Recently I was struck by the similarities underlying dystopic visions found in a novel first published in 1953, and another released this year. In both Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, the future America is an illiterate country. Americans are not only illiterate in both of these bleak futures, but they are illiterate (unwittingly or not, it’s difficult to say) as a result of their own design.
In Fahrenheit 451, Americans of the future have rendered the written word as a useless, time-wasting form of conveying both pleasure and information. Instead, multiple television screens (or walls) provide all the nourishment one would normally find in a book: escapism, educated debate, politics, and plain old entertainment. Firemen are called on to light fires rather than extinguish them, and most—if not all—of the bonfires they spark are made of kindling composed of Plato, Dickens, Shakespeare, Cicero, Woolf, and so on. Since books are not needed, we might as well burn them, the logic goes. “It was a pleasure to burn,” says the opening sentence of the novel, setting the tone for what's to come.
In Super Sad True Love Story, books have all but disappeared from the cultural conscience of a country fixated on pseudo-reality television and social networking devices that are practically strapped to each and every person. Sure, books exist, and nobody is persecuted for owning them or wanting to actually sit down and read them page by page, but such crazies are looked upon with a mix of bewilderment, disdain, and pity. Shelves stacked with books inside homes are a mark of idiosyncrasy and reflective of how out of touch the owner of the precious volumes is with society at large. Owning a book in Shteyngart's future is like owning a Vitrola today. It's quaint.
Considering the overwhelming rise and speed of technological advances in the past thirty years, and the increasing dependency of American society on digital media over print media, it’s no surprise that Shteyngart chooses to use this hook in Super Sad.... But what compelled Bradbury to the same logical conclusion (or prediction) on the irrelevancy of books? Consider, briefly, the most famous dystopian novel of all time, 1984 by George Orwell (published just four years before Fahrenheit 451 in 1949): books were not outlawed entirely in Orwell's imