The Illustrated Man. The story is about two children whose nursery has a virtual-reality techno-fantasyland installed in it. Worried that the kids are too absorbed in their entertainment, their father and mother apply what would later be termed parental controls. The kids do not take kindly to this interference and use the technology to kill them.
Friction between children and parents, and between husbands and wives, recurs often in Bradbury’s fiction. While his thoughts on the cultural effects of technology were eerily prescient about our own time, matrimonial discord is part of the “period” quality of his most beloved works. Bradbury and other pulp writers, whether consciously or not, updated Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. G. Wells for postwar America. This was the era of Ralph and Alice Kramden, the working-class couple in Jackie Gleason’s television comedy, and of the more upscale and suburban “battle of the sexes” stylized in Madison Avenue ad campaigns and New Yorker cartoons. The average mid-twentieth-century American male was depicted in terms that in retrospect look terribly stark: as a hemmed-in creature with an unfulfilling job out in “the rat race” and a wife ruling the roost at home. The high-toned literature of the time, as Christoper Lasch pointed out in his book The Culture of Narcissism (1979), likewise reflected anxiety about the “domineering woman.” Lasch saw this in the work of such writers as Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Philip Roth, and “the joyless humor of James Thurber.”
Science fiction and fantasy writers like Bradbury and Philip K. Dick offered their own take on the contemporary “battle of the sexes.” Their protagonists — whose careers were not going well and whose spouses, given names like Madge, Millie, or Elma, were persons of off-putting silliness or harshness or both — desperately needed something in their lives to change. Procurement of a mysterious “thing” in a jar; an alien visitation; or a sudden, inexplicable transferrence to another dimension (or, in Guy Montag’s case, a kind of political awakening) usually did the trick.
So handy was this off-the-shelf construct that Bradbury took it to Mars. Seeing the comic possibilities in conflation, Bradbury made his aliens bourgeois. He indulged his domicile-centric imagination, giving us a Red Planet on which Martian men and their dissatisfied Martian wives lived in elegant desert homes in high-tech comfort and were buried in graveyards when they died. The Martian Chronicles, about the planet’s invasion by Earthlings, naturally enough begins with the invaders’ arrival. That arrival is heralded in a wonderfully “period” way, through Mr. and Mrs. K and their relationship problems:
Mr. and Mrs. K were not old. They had the fair, brownish skin of the true Martian, the yellow coin eyes, the soft musical voices. Once they had liked painting pictures with chemical fire, swimming in the canals in the seasons when the wine trees filled them with green liquors, and talking into the dawn together by the blue phosphorous portraits in the speaking room.
They were not happy now.
She, the typical Martian wife, cooks over a lava-bubbling stove while her husband pursues cerebral hobbies in another room, venturing out to field and stream for recreational hunting when the mood takes him. Mrs. K has longings that Mr. K does not understand. Her “emotional wailing” irritates him. He gets jealous when she starts dreaming of a tall, handsome stranger. Mrs. K has the telepathy of all Martians and has inadvertently picked up that, indeed, someone is coming who fits that description. Mr. K’s jealousy increases — “When’s he landing? Where’s he coming down with his damned ship?” — and out the door he goes with his hunting weapon to shoot dead the first human being who sets foot on Mars. Former watchers of Saturday-morning cartoons can see in Bradbury’s fanciful mash-up the basic construct used by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, the former MGM animators who created a Stone Age couple (The Flintstones) and a Space Age couple (The Jetsons) who were, for all intents and purposes, American suburbanites.
One could overdo it with the irritable householder and the bored hausfrau, and Bradbury did. That he would recur too frequently to this stock setup to furnish his main characters with personal lives was perhaps understandable, however. Delving deeper than that might have led into matters of the heart. Or even sex. The Bradbury corpus contains many lurid touches but they are of the gross-out variety, not the risqué. He differs in that regard from writers like Heinlein and also Roald Dahl, to whom he is in other ways comparable. It makes sense for him to have played it safe out of solicitude for the tender age of a large segment of his audience, but it would also seem that for Bradbury, mixing sexual fantasies into fantasy writing simply held little appeal. His adventurous quality is boyish in the manner of the classic Anglo-American authors — Kipling, Stevenson, Cooper, and Twain. “The idea of making believe appeals to him much more than the idea of making love,” said Henry James of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson. Based on his writings, the same could have been said of Bradbury.
He filled his stories with inventor-wizards ranging from the adventurous to the purely deluded. “The Fire Balloons” (a 1951 story incorporated into later editions of The Martian Chronicles) features Father Peregrine, who may be the most compelling of this type. Father Peregrine is among those chosen when Planet Earth — which, in Bradburyland, means the United States of America — sends a team of missionaries to Mars to save the souls of the indigenous population. By this time the Martians, having lost control of their planet, are scarce and reclusive like the Plains Indians of North America. They represent freedom and lofty spirituality, and Father Peregrine yearns to know them. He shocks his fellow missionaries by going up the mountainside and building an altar that replaces the cross with a globe, the better to draw the Martians from the wilderness. He has intuited what the right signals are — not only his special construction project but the organ music he sends wafting into the upper atmosphere. The Martians reward this sympathetic human with a rare contact. An excited and wonder-struck Father Peregrine says meeting these ethereal beings confirms what he already sensed: “They know. They understand.... They think and judge and live in a moral climate.” Just add mashed potatoes, a beautiful film score, and Richard Dreyfuss — and you’ve got Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Invention, wonder, and amazement can make captivating fiction (and movies) but they are not a philosophy. Bradbury worked and reworked his prose to get the most powerful descriptive images, and shuffled and reshuffled parts of novels in search of the most artistically satisfying arrangement, yet he was a less than systematic thinker. He relied on common sense even when seeming to be exploring the sophisticated world of ideas. Many a Bradbury character will launch into a mini-discourse à la George Bernard Shaw (Shaw’s plays were a major inspiration for him), but these excursions, studded with references to Dante, Swift, and Marcus Aurelius, or to Darwin, Huxley, and Freud, are often stilted. The speech at the heart of The Martian Chronicles from Jeff Spender, the astronaut who turns against his cohorts, is an example of impossibly learned philosophical arguments from Bradbury’s characters. Spender’s diatribe does not lend his character much believability, but we do see his frustration as justified. His fellow Earthmen, who have landed on Mars blithely expecting the Martians’ obeisance, who careen around loud, drunk, and disorderly, and who even litter, need to be shown a better path. The Martians follow that better path, Spender has discovered. He has explored their beautiful art and artifacts and studied their cultural records. The Martians live in concert with nature; they “quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything.” Whereas mankind has become stymied by falling into the conviction that Darwinian evolution and religious faith are incompatible, the Martians, says Spender, “knew how to combine science and religion so the two worked side by side, neither denying the other, each enriching the other.”
Politically libertarian or left-wing science fiction writers, like Ursula K. Le Guin, Dune author Frank Herbert, or Philip K. Dick, who adopted the critique of neo-imperialist capitalism that was in vogue in the 1960s, might have given the last word to the guy who “goes native.” Not our Midwestern middle-of-the-roader, Ray Bradbury. The ecologists have a decent point, but they shouldn’t go too far — this we see from the fact that angry Jeff Spender takes off on a rampage, killing his boorish crewmates, forcing his captain to order his death. Spender is one of several violent radicals in Bradbury’s fiction who get their comeuppance.
Guy Montag, too, contemplates armed insurrection against the state in Fahrenheit 451. He is guided by his mentors to see that quiet perseverance is preferable to revolution. For Bradbury, culture is usually the problem — culture as affected by technology — not the decisions of the powers that be. Even Fahrenheit 451, which is about an evil regime, is in a sense an apolitical work. The government that tries to quash the last remnants of independent thought is not so much imposing its will as it is fulfilling the wishes of a degenerate society. It was not oppressive government policies, but decisions of the people, under the influence of technologies that sped up human experience too much, that undermined humanistic values and intellectual curiosity in the first place. Not state censorship, but a more general failure to value the mind, the imagination, nature, and a civilization’s hard-won insights, is the main target of criticism in that novel.
If the message reveals a certain conservatism or traditionalism in Bradbury, his liberal side cannot be denied either. He spoke wistfully, through his characters and in person, of achieving a world without war, sounding very much the soft-headed progressive at those times. On a personal level, he freely admitted his fear of going into the U.S. Army in 1941 and his relief when his poor eyesight exempted him from possibly having to die for his country. His work reflects the atomic angst and even bears touches of the moral equivalence of the political left in the Cold War. In “The Last Night of the World” (1951, collected in The Illustrated Man), a nuclear holocaust is coming because the logic of the superpowers’ arms race is playing out, not because any state (the Soviet Union is never mentioned) fomented an aggressive ideology.
As the critic Paul Brians has written, a kind of “muscular disarmament” is visited upon Earth in Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. Thermonuclear apocalypse is a tragedy that Bradbury sees as ultimately salutary, a wiping away of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. He even dared play it for comic effect. In The Martian Chronicles, nuclear war on faraway Earth occurs late in the book, but incidentally rather than as the grand finale. Just as the arrival of Homo sapiens on Mars was subsumed into situation comedy, so is this: A former astronaut has brought the ol’ ball ‘n’ chain to live with him on Mars and fields her complaints about his new hot dog stand in the middle of the desert, the planet’s first fast-food joint, which she doesn’t think is a good idea. Score one for the wife. The bickering couple look up in the sky and see their native Earth, the orb whence his customers were supposed to come, blasted to smithereens. Leave it to Ray Bradbury to extract charm from the end of the world.
Piratical space travelers, lusting for land and resources, are put before us in The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles, and earn our disapproval. Yet with Bradburian inconsistency, and in all innocence, he gives to the big question — why voyage to other parts of the universe? — the politically incorrect answer that we are rapidly using up our world and must take over others if we are to survive. One cannot call this conservative or liberal. Nor is it particularly ennobling. It is seat-of-the-pants practicality, and it signifies the way in which fear drove not only Bradbury’s literary imagination but his view of the future.
Arnold J. Toynbee, in his 1934–1961 Study of History, argued that a civilization needs challenges to which to respond or it will die. Toynbee’s rather hopefully accented “challenge/response” theory caught on in the United States after he appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1947. It was sort of the power of positive thinking, in civilizational terms — and Americans, including Ray Bradbury, embraced the British historian’s ideas as an antidote to the pessimistic thought of another famous European historian, Oswald Spengler. From the 1984 Bradbury story “The Toynbee Convector” we can get an idea of how hope and fear fit together in his body of work.
The author sometimes called this his favorite among his creations. It revolves around an inventor-wizard figure who, while not nearly as well drawn as Father Peregrine, at least has the virtue of piquancy. Craig Bennett Stiles, age 130, turns out to be a wizard like L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz. That is to say, a highly respected charlatan. The story describes the centenary celebration of the time-traveling that Stiles allegedly did in his old Toynbee Convector — a time machine that made him famous when his own countrymen were in a malaise, bowed down by seemingly insoluble social and economic problems. To lift society out of its “obsession with doom,” young Stiles faked that trip, as he now reveals in an interview with a journalist. Stiles had assured everyone that the future he glimpsed held marvels:
We rebuilt the cities, freshened the small towns, cleaned the lakes and rivers, washed the air, saved the dolphins, increased the whales, stopped the wars, tossed solar stations across space to light the world, colonized the moon, moved on to Mars, then Alpha Centauri.
But these triumphs were in his head, for he had in truth gone nowhere. He was acting on the philosophy of Toynbee, “that fine historian who said any group, any race, any world that did not run to seize the future and shape it was doomed to dust away in the grave.”
Stiles made people believe in his machine even though it was just plausible-looking junk. That is, it is not the hardware that counts, but human will. One must, he tells the journalist, “gently lie and prove the lie true.... What seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wishing to be born.” These prognosticating pep talks are authorial sermons, for, as Bradbury later explained, “The old man who builds the fake time machine and fools everyone into believing that he has seen the future and that we must do something to save ourselves is me.”
The piece missing from “The Toynbee Convector” is religion. Bradbury’s old-fashioned compatibilism made him, at the very least, not your usual liberal promoter of pacifism and endangered species. His writing as a whole makes little sense without understanding this. As the doomed astronaut Jeff Spender said, religious faith should never have been dismissed by modernity as incompatible with science. We need our faith to inspirit us, Bradbury believed. We need the hope that the Almighty instills or else our fear will paralyze us.
Entertaining a faith in faith may be pretty conventional stuff, but it connects Bradbury (who was raised vaguely Baptist) to American readers in a unique way. Then, too, consider the leave-me-alone libertarianism that is typical of genre fiction. The bon mot of the sci-fi writer Octavia Butler captured it: “I’ve never believed in utopias,” she said, “since my utopia could so easily be someone else’s hell.” Bradbury doesn’t believe in utopia, either; he is seeking for mankind not perfection but a cheerful muddling through. Yet he is no libertarian. He naturally thinks in terms of the group, not the individual — as in the moving final vignette of The Martian Chronicles, with the pioneer family from Minnesota that has escaped a moribund Planet Earth and that will seed new human communities on Mars. Again, sheer convention — and yet in Bradbury’s hands it is given a touch of the sublime.
More important than the technology that humans invent is the vision of the inventors; the fact that they dared is what matters most. Bradbury wrote stories that tried to hypnotize us into finding the future oddly, but comfortably, familiar — so that we might go forward to meet it not in fearful uncertainty but with courage, and therefore with success.
Lauren Weiner is a writer living in Baltimore.
Lauren Weiner, "The Dark and Starry Eyes of Ray Bradbury," The New Atlantis, Number 36, Summer 2012, pp. 79-91.
Martian Legacy: Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles
Author(s): Morgan Harlow
Publication Details: War, Literature and the Arts in 2005
Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale,
Full Text:
[(essay date 2005) In the following essay, Harlow finds The Martian Chronicles still relevant over fifty years after its initial publication.]
Beyond providing pure enjoyment for space freaks and gadget geeks, one hallmark of the best science fiction is that it offers serious examination of the cultural and psychological landscapes and ethical questions raised by our changing times. In The Martian Chronicles, written in the late 1940s, published in 1950, Ray Bradbury reminds us that the world will become what we make of it, and each step in re-imagining ourselves brings us steadily closer to the future.
More than prediction, however, Bradbury claims that he is writing to "prevent the future," by pointing out the failings of society. To imagine an encounter with Martians is to see ourselves anew, an experience to be both hoped for and feared as it brings the knowledge that we, too, are the "other." This is the central idea of The Martian Chronicles, a meditation of self and other in the tradition of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, where the encounter with the other becomes a means to knowing the self, an age-old theme basic to human nature and implicit in the experience of all art and literature.
While Whitman sought to unify and direct a nation divided by the politics of civil war, Bradbury, in the aftermath of WWII and the atomic bombings of Japan, sought to redirect the course of technology and prevent the human race from self-annihilation. Both Bradbury and Whitman concentrate not on the future but on the now, inviting us to come along with them, Whitman for a walk across America, Bradbury to Mars, to see the people as they are, for what they are--individuals with emotions, desires, hopes and fears.
Of his first published story, "The Lake," Bradbury has said, "It was some sort of hybrid, something verging on the new." The Martian Chronicles may be seen as such a hybrid, one which resulted from the creative merging of a variety of literary techniques, steeped in the traditions of naturalism, romanticism and realism and suffused with a collage of allusions ranging from those which have been borrowed from and quoted outright--Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Sara Teasdale--to those which may or may not have been consciously assimilated into the text.
Bradbury set about his work in writing The Martian Chronicles with the cool critical eye of the naturalistic novelist, providing the laboratory conditions Emile Zola, in Le roman experimental, has set forth as necessary in order to observe the forces which work upon humans. The colonization of Mars, like the colonization of the Americas by Europeans, is characterized by greed and ignorance, fear of the natives, exploitation of the new world, and acts of genocide. This parallel is clearly drawn in the Chronicles episode, "And the Moon Be Still as Bright," in which the Fourth Expedition to Mars arrives to discover that the Martian race has been killed off by a chicken pox virus brought to the red planet by a previous expedition, thus echoing the deadly smallpox epidemic which devastated Native American populations after the Europeans arrived on the scene. Spender, a member of the Fourth Expedition, sympathizes with the spirit of the Martians and seeks to avenge the death of the Martian race by raging against the earth crew in a manner bearing striking resemblance to the 1990's Unabomber case, in protest of the technology and greed that brought them to Mars. Spender invokes the poetry of romanticism by reciting Byron's "So We'll Go No More A-Roving," a poem, he says, that "might have been written by the last Martian poet." The Consul's assumption of the identity of William Blackstone, the white man who went to live with the Indians, in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano comes to mind here, as does the romantic notion of spiritual vision gotten through an affinity, accidentally stumbled upon, for the land and the collective spirit of the inhabitants who lived there before. As with the Consul's drinking, Mars becomes a way of seeing, of being, a state of mind, a vision, an addiction.
The romantic notion of the power of the imagination to reinvent ourselves, to make the world over and to place ourselves in a history, in time, in the cosmos, is explored by Bradbury with the landing of Earth people on the Martian world. At first the core of the self for the Earth people, like the purple triangle that forms the core of Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, can be defined as an entity with a definite shape and color: the third planet from the sun, Earth. And yet the self has a way of spreading outward, and the core is, essentially, selfless. Mrs. Ramsay's self extends limitlessly through space, through time, to include the lives of other people, the lighthouse, the rooks gathering at twilight; beyond her own death to become the house, the sky, the neglected garden, the cleaning woman, the future of the cleaning woman's son, and so on, ad infinitum. In the same way, the people from Earth become part of the timeless haunted landscape of the Martian world and the dead yet still dreaming cities of the ancient Martian race. The knowledge of this slowly creeps into the consciousness, as when the captain of the Fourth Expedition wonders: were the Martians ancestors of humans ten thousand years removed? By the time the great intellectual leap is made, the flash of brilliance, Emerson's "transparent eye-ball," Borges's "The Aleph," the realization that we are the Martians, it has, more than likely, already become an accepted, matter of course fact of life.
And so one of Bradbury's transplanted Earth people looks back at Earth one day, trying to imagine the war he has heard about by radio and seeing nothing but a green light:
"It's like when I was a boy," said Father Peregrine. "We heard about wars in China. But we never believed them. It was too far away. And there were too many people dying. It was impossible. Even when we saw the motion pictures we didn't believe it. Well, that's how it is now. Earth is China. It's so far away it's unbelievable. It's not here. You can't touch it. You can't even see it. All you see is a green light. Two billion people living on that light? Unbelievable! War? We don't hear the explosions."
Like the green light at the end of Daisy's dock in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the green light of Earth is all that is left of a world that has been lost. We are woken up out of the dream. There is realism.
Even Bradbury can't avoid realism, that ugly but inevitable footnote to our existence. Realism is the spoiler of dreams, wrecker of homes, a death that extinguishes even desire. It brings with it the knowledge that ideas are not enough so we must act, it reduces music, however lovely, to the status of noise. Realism is the ultimate downer, as in songwriter Jimmy Webb's 1960's pop ballad, "MacArthur Park": "someone left the cake out in the rain ... and we'll never have that recipe again," a feeling James Salter's character, Nedra, in the novel, Light Years, knows all too well.
In The Martian Chronicles, realism is the littering of the Martian landscape, the shattering of the beautiful crystal cities of the Martians with a single blast of gunshot, the 1940's-era plain-old-Americans transplanted to Mars, the humanity of the Martians, and the tragic awareness that mankind doesn't learn from its mistakes, that its failings loom large.
A decade after the publication of The Martian Chronicles, the war in Vietnam found Americans involved in the same pattern of genocidal colonization that had been inflicted on countless cultures over the course of history, a pattern Bradbury had warned against with realistic and what now seems tragically prophetic vision.
The Martian Chronicles represents an original and serious work of artistic invention and vision, firmly grounded in literary tradition. It remains a force to be reckoned with, a pivotal work which has influenced the course of literature and the thinking of scientists and of ordinary citizens who face the task--with nothing less than the biological imperative of an entire species at stake, and with it, all life as we know it--of advancing human nature and values into an age in which atomic warfare and space travel have become part of the human experience. The challenge of Mars, according to Bradbury, is to the mind.
Works Cited
Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. New York: Doubleday, 1950.
Bradbury, Ray. "Run Fast, Stand Still ..." (1986). In Zen in the Art of Writing, Essays on Creativity. Capra Press, 1990.
Bradbury, Ray, Arthur C. Clarke, Bruce Murray, Carl Sagan, and Walter Sullivan. Mars and the Mind of Man, New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
"Playboy Interview: Ray Bradbury," Playboy, 43.5, 1996.
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Harlow, Morgan. "Martian Legacy: Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles." War, Literature and the Arts 17.1-2 (2005): 311-314. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 235. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Jan. 2014.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1100076536&v=2.1&u=mnkanokahs&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w&asid=17e97c3ea96ec3ece0ea1c9bcee41d90
The Thematic Structure of 'The Martian Chronicle.'
Author(s): Edward J. Gallagher
Publication Details: Ray Bradbury. Ed. Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1980. p55-82.
Source: Short Story Criticism. Ed. Lynn M. Zott. Vol. 53. Detroit: Gale, 2002.
[(essay date 1980) In the following essay, Gallagher underscores the structural and thematic unity of the stories in The Martian Chronicles.]
The Martian Chronicles (1950) is one of those acknowledged science fiction masterpieces which has never received detailed scholarly study as a whole. Its overall theme is well known. Clifton Fadiman says that Bradbury is telling us we are gripped by a technology-mania, that "the place for space travel is in a book, that human beings are still mental and moral children who cannot be trusted with the terrifying toys they have by some tragic accident invented."1 Richard Donovan says that Bradbury's fear is that "man's mechanical aptitudes, his incredible ability to pry into the secrets of the physical universe, may be his fatal flaw."2 And from "we Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things" to "science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness ... emphasizing machines instead of how to run machines," The Martian Chronicles itself provides an ample supply of clear thematic statements.3
The structural unity of the novel's twenty-six stories, however, is usually overlooked or ignored. Six of the stories were published before Bradbury submitted an outline for The Martian Chronicles to Doubleday in June 1949.4 Thus, while individual stories have been praised, discussed, and anthologized out of context, it has been widely assumed that the collection, though certainly not random, has only a vague chronological and thematic unity. Fletcher Pratt, for instance, says that the stories are "assembled with a small amount of connective tissue."5 Robert Reilly holds that "there is no integrated plot," and Juliet Grimsley says that, although there is a central theme, there is "no central plot."6 Finally, Willis E. McNelly stresses that Bradbury is essentially a short-story writer, that "the novel form is simply not his normal medium."7
The Martian Chronicles may not be a novel, but it is certainly more than just a collection of self-contained stories. Bradbury, for instance, revised "The Third Expedition" (which was published as "Mars is Heaven" in the Fall 1948 Planet Stories) for collection in the Chronicles, adding material about the first two expeditions and drastically changing the ending. The Martian Chronicles has the coherence of, say, Hemingway's In Our Time. The ordering of stories has a significance that goes beyond chronology and which creates a feeling of unity and coherence; thus it almost demands to be read and treated as though it were a novel. My purpose here, then, is to provide a means for understanding and appreciating The Martian Chronicles as a whole. I will discuss all of the stories, almost always in order and always in context, though I realize that this rather pedestrian approach may lead to a certain superficiality and qualitative leveling. I hope to show that the stories draw meaning from one another, as well as preparing the way for future close analyses. As David Ketterer has said, "if more teachers of literature are to be convinced that science fiction is a viable area of study, it must be demonstrated to them that a novel such as Martian Chronicles can open up to intense critical scrutiny just as Moby-Dick can."8
To facilitate discussion, the twenty-six stories in The Martian Chronicles may be divided into three sections. The seven stories in the first section, from "Rocket Summer" to "And the Moon Be Still as Bright," deal with the initial four attempts to successfully establish a footing on Mars. The fifteen stories in the second section, from "The Settlers" to "The Watchers," span the rise and fall of the Mars colony; and the four stories in the final section, from "The Silent Towns" to "The Million-Year Picnic," linger on the possible regeneration of the human race after the devestating atomic war.
Bradbury's purpose in this first group of stories is to belittle man's technological achievement, to show us that supermachines do not make supermen. The terse power of "Rocket Summer" is filtered through three humiliating defeats before man is allowed to celebrate a victory. In fact, "celebration," the goal men seek as much as physical settlement, is the main motif in this section. Bradbury uses it to emphasize the pernicious quality of human pride. The stories build toward the blatant thematic statement of "And the Moon Be Still as Bright"; but this story is artistically poor, since the section does not depend on it, either for meaning or for effect. Next to a sense of delayed anticipation, the strength of the section stems from a sense of motion; the stories of the three defeats are not repetitious of one another. Bradbury varies both style and tone in "Ylla," "The Earth Men," and "The Third Expedition," increasing the intensity from the mellow and the comic to the savage. In this way, "And the Moon Be Still as Bright" serves a cohesive function as the climax of and clarification of views which we have already felt. Another significant motif in this section comes from the phantasmagoric atmosphere that Bradbury associates with Mars. This trapping, this "accident" of his fantasy, produces clashes of dream and reality, sanity and insanity, which serve functionally to underscore Bradbury's desire for us to view technology from a different perspective.
"Rocket Summer" is an audacious introduction to the subject of space travel. Its five short paragraphs capture the power and import of this technological marvel with the intensity of myth and the jolt of a hypodermic needle. The scene engenders an expectation of immediate and glorious triumph in space. The move to space changes Earth; in one leap, technology conquers nature. "The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land" (Chronicles, 1). Often overlooked in the display of power, however, is that the summer created by this supernal force isn't altogether a pleasant change from the Ohio winter. The winter is, indeed, a time of constriction and inactivity, of negative things: doors are closed, windows licked, panes frosted over, and housewives lumber along "like great black bears." But the winter is also a time of "children skiing on slopes." The "warm desert air" of rocket summer ends these games, erases winter's "art work," and steams the town in a "hot rain." The power here is actually more display than benefit. Implying man's defiance and defiling of nature, "Rocket Summer" is a perfect foil for the final scene of The Martian Chronicles, in which the new Martians see themselves in nature.
The breathtaking power of the opening scene hovers over "Ylla" and "The Summer Night" like an uncollected debt. But both stories deflect this power into unexpected channels; both shift to the Martian perspective on human space travel. Men and their machines appear only in dreams, in premonitions--in a kind of advance mental infection made possible by the psychic powers of Martians. Ylla is party to a dying marriage which is a symbol of the dying Martian culture, and she views the coming American technological power in sexual terms. Subtly punning on the old notion of Earth someday inseminating space, Bradbury has Ylla literally see the captain in his phallic rocket as the man of her dreams, come to bring her new life. Then, with almost predictable irony, the first giant flex of our technological muscle is brought to naught by a jealous husband. Our technology will not impregnate this planet.
The reception planned for this first expedition is a bullet; a quirk of fate, a chance combination of time and place, subvert the first mission. The anticipation of glorious triumph in space that is ignited in "Rocket Summer" is defused. We feel sad, not because humans have died (they do not appear until the fourth story) or because a mission has been thwarted, but because the Martians are portrayed sympathetically and we respond to their desire for new life. The marital situation is recognizably human; along with Ylla, we know that marriage makes people old and familiar while still young. Most of all, however, we are sad because Mr. K's action is so totally fruitless:
"You'll be all right tomorrow," he said. She did not look up at him; she looked only at the empty desert and the very bright stars coming out now on the black sky, and far away there was a sound of wind rising and canal waters stirring cold in the long canals. She shut her eyes, trembling. "Yes," she said. "I'll be all right tomorrow."(Chronicles, 14)
In this absorbing, archetypal personal drama, the pinnacle of our technological progress plays but a supporting role.
As an introduction to the second expedition, "The Summer Night" returns to space travel the portentous power found in "Rocket Summer." The relationship of the two stories, in fact, is that of equal but opposite reaction. Whereas in "Rocket Summer," space travel transforms an Ohio winter into a temporary summer, bringing people outside, in "The Summer Night" this same force creates a "winter chill" which forces the Martians inside. This time the portentous power is not in sexuality but poetry and song, the beautiful words of Byron and the familiar words of the old nursery rhyme. What is beautiful and familiar to us is seen as strange and ominous, even poisonous, to the Martians. With their speech uncontrollably infected with fragments of Earth song, just as their bodies will later be infected with chicken pox, the Martians fill the air with direful chants like "something terrible will happen in the morning" (Chronicles, 16). In denigrating Ylla's dream man, Mr. K tries to point out the gulf between the two cultures: his height makes him a misshapen giant, the color of his hair and eyes are most unlikely, his name is no name, and he comes from a planet incapable of supporting life. Now a similar perspective again dramatizes the otherness that Bradbury will mark in the second section as the reason why the colonization is so rapacious.
At this point, however, the Martians have little to fear, for "The Earth Men" of the Second Expedition, the first human characters in the book, are butts of Bradbury's wild comedy, pompous straight men who are reduced to babbling idiots before the rather grotesque conclusion. High on the pride of their accomplishment, these ambassadors seek the proper comprehension, appreciation, and celebration of their presence. "We are from Earth," says Captain Williams, pressing his chubby pink hand to his chest; "it's never been done before"; "we should be celebrating" (Chronicles, 17-18). The Earth men want somebody to shake their hands, pat them on the back, shout hooray, give them the key to the city, throw a parade; ironically, however, they must struggle just to get attention. The great reality of Earth's technological world is treated as merely another manifestation of a common madness on Mars. In a bitter, comic touch, the only celebration they receive is from fellow inmates of an asylum.
In this story Bradbury uses several different techniques to achieve comedy at the expense of the Earth men. First they have the misfortune to land near the home of a Martian Gracie Allen. Their verbal exchanges with the daffy Mrs. Ttt, the archetypal house-bound housewife, contain the myopia, the logical illogicalities, and the flitting concentration Gracie Allen made famous.9
The man gazed at her in surprise. "We're from Earth!""I haven't time," she said. "I've a lot of cooking today and there's cleaning and sewing and all. You evidently wish to see Mr. Ttt; he's upstairs in the study.""Yes," said the Earth Man confusedly, blinking. "By all means, let us see Mr. Ttt.""He's busy." She slammed the door again.(Chronicles, 17)
Comedy in the following conversation with Mr. Aaa comes from his refusal to do anything but nourish his desire to kill Mr. Ttt. The result is a conversation that is not a conversation but two monologues, each escalating in intensity while moving in different directions. The only genuine response Mr. Aaa makes to the Earth men is a correction:
"We're from Earth!""I think it very ungentlemanly of him," brooded Mr. Aaa."A rocket ship. We came in it. Over there!""Not the first time Ttt's been unreasonable, you know.""All the way from Earth.""Why, for half a mind, I'd call him up and tell him off."Just the four of us; myself and these three men, my crew.""I'll call him up, yes; that's what I'll do!""Earth. Rocket. Men. Trip. Space.""Call him and give him a good lashing!"....."Challenged him to a duel, by the gods! A duel!".....The captain flashed a white smile. Aside to his men he whispered, "Now we're getting someplace!" To Mr. Aaa he called, "We traveled sixty million miles. From Earth!"Mr. Aaa yawned. "That's only fifty million miles this time of year."(Chronicles, 19-20)
In contrast to the obvious quality of the comedy in the above quotation, Bradbury lets the simple fact that "the little girl dug in her nose with a finger" undercut the captain's next attempt to impress a Martian with who they are. The comedy changes drastically, however, in the scenes with Mr. Xxx, the kind of mad scientist that Peter Sellers has played. At first the tone is delightfully absurd, as every attempt by the Earth men to prove that they really have made a space flight inevitably adds evidence of their "beautifully complete" insanity. The climax of the passage attests to the wacky madness of the very person entrusted to "cure" them:
"This is the most incredible example of sensual hallucination and hypnotic suggestion I've ever encountered. I went through your 'rocket,' as you call it." He tapped the hull. "I hear it. Auditory fantasy." He drew a breath. "I smell it. Olfactory hallucination, induced by sensual telepathy." He kissed the ship. "I taste it. Labial fantasy!"(Chronicles, 28-29)
Because the crew and the hardware are the product of a sickness that will make history--Martian medical history--the Earth men are celebrated at last--for being crazy. "May I congratulate you? You are a psychotic genius!. ... Let me embrace you!" (Chronicles, 29). The tone darkens considerably, though, when Mr. Xxx kills the Earth men and discovers that their bodies do not disappear. Caught in the logic of his own argument, and with a faint echo of the infection aspect of "The Summer Night," Xxx can only conclude that he has been contaminated. Eyes bulging, mouth frothing, he kills himself--the final absurdity. Something terrible did happen. Like "Ylla," the Second Expedition comes to nothing, both for the Martians and the Earth men.
Almost in passing (for throughout The Martian Chronicles the "great" events are relegated to the interstices), "The Earth Men" provides important information about the Martian background. The reason why their culture is dying even before human settlement, a fact first sensed in "Ylla," is that "a good number of their population are insane" (Chronicles, 28). Now, in "The Taxpayer," we get equally important background information about Earth. Sensing an atomic war and wishing to escape oppressive and pervasive government control, Pritchard seeks a new start on Mars: "maybe it was a land of milk and honey up there" (Chronicles, 31). In tried-and-true American fashion, Mars becomes the place of escape, of refuge, the place we head for when the going gets rough (the next story, incidentally, was first published separately under the title, "Mars Is Heaven"). Also interesting as an introduction to "The Third Expedition" is the continued questioning of the locus of truth found in "The Earth Man." Pritchard is the prophet of the atomic war that eventually destroys the Earth of The Martian Chronicles. He is the man who speaks the truth. Considered crazy, he is dragged away kicking and screaming. Clearly, Bradbury has created a kind of whirlpool in which appearance and reality, sanity and insanity, continually change places and are constantly intermixed.
"The Third Expedition" gathers the motifs that are established in the previous stories. It acts as the dramatic culmination of Bradbury's views on our technological achievement before the successful landing and the overt philosophizing of "And the Moon Be Still as Bright." The domestic resonance of "Ylla" and the Mrs. Ttt section of "The Earth Men" become the full-blown landscape of an old-fashioned, idealized, and therefore seductive mid-American town. The expectation of success created by "Rocket Summer," as well as the need for celebration that are explicit in "The Earth Men," become the loving reception, impossible to deny, of lost loved ones. The crumbling borders of appearance and reality that are present in every story now become a fatal human weakness. Mars is not a paradise, it is a hell.
Though "The Third Expedition" eventually picks up the savage tone of the ending of "The Earth Men," it begins on quite a different note. The opening two paragraphs describe a heroic journey in the kind of stalwart prose and epic rhythms one would expect following "Rocket Summer," if Bradbury were writing The Martian Chronicles in praise of our technological achievements.
Moreover, in "The Third Expedition" we meet "real" humans for the first time. In "Ylla," the Earthmen are only a dream while in "The Earth Men" they are impotent puppets programmed with one desire. But here, for the first time, are people who think, who have that power which is associated in our technological world with the quintessence of humanity. Ratiocination is a key to the story, the pivotal concept. Thus, although the rocket lands incongruously like the preceding two expeditions (on a lawn of green grass, near a brown Victorian house, with "Beautiful Ohio" on the music stand), the story gains a realistic tone from the logical search for truth that is immediately applied by the captain. The story also gains an optimistic tone.
Captain Black is a "doubter" figure, a figure common in science fiction. The doubter figure is usually a character against whom the unbelievable marvel, the insoluble problem, is bounced. It is a device for getting information to the reader. Here, though, the doubter is the central character, one who clearly transcends the stereotyped status. Unlike his crew, Captain Black does not immediately and intuitively respond to the familiar setting on Mars. "How do we know what this is?" he asks, later saying, "I like to be as logical as I can" (Chronicles, 33, 39). The Mars that the Third Expedition finds is a nostalgic, pretechnological, Midwestern small town of cupolas, porch swings, pianolas, antimacassars, Harry Lauder and Maxfield Parrish artifacts, tinkling lemonade pitchers, succulent turkey dinners, and friendly people. Like the Martian psychologist in "The Earth Men," Black distrusts the reality he sees, even though its magnetic appeal is undeniable. In this inability to forget, or at least resist, the past, A. James Stupple sees a metaphor for The Martian Chronicles as a whole. In a time of exciting yet threatening and disruptive progress and change, Americans are attracted to the security of an idealized, timeless, and static past; and they make the fatal mistake of trying to re-create Earth rather than accepting the fact that Mars is different.10
The plot of this story moves from an emphasis on logic, which is finally overpowered by emotion, to the return of an emphasis on logic in the grim conclusion. For instance, the first half of the story, which is developed mainly through the conversation of the crew, has the air of an exercise in problem-solving. Five possible reasons are considered for the existence of an American town on Mars: one of the previous expeditions succeeded, a divine order may have ordained similar patterns on every planet in our solar system, rocket travel somehow began back in the early twentieth century, they have gone back in time and landed on Earth, and finally, to escape insanity caused by intense homesickness, early space travelers reproduced Earth as much as possible and then hypnotized the inhabitants into belief.
The captain no sooner settles for the last explanation ("Now we've got somewhere. I feel better. It's all a bit more logical" [Chronicles, 39]) than he and his crew are hit with an emotional thunderstorm, and the explanation is found to be false. Everywhere the Earth men are greeted by old friends and relatives, and the very wish of the Second Expedition crew comes true. The American arrival on Mars is celebrated: people dance, a brass band plays, little boys shout hooray, the mayor speaks, and the crew is escorted away in loving style. Not even the captain can resist this. Confronted by his parents and brother, the old house on Oak Knoll Avenue, his old brass bed and college banners, the skeptic becomes a child again and is converted to belief. "It's good to be home," he says. "I'm soaked to the skin with emotion" (Chronicles, 44).
In bed, however, reason reasserts itself. "For the first time the stress of the day was moved aside; he could think logically now. It had all been emotion" (Chronicles, 45). In a vicious parody of the asylum scene in "The Earth Men," Black's reason, in careful step-by-step fashion, produces images as crazy as little demons of red sand running between the teeth of sleeping men, or women becoming oily snakes. The Martians have used his memories to pierce his defenses--in order to kill him. And the crazy image is true, as if his thought gave it life! Ironically, the moment of illumination, which reason provides, is also the moment of death. So the Third Expedition comes to naught, a victim of emotion and weakness for the past. Reason, the sire of technological progress, does not guarantee survival.
The story doesn't end with the murder of Captain Black, however, though this event is horrible climax enough. Almost blasphemously, Bradbury permits the Martian charade to continue to its logical end--in a mock funeral. Like "The Earth Men," the illusions hold after the death of the humans, and we have a final absurdity, or more precisely here, a final profanity. A solemn procession of Martians with melting faces ring the graves while the brass band plays "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean"! In this second ending, in this final "celebration," Bradbury, like Mr. Hyde (in the Barrymore movie) taking one last, irresistible blow at his already dead victim, almost gratuitously pushes his satire on human pride from the personal to the national level. It has a chilling effect. Seen in relation to the story's focus on logic, its connection with "The Earth Men" and with Bradbury's overall satiric purpose, it seems perfectly organic.11
"And the Moon Be Still as Bright" is as baldly didactic as Kent Forrester makes it out to be, though I hope it is clear that this quality is not characteristic of The Martian Chronicles as a whole.12 In a story which can be called the work's thematic center, Spender, the killer, the "very crazy fellow" who tries unsuccessfully to be a Martian, is Bradbury's mouthpiece. Spender is stalked and finally killed by Captain Wilder, a man who understands Spender yet who cannot be a Martian either. "There's too much Earth blood in me," he says. Yet, in one of those mystic transformations, the spirit of the hunted lives on in the spirit of the hunter. Wilder discovers that he is "Spender all over again" (Chronicles, 71). Mars is left to the Sam Parkhills of this world, however; later, Wilder is "kicked upstairs" so he won't interfere with colonial policy on Mars. It's all quite gimmicky. Bradbury's theme is stated a bit too plainly and the disappearance of a character of such promise leaves us with a hollow feeling. Clearly he wants no obstructions in the way of the coming apocalypse.
Unlike most of the crew, Spender does not want a "celebration" to mark the successful arrival of the Fourth Expedition. Spender, whose imagination and sensitivity are contrasted with the physicality and sensuality of Biggs and Parkhill, feels the Martian presence around him and respects the remnants of Martian culture. He has ventured into space with awe, not pride, realizing that "Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things" (Chronicles, 54), that man has already brought chicken pox to Mars and will soon bring more pollution. "There'd be time for that later; time to throw condensed-milk cans in the proud Martian canals; time for copies of the New York Times to blow and caper and rustle across the lone gray Martian sea bottoms; time for banana peels and picnic papers in the fluted, delicate ruins ..." (Chronicles, 49). Spender also realizes that humans hate the strange ("If it doesn't have Chicago plumbing, it's nonsense"), and will "rip the skin" off Mars, changing it to fit their image (Chronicles, 64, 54).
Supermachines do not make supermen. Biggs, the archetypal ugly American christening the Martian canal with empty wine bottles and puking in a Martian Temple, is a stark commentary on human nature that does not keep pace with technology. He drives Spender over the edge, alienating him from his own culture. "I'm the last Martian," Spender tells Biggs before killing him (Chronicles, 58). Spender sees that the Martians "knew how to live with nature and get along with nature," that the Martians had
discovered the secret of life among animals. The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life ... the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: Why live? Life was its own answer.(Chronicles, 66-67)
Spender/Bradbury seems to be saying that the Martians stopped where we should have stopped a hundred years ago, before Darwin and Freud blended art and religion and science into a harmonious whole. Spender also sees that the Martians knew how to die. Quoting Byron, he pictures the Martians as a race aware that everything must end, thus accepting the fact of their own cultural death. Mars should chasten our pride. "Looking at all this," says Wilder, "we know we're not so hot; we're kids in rompers, shouting with our play rockets and atoms, ..." (Chronicles, 55).
Spender's vision of Earth through the Martian perspective is the clear criterion for Bradbury's satiric representation of Earth. Earth people are proud, polluters, sacrilegious, incapable of wonder, commercial, hostile to difference and hostile to nature. Earth is so odious, in fact, that Bradbury plants the seed here for "The Million-Year Picnic": that we must shuck Earth off, that we need a new start, that we must become Martians. Spender is crazy, but as Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Roszak have argued, in a world in which Reason is Truth, and in which Technology is the embodiment of Reason, any move toward qualitative change will seem insane. Spender is crazy like Thoreau, who, the story goes, asked Emerson why, in a world of injustice, he too wasn't in prison. But as Forrester has pointed out, the severe artistic problem here is that the positive view of the Martians is given rather than being successfully dramatized. Most of the Martians we have met so far are killers! In several ways, therefore, "And the Moon Be Still as Bright" is not as satisfactory as the other stories in this section.
The second section of The Martian Chronicles, the fifteen stories from "The Settlers" to "The Watchers," spans the rise and fall of the Mars colony. Because of the large span of events, this section seems less taut, less focused and more discursive than the first section. Whereas the very short stories in the first section ("Rocket Summer," "The Summer Night," "The Taxpayer") were stories in their own right, as well as introductions to the main stories about the three expeditions, here the nine very short stories seem burdened with the "history" of the settlement. As a result, the flow is a bit choppy. The most important stories in the section are "Night Meeting" and "The Martian," and the purpose of the section is to point to mankind's hostility toward difference--toward otherness, another manifestation of human pride--as the factor which determines the quality of colonization. I have already mentioned that A. James Stupple sees American attachment to a static past leading them to the fatal mistake of re-creating Earth rather than, to push his idea a bit, allowing Mars to re-create it.
Pritchard, the taxpayer, wanted to come to Mars because it might be a paradise compared to the wretched conditions mounting on Earth; but the Earthmen of "The Settlers" share no such sense of urgency or mission. There is no epic motivation here, no myth-making; they are an ordinary mix of men who come for an ordinary mix of reasons. What they share is "The Loneliness," a disease which strikes when "the entire planet Earth became a muddy baseball tossed away," and "you were alone, wandering in the meadows of space, on your way to a place you couldn't imagine" (Chronicles, 73). The cure for the Loneliness is people; but to bring people, Mars must be changed, and this is the self-appointed task of Benjamin Driscoll in "The Green Morning."
The story is tricky. It is, as John Hollow calls it, a "cheerful" story since the colonization of Mars begins on a seemingly optimistic note.13 This optimism has an unmistakable mythic resonance. Driscoll is a Johnny Appleseed figure interested in transforming the howling wilderness into a fruitful garden, "a shining orchard"; that is, Driscoll wants to repeat the colonization of North America on Earth. The magical soil of Mars repays his efforts with Whitmanesque abundance.
It is hard not to like a fellow with such charitable sentiments and such evident success. Having seen the results of the first cycle, however, Bradbury isn't interested in repeating it, and we must be careful not to take this optimistic tone too seriously. Driscoll is waging "a private horticultural war with Mars" (Chronicles, 75, my italics), which even he suspects will precipitate tapping the untold mineral wealth of the Martian soil. He may be a Johnny Appleseed, but he is also Jack, of "Jack and the Beanstalk," forging a link to the land of hostile giants. Although he builds trees instead of domes, the result is the same: the technological onslaught of the next story. Cheerful as it is, Hollow says, "The Green Morning" is still a story of man "changing Mars to fit his image of what a planet ought to be," "an imposition of man's will upon a surface he only presumes to own." Most of the impositions are less attractive. The story comes full circle: Driscoll faints when he arrives on Mars, and he faints after his success. "The Green Morning" is not meant to signal beneficial progress.
Like Natty Bumppo, all Driscoll does is pave the way for those less noble than he. After a dream of man-in-nature comes the reality of man bludgeoning nature. A plague like the pox strikes this paradise. In a vicious parody of the gentle animality Spender seeks, the rockets--still controlling nature, turning rock into lava and wood into charcoal--are "The Locusts" bearing steel-toothed carnivores who, as Hollow says, "afraid of strangeness ... hammer Mars into a replica of Mid-America."
The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night. And when the carpenters had hurried on, the women came in with flower-pots and chintz and pans and set up a kitchen clamor to cover the silence that Mars made waiting outside the door and the shaded window.(Chronicles, 78)
The diction in this description of domestic activity is particularly vicious. It clearly reveals Bradbury's almost snarling disgust at man's propensity to impose himself on the universe. Nevertheless, The Loneliness is conquered.
In "Night Meeting" an antimaterialistic old man who embodies an alternate way of living on Mars is the portal for a vision of communion that represents the way colonization should be approached. An American outcast simply because he is "old" and "retired," the old man is the gatekeeper of the dream land. One must pass through his world view before being blessed with the vision. He is not interested in making money from the gas stations he runs. "If business picks up too much," he says, "I'll move on back to some other old highway that's not so busy, where I can earn just enough to live on" (Chronicles, 79). The only important thing for him is feeling the "difference" on Mars--the different weather, the different flowers, the different rain. Mars is a kaleidoscope, a Christmas toy, a succession of shifting patterns meant only to be enjoyed. "We've got to forget Earth and how things were," he says. "If you can't take Mars for what she is, you might as well go back to Earth. ... don't ask it to be nothing else but what it is." For this old man out of the mainstream of his culture, Mars has the beneficial effect of always providing something new; he is there to experience and to be entertained. He approaches Mars like a child (cf. "The Million-Year Picnic"), vivid proof that "even time is crazy up here."
Time is the key to this meditation on difference and human pride. Shortly after crossing the ideational threshold marked by the old man, Tomás Gomez responds to the sensual presence of time: "There was a smell of Time in the air tonight ... tonight you could almost touch Time" (Chronicles, 80). Gomez goes further, in fact, actively cultivating its sensual presence by constructing similies: Time smells like dust and clocks and people; it sounds like water running in a dark cave and dirt dropping on hollow box lids; it looks like snow dropping silently into a black room or like a silent film in an ancient theater. Like the steps in a prescribed ritual, this exercise in imagination calls forth a being from another time, "a strange thing," a Martian with melted gold for eyes and a mechanical mantis for a vehicle. There are three stages in Gomez's night meeting with this Martian: incomprehensibility, a realization of different perspectives, and symbolic union. The result of the meeting is a distinct feeling of simultaneous reality, mutual fate, and mental (spiritual?) communion. For the first time in The Martian Chronicles, under the spell of the old man's pleasure in difference, Martians and Earthmen are not adversaries.
At first the language barrier keeps Martian and human apart. "Hello! he called. Hello! called the Martian in his own language. They did not understand each other." On Mars, however, the language barrier isn't a problem if there is a sincere desire to communicate; thus this is not a repetition of the conversation-which-is-not-a-conversation in the Mr. Aaa section of "The Earth Men." Here the Martian and the Earth man are together even in their separate tongues. Both ask, "Did you say hello?" and "What did you say?" They both scowl; they both look bewildered. When the speech barrier is overcome, as each disputes the reality of the other, this harmony breaks; but it returns in common reflections about time. Also, though they see each other differently during this stage, at least they are talking to each other in a mutual search for truth. You're a ghost; no, you're a phantom. "There's dust in the streets"; "the streets are clean." "The canals are empty right there"; "the canals are full of lavender wine." "You're blind"; "You are the one who does not see." "You are a figment of the Past"; "No, you are from the Past." "I felt the strangeness, the road, the light, and for a moment I felt as if I were the last man alive on this world"; "So did I" (Chronicles, 82-85).
Confronted by their simultaneous realities and varying perspectives, Earth man and Martian do not recoil in solipsistic fashion or jump for each other's throat. Like the husband and wife in Robert Frost's "West-Running Brook," they "agree to disagree"; they accept the illogicality, accept their difference, and find a common bond. "What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow" (Chronicles, 86). Decay and death will invariably strike both cultures. They "shake" hands and exchange wishes to join in the exciting pleasures of each other's present.
Bradbury doesn't give either culture the last reality; nor does he return the story to a human perspective. Instead he preserves the balance struck between the two cultures by holding the narrative point of view neutrally at the scene after both beings disappear with parallel reflections of their experience. Thus, in this mixture of dream and reality, which is so characteristic of The Martian Chronicles, we are finally given a vision of what could be on Mars, a vision soon blotted out by such stories as "The Musicians," "The Martian," and "The Off Season."
"The Shore" and "Interim" continue the chronicle of Martian colonization begun in "The Settlers" and "The Locusts," which is completed five stories hence in "The Old Ones." The first wave of men, "bred to plains and prairies," have "eyes like nailheads, and hands like the material of old gloves," and "Mars could do nothing to them" (Chronicles, 87). The second wave, among whom are the town builders, come from the "cabbage tenements and subways" and permit the possibility of art and leisure. At last--completing civilization--come the old ones, "the dry and crackling people, the people who spent their time listening to their hearts and feeling their pulses and spooning syrups into their wry mouths, these people who had once taken chair cars to California in November and third-class steamers to Italy in April, the dried-apricot people, the mummy people" (Chronicles, 118). Bradbury's disgust with the cycle of civilization is again supremely obvious in "The Old Ones," but it is also evident in a more subtle form in "Interim." The description of Tenth City seems not to be slanted but, like an Iowa town shaken loose by a giant earthquake and carried to Mars by a twister of Oz-like proportions Tenth City is similar to the seductive trap designed by the Martians in "The Third Expedition."
"The Musicians" is a good example of Bradbury's skewed vision. Throughout The Martian Chronicles he has a delightful way of looking at things in an unusual, off-center way.14 Our perspective on the First Expedition was that of a jealous husband; Byron is a threat to Mars. In a later story the end of the Earth is seen through the eyes of the owner of a hot dog stand. Likewise, in this compact yet powerful story, the desecration of Martian civilization is dramatized through a children's game. The focus on difference is still here. While in the background the Firemen burn Mars clean of its horrors, "separating the terrible from the normal," in the foreground, straining parental restrictions in time-honored fashion, a handful of adventurous kids revel in the brittle flakes of dead Martian bodies, imagining "like on Earth, they were scuttering through autumn leaves" (Chronicles, 88; my italics). Instead of the hammering of the steel-toothed carnivores on the fifteen thousand feet of Oregon pine and the seventy-nine thousand feet of California redwood brought to Mars to fabricate a new Earth, we have the plangent strokes of the first daring boy, the Musician, "playing the white xylophone bones beneath the outer covering of black flakes." One culture makes music out of the death of another. Bradbury turns the advance of colonization "into a game played by boys whose stomachs gurgled with orange pop" (Chronicles, 89). The result is a paralysis of criticism. Here there are no culprits, no villains, just innocent "candy-cheeked boys with blue-agate eyes, panting onion-tainted commands to each other." Our truth that "boys will be boys" contributes also to the destruction of Mars.
Pritchard, the taxpayer, seeks Mars as an escape from "censorship and statism and conscription and government control of this and that" (Chronicles, 31), an idea Bradbury returns to in the next three stories, "Way in the Middle of the Air," "The Naming of Names," and "Usher II." After the mythic ownership implied by the act of naming, after all traces of Mars are covered by "the mechanical names and the metal names from Earth," after "everything was pinned down and neat and in its place," comes "the red tape that had crawled across Earth like an alien weed" (Chronicles, 103). Mars has become a political and psychological mirror of Earth, as well as a physical one. "They began to plan people's lives and libraries; they began to instruct and push about the very people who had come to Mars to get away from being instructed and ruled and pushed about." "Way in the Middle of the Air" concerns a group of people who go to Mars to avoid being pushed about, while "Usher II" is about a man who pushes back.
Bradbury uses the vestiges of slavery in the South to suggest the generally oppressive conditions on Earth. Because "Way in the Middle of the Air" is the only story that dramatizes the migration, and since the departure is described in an extended river metaphor first introduced in "The Shore," the "niggers" come to symbolize virtually all of the emigrants. "I can't figure why they left now," says Samuel Teece. Things are looking up, laws are fairer, money is better. "What more [do] they want?" What they want is to be free now, free from law, from debt, from contract, from the KKK. Freedom--the ultimate human value. In Bradbury's eyes, we are all slaves.
In this story, Bradbury shows himself comic master of the stereotyped situation. In the person of Samuel Teece, the blustery power of the white establishment ("Ain't there a law?. ... Telephone the governor, call out the militia. ... They should've given notice!") is challenged. Teece feels the cut of the laconic humor of his porch cronies ("Looks like you goin' to have to hoe your own turnips, Sam") as he meets the withdrawal of the still docile, still shuffling darkies ("Mr. Teece, you don't mind I take the day off"). The story demonstrates that the establishment's only source of power is fear and that the only fear in the loss of this power is the loss of an artificial dignity. Belter, for instance, withstands Teece's attempts to scare him: "Belter, you fly up and up like a July Fourth rocket, and bang! There you are, cinders, spread all over space. ... There's monsters with big raw eyes like mushrooms" who "jump up and suck marrow from your bones! ... And it's cold up there; no air, you fall down, jerk like a fish, gaspin', dyin', stranglin', stranglin', and dyin'" (Chronicles, 93-94). But Teece maintains his self-respect: "Did you notice? Right up to the very last, by God, he said 'Mister'!"
For all their dedication to the journey, however, these blacks do not suggest a new life on Mars; they remain servile stereotypes. Silly, for instance, plans to open his own hardware store. More important, they remain attached to their earthly possessions--and a motley collection it is: "tin cans of pink geraniums, dishes of waxed fruit, cartons of Confederate money, washtubs, scrubboards, wash lines, soap, somebody's tricycle, someone else's hedge shears, a toy wagon, a jack-in-the-box, a stained-glass window from the Negro Baptist Church, a whole set of brake rims, inner tubes, mattresses, couches, rocking chairs, jars of cold cream, hand mirrors" (Chronicles, 101). These are all deposited with feeling and decorum on the road to the rocket. Although no possessions are taken, neither is anything forgotten. They do not "burn" the past like the family in "The Million-Year Picnic"; they carefully leave it where it can be seen "for the last time." Clearly, they carry Earth with them into the new land. The vacuum created by their departure ("What you goin' to do nights, Mr. Teece?") will soon be filled on Mars, too. The Bureau of Moral Climates reinstitutes the exercise of power which Mr. Teece exulted in.
"My lord, you have an imagination, haven't you?" says the Investigator of Moral Climates in "Usher II" about the fun house which Mr. Stendahl has built on Mars (Chronicles, 115). Here again, Bradbury's vision is delightfully skewed. Of all of the possible examples of bureaucratic control on Mars, he focuses on an absurd extreme but one dear to the writer: control of the imagination. His focus is perfect, however, for the American inability to wonder is precisely why Mars is mistreated. They have killed the aliens on Earth (Sleeping Beauty, Mother Goose, the Headless Horseman, St. Nicholas), as well as those on Mars. As a result of legislation permitting only realism, Earth suffered a "Great Fire" in which all tales of fantasy, horror, and the future were destroyed. Now, with the investigators of Moral Climates and the Society for the Prevention of Fantasy, this higher level of civilization has finally reached Mars. In such a supremely technological society, the imagination is a totally alien force; but "we'll soon have things as neat and tidy as Earth," promises Garrett (Chronicles, 107). Stendahl, however, has built a "mechanical sanctuary" as an obscene gesture to the "Clean Minded People," as repayment to an "antiseptic government." In an ironic foreshadowing of the closing scenes of "The Million-Year Picnic," similar to the one in "Way in the Middle of the Air," Stendahl bases his sanctuary on ideas which transcend a burning on Earth--the ideas of Edgar Allan Poe.
In true Poe fashion, the story is laden with ironies: the inexorable advance of the bureaucracy is dramatized through its temporary but resounding defeat; the climate alien to human life on Mars is not physical but moral; technology is used to give life to a fantasy so that the accomplishment of technology can be subverted; reality and illusion again trade places; and fantasy is literally fatal. The use of "The Fall of the House of Usher" as a frame for the story anticipates the atomic apocalypse, just as failure of mind precipitates physical collapse; and the use of "The Cask of Amontillado" reminds us once again that madness can masquerade as sanity. Suppressing wonder, however, can only result in the unleashing of horror. Like Spender, here Bradbury's spokesman for human values is a crazed killer who succeeds spectacularly this time.
In many ways "The Martian" is the central story in the second section of The Martian Chronicles. It is a horror story similar to "Usher II," with "old ones" as the central characters. It is also a direct denial of the possibility of the acceptance of difference offered in "Night Meeting." As John Hollow has said, "the denial of the Martian's true self, of his existence as other than their projections on him, results in complete destruction." But this central story about the rape of Mars is not what one would expect. The horror perpetrated by the "good" guy in "Usher II" is malicious, almost masturbatory, whereas here the horror caused by the "bad" guys is accidental, understandable. Although the old ones in the introductory story are cardboard mummies, here they are sympathetic figures seeking new life. They grasp the promise of Mars not out of gross avarice or blind insensitivity but for reasons of the heart. As it is in "The Green Morning," here Mars is enormously responsive to human action; but again Bradbury refuses to focus on a culpable segment of society. In "The Musician" it was the young, while in "The Martian" it is the old through whom Bradbury dramatizes the exploitation of Mars.
The story opens with the somber tone of "Ylla." Love is gone. Age nibbles at the corners of vitality. It is a dreary November of the soul. "It's a terrible night," Mrs. LaFarge says; "I feel so old" (Chronicles, 120). Old LaFarge and his wife have lost their only son, with the result that the meaning is gone from their lives; and they have come to Mars to assuage their grief. "He's been dead so long now, we should try to forget him and everything on Earth" (Chronicles, 119). But like a sentient chameleon, the Martian who comes their way has the magic ability to assume any shape. He becomes Tom, "an ideal shaped by their minds." Their life is quickened by the "return" of their son; the earthly dream has become a reality on Mars.
The problem is that Tom is subject to the force--"trapped" is his word--of any strong human emotion around him. What we see is a series of individuals, each struggling desperately, selfishly, and alone to make him what they want him to be. In town, for instance, Tom becomes Lavinia Spaulding, a drowned young woman whose parents are as distraught as the LaFarges. Obviously, the Martian cannot be all things to all people at all times, but that is what they want. Faced with having Tom "die" for the second time (an unthinkable agony), LaFarge struggles to keep him; but the city is rife with powerful urges. In the last scene Tom runs a psychic gauntlet which leaves him dead, misshapen and grotesque, the result of his inability to simultaneously satisfy the multitude of human dreams.
Before their eyes he changed. He was Tom and James and a man named Switchman, another named Butterfield; he was the town mayor and the young girl Judith and the husband William and the wife Clarisse. He was melting wax shaping to their minds. They shouted, they pressed forward, pleading. He screamed, threw out his hands, his face dissolving to each demand. "Tom!" cried LaFarge. "Alice!" another. "William!" They snatched his wrists, whirled him about, until with one last shriek of horror he fell.He lay on the stones, melted wax cooling, his face all faces, one eye blue, the other golden, hair that was brown, red, yellow, black, one eyebrow thick, one thin, one hand large, one small.(Chronicles, 130)
Humans do not respect limits! Tom is a beautifully concise symbol of Martian colonization. He is the magic planet torn apart, identity killed by a dense, hungry horde of grasping and competing American dreams. Like "Ylla," nobody wins; the framework of the story permits only sadness, not anger. LaFarge and his wife--still in bed, still listening to the rain, still dreaming--effectively suppress the realization that in this story, lack of restraint has turned rape into murder. For the first time, humans are the killers. Yet the dream goes on.
Pritchard introduces the migration to Mars with the statement that "there was going to be a big atomic war on Earth in about two years" (Chronicles, 3). This notion of imminent war is kept alive in "And the Moon Be Still as Bright" and "The Shore" before coming into focus in the last three stories of section two. An atomic war, powered by the same force that takes men into space, ingloriously ends the cycle of human civilization. In the context of The Martian Chronicles, it is a fitting end to a feverishly proud, competitive, commercial ethic. In contrast to the death of Mars, the end of our culture is suicidal, "unnatural," and unaesthetic ("a last-moment war of frustration to tumble down their cities"). More important to the theme of the section is that the war proves the people on Mars are still Earthmen, regardless of the distance between the planets and the amount of time that has elapsed since their separation. Mars has not homogenized them in the least. Father Peregrine likens the war on Earth to wars in China when he was a boy, far away and therefore unreal and beyond belief. But the proprietor of "The Luggage Store" believes otherwise: "I think we'll all go back. I know, we came up here to get away from things--politics, the atom bomb, war, pressure groups, prejudice, laws--I know. But it's still home there. You wait and see. When the first bomb drops on America the people up here'll start thinking. They haven't been here long enough" (Chronicles, 132). He's right. Earth is still home. The war which eventually destroys Earth resurrects it in the memory of the colonists. And "The Watchers," after vainly putting up their hands "as if to beat the fire out," troop en masse to the luggage store.
The climactic story of the second section is "The Off Season." It is a story which dynamically couples commercialism with the destruction of earth and Mars. Sam Parkhill, the character from "And the Moon Be Still as Bright," is the direct antithesis of the old man, the gas station, and the relish in and acceptance of difference found in "Night Meeting." "Like any honest businessman," he picks a choice location ("those trucks from Earth Settlement 101 will have to pass here twenty-four hours a day!") to reproduce the ultimate American banality: a hot dog stand. "Look at that sign. SAM'S HOT DOGS! Ain't that beautiful, Elma?" Even as we now joke about a McDonald's on the moon, Parkhill fulfills Spender's grim prophecy of commercial pollution: "We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn't set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose" (Chronicles, 54). Minding the main chance, Parkhill's goal is to make a financial killing by making the "best hot dogs on two worlds" in his "riveted aluminum structure, garish with white light, trembling with juke-box melody." "We'll make thousands, Elma, thousands." Parkhill, a product of the mainstream of American materialism, puts his faith in Earth, in the customers it will send him.
The phrase financial killing is apt; the drive for dollars always entails the destruction of something. Here the commercial man literally kills. Parkhill, who doesn't like Martians, shoots first--mindlessly and wantonly--and feels sorry later. He operates on the principle of give and take in a world view in which the old inevitably gives way to the new. He is a bull in a china shop, who, by his rough advance, blows away the fragile Martians. The first Martian he shoots falls "like a small circus tent pulling up its stakes and dropping soft fold on fold." During the ensuing chase, he shoots a girl who "folded like a soft scarf, melted like a crystal figurine. What was left of her, ice, snowflake, smoke, blew away in the wind."
At the core of this story, however, is a colossal Martian joke, the kind of revenge that feeds on enormous human lust. Parkhill doesn't have to kill the Martians. "The land is yours," they say and give him land grants to half of Mars. Immediately Sam Parkhill is landlord of Mars. "This is my lucky day!" he exults. Looking toward Earth, he says in Statue-of-Liberty rhetoric: "send me your hungry and your starved." What the Martians know is that atomic war will wrack Earth. In another swipe at human materialism, Bradbury has the disappointed hopes of the owner of a hot dog stand our perspective on the end of our world. The destruction of Earth is briefly yet vividly described: "Part of it seemed to come apart in a million pieces, as if a gigantic jigsaw had exploded. It burned with an unholy dripping glare for a minute, three times normal size, then dwindled." The climactic emphasis, however, is given to Sam's emotionally estranged wife. Throughout the story Elma is the voice of criticism and caution. She realizes that Sam, in his drive for success, would kill her. During the chase she even identifies with the Martians. Now, picking up the celebration motif so evident early in The Martian Chronicles and finding, with explosive effect, the proper business term to characterize the future of humanity, she gives the benediction: "Switch on more lights, turn up the music, open the doors. There'll be another batch of customers along in about a million years. Gotta be ready, yes, sir ... looks like it's going to be an off season" (Chronicles, 143). This second section of The Martian Chronicles ends with a thump of doom which casts a shadow far into the remaining stories about renewal.
The four stories--"The Silent Towns," "The Long Years," "There Will Come Soft Rains," and "The Million-Year Picnic" linger on the possible regeneration of the human race after a devastating atomic war and the consequent evacuation of Mars. Bradbury does not allow hope to come easy, and when it does, it comes almost grudgingly. Just as Bradbury filters the power of "Rocket Summer" through three unsuccessful expeditions, he squeezes optimism about a second beginning on Mars--a really new life--through three resounding defeats. "The Silent Towns" is a parody of the familiar new-Adam-and-Eve motif in science fiction, which comically thwarts notions of a new race of humans. "The Long Years" and "There Will Come Soft Rains" focus on the machines, the sons of men, which inherit the Earth. Both stories end with meaningless mechanical rituals which mock the sentience that gave them life. The Martian Chronicles does not turn upward until the last story, "The Million-Year Picnic." Only in the complete destruction of Earth, Earth history, and Earth values, plus the complete acceptance of a new identity, can hope be entertained. "It is good to renew one's wonder," says Bradbury's philosopher in the epigraph, "space travel has again made children of us all." In the context of game, vacation, and picnic, this last story entrusts the possibility of new life to a small band of transformed Earth children.
Bradbury's irrepressible dark humor--so evident in "The Earth Men," "Way in the Middle of the Air," and "The Off Season"--is again the vehicle in "The Silent Towns." War has come to Earth, and the towns on Mars are empty. Silence has replaced the musicians and the hammering of the steel-toothed carnivores. The Loneliness again strikes Mars. Walter Gripp, acutely aware of "how dead the town was," that he is "all alone," sprinkles "bright dimes everywhere" in a meaningless Johnny Appleseed charade as the last man on Mars. Gripp is a miner who "walked to town once every two weeks to see if he could marry a quiet and intelligent woman." The story gains movement from the continued search of this New Adam for his New Eve. As the story builds toward the apparition of Eve, however, the tone becomes increasingly mock-romantic.15 When the phone rings, Gripp's heart slowed: "he felt very cold and hollow"; "he wanted very much for it to be a 'she.'" When he finally phones Genevieve Selsor in the beauty parlor, her voice is "kind and sweet and fine. He held the phone tight to his ear so she could whisper sweetly into it. He felt his feet drift off the floor. His cheeks burned." He sings the teary old ballad "Oh, Genevieve, Sweet Genevieve" as he entertains beautiful dreams of his new partner. He doesn't find her in the first beauty salon he stops at, though he does find her handkerchief. "It smelled so good he almost lost his balance."
As we have seen so many times, however, on Bradbury's Mars, dream and reality are constantly changing places, always untrustworthy. Thus the real Genevieve is nothing like the anticipated one. Her fingers, cuddling a box of chocolates, are plump and pallid; her face is round and thick; her eyes are "like two immense eggs stuck into a white mess of bread dough." Her legs are as big around as tree stumps, her hair a bird's nest. She has no lips, a large greasy mouth, and brows plucked to thin antenna lines (Chronicles, 152). This bizarre woman paws him, pinches him, puts her chocolaty fingers on him, and finally tries to bed him. The scene is priceless parody:
"So here I am!""Here you are." Walter shut his eyes."It's getting late," she said, looking at him."Yes.""I'm tired," she said."Funny, I'm wide awake."
The presence of Genevieve Selsor, replete with wedding dress, is simply too much for Gripp.
"Genevieve." He glanced at the door."Yes?""Genevieve, I've something to tell you.""Yes?" She drifted toward him, the perfume smell thick about her round white face."The thing I have to say to you is ..." he said."Yes?""Good-by!"(Chronicles, 154-55)
And with that, the last man lights out for the territory, content to live out his life alone. As Hollow observes, Genevieve is an archetype of human piggishness, and Gripp flees from a symbol of mankind grown gross in the softness of material goods. His flight is Bradbury's way of saying that mankind isn't fit to continue.
"The Long Years" is also about a last man and his long wait. The action in the preceding twenty-three stories takes place between the years 1999 and 2005; now the scene moves to 2026. Though, after twenty years, Earth is only a memory, it is still home, and Hathaway longs for rescue, for return there. In the meantime, to combat The Loneliness which would have caused him to take his own life, he recreates mechanically both his family and an American town. Hathaway is a brilliant man, a genius, a still potent remnant of American technological prowess; yet he needs the security of familiar surroundings to save him from Martian otherness. Hathaway, in fact, chooses precisely the plan for survival suggested by Captain Black in "The Third Expedition." The consternation of Captain Wilder and his crew at finding such an apparently genuine and timeless domestic scene is another reminder of that grim story.
This time, however, the domestic scene is warm and real. Hathaway has done a "fine job," and when he dies, Mars is left to his mechanical family. He "took us as his real wife and children. And, in a way, we are" (Chronicles, 163). The Americans cannot "murder" the machines: "They're built to last; ten, fifty, two hundred years. Yes, they've as much right to--to life as you or I or any of us" (Chronicles, 165). Thus, in a way, human life will continue on Mars for a long time. Man buys a bit of immortality by building machines like himself. But this melancholy story remains brutally negative. The machines are built to last, but Hathaway knew that "all these things from Earth will be gone long before the old Martian towns" (Chronicles, 156). Even while they last, however, these machines, which were deliberately not programmed to feel, perform an empty rite of supplication as chilling as the ending of "The Third Expedition." The fact that these are merely machines is never more vivid than in the concluding paragraph, a grim reminder of the scene in which wine dribbles down their chins.
Night after night for every year and every year, for no reason at all, the woman comes out and looks at the sky, her hands up, for a long moment, looking at the green burning of Earth, not knowing why she looks, and then she goes back and throws a stick on the fire, and the wind comes up and the dead sea goes on being dead.(Chronicles, 165-66)
In this story about a last man, the last mourner is only a paid pallbearer. Even the machines look mindlessly toward Earth.
"There Will Come Soft Rains" takes us back to Earth after the atomic war, to the mechanical children there. Like "Rocket Summer," people are absent. It is a fitting climax to these stories of man's technological achievement. By taking man out of it, Bradbury helps us see our mechanical environment and think about our relation to it. Indeed, the story is directly connected to the thematic statement in "The Million-Year Picnic":
"Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth."(Chronicles, 179-80)
The house is a mechanical wilderness, a symbol of a civilization which destroys itself in its own sophistication. The story reminds us that "built to last"--whether it be ten, fifty, or two hundred years--is the typical American short haul when compared to cultures that measure their lives in the millions. It does not matter how much we live for our machines; they will never represent a significant continuation of our lives.
The house, which is the central character in "There Will Come Soft Rains," is a supreme technological achievement. It sounds like the kind of domestic utopia that Life Magazine might have prophesied for an eager audience. The house wakes you up, prepares your meals, counsels you about the weather, reminds you of duties, cleans, and even entertains. It is "an altar with ten thousand attendants." It is a mechanical paradise antithetical to Ylla's natural one, with streams for floors and fruits growing out of the walls, following the sun and folding up at night like a giant flower. In accordance with the functions we often expect our machines to assume and the care we bestow on them, the house is described in human terms. It has a voice clock, memory tapes, electric eyes, a metal throat, an attic brain, and a skeleton; it acts like an old maid, digests food, and suffers paranoid and psychopathic behavior. The house is also the "one house left standing" in a city of rubble and ashes; its humanness only heightens the void created by human self-destruction. Since technology is meant to serve, it has no function without humanity. Machines cannot "exist" without men. Though we can be mesmerized by mechanical "life," without the masters, it is a meaningless charade. "But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly" (Chronicles, 167).
The story begins in the morning, in the living room, in the snappy rhythms of the voice clock, with expectation of life; but it is actually about the machinations of death. "At ten o'clock the house began to die." This sophisticated product of technology is attacked, ironically, by fire, man's first technology, and none of the scurrying water rats, mechanical rain, blind robot faces with faucet mouths, or frothing snakes can help it save itself. Before it crashes into oblivion like the House of Usher, Bradbury paints a raging scene of technology madly out of control (Chronicles, 171). This scene is so vivid, so tragic, so comic that it smacks of the final exorcism of the demonbeast technology in The Martian Chronicles. Like "The Million-Year Picnic," this story about a last machine ends with a meaningless ritual. As the new day dawns, a "last voice," needle stuck, destined to become further and further out of sync with nature, repeats the date over and over again, endlessly. There can be no hope of life here. Mechanical time stands still while the eternal rhythm of nature moves on. If there is to be regeneration, it must be through the eternal-life principle of nature, a force technology has not been able to maim.
"The Million-Year Picnic" concerns another expedition to Mars. This time, though, it is as an escape from Earth, not as an extension of it. A former state governor secretly takes his family to Mars, "to start over. Enough to turn away from all that back on Earth and strike out on a new line--" (Chronicles, 180). In order to consecrate his dedication to a new start on Mars, Dad destroys their transportation back to Earth and then deliberately burns a collection of documents symbolizing their way of life there. Though the children are told that the trip is a vacation--a game, a picnic--the tone of the story is somber, muted, primarily because the narrative stays close to the adolescent Timothy who can't quite understand his parents' actions. Thus Timothy's efforts to distinguish illusion from reality, to "lift the veil" his parents wear, establishes Mars as a strange, odd, puzzling place--it is different.
One key to the story is the children. Mars will be given to children who are still capable of wonder: "They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was" (Chronicles, 179). The tone is optimistic yet tentative. If the Edwards' rocket succeeds, and if the human ritual here of telling the children every day how Earth "proved itself wrong and strangled itself with its own hands" succeeds, there is hope for a new start. A second key is nature. Nature is not an antagonist to be conquered, as in "Rocket Summer," but a beneficial force to be sought. Dad's face looks like a fallen Martian city, Mom's eyes have the color of deep cool canal water, Robert's hand is a small crab jumping in the violet water, Timothy's hand is a young tarantula, Mike's face is like an ancient Martian stone image. They all whisper--like Spender--in the dead cities. They are all attracted to a town with a life-giving fountain. And climactically, they all receive their new identity as Martians from the rippling water of the canal. Nature, and the Martian culture that is based on it, are accepted without reservation. "This time earthmen may keep enough of the childlike wonder," says John Hollow, "this time earthmen may confront Mars and therefore reality on its own terms, seeing themselves as Martians rather than as transplanted earthlings; this time they may learn from the ancient Martians to enjoy existence as a million-year picnic, a camping out in the universe man will never own, an existence with a limit just as individual lives have limits, and yet still a feast, a meal, something to live on."
Unless we pay close attention to the sermons of Spender and the symbolism of "The Million-Year Picnic," it is easy to feel that in The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury is against space travel per se. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over and over again in his personal statements, Bradbury has stressed that space is our destiny. Speaking as Jules Verne in an imaginary interview, Bradbury says that the function of the writer is to push the wilderness back. "We do not like this wilderness, this material universe with its own unfathomable laws which ignore our twitchings. Man will only breathe easily when he has climbed the tallest Everest of all: Space. Not because it is there, no, no, but because he must survive and survival means man's populating all the worlds of all the suns." There is only one thing that can stop this journey--the wilderness in man himself: "Man's other half, yes, the hairy mammoth, the sabre-tooth, the blind spider fiddling in the venomous dark, dreaming mushroom-cloud dreams."16
The mushroom-cloud dreams are significant. The threat of atomic war, kept in the background and off stage in The Martian Chronicles, is more on Bradbury's mind than it might appear. "Today we stand on the rim of Space," he says; "man, in his immense tidal motion is about to flow out toward far new worlds, but man must conquer the seed of his own self-destruction. Man is half-idealist, half-destroyer, and the real and terrible thing is that he can still destroy himself before reaching the stars."17 Perhaps, he suggests, a book for his time would be one "about man's ability to be quicker than his wars." "Sometimes there is no solution, save flight, from annihilation. When reason turns murderously unreasonable, Man has always run ... If but one Adam and Eve reach Mars while the entire stagecraft of Earth burns to a fine cinder, history will have been justified, Mind will be preserved, Life continued."18
Bradbury, then, comes not "to celebrate the defeat of man by matter, but to proclaim his high destiny and urge him on to it." The rocket is the conqueror of Death, the "shatterer of the scythe." The proper study of God is space.19 Bradbury--like Jonathan Edwards, for example--is truly a moralist. Edwards said that if you believe in the certainty of a hell, it makes good sense to scare people away from it. The Martian Chronicles is Bradbury's hellfire-and-brimstone sermon.
Notes
1Fadiman's "Prefatory Note" to the Bantam edition of The Martian Chronicles has been dropped from recent printings.
2Richard Donovan, "Morals from Mars," The Reporter, 26 June 1951, pp. 38-40.
3The Martian Chronicles, pp. 54, 179-80. All page references are to the Bantam paperback edition first printed in 1951.
4See William F. Nolan, The Ray Bradbury Companion, Detroit: Gale Research, 1975, pp. 57, 189-94.
5Fletcher Pratt, "Beyond Stars, Atoms, & Hell," Saturday Review of Literature, 17 June 1950, pp. 32-33.
6Robert Reilly, "The Artistry of Ray Bradbury," Extrapolation, 13 (1971), 64-74; Juliet Grimsley, "The Martian Chronicles: A Provocative Study," English Journal, 61 (1972), 1,309-14.
7Willis E. McNelly, "Ray Bradbury--Past, Present, and Future," in Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, ed. Thomas D. Clareson, Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1976. See also the first chapter in this book.
8David Ketterer, New Worlds for Old, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1974, p. x.
9Nolan notes that in 1934, Bradbury was "an audience of one" at the Burns and Allen radio show at Figueroa Street Playhouse. Bradbury Companion, p. 45.
10A. James Stupple, "The Past, the Future, and Ray Bradbury," in Voices for the Future. See also the first chapter in this book.
11In the essay cited below, Forrester says that the final scene, though a masterpiece as an isolated tableau, "doesn't satisfy our need for a well-made plot and internal consistency."
12Kent Forrester, "The Dangers of Being Earnest: Ray Bradbury and The Martian Chronicles," Journal of General Education, 28 (1976), pp. 50-54.
13John Hollow, "The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man," audio-cassette tape #1306, Everett/Edwards, Inc.
14McNelly mentions this, too.
15It is interesting that this story first appeared in Charm (see Nolan, p. 152).
16"Marvels and Miracles--Pass It On!" New York Times Magazine, March 20, 1955, pp. 26-27, 56, 58.
17Quoted by McNelly.
18"Marvels and Miracles."
19These ideas are in a Playboy article excerpted in "Shaw as Influence, Laughton as Teacher," Shaw Review, 16 (1973), pp. 98-99.
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Gallagher, Edward J. "The Thematic Structure of 'The Martian Chronicle.'." Ray Bradbury. Ed. Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1980. 55-82. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Lynn M. Zott. Vol. 53. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Jan. 2014.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1420044373&v=2.1&u=mnkanokahs&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w&asid=f9a4d7c664e8759d7008c30db53f89e4
O’CONNOR
Politeness in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction: Social Interaction, Language, and the Body
Donald E Hardy, Style(DeKalb) , Winter 2010, Vol. 44, Iss. 4, pg. 524
Full Text:
(Copyright Northern Illinois University, Department of English Winter 2010)
1. Introduction
Although the social context of Flannery O'Connor's fiction has been studied in some detail, especially the racial social context, relatively little O'Connor criticism has detailed the linguistic patterns of O'Connor's style and none thus far has thoroughly analyzed the linguistic patterns of politeness. ' This neglect is quite surprising given the long history of politeness studies on authors as widely varied as Hemingway (Hardy, "Strategic Politeness"), Shakespeare (Magnusson), Ionesco (Simpson), and Dickens (Cecconi). My analysis of politeness in O'Connor's fiction makes the argument that there is a stylistics of politeness in the fiction: that is, that there are characteristic patterns representing politeness in O'Connor's fiction. In particular, politeness in O'Connor's fiction is intimately linked to O'Connor's concerns with the body, the grotesque, and the sacramental.
When asked in an interview how "Southern manners bear on the racial turmoil" of her time, O'Connor answered, "Manners are the next best thing to Christian charity" (qtd. in Magee 102), expressing at once a pessimism about Southern race relations, a faith in the power of manners that would today certainly seem misplaced, whether in the American South or any geographical region, and a keen awareness of the differences between charity and manners. As Jan Nordby Gretlund points out, "the demands of the social order in O'Connor's rural Georgia often prove more than a match for ethical standards and Christian ideas of neighborly love" ("Flannery O'Connor and Class" 123). Charity (love) would ideally create a cohesive society, regardless of race and class. In the absence of charity, the distancing formalisms of manners preserve a civil - if not a loving - society. In elaborating on the relationship between manners and charity, O'Connor expressed doubt in an abundance of "unadulterated Christian charity" in the South but also expressed "confidence that the manners of both races will show through in the long run" (qtd. in Magee 102). In spite of her clear belief in the ideals of Christian charity, O'Connor very much believed in the efficacy and necessity of formality: "Formality preserves that individual privacy which everybody needs and, in these times, is always in danger of losing" (qtd. in Magee 104). And that formality is there to protect everyone, according to O'Connor:
When you have a code of manners based on charity, then when the charity fails - as it is going to do constantly - you've got those manners there to preserve each race from small intrusions upon the other. The uneducated Southern Negro is not the clown he's made out to be. He's a man of very elaborate manners and great formality which he uses superbly for his own protection and to insure his own privacy. (Magee 104; also qtd. in Day 137)
Given O'Connor's own privileging of religious issues in discussions of her fiction, it is not surprising that social manners have not been among the foremost issues that O'Connor critics have grappled with. D. Dean Shackelford, for example, argues that for O'Connor "earthly values, including those involving racial relations, were, in comparison to spiritual conviction, insignificant" (89). There are exceptions, such as Gretlund, whose analyses of O'Connor's sensitivity to both race and class concentrate their attention on "The Displaced Person" ("Flannery O'Connor and Class," "The Side of the Road"). And there is Ralph C. Wood's recognition of the role of manners in supplying "the constraints necessary for social intercourse" (The Christ-Haunted South 124). Wood's contrastive analysis of the early "Geranium" and the late rewrite "Judgement Day" foregrounds the manners of both Tanner and Coleman in the later story, manners that create both charity and friendship between two people who without those manners would be enemies, against the "fake manners" of the early story (The Christ-Haunted South 134-39). Barbara Wilkie Tedford argues that O'Connor criticism has too frequently focused on "theological implications" (27). Tedford instead concentrates on how O'Connor has the reader's prejudices and feelings of superiority in her sights as she exposes her racist and classist characters (27-28). Linda Rohrer Paige focuses on the ability of members of the lower classes in O'Connor's fiction to see spiritual truths, but there is no analysis of the interaction of the social classes in her essay. Broader social issues have been examined in O'Connor's fiction, for example Katherine Hemple Prown's analysis of gender politics and Jon Lance Bacon's analysis of Post-World War II consumerism. Robert Coles's book-length ethnographic study of the "social scene" of O'Connor's time and region both takes care to place her fiction into the everyday context in which most of it was written and quotes at length both blacks and whites who think and talk of manners with as much seriousness as they do religion (xix-xx, 60-61). But following O' Connor's lead, most critics have generally foregrounded race in their discussions of manners rather than manners itself (e.g., Armstrong; Zaidman, Whitt, and Vogel; Wood, "Racial Morals and Manners," "Flannery O'Connor on Race"; Fowler). As I suggest here, the examination of manners as they affect and are affected by issues of race and class is relatively limited in the body of O'Connor criticism.
When critics have paid close attention to manners, most of those analyses have either used manners to make generalizations about black/white relations and/ or Southern gentility (as in Matthew Day's analysis of both in O'Connor) or used politeness as a synonym for "meaninglessness and intellectual vacuity" (as in Dixie Lee Highsmith's analysis of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People"). For instance, Day argues that the texture of manners in O'Connor's fiction is akin to the realism of William James. In particular, he sees that texture of realism revealed in both the propriety of O'Connor's matrons (for example, Ruby Turpin, who wears her good shoes to the doctor's office) and, most especially, in black/ white relations. It is in those racial relations that Day finds America's parallel to European class struggle: "So, rather than hearing only the echoes of a provincial class struggle in southern fiction, we should also expect to find a vocabulary of manners and social distinctions differentiating whites from blacks." In fact, Day sees these racial issues to be the primary attraction of O'Connor's writing: "More to the point, O'Connor's fiction has endured . . . largely because her writing is knotted with the grainy details of the Southern catalog of manners that regulates white-black relations" (136-38).
Highsmith, on the other hand, narrowly restricts the meaning of politeness to clichés, however much those clichés might be part of politeness. Highsmith argues that a character's non-intentional use of banality, such as the frequent use of "a good man is hard to find" in the story by the same name, "points to the essence of the story" ( 1 00) . The clichés in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and the frequent elicited speech of the "good country people" in the story by the same name, Highsmith argues, "can become stepping stones for the reader into the world of spiritual concerns" (107). Thus, Highsmith contends, "Language itself can be a key to sacramental vision" (96). For example, the grandmother's failure of voice just before she is murdered marks a breakdown in the clichés she lives by. Highsmith argues that the failure of the clichés leads to the grandmother's "gesture" of reaching out both physically and spiritually to The Misfit, a "gesture" that is "Christ-like . . . demonstrating recognition, kinship, love" (103). Carole K. Harris views the elicited talk between Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman in "Good Country People" differently: "Clichés allow these two women from different class backgrounds to establish an intimate friendship which, due to social decorum, might not otherwise take place, at least not comfortably" (59-60). In general, the critical judgment on the social and personal efficacy of politeness in O'Connor's work is usually ambiguous. For example, politeness is elicited, yet it allows the social classes to interact. However, some critics are unabashedly negative in their judgment of its efficacy. Josephine Hendin argues that the "politeness" of the many mothers in the collection Everything That Rises Must Converge makes their children "impotent" (99). Both Hendin (14) and Martha Stephens (28) comment on the politeness of The Misfit as he both orders and commits the murders of the grandmother's family. Hendin argues that "the silent and remote rage that erupts from" The Misfit's "politeness," the grandmother's "manners," and the murders themselves "suggests that neither Christian charity nor Southern politeness can contain all the darker human impulses" (14-15). Similarly, Timothy P Caron implies that Julian's mother's manners in "Everything That Rises Must Converge" are simply inadequate cover for her "condescending racism." Caron argues that "her gentility, her 'manners,' are her greatest vice . . ." (152). Thus, critical assessment of politeness is, at best, mixed. But this mixed assessment is understandable given the multifaceted interaction of politeness, race, class, the sacramental, and the grotesque.
Once one concentrates specifically on manners, or rather on what sociolinguists and discourse analysts refer to as "politeness," one sees that the effects of race and class on manners in O'Connor's fiction are themselves more complex than we might think looking back to the Civil Rights era through a foreshortening lens. Furthermore, politeness, race, and class are implicated in the two most thoroughly investigated thematic concerns of O'Connor's fiction: the sacramental and the grotesque. And they are implicated in ways that go beyond the equation of the polite with the clichéd or the banal. This paper's exploration of the full manifestation and representation of manners (politeness) in O'Connor's fiction serves to deepen our understanding of the fundamental nature of that fiction, which is an extended narrative questioning of the relationships between the grotesque and the sacramental, especially as the grotesque is manifested in spiritually crippling isolation and the sacramental is manifested in connection - not only between the spiritual and the physical but also between humans themselves. This exploration of grotesque isolation not only treats cliché as a manifestation of insincere politeness - which is crucially not synonymous with politeness itself - but also addresses a wide range of O'Connor's fiction.
O'Connor's sacramental view of fiction, the sacred connection of the spiritual with the physical, is theologically opposed to grotesque isolation. In "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction," O'Connor makes the connection between the grotesque and isolation - what she calls "the freak" and "displacement" - when she writes "it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature" (Mystery and Manners 45). There are certainly physical grotesques of O'Connor's fiction: e.g., the missing limbs of Hulga Hopewell or Tom T. Shiftlet that figure their spiritual lameness. These and other grotesqueries in O'Connor's fiction come to mind when O'Connor writes that "the writer of grotesque fiction" is "looking for one image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete, and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye . . ." (Mystery 42). But what is the spiritual disability of a Hulga Hopewell or a Tom T. Shiftlet except, at least in part, a personal failure to make the sacramental connection between the world and the spirit or the individual and others of God's creatures? O'Connor says the grandmother makes that connection in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" after her entire family has been murdered by The Misfit's gang: "The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the Misfit. Her head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far" (Mystery 111-12). The grandmother's gesture of reaching out to comfort The Misfit as one of her "own children" is a "gesture," O'Connor argues, that is "on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it" (Mystery 111).
The connection between isolation and the absence of charity in O'Connor's fiction has been recognized by a select collection of critics. Paul W. Nisly believes that the isolation that is characteristic of American literature in general is especially foregrounded in O'Connor's characters. Wood argues that O'Connor "understood that, severed from charity, both morals and manners are without foundation" ("Racial Morals and Manners" 1080). Highsmith makes the same general point but specifically argues that "the separation of manners from the mystery which gives them meaning" is signalled metaphorically by cliché (96). On a more positive note, Wood argues elsewhere that manners "enable us to treat others with respect even when we don't like them" ("Flannery O'Connor on Race" 105). Susan Srigley makes explicit the connection between the grotesque and isolation:
To interpret the grotesque simply as a reflection of the worthlessness and ugliness of matter is to miss the moral dimension of O'Connor's understanding of what is grotesque. She saw the grotesque as implicitly revealing an ethical choice, because for her the grotesque is rooted in the desire for absolute human autonomy (represented by Hazel Motes in Wise Blood), for life lived independently of God. (5)
Also see my "Embedded Narration in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction and Letters" for an extended analysis of the manifestation of grotesque isolation in the sometimes disconnected embedded narratives in O'Connor's writing.
The remainder of this paper will argue that in O'Connor's fiction, the irresolvable tensions between "grotesque" autonomy and social communion are played out in stylistically repetitive ways at the levels of narrative irony, narrative representation of body language and body action, and conversational interaction among characters. Thus, my analysis synthesizes several threads of O'Connor criticism: issues surrounding politeness, sacramentalism, the grotesque, irony, class, race, and the body. That these threads may be interwoven in an explanatorily satisfactory way demonstrates the fundamental embodiedness of O'Connor's fictional themes in the mutually intersecting senses of the human body, the form and structure of the language of the text, and the form and structure of social interaction among her characters.
2. "Grotesque" Politeness
It is in Wise Blood, O'Connor's first major work, where her view on the potential grotesqueness of isolation is made most evident through ironic mentions and use of politeness (Brown and Levinson; Watts). That view is that politeness (manners) can be essentially a manifestation of the grotesque, that is, in so far as it is a manifestation of isolation. In their tour through the city zoo, Hazel and Enoch gawk at the polite but isolated animals in their cages: "Two black bears sat in the first one, facing each other like two matrons having tea, their faces polite and self-absorbed" (O'Connor, Collected 53). It becomes clear in Enoch's interaction with animals at the zoo that he spends time there in order to boost his self-esteem, in obsessive behaviors designed to humiliate the animals. When he gets to what he thinks of as the "hyenas," Enoch "leaned closer and spit into the cage, hitting one of the wolves on the leg. It shuttled to the side, giving him a slanted evil look" (O'Connor, Collected 53). The narrator tells us, "Usually he stopped at every cage and made an obscene comment aloud to himself, but today the animals were only a form he had to get through" (O'Connor, Collected 53). In an episode that especially clearly represents his obsessive interaction with the non-human world Enoch is offended by a perceived social infraction from an ape: "At the last of the monkey cages, he stopped as if he couldn't help himself. 'Look at that ape,' he said, glaring. The animal had its back to him, gray except for a small pink seat. 'If I had a ass like that,' he said prudishly, 'I'd sit on it. I wouldn't be exposing it to all these people come to this park'" (O'Connor, Collected 53). The grotesque isolation of perverse manners is particularly evident in the figure and interactions of Enoch. He goes to the city pool for voyeuristic sexual satisfaction, but the narrator tells us that in order to watch the female swimmers and sunbathers, Enoch "crawled into the bushes out of a sense of propriety" (O'Connor, Collected 44-45). Enoch wants to make friends, especially with Hazel, but he is at the bottom of any social hierarchy, so low that he perceives that his competitors are the animals at the zoo, the moose in a picture in his room, and the gorilla advertising the new Gonga movie. Enoch "kept up a constant stream of inner comment, uncomplimentary to the moose, though when he said anything aloud, he was more guarded" (O'Connor, Collected 75). Enoch's ultimate social challenge, however, is the human in the ape costume advertising the new Gonga movie: "To his mind, an opportunity to insult a successful ape came from the hand of Providence" (O'Connor, Collected 100). Although the gorilla's hand is "warm and soft" and although his touch brings forth from Enoch all his unmet human need for social connection, the gorilla tells him to "go to hell" (O'Connor, Collected 100-102). Enoch's isolation and transformation to the bestial is completed when he attempts to turn himself into the popular Gonga only to have his first human contacts run terrified from his friendly advances (O'Connor, Collected 112).
The insults that Enoch both gives and receives in Wise Blood are only one example of the grotesqueness of social isolation in O'Connor. Just as grotesque is insincere polite attention to others. The most insincere characters in O'Connor's fiction - Hoover Shoats of Wise Blood and Meeks, the copper flue salesman of The Violent Bear It Away, and Tom T. Shiftlet of "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" - are all very polite, and persuasive, men. As Highstreet argues, "Moral laxity in O'Connor's characters is represented . . . never so clearly as in the use of religious cliché by essentially non-religious characters" (97). Shoats tells his audience that the most important reason to join his Holy Church of Christ Without Christ is to make sure that the "sweetness" inside them gets out to "win friends and make [them] loved" (O'Connor, Collected 87). Meeks claims that "love [is] the only policy that work[s] 95% of the time" (O'Connor, Collected 362). He asks after his customers' families, especially those in which there is serious illness, until the ill family member dies, and then he is able to remove that person from his list of people about whom to ask (O'Connor, Collected 362). And Tom T. Shiftlet, in his extended but largely ineffectual and unnecessary flattery of Lucyneil Crater's corner of the countryside, tells Crater that "he wished he lived in a desolate place like this where he could see the sun go down every evening like God made it to do" (O'Connor, Collected 175).
Although the previously mentioned clichés that Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Hopewell exchange do provide some connection between them, I do not believe that the two women have what Harris refers to as an "intimate friendship," not least because, as Harris says, they have a "relationship as employer/hired help" (5960). There is very little genuine social grace among O'Connor's characters. That is not to say that there is none. In spite of the many empty clichés that Highstreet criticizes in "Good Country People," it is quite likely that Mrs. Hopewell does have the good manners that one normally associates with the word politeness. However, that doesn't mean that she doesn't suffer the consequences of her own manners. When she invites Manley Pointer to stay for dinner, she "was sorry the instant she heard herself say it" (O' Connor, Collected 27 1 ) . During dinner with Manley, Hulga (Joy) ignores him the best she can: "He had addressed several remarks to her, which she had pretended not to hear. Mrs. Hopewell could not understand deliberate rudeness, although she lived with it, and she felt she had always to overflow with hospitality to make up for Joy's lack of courtesy" (O'Connor, Collected 272). Part of Mrs. Hopewell's courtesy is to encourage guests to talk about themselves. As the narrator says, Mrs. Hopewell "urged [Manley] to talk about himself and he did" (O'Connor, Collected 272). It takes her two hours to get him out the door after dinner, at which time Manley and Mrs. Hopewell exchange further politeness: "he stopped and wrung her hand and said that not on any of his trips had he met a lady as nice as her and he asked if he could come again. She had said she would always be happy to see him" (O'Connor, Collected 21 2). In all of O'Connor's fiction there is probably no better example of both the charity and insincerity of manners than the farewell between the well-meaning but justifiably impatient Mrs. Hopewell and the duplicitous Manley Pointer.
3. Factoring Politeness in O'Connor
An examination of a few of the scenes in O'Connor's fiction in which politeness is foregrounded allows us to tease out the social factors that are especially important in the determination of the use of politeness, whether genuine or not, in O'Connor's fiction. In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," when Red Sammy's wife asks the "cute" June Star if she would like to come live with her, June Star replies, "No I certainly wouldn't .... I wouldn't live in a broken down place like this for a million bucks !" Politeness prevails, at least among the adults: " Ain't she cute?' the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely" (O'Connor, Collected 141). Similarly, in "The Comforts of Home," when Thomas meets "Star Drake" (Sarah Ham) for the first time, he cannot contain his rudeness, at least at first: "he said, 'How do you do, Sarah,' in a tone of such loathing that he was shocked at the sound of it. He reddened, feeling it beneath him to show contempt for any creature so pathetic. He advanced into the room, determined at least on a decent politeness and sat down heavily in a straight chair" (O'Connor, Collected 579). Red Sammy's wife and Thomas use politeness in "decent" attempts to lessen the social strain of difficult interaction with difficult conversational partners. Their attempts are consistent with the concept of maintaining or creating social distance as a primary motivating force behind politeness (Brown and Levinson 74; Leech 1 26; Mey 70) . As social distance increases, up to a point (see Wolfson), communicative politeness increases. As social distance decreases, communicative politeness correspondingly decreases (Brown and Levinson 80; Culpeper 354-55). In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," when the grandmother makes known her recognition of The Misfit and thus dooms her entire family, O'Connor writes, "Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother that shocked even the children" (O'Connor, Collected 147). In "Greenleaf," after Mrs. May reminds her son Wesley that if she hadn't controlled Mr. Greenleaf, her sons, including Wesley, might "be milking cows every morning at four o'clock," Wesley treats his mother to a bit of intimate family manners: "Wesley pulled the paper back toward his plate and staring at her full in the face, he murmured, ? wouldn't milk a cow to save your soul from hell'" (O'Connor, Collected 510; for analysis of social "face" in this passage, see Hardy, The Body 91-92). And, as Wood comments of "Everything That Rises Must Converge," "Julian can 'love' the anonymous Negro whom he does not know, but not the mother whom he does know and who also knows him" ("Flannery O'Connor on Race" 102).
The other variable in O'Connor's fiction that is commonly important in the determination of who is polite to whom and how politeness is communicated is power, variously manifested as economic control or even frequently the ability to inspire fear (Brown and Levinson 77; Leech 126; Watts 213-16). In "A Circle in the Fire," Mrs. Cope realizes the powerless position that she is in with Powell and the other juveniles who invade her farm. In an argument with Powell about whether the boys can spend the night in her barn, she softens her assertion: '"I'm afraid you can't spend the night in there just the same,' she repeated as if she were talking politely to a gangster" (O'Connor, Collected 239). The epistemic "I'm afraid" hedges her assertion and the quasi-simile "as if gives the reader a hint about Mrs. Cope's conciliatory tone. The kind of power that economic domination provides is indicated in Mrs. Cope's earlier tone with Culver, one of the black workers on her farm. When Culver tells her that he didn't go through a gate with a tractor because he would have had to raise the mower blade, the narrator reports on Mrs. Cope's barely suppressed rage and her direct order without the "redress" of politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson 69-70), the latter made socially possible by her power over Culver: "Her eyes, as she opened them, looked as if they would keep on enlarging until they turned her wrongsideout. 'Raise it,' she said and pointed across the road with the trowel" (O'Connor, Collected 233-34).
4. Indirection in Politeness
Indirection is one of the primary strategies for polite conversational interaction when one is in a relatively powerless position or when one is in a conversation with a relative stranger (that is, when there is great social distance between speakers). Such indirection is protective of both the speaker and the hearer (Brown and Levinson 21 1-13; Leech 39-40). What I see as polite indirection is close but not identical to the strategic indirection that Wood sees in the "Tomming" ("an abject acquiescence to the white man") of some of O'Connor's black characters ("Flannery O'Connor on Race" 105-07). Claire Kahane has a similar perspective on the "social mask" of "conciliatory" blacks ( 1 84-86). It is certainly the case that it is the black characters in O'Connor's fiction who have the most elaborate manners and use of indirectness as a politeness strategy, largely because they need them for protection against both the dangers of and the annoyances of interacting with the usually economically more powerful whites. The most brilliantly indirect statement in O'Connor's fiction is provided in "Greenleaf ' by the unnamed "Negro" who is working on the Greenleaf farm when Mrs. May goes to tell the Greenleaf boys to come get their stray bull off her farm. The Greenleafs are away from the farm house. Mrs. May asks the worker a question:
"Can you remember a message?" she said, looking as if she thought this doubtful.
"I'll remember it if I don't forget it," he said with a touch of sullenness.
"Well, I'll write it down then," she said. (O'Connor, Collected 515)
Mrs. May's question, which in itself is offensive in its implication that it is uncertain whether the man can remember a message, is made even more insulting by her doubtful look. The man in turn delivers a stunningly effective tautology (X [remember it] if not not-X [don't forget it]), which like most tautologies can be understood to provide indirect meaning. That indirect meaning arises because tautologies violate what H. Paul Grice calls the "quantity maxim" of conversational interaction, which is specifically to give no more and no less information than is needed for the purposes of a cooperative conversation (309). Tautologies, such as "War is war," "Boys will be boys," and "I'll remember it if I don't forget it," invite the hearer, or reader, to construct extra conversational meaning, what Grice calls "conversational implicatures" (310-11). The sullenness with which the man delivers his tautology makes it unambiguously clear that he is insulted by Mrs. May's question, even if the precise meaning of his tautology is not unambiguous. Mrs. May's response that she will write the message down is an indicator that she most likely doesn't understand the implicature of the man's tautology.
Indirection (generally, Brown and Levinson's "off-record strategy") is a politeness tool of enormous value in situations of social distance or other factors that make a conversational act difficult or dangerous to an individual's "face" (Brown and Levinson 74-78). One of the most socially awkward of settings in O'Connor's fiction - largely because of the class (social) differences represented there - is the physician's waiting room in "Revelation." This is the place where Ruby attempts to interact with the stranger Mary Grace, who is indeed a stranger in spite of Ruby's feeling that Mary Grace "was looking at her as if she had known and disliked her all her life" (O'Connor, Collected 640). Their battle of wills is acted out largely through aggressive staring and verbal indirectness:
[Mary Grace's] eyes were fixed like two drills on Mrs. Turpin. This time there was no mistaking that there was something urgent behind them.
Girl, Mrs. Turpin exclaimed silently, I haven't done a thing to you! The girl might be confusing her with somebody else. There was no need to sit by and let herself be intimidated. "You must be in college," she said boldly, looking directly at the girl. "I see you reading a book there."
The girl continued to stare and pointedly did not answer.
Her mother blushed at this rudeness. "The lady asked you a question, Mary Grace," she said under her breath.
"I have ears," Mary Grace said. (O'Connor, Collected 642-43)
The value of indirection in polite interchange is demonstrated even in this rude interchange. The looks that Ruby and Mary Grace trade are unmistakably direct; however, Ruby's question is not a literal question. Her use of the modal hedge must in "You must be in college" indicates less than absolute knowledge of Mary Grace's matriculation. One way to ask an indirect question is to allude to ignorance of the information required (Gordon and Lakoff 102; referenced by Brown and Levinson 132). It is an indirect question, but nevertheless a question, thus explaining Mary Grace's "rudeness" in not saying anything, as her mother suggests.
5. The "Polite" Body
Because we usually think of politeness in terms of what we say, how we say it, and what we don't say, it is easy to forget that the body both affects and is affected by politeness strategies. That the body is object to the effects of politeness, or the lack of it, is evident immediately above in the reaction of her mother to Mary Grace's deliberate slight of Ruby ("Her mother blushed at this rudeness") (O'Connor, Collected 643) or earlier in Thomas's blushing at recognition of his own rudeness (O'Connor, Collected 579). That the body can both express politeness and hide embarrassment is evident in the reflexive body action of Red Sammy's wife in responding to June Star's rudeness: '"Ain't she cute?' the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely" (O'Connor, Collected 141). In a reminder that touch is perhaps the most obvious way to make human connections, the only physical gesture of social charity in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" occurs when the grandmother shows real concern for The Misfit at the end of the story: "She murmured, 'Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!' She reached out and touched him on the shoulder" (O'Connor, Collected 152). The grandmother is then immediately murdered for her sincere charity.
The importance of the eye in O'Connor's fiction has been widely recognized (Brown; Freeman; Maida; Meyer; Hardy, The Body; Sloan). Most discussions of the eye have concentrated on its symbolic function, whether epistemologically or sexually oriented. It is worth noting that the gaze of the eye can register politeness as well, in the sense of both recognition and protection both for those who are gazed at and those who gaze. A representative example occurs in "The Displaced Person" in the scene in which Astor and Sulk see the Shortleys leaving in early morning after discovering that Mrs. Mclntyre was intending to fire Mr. Shortley: "They looked straight at the car and its occupants but even as the dim yellow headlights lit up their faces, they politely did not seem to see anything, or anyhow, to attach significance to what was there" (O'Connor, Collected 304).
Critics often recognize in O'Connor's fiction the sacramental and incarnational interpénétration of the human and the non-human worlds and the spiritual and the physical (e.g., Srigley; Lake; Hardy, The Body). The pattern is pervasive in O'Connor. In Section 2, 1 detailed this interaction as it occurs in Wise Blood. In "Good Country People," Hulga Hopewell "took care of [her wooden leg] as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away" (O'Connor, Collected 281). In fact, the non-human world is frequently personified in O'Connor, as, for instance, the sun is in The Violent Bear It Away: "The sun was directly overhead, apparently dead still, holding its breath, waiting out the noontime" (O'Connor, Collected 356). One of the subtler connections between politeness and the body is the physical act of glaring. A glare is an accusatory and rude act. In Wise Blood, a man who is defensive over Hazel's preaching glares at no one in particular: " ? wise guy,' the little thin man said, and glared as if someone were about to insult him" (O'Connor, Collected 58). In The Violent Bear It Away, Francis Tarwater, like Enoch Emery, has an antagonistic relationship with the physical world. When he vomits in the lake, "Tarwater said nothing, glaring with his red-lidded wet eyes at the water as if he were glad he had polluted it" (O'Connor, Collected 438). In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Bailey is consistently represented as having a foul demeanor. At Red Sam's, the grandmother "asked Bailey if he would like to dance but he only glared at her" (O'Connor, Collected 14 1 ). And in "Good Country People," Hulga Hopewell is offended by Manley's probing questions about her artificial leg: "She turned an ugly red and glared at him and for an instant the boy looked abashed" (O'Connor, Collected 277). Now if humans can glare at one another and the physical world in O'Connor, the physical world often "glares" back when personified. And that glare is responsible at least in part for the perceived malevolence of O'Connor's world, as Christiane Beck has noted. She writes of the image of the sun as a "ball of glare" in The Violent Bear It Away that it "suggests the explosive sense of outrage which the eye can express" (143). Beck also argues that the "glaring white" of the sky in the beginning of "A Circle in the Fire" communicates "a note of hostility in the very disposition of the landscape . . ." (138). These landscape images and others, Beck contends, "point to the apocalyptic strain" of O'Connor's fiction (136). That strain is pervasive in O'Connor's fiction, extending even to manufactured objects. In Wise Blood, Hazel Motes's "suit was a glaring blue and the price tag was still stapled on the sleeve of it" (O'Connor, Collected 3). Just before Hazel runs over Solace Layfield, the false prophet, Layfield is pictured as "squinting in the glare from Haze's lights" (O'Connor, Collected 1 13). In The Violent Bear It Away, the building in which the Carmodys hold their revival seems to "accuse" Rayber in his self-satisfied atheism: "Two blue and yellow windows glared at him in the darkness like the eyes of some Biblical beast" (O'Connor, Collected 407).
6. Race and Class
In this section I try to integrate observations made in earlier sections about grotesque isolation, social distance, power, indirectness, and the body in an attempt to determine the social value of politeness to both blacks and whites as well as the poor and the middle class characters in O'Connor's fiction. Although it isn't stated in O'Connor's phrase "manners [that] preserve each race from small intrusions upon the other" (Magee 104), those manners are, of course, used across social classes as well. In other words, privacy is important to people, both white and black races, and all classes. In O'Connor's fiction, politeness manifests itself primarily in managing class interactions among whites and racial interactions between blacks and whites. These interactions may have their characteristic tendencies - with whites generally having more power over blacks and whites generally fighting among themselves over social distance - but the race and class divides are far from absolute, and the challenges to those divides in fact give O'Connor's fiction a social complexity that is often neglected in O'Connor criticism (but see Day's analysis).
In spite of this social complexity, there is precious little strategic politeness among blacks in O'Connor's two novels and two short story collections (excluding the odd "Wildcat" of the M. A. thesis). Memorable but isolated examples include Sulk's angry response to Mrs. Shortley's warning in "The Displaced Person" that the displaced people were to take the place of the black worker and Astor's reaction to that angry response: "Big Belly act like she know everything." Astor tells Sulk, "Never mind . . . your place too low for anybody to dispute with you for it" (O' Connor, Collected 297) . Another rare socially strategic interaction occurs in "The Enduring Chill" when Randall tells Morgan to shut up, after Morgan tells Asbury what he takes when he has a cold. Randall "growl [s]," "He don't take what you take" (O'Connor, Collected 570). In both of these cases, black characters chastise other black characters for presuming to intrude on the social space of white characters.
O'Connor's fiction most frequently represents the brooding interior thoughts of her characters on politeness in the relationships of the white landowners to the poor whites who are hired to work on the landowners' farms. In one of her most incisive accounts of the intricacies of class and politeness, O' Connor briefly explores the relationship between Hulga Hopewell (daughter of the landowner) and Mrs. Freeman (wife to the hired farmhand on the Hopewell farm) in "Good Country People." The narrator tells us that Hulga thought that she "could not stand Mrs. Freeman for she had found that it was not possible to be rude to her." Any kind of "direct attack, a positive leer, blatant ugliness to her face - these never touched her" (O'Connor, Collected 266). The point is, of course, that this Ph.D., this educated woman, is beneath Mrs. Freeman's contempt - almost. Mrs. Freeman's assertion of social proximity comes in the form of using Hulga Hopewell's self -invented name, Hulga. When Freeman uses the name, "the big spectacled Joy-Hulga would scowl and redden as if her privacy had been intruded upon" (O'Connor, Collected 266). In "The Displaced Person," the relationship between Mrs. Mclntyre and Mrs. Shortley is telling of the same sensitivity to social distance between landowners and their hired white workers. Rural whites of both middle and working classes generate a great deal of social friction in O'Connor's stories. When Mrs. Shortley indicates that the Guizacs' daughter has been hinting that they might have to move in order to make more money, Mclntyre says of Mr. Guizac, "He's worth raising . . . . He saves me money" (O'Connor, Collected 295). Shortley takes offense on her husband's behalf at the probably unintentional underlying meaning: "This was as much as to say that Chancey had never saved her money" (O'Connor, Collected 295). And when Mclntyre asks whether Mr. Shortley is "feeling better today," the narrator reports, "Mrs. Shortley thought it was about time she was asking that question" (O'Connor, Collected295). Mclntyre is really only interested in whether Chancey is back to work, as she makes clear in saying that if he is "over-exhausted . . . then he must have a second job on the side" (O'Connor, Collected 295). Again, the narrator presents us with Mrs. Shortley's defensive and wounded feelings: "The fact was that Mr. Shortley did have a second job on the side and that, in a free country, this was none of Mrs. Mclntyre's business" (O'Connor, Collected 295). In one conversation in which Mrs. Mclntyre praises Mr. Guizac as her savior, Mrs. Shortley reacts with an attempt at indirect criticism:
"I would suspicion salvation got from the devil," she said in a slow detached way.
"Now what do you mean by that?" Mrs. Mclntyre asked, looking at her sharply.
Mrs. Shortley wagged her head but would not say anything else. The fact was she had nothing else to say for this intuition had only at that instant come to her.
(O'Connor, Collected 294)
The quick reaction that Mrs. Mclntyre shows to her white farm worker's indirect meaning contrasts starkly with Mrs. May's oblivious response to the black farm worker's tautologie violation of the Grician Quantity maxim, demonstrating that racial distance is greater than class separation, or is so at least in O'Connor's "The Displaced Person."
To generalize from Astor's observation about Sulk's place, we can say that rural blacks and whites in O'Connor's fiction are usually too far apart socially for there to be serious social concern about interpersonal meaning. In particular, the power that most whites have over most blacks in O'Connor's fiction maintains the greatest social separation. One of the scenes most revealing of the general lack of sincere social interaction among whites and blacks in O'Connor's fiction is the comically exaggerated response from the black farm workers to Ruby Turpin's report of Mary Grace's attack on her:
There was an astounded silence.
"Where she at?" the youngest woman cried in a piercing voice.
"Lemme see her. I'll kill her!"
"I'll kill her with you!" the other one cried.
"She b'long in the sylum," the old woman said emphatically. "You the sweetest white lady I know."
"She pretty too," the other two said. "Stout as she can be and sweet. Iesus satisfied with her!"
"Deed he is," the old woman declared.
Idiots! Mrs. Turpin growled to herself. (O'Connor, Collected 650)
More than silence itself, the workers' ludicrously exaggerated response demonstrates the gulf that divides white farm owners and black farm workers. Day (141) also notes the "elaborate manners" and "protection" on "the black side of the color line" in this episode. As I have argued elsewhere, the appearance of this passage as a summary coda to Ruby's narrative demonstrates that "redemption is not a social gift" and that "isolation may be a sign of the grotesque in O'Connor, but social connection itself, especially when it is false ... is not a guarantor of redemption" ("Embedded Narration" 148-49).
As I pointed out earlier, the relationship between blacks and whites has understandably attracted a great deal of critical attention. In "The Enduring Chill," the faux-intellectual and faux-liberal Asbury briefly works on his mother's dairy farm in an attempt "to see how they [the black workers] really felt about their condition" because he was "writing a play about the Negro" (O'Connor, Collected 558). The trouble is that he has a very hard time talking with them. Matthew Day focuses attention on this passage: "When they [Morgan and Randall] said anything to him [Asbury], it was as if they were speaking to an invisible body located to the right or left of where he actually was ..." (O ' Connor, Collected 558) . Day comments, "With an economy of expression that the genre of the short story demands, O'Connor reveals a world where black men receive death sentences simply for looking white men in the eyes. She has, to invoke James's formula, discerned the awful legacy of slavery and gothic complexity of southern culture in the pattern of this isolated exchange" (137). It may be the case that O'Connor is evoking the reality and the undeniable and horrifying threat of racial violence in the South. However, there is more going on here, as one sees in examining Day's excerpt in its complete context, including the entire sentence from which it is excerpted: "They didn't talk. . . . When they said anything to him, it was as if they were speaking to an invisible body located to the right or left of where he actually was, and after two days working side by side with them, he felt he had not established rapport" (O'Connor, Collected 558). Morgan and Randall are avoiding eye contact with Asbury in part, in O'Connor's words, not only for their "own protection" but also for their "own privacy," as is clear in further interactions with Asbury. When Asbury defiantly lights a cigarette in his mother's dairy, Randall certainly has no difficulty looking at Asbury, "The Negro had stopped what he was doing and watched him. He waited until Asbury had taken two draws and then he said, 'she don't 'low no smoking in here'" (O'Connor, Collected 558). Then, two days later, Asbury makes the fateful, ill-considered move of offering unpasteurized milk to Randall and Morgan, another defiant act for which Morgan has no problem staring directly at him and then challenging him: "Morgan stared at him; then his face took on a decided look of cunning. ? ain't seen you drink none of it yourself,' he said" (O'Connor, Collected 559).
Thus, both Randall and Morgan invoke Asbury's mother's power in their defiance, going so far as to watch and stare at Asbury. The physical act of looking is for O'Connor an act of power, as is evident in the following exchange in "The Displaced Person" between Mrs. Mclntryre and Astor, the oldest black worker on the Mclntyre farm. He has been on the farm even longer than Mrs. Mclntyre, having known and worked for "the Judge," Mrs. Mclntyre's late husband. Astor "thought this gave him title" (O'Connor, Collected 308). Astor, who clearly knows of Mr. Guizac's plan to marry his cousin off to Sulk, either can't or won't bring himself to tell Mrs. Mclntyre of the plan:
"We seen them come and we seen them go," he said as if this were a refrain. "But we ain't never had one before," he said, bending himself up until he faced her, "like what we got now." He was cinnamon-colored with eyes that were so blurred with age that they seemed to be hung behind cobwebs.
She gave him an intense stare and held it until, lowering his hands on the hoe, he bent down again and dragged a pile of shavings alongside the wheelbarrow.
(O'Connor, Collected 306)
Astor acquiesces to Mrs. Mclntyre's power here, but this is no more than is typically to be expected with employers and employees. After several indirect hints from Astor that Mr. Guizac is up to something strange because in Poland "[t]hey got different ways of doing," Mrs. Mclntyre commands him to be direct: "What are you saying?" (O'Connor, Collected 307).
It is power, not race (however much race may correlate with power), that determines whether one can dominate the other through a look, as is demonstrated in "Everything That Rises Must Converge." There, as Shackelford points out, the businessman whom Julian attempts to befriend in his patronizing way, "is characterized less stereotypically than the Blacks in many of O'Connor's stories . . ." (83). Part of that less stereotypical characterization is the power that the man exhibits in expressing annoyance with Julian's silly and pointless request for matches. Julian doesn't have any cigarettes and smoking is prohibited on the bus: "The Negro lowered the paper and gave him an annoyed look. He took the matches and raised the paper again" (O'Connor, Collected 493). Another black character who refuses to tolerate the insults of immature whites is the maid in "The Lame Shall Enter First": '"Well look at Aunt Jemima,' he [Rufus] said. The girl paused and trained an insolent gaze on them. They might have been dust on the floor" (O'Connor, Collected 605). And it is not the case that the power of looking is limited to signifying relations between blacks and whites. Focalizing through Mrs. May in "Greenleaf," the narrator tells us that Mr. Greenleaf "walked on the perimeter of some invisible circle and if you wanted to look him in the face, you had to move and get in front of him" (O'Connor, Collected 502-03; see Hardy, The Body 91-92, on the word "face").
A later conversation between Mrs. May and the young black worker on the Greenleaf farm reveals just how isolated and protective both sides of the race/power divide are in O'Connor's fiction. Mrs. May asks the man which of the Greenleaf brothers is "boss":
"They never quarls," the boy said. "They like one man in two skins."
"Hmp. I expect you just never heard them quarrel."
"Nor nobody else heard them neither," he said, looking away as if this insolence were addressed to some one else.
"Well," she said, "I haven't put up with their father for fifteen years not to know a few things about Greenleafs."
The Negro looked at her suddenly with a gleam of recognition. "Is you my policy man's mother?" he asked.
"I don't know who your policy man is," she said sharply.
(O'Connor, Collected 516)
When the black worker tells Mrs. May that no one has heard the Greenleaf boys quarrel, his looking away signals that he recognizes that his assertion is a direct contradiction of Mrs. May's indirect implication that the boys do indeed fight. Thus, as is common with O'Connor's black workers, the man here signals deference and acknowledges differential power in looking away from Mrs. May. But there are two kinds of looking, one that indicates power and one that indicates solidarity. Note that when he realizes that Mrs. May is probably his "policy man's mother" he looks at Mrs. May "with a gleam of recognition" (O'Connor, Collected 516). This recognition and looking, and the bid for solidarity they imply, are repugnant to Mrs. May for many reasons, including that, as the story has demonstrated earlier, she is ashamed of Scofield's being a "policy man" to the local blacks (O'Connor, Collected 504). Thus, O'Connor's blacks frequently protect themselves from the intrusion of white power, while the whites protect themselves from the social intrusion of the blacks.
7. Conclusions
O'Connor's fictional use of politeness represents not only the complex issues involving white-black and class relations but also the profound failure of manners and politeness to create human connections in both rural and urban settings. Ultimately, there simply is no safe social place in O'Connor's fiction, at least in part because society is not where O'Connor saw or sought salvation in the first place. As Shackelford writes of O'Connor's fiction, "Without [spiritual] salvation, social values are meaningless" (89) . Ruby Turpin still imagines distinct classes and races of people on the stairway to heaven.
O'Connor's fictional world is one in which most people are isolated both emotionally and spiritually. However, that alienation is different for blacks and whites and it is different for individuals within either races. Power and social distance, as many theorists of politeness have argued, seem to be primary variables that determine politeness strategies. The blacks in O'Connor's fiction are, unfortunately, constrained by differences in power, and the attempts on the part of whites to bridge that power gap - as in Asbury's case - simply reiterate that power differential. The powerful whites are preoccupied with keeping their social distance from both blacks and poorer whites. Ultimately, most politeness in O'Connor is grotesque in that it usually leads to the reinforcement of the debilitating isolation that most of her characters ironically share. The clichés of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People" that Highsmith rightfully condemns as empty (as well as those of Hoover Shoats, Meeks, and Tom T. Shiftlet and others) demonstrate the failure of language in its communal function (Highstreet 99). Enoch's attempts to place himself above the beasts he feels superior to only reinforce that he belongs among the beasts. Mrs. Hopewell's polite attempts to compensate for Hulga's rudeness lead to regret at her own graciousness. Thomas places himself on the rack in order to live up to his own ideals of politeness in his interactions with the sociopath Star Drake. Asbury fails miserably in his attempt to connect with the black workers on his mother's farm. Julian makes a fool of himself trying to befriend the black man on the bus. Wesley brutalizes his mother for her kindness. O'Connor's characters glare at a world that seems to glare back. In the harsh light of such a brutal world, formality indeed gives everyone a measure of protection. However, that protection comes at the cost of an isolation that is at once grotesque but also strangely comforting in a fictional world severely deficient in genuine Christian charity.
This article has made the argument that a stylistic analysis of politeness in O'Connor's fiction reinforces a number of important themes in that fiction, especially the relationship between isolation and the grotesque and sacramentalism and spiritual connection. The article has intentionally not attempted an exhaustive close reading of any one particular O'Connor story. Rather, it has shown, as is the goal of a great deal of stylistic work, that a particular stylistic trait (here, the exploration of social politeness) is pervasive in and integral to an author's work as a whole.
[SIDEBAR]
Rather than simply demonstrate the by now commonplace applicability of linguistic models of politeness to literary texts in general, this paper identifies the persistent tendencies of O'Connor's texts in their representation of social interaction in terms of the grotesque and the sacramental, O'Connor's central themes. The analysis is ambitious in two ways. First it determines O'Connor's typical strategies of representing politeness. Second, it expands the range of literary politeness studies to thematics of the body in general as well as O'Connor's particular concerns with the body in relation to the grotesque and sacramentalism.
[FOOTNOTE]
Notes
1 Walter Spitz uses Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies in an analysis of the conversational interaction of the grandmother and The Misfit in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," in part as an examination of The Misfit's use of negative politeness to maintain socially isolated "distance from his interlocutor" (16). Spitz's unpublished essay is an example of the relatively early use of Brown and Levinson's politeness model to catalogue and analyze strategies of politeness interaction in a single fictional work, as is my "Strategic Politeness in Hemingway's 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.'" Although my "Politeness in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction" is broadly consistent with Spitz's essay, my arguments were developed independently.
[REFERENCE]
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Sloan, LaRue Love. "The Rhetoric of the Seer: Eye Imagery in Flannery O'Connor's 'Revelation.'" Studies in Short Fiction 25.2 (1988): 135-45. Print.
Spitz, Walter. "The Exploitation of Politeness Strategies in A Good Man Is Hard to Find.'" Unpublished essay, 1995. Print.
Srigley, Susan. Flannery O'Connor's Sacramental Art. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2004. Print.
Stephens, Martha. The Question of Flannery O'Connor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1973. Print.
Tedford, Barbara Wilkie. "Flannery O'Connor and the Social Classes." Southern Literary Journal 13.2 (1981): 27-40. Print.
Watts, Richard J. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.
Wolfson, Nessa. "The Bulge: A Theory of Speech Behavior and Social Distance." Second Language Discourse: A Textbook of Current Research. Ed. Jonathan Fine. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1988. 21-38. Print.
Wood, Ralph C. Flannery O 'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004. Print.
_____ . "Flannery O'Connor's Racial Morals and Manners." Christian Century 111.33(1994): 1076-81. Print.
_____. "Where Is the Voice Coming From? Flannery O'Connor on Race." The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 22 (1993-94): 90-118. Print.
Zaidman, Laura, Margaret Whitt, and Jane Vogel. "A Teachers' Forum: O'Connor and the Issue of Race." Flannery O'Connor Review 1 (2001-2002): 99-102. Print.
Flannery O'Connor's Religious Vision
George H Niederauer, America(New York) , Dec 24-Dec 31, 2007, Vol. 197, Iss. 21, pg. 9
Full Text:
(Copyright America Press Dec 24-Dec 31, 2007)
FLANNERY O'CONNOR DIED during the Second Vatican Council, while the bishops were writing anew what she had always known: that the church is the body of Christ, the people of God; that laypeople are its flesh and blood; and that the clergy and religious orders are its servant-leaders. While O'Connor was a supreme artist in fiction, she was also a particularly valuable witness to the Catholic Church and its leaders in this country, especially as she appears in her collected letters, The Habit of Being, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979). Hers is the testimony of a watchful, honest, faith-filled and eloquent layperson; and she had much to say about the experience of living the faith within the Catholic Church, especially in a society and a culture that had marginalized genuine Christian faith and practice.
Our present age has been described as one in which people place a high value on spirituality and a low value on religion, especially organized religion. Of particular interest, then, is O'Connor's thinking about the experience of church, of the assembly of believers. She valued the church highly and observed it acutely, warts and all. If the church made life endurable, it also provided much that had to be endured. "You have to suffer as much from the church as for it," she once wrote. "The only thing that makes the church endurable is that somehow it is the body of Christ, and on this we are fed." She went on to explain why we suffer from the church: "The operation of the church is entirely set up for the sake of the sinner, which creates much misunderstanding among the smug." God is as patient with the entire church as he is with each lost sheep, and many of us Catholics have very little patience with either.
The church is made up of imperfect pilgrims on a long, difficult journey, and O'Connor described them well: "The Catholic Church is composed of those who accept what she teaches, whether they are good or bad, and there is constant struggle through the help of the sacraments to be good." In "Choruses from the 'Rock,'" T. S. Eliot says that modern people do not like the church because "she is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft." (Think of issues like abortion, euthanasia, welfare reform, capital punishment and more.) O'Connor might have appreciated Eliot's remark.
The Human Element
Within the visible church, the Holy Spirit is constantly acting in the lives of its members, individually and collectively. Thus, the church cannot be accurately judged or evaluated by what her critics observe externally. O'Connor pointed this out to one of her friends:
You judge [the church] strictly by its human element, by unimaginative and half-dead Catholics who would be startled to know the nature of what they defend by formula. The miracle is that the Church's dogma is kept pure both by and from such people. Nature is not prodigal of genius and the church makes do with what nature gives her. At the age of 11, you encounter some old priest who calls you a heretic for inquiring about evolution; at about the same time Père Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., is in China discovering Peking man.
The "human element" in the church was a frequent target of O'Connor's wit, as when she proposed this motto for the Catholic press of her day: "We guarantee to corrupt nothing but your taste." More seriously, she quoted St. Augustine's advice to the "wheat" in the church not to leave the threshing floor of life before the harvest is complete, just because there is so much of that disgusting chaff around! In this connection, she slyly suggested what the difficulty may be for more sensitive Catholics (referring to one young woman in particular): "She probably sees more stupidity and vulgarity than she does sin and these are harder to put up with than sin, harder on the nerves."
Meanwhile, the world goes on judging the church in utilitarian fashion, using the same standard it would apply to the Rotary or the Kiwanis. O'Connor challenged this approach, writing that "any Catholic or Protestant is defenseless before those who judge his religion by how well its members live up to it or are able to explain it." The surface is easy to judge, she was saying, but not the interior operations of the Holy Spirit. She illustrated this principle with a touching reference to the vocation of Catholic priests, whom she often found to be overworked and unimaginative:
It is easy for any child to find out the faults in the sermon on his way home from church every Sunday. It is impossible to find out the hidden love that makes a man, in spite of his intellectual limitations, his neuroticism, his lack of strength, give up his life to the service of God's people, however bumblingly he may go about it.
While O'Connor defended her church against superficial and unfair judgments, she was neither a whitewasher nor a fatalist, and she was an implacable foe of complacency. She believed that the church must struggle toward greater virtue as surely as each of its members. She wrote quite forcefully in this regard: "It's our business to change the external faults of the church-the vulgarity, the lack of scholarship, the lack of intellectual honesty-wherever we find them and however we can."
Raws in the Church
Here are three examples of faults in the church that O'Connor criticized and wished to see corrected. I think they are in order of increasing severity.
First, she condemned smugness as the great Catholic sin. Now, 45 years later, perhaps something else would head her list; but smugness would probably still be listed. Referring to the German priest and author Romano Guardini, she wrote about smugness: "I find it in myself and I don't dislike it any less. One reason Guardini is a relief to read is that he has nothing of it. With a few exceptions the American clergy, when it takes to the pen, brings this particular sin with it in full force." About 20 years ago a bumper sticker appeared that read: "If you feel God is far away, guess who moved?" If O'Connor had lived to see one of those signs on a Georgia road, I like to think that she would have skewered the sentiment as very smug, even as she chuckled at the rampant vulgarity of bumper-sticker theology.
Related to smugness is glibness, which she described as "the great danger in answering people's questions about religion." Again, a sense of mystery will give the Christian apologist a sense of humility: if I am convinced that I have the truth about God, I am much more likely to be obnoxious about it than if I am convinced that God's truth has me.
O'Connor expressed impatience with the kind of Catholicism-and Catholic fiction-that kept everything nice, shallow, cute and safe. She described what she called "A nice vapid-Catholic distrust of finding God in action of any range and depth. This is not the kind of Catholicism that has saved me so many years in learning to write, but then this is not Catholicism at all." Genuine Catholicism, she felt, must be as radical and demanding as its founder's teaching.
Still another Catholic fault O'Connor described is, I believe, an evergreen reality in the church: a Jansenistic disdain for human weakness and struggle and distrust of questions, speculations and discussions of any depth. Of the pseudo-faith of such persons she said:
I know what you mean about being repulsed by the church when you have only the MechanicalJansenist Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don't really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man's insurance system. It's never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.
In considering such people's self-righteous judgments of others, she made an acute observation: "Conviction without experience makes for harshness." By contrast, Christians who have struggled with their demons are better equipped to show compassion toward others.
Religion Into Therapy
O'Connor had a deep distaste and contempt for modern, sanitized, "empty" religion. Because she embraced an imaginative vision of religion as the mystery of God's saving action intersecting with all that is earthly, O'Connor remarked to one correspondent: "All around you today you will find people accepting 'religion' that has been rid of its religious elements." Elsewhere she described this development in more detail:
One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.
The issue of religion bled dry of its content is featured in what is probably the most famous story told about O'Connor. As a very young and unknown writer, she was visiting New York and was taken to a party at the home of Mary McCarthy, ex-Catholic and ex-believer, a sophisticated and accomplished novelist, essayist and critic. What follows is O'Connor's description of the encounter:
We went at eight and at one, I hadn't opened my mouth once, there being nothing in such company for me to say.... Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward the morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most "portable" person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." That was all the defense I was capable of.
In The Life You Save May Be Your Own (2003), Paul Elie writes of this exchange, "The closing remark is the most famous of all O'Connor's remarks, an economical swipe at the reductive, liberalizing view of religion."
O'Connor even locates one important moment in the development of this religious trend in this country. With some amusement she recalls a talk she gave at a college: "I told them that when Emerson decided in 1832 that he could no longer celebrate the Lord's Supper unless the bread and wine were removed, that an important step in the vaporization of religion in America had taken place."
'Jesus, Jesus, Jesus'
For some readers one of the most surprising, even jarring, features of O'Connor's fiction is its consistently comic character, even as the stories and novels pursue such serious themes of faith and grace. Elie describes an experience the author had when visiting the Cloisters, a museum of medieval art in Fort Tryon Park in New York City: "She was 'greatly taken' with a wooden statue on display in one of the chapels. 'It was the Virgin holding the Christ child and both were laughing; not smiling, laughing.'" He concludes: "It was a piece to emulate as well as admire; like her own work, it was religious and comic at the same time."
The betrayal of religion is downright diabolical in O'Connor's view, and so it is portrayed in her fiction. For her, the crucial choice facing each of us is between the "lost" life with Christ and the worldly "saved" life without him. Thus, the most fiendish of temptations is to offer a saved, worldly life, but to offer it under the guise of being generically "Christian," though with no Christ content whatsoever.
In this connection Elie describes a type of character that appears over and over again in O'Connor's stories: "the middle-aged busybody who knows exactly what she thinks, who sees all and understands nothing." One example is the character of Mrs. May in the story "Greenleaf." At one point Mrs. May comes upon Mrs. Greenleaf in the woods, murmuring over and over again, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus." O'Connor wrote: "Mrs. May winced. She drought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building, like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, diough she did not, of course, believe any of it was true."
O'Connor had much to say about living together as church in the midst of modern culture, but finally we should turn to one simple statement she made about herself: "I write because I write well." Nearly 45 years after her deadi, believers and unbelievers alike agree with her more than ever. She wrote well. But there is so much more than that to be said of her. One point will suffice here: How wonderfully different Flannery O'Connor was from Mrs. May. She thought that the name of Jesus, the reality of Jesus, belonged everywhere, indeed was everywhere. Regarding the Christian faith, Flannery O'Connor was the polar opposite of Mrs. May, because she, of course, believed all of it was true.
[SIDEBAR]
A self-portrait of Flannery O'Connor with a letter she wrote in 1955.
[SIDEBAR]
The betrayal of religion is downright diabolical in O'Connor's view. The crucial choice is between the lost' life with Christ and the worldly 'saved' life without him.
[SIDEBAR]
From the archives: Flannery O'Connor on "The Church and the Fiction Writer," at americamagazine.org.
[AUTHOR_AFFILIATION]
MOST REV. GEORGE H. NIEDERAUER is the archbishop of San Francisco. This article is an adapted excerpt from his Lane Center Lecture, delivered Sept. 28, 2007, at the University of San Francisco.
Grace and the Grotesque
Allen, Charlotte
The Wilson Quarterly
01-01-2005
Grace and the Grotesque
Byline: Allen, Charlotte
Volume: 29
Number: 1
ISSN: 03633276
Publication Date: 01-01-2005
Page: 114
Section: Current Books
Type: Periodical
Language: English
Grace and the Grotesque
FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S SACRAMENTAL ART. By Susan Srigley. Notre Dame Univ. Press. 208 pp. $42 (hardcover), $20 (paper)
FLANNERY O'CONNOR AND THE CHRIST-HAUNTED SOUTH. By Ralph C. Wood. Eerdmans. 272 pp. $22
Flannery O'Connor (1925-64) is now recognized as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, perhaps second in stature only to fellow southerner William Faulkner. This despite the fact that, because she died at age 39 of hereditary lupus, her literary output was small: just two novels and 32 short stories, nearly all set in or near her native Georgia, and nearly all bearing her signature qualities of extreme physical and emotional violence, mordant wit, and fascination with the "Christ-haunted" (her words) consciousness of the Protestant fundamentalist South.
The characters in O'Connor's fiction typically flail in semicomic, semitragic misery as they strive to break free from their religious pasts and remake the world in their own images, but find themselves pinned like butterflies by a God who will not leave them alone. In her novel Wise Blood (1952), the anti-Christian protagonist Hazel Motes winds up blinding himself with lye and dying in a ditch; in her short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," a prison escapee called the Misfit shoots an entire family to death; in another story, "Good Country People," the smug intellectual Hulga has her wooden leg stolen by a traveling Bible salesman. Not a single one of those novels or stories seems dated some 40 years after the author's death.
IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH
Flannery O'Connor stands in front of a self-portrait at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia.
O'Connor herself was a Roman Catholic, and not just any sort of Catholic, but a daily Mass-goer when her health permitted and a ferocious defender to friends and correspondents of every last embarrassing Catholic teaching, from the Real Presence to the ban on birth control. At the same time, she despised the smarmy "Pious Style," as she called it, of conventional midcentnry Catholic writing, and, like her fellow anti-sentimentalist Evelyn Waugh, she chose mostly not to write about Catholics.
For these reasons, as both Susan Srigley and Ralph C. Wood point out in these additions to a burgeoning corpus of O'Connor criticism, Flannery O'Connor has been systematically misinterpreted by critics. When O'Connor's work began appearing in the 1950s, she was pigeonholed as "Southern Gothic" in the tradition of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. A little later, she got lumped with John Hawkes, Terry Southern, and the rest of the nihilistic black humor crowd of the 1960s: She was the Diane Arbus of literature.
Many of today's critics, led by Frederick Asals, the author of Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity (1982), attempt to sever O'Connor the writer from O'Connor the Catholic, putting her literary and religious aims utterly at odds with each other. Mary Gordon, the dissident Catholic novelist, considers O'Connor's sensibility cruelly Jansenistic. It views humans as essentially lacking free will and condemns most of them, à la Hazel Motes, to unredeemed death. Others have characterized O'Connor, who never married and seldom wrote about carnal matters, as sexually immature (and hence limited as a writer), or as a premature feminist who, as one critic put it, seethed with "repressed rage," or as a lesbian. On the other side, many Christian critics have offered simplistically allegorical readings of O'Connor, interpreting "Good Country People," for example, as a satirical critique of the Protestant principle of sola scriptura, the notion that "Scripture alone" is the source of God's revelation.
Srigley and Wood try to correct this state of affairs through sophisticated reconciliations of O'Connor's artistry and her Catholic religious intentions, with varying degrees of success. Wood, a longtime professor of theology and literature at Baylor University, is the more eloquent and interesting of the two, but also the more disappointing. He frankly admits that he is offering not a "close literary examination of O'Connor's individual stories and novels," but rather a study of her work "as it bears on the life of the contemporary church and one of its regional cultures," the South. Many of his readings of O'Connor's work strike me as spot-on, as when he observes that the Grandmother, a casually racist, self-satisfied chatterbox who is the last family member shot in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," is no mere Southern grotesque, but redeems herself just before her death when she cries out to the Misfit in a sudden gesture of Aclamic solidarity, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children." Elsewhere, however, Wood's book tends to turn into a florilegium of generalized observations about southern culture, American religion, and the emptiness of modern secular life, with long quotations from Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, Pope John Paul II, and others only tangentially connected to Flannery O'Connor.
Srigley's book, a revision of her doctoral dissertation (she teaches at Nipissing University in Ontario), is more focused, but could use some of the larger context that Wood serves up in overabundance. She aims to counter the theory of Asals and others that O'Connor's religion was irrelevant to her art, as well as the view of critics such as Gordon that the comic cruelty in O'Connor's fiction suggests that she was a quasiManichaean dualist who regarded the physical world and the spiritual world of God's grace as radically separate.
O'Connor was a devoted reader of the 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, whom she had encountered in the writings of Jacques Maritain, a famous mid-20th-centnry French neo-Thomist. Maritain's book Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers of Poetry, translated into English in 1962, interpreted Aqninas's theories about nature and grace to devise an aesthetic philosophy holding that when an artist creates something from the materials of the natural world, the creation, even if uninspiring, is good and partakes of God's grace. Art is thus "incarnational," imitating God's becoming part of the natural world through Christ, and also "sacramental," using the materials of the natural world to invoke God's grace. Supporting her claims with many detailed citations from Aquinas's Summa Theologien, Srigley makes a case that O'Connor intended to represent human nature as ever open to salvation - unless we willfully blind ourselves with self-regard, like Hazel Motes.
This is an interesting argument, although Srigley does not, perhaps cannot, offer any evidence that O'Connor, for all her devotion to Aquinas, actually read many of the specific passages in the mon- 1 umental Summa that Srigley cites. O'Connor's voluminous correspondence does not make it clear that Aquinas himself, rather than Maritain's interpretation of Aquinas, inspired her aesthetic. Still, Srigley's book, as well as Wood's, puts to rest any notion that Flannery O'Connor can be regarded as just another of the 20th century's secular specialists in the grotesque. Anyone seriously interested in her well-deserved place in America's literary pantheon should take a look at both books.
AUTHOR_AFFILIATION
CHARLOTTE ALLEN is the author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus (1998), and coedits the InkWell weblog for the Independent Women's Forum.
Copyright Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Winter 2005
Southern misfit
Rosean, Ted
U.S. Catholic
10-01-2010
Flannery O'Connor's tales may be unusual, but it's precisely their dark, strange nature that points to God's grace.
YEARS AGO, THE FINE THEOLOgian John Shea, teaching a course on redemption, introduced me to Flannery O'Connor's fiction. I found her stories violent, shocking, funny, and awfully readable- but they left me, as a young student without a great deal of real life experience, confused about what exactly the stories had to do with redemption.
These were dark dramas with ugly characters and gloomy endings. There was a lot more Good Friday to these tales than Easter Sunday. For me, a story about redemption ought to have a happy ending. It should not so much be about an escaped con who murders an entire family out on a country drive, or about a traveling Bible salesman who steals a young woman's wooden leg.
What's so Christian about this? Before redemption there is sin, Shea explained. You can't get to Easter Sunday without going through Good Friday. He quoted O'Connor: "Evil is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be endured." She has been in my blood since.
ACRADLE CATHOLIC, FLANNERY O'CONNOR DWELLED in the depths of the Protestant South for most of her life, living with her mother on her family's dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. There she wrote her most memorable stories and raised peacocks because the "king of the birds" fascinated her.
She attended Mass daily at Sacred Heart Church in town and traveled to universities to lecture as her fame grew. Her mobility was limited when she was diagnosed with lupus in 1950 at age 25. It was the same disease that killed her father a month before her 16th birthday.
The affliction hardly limited her writing and provided no basis for self-pity. An extensive collection of published personal letters she wrote to friends and literary correspondents reveals what she really cared about- her work- and minimizes her disease with a comical, self-effacing manner.
Working furiously from her deathbed, she completed Everything That Rises Must Converge, a collection of short stories many critics consider her finest work. "I have drug another out of myself and I enclose it," she wrote a friend on July 15, 1964. Just two weeks later, at 39, Flannery O'Connor died.
Her interest in chickens, and later peafowl, revealed something about the characters she created. "I favored those with one green eye and one orange or with over-long necks and crooked combs. I wanted one with three legs or three wings." She had an eye for the freak, the monstrous, the twisted - not altogether different from the type of company our Lord kept.
The rural Southern Bible Belt provided a fertile crop of these studies, whom she exaggerated to make her tales come alive. "While the South is hardly Christcentered," she wrote, "it is most certainly Christ-haunted."
The embellishment of her characters did not render them unrealistic, but rather genuine and authentic. Her stories are concrete - über-real. There is an Old Testament flavor to this fiction, and indeed, she remarked, "The ancient Hebrew genius for making the Absolute concrete has conditioned the Southerner's way of looking at things."
Unashamedly Catholic, O'Connor found the messy circumstances of human life not void of God's presence, but the very place where grace often enters. Her work suggests there is more at risk when we turn our heads away from the world, preferring to store our view of God piously elsewhere: "It is where the individual's faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life, and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the sense of the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost."
O'Connor did not compartmentalize or sentimentalize or dress up the supernatural in pretty white lace. Her keen and reportedly beautiful blue eyes observed it in the darkest corners of human affairs.
THIRTY YEARS OF LIFE EXPERIENCE have brought O'Connors stories into better focus. That grace might find its way into life's untidy corners is a comfort to me - a broker whose clients have endured two market crashes in the past 10 years; a father whose best efforts with his wife and seven children often fail; a partisan American who too often labels one side completely right and the other wrong.
O'Connor s gospel gaze would, I expect, see through all of this folly, finding sin just about everywhere and God's grace not far behind. A portrait of the great writer hangs in my office, looking down on me through those penetrating blue eyes, hopefully spying a trace of grace.
SIDEBAR
The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look.
-Flannery O'Connor
SIDEBAR
She had an eye for the freak, the monstrous, the twisted - not altogether different from the type of company our Lord kept.
SIDEBAR
SELECTED RESOURCES:
Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works edited by Sally Fitzgerald (Library of America, 1988)
The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003)
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor by Brad Gooch (Little, Brown & Company, 2009)
Andalusia Farm (tours of O'Connor's home and town): andalusiafarm.org
AUTHOR_AFFILIATION
By Ted Rosean, a securities broker from St. Francis Xavier Parish in Wilmette, Illinois.Southern misfit
Byline: Rosean, Ted
Volume: 75
Number: 10
ISSN: 00417548
Publication Date: 10-01-2010
Page: 47
Section: wise guides
Type: Periodical
Language: English
The Theology of Flannery O’Connor:
Biblical Recapitulations in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor
scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd.../ThesisFinalDraftJC.pdf.pdf
Grace Versus the Glamour of Evil in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”
STEPHEN SPARROW
During an interview granted to Jubilee Magazine, Flannery O'Connor was reminded of something she had once written to the effect that the creative action of the Christian's life is to prepare his death in Christ. The interviewer then asked how this related to her work as a writer? O'Connor replied, "I'm a born Catholic and death has always been brother to my imagination. I can't imagine a story that doesn't properly end in it or in its foreshadowings."
I can't imagine a story that doesn't properly end in it or in its foreshadowings."1 Flannery O'Connor was faithful to her own dictum and out of her two published collections of short stories twelve of the twenty end in death, and, of her two novels one begins with death and the other ends in it, and each also features a murder. Untimely death, or its foreshadowing, is the eschatological theme underlying most of O'Connor's fiction, which, for the Christian, means that the last four things are; death, judgement, heaven and hell.
In her acclaimed short story "A Good Man Is Hard To Find", O'Connor makes spectacular use of violent death to highlight this theme. The story is about a vacationing family murdered by a trio of psychopaths, and right from the beginning it is filled with portents of doom. First, we witness the manipulative grandmother lecturing her apathetic son on the dangers of heading in the same direction (Florida) as this "Misfit...aloose from the Federal Pen." She tries unsuccessfully to gain his attention by saying, "'Now look here, Bailey, see here, read this,' and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head." The grandmother has another destination in mind. She would like them all to visit East Tennessee, which the children have never visited, rather than Florida where they have previously vacationed. For their part, the children bicker openly with their grandmother and disparage her to each other, while their father ignores them all, being absorbed by the daily newspaper's sport section. Meantime, his homely looking wife just sits on the sofa saying nothing as she spoon feeds the baby. The decision to head for Florida stands, and next morning the family get in the car and commence their journey. As they leave Atlanta and drive into the countryside, O'Connor tells us, "the trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled." The trees stand impassively but even the meanest — the worst — of them sparkle, symbolising the wilderness of good and evil the family is about to enter; a very Dantesque2 image. But, it's not just the trees that sparkle; so too do the people the family encounter. Even in the Misfit — leader of the killers — an infinitesimal spark of goodness shows fleetingly right at the end of the story, and this comparison with "mean" trees that sparkle illustrates the uniquely sacramental view of life O'Connor portrays through her fiction.
To get quickly to the crux of the story, we'll only skim through the remaining portents of doom. O'Connor tells us that in the car the grandmother is dressed meticulously so that "anybody seeing her dead on the highway would know that she was a lady." The family is not long on the journey when they pass a cotton field with five or six graves in it. "The family burying ground...that belonged to the plantation," the Grandmother announces, and the children ask what happened to the plantation. "Gone with the wind," the old lady tells them. They stop for a break at Red Sammy Butt's barbecue stand and learn in passing how several days earlier, Butt's was ripped off by three men who filled their car with gas and took off without paying. A short time later we find ourselves with the family traveling along a winding dirt road in search of an old mansion remembered by the Grandmother. The children, in an unruly display, have forced Bailey, against his better judgment, to seek out the place. The last thing Bailey wants is a detour on a dirt road and so before agreeing to search for the mansion, he warns his passengers, "this is the one and only time...we're going to stop." Prophetic words indeed. A short time later the Grandmother's cat panics and springs from its basket in the back, distracting the driver, and the car crashes off the road landing right side up in a ditch. The family emerge from the partly wrecked vehicle and count the cost. The only real injury is the mother's broken arm.
The crash has been witnessed by the Misfit and within a short time he and his two sidekicks arrive on the scene. The Grandmother makes the mistake of admitting that she recognises the Misfit and he in turn orders his sidekicks to take the mother, father and children into the woods and execute them. Left alone with the Misfit the Grandmother attempts to talk him out of killing her. She prattles on about prayer and Jesus and attempts to bribe him with all the money she's got, causing the Misfit to respond, "there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip." And on the subject of Jesus he continues, "Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead and He shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness." However, the Grandmother can't stop prattling on until quite suddenly her head clears and she realises that both she and the Misfit are connected. They are both children of God. "Why, you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children," she says and reaches out and touches him on the shoulder, and the Misfit retaliates by jumping up and shooting her. She had unwittingly told him the one thing he didn't want to hear and paid for it with her life. She had touched a raw nerve and reminded the Misfit of his kinship and, by inference, his duty to all other human beings. Immediately afterward when one of his sidekicks talks about the fun they just had, the Misfit, realising the pointlessness of their actions, tells him to shut up and says, "It's no real pleasure in life." For the Misfit, it is the first stage on the journey of repentance. Writing about this encounter later, O'Connor said that, "The story is a duel of sorts between the Grandmother and her superficial beliefs and the Misfit's more profoundly felt involvement with Christ's action, which set the world off balance for him."3
For the Misfit (or anybody for that matter) the inconvenient thing about Christianity is its all or nothing character. Christianity is either true for everybody or not true for anybody. Both stances are dogmatic. One states that Jesus Christ is God, the other denies that belief. Neither position is provable, but, if there is no such thing as a merciful God, then how can killing or murder be a crime? Isn't murder just force? Isn't this world merely a product of blind force? So what is the big deal? If force is supreme then surely the exercise of the greatest force would be the greatest achievement; greater by far than mercy and justice, which sit at the opposite end of the "Force" scale. If Force is supreme, then Justice is mere folly and, in conflict with Force/Natural Selection/Evolution etc, it should never have got off the ground. But first we had better define Justice. My definition is: the dignity and the freedom for each and every individual to be their unique selves. Now if Justice is really folly, there would be no moral absolutes such as the Ten Commandments and we would then have to agree with what the Misfit told the Grandmother: "If He (Christ) didn't (raise the dead), then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness."
Flannery O'Connor was familiar with the writings of Charles Pegúy, and with a deft touch she used fiction in "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" to echo what Pegúy' stated in his essay "Clio I": "You (Christianity) have eternalised everything. You have grabbed all the values on the market. And turned them all into infinite values. And now one can no longer be sure of quiet for a single moment." 4 O'Connor often plugged this theme in various ways in her lectures, one remark being, "Redemption is meaningless unless there is a cause for it in the actual life we live,"5 and in 1959 she publicly reiterated her raison d'être saying, "I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centred in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that."6 The whole thrust of A Good Man Is Hard To Find is consistent with these avowals.
O'Connor had a high opinion of Dante Alighieri's writings, especially The Divine Comedy, and she could not have overlooked the aptness of the line, "As many coals produce a single heat."7 What a superb phrase to illumine the social role of Christianity. If we turn that meaning around and imagine the fire of Christianity cooling, all hell (quite literally) breaks loose, making it plain that Christianity should not be respected merely on account of its civilising role in history, but rather the unshakeable fact exists that the social and civil advantages gained by any State from its Christian roots have accrued as a direct consequence of the Missionary Church's main aim of saving souls.
So, what is it like to be holy? For the individual it is to increase and enhance goodness and happiness wherever he is. It is to arrive in some situation and leave it better than when he entered it. Authentic holiness is all about wholeness, which in turn is about balance in our lives — the balance of sensible things — and without that balance, joy and happiness become inaccessible. O'Connor touched on this when writing to Betty Hester, "Always you renounce a lesser good for a greater; the opposite is what sin is."8 To shy away from holiness is to veer toward sin, but, much as we may want otherwise, we human beings are incapable of leaving the transcendental alone. We're caught in a supernatural tug-of-war; one end of the rope is good and the other end evil. We seem to be scared that holiness might somehow make us miserable, when in fact the opposite is the case, and inevitably we feel drawn to the evil end of the rope.
Flannery O'Connor's undoubted sympathy for the Misfit in his situation is well covered by a few lines in another letter she wrote to Hester. "We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord, nor gracefulness,"9 and still later in the introduction to "A Memoir of Mary Ann" she wrote, "Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil. To look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept the fact that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction."10
However, as noted earlier, that infinitesimal sparkle of goodness from the Misfit shows up clearly right near the end of the story. Talking of the Grandmother he says, "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Note the Misfit's use of that word good: like all of us he instinctively knows about good and evil and his comment applies to each and every one of us irrespective of gender. In other words, who would not be well behaved if there were always a loaded gun pointed at them? The threat of imminent death may be the only way some people will ever understand the deep-seated reason for being good, which is a prime aspect of the Natural Law. Such a threat surely begs the question, should people be good because of the fear of punishment or because of their love for fellow human beings? But we're given a clue to the answer in the final line of the story where the Misfit utters those famous words showing his freely chosen change of heart, "It's (meanness) no real pleasure in life."
The Misfit had a rough upbringing and his behaviour had seldom conformed to the norms of middle class society. He told the Grandmother of how he had once had a "run in" with the so called Justice System (Force masquerading as Justice!), which, as everyone knows, is what governments use to tidy the frayed edges of society. The Misfit got enjoyment from hurting others because his experience of life had shown how others found enjoyment and pleasure in hurting and harming him. St Thomas Aquinas defined all evil as mistaking or misusing the means for the end.11 The Misfit did exactly that. He made enjoyment and pleasure in crime an end in itself. He thought this was his right instead of remembering that rights and duties are intertwined. His killing of someone as old and helpless as the Grandmother certainly opened his eyes and changed him and it is equally certain that the encounter changed the Grandmother as well. With one brutal stroke God's Grace is shown to cut both ways, causing each of the protagonists to come face to face with the Mercy of God. As O'Connor said, "There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored."12 In "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" both the Misfit and the Grandmother are portrayed (albeit covertly) as being restored to a state of grace.13 Truly, Flannery O'Connor was right when she wrote, "and the meanest of them sparkled," because somewhere deep inside each and every one of us lies the faculty to be good; that capacity to sparkle.
ENDNOTES
1. Conversations With Flannery O'Connor. Rosemary Magee, ed. Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press. 107.
2. Dantesque: from Dante Alighieri 1265-1321. Italian Poet and author of The Divine Comedy. Dante frequently used sacramental imagery.
3. "Letter to Mr. — ." Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works. New York: Library of America, 1988. 1148.
4. Pegúy Charles 1874-1914. French Poet and Thinker. "Clio I" extract from Temporal and Eternal. English edition. Harvil Press, 1954.
5. "The Fiction Writer And His Country." Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works. New York: Library of America, 1988. 805.
6. Ibid Pages 804-5
7. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. "Paradiso." Canto 19: line 19.
8. "Letter to A." Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works. New York: Library of America, 1988. 978.
9. Ibid Page 1082
10. "A Memoir of Mary Ann." Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works. New York: Library of America, 1988. 830.
11. The aspect of good is found chiefly in the end: and therefore the end stands in the relation of object to the act of the will, which is at the root of every sin. (St Thomas Aquinas: cf. Summa Theologica, 2.1.72.1, "reply to objection 1") Put simply this states, "All evil exists in the mistaking or misusing of the means for the end." (Hilaire Belloc: "The Cruise of The Nona.") Flannery O'Connor studied Thomas Aquinas.
12. "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction" Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works. New York: Library of America, 1988. 820.
13. State of Grace: The state of being reconciled with God in His Mercy.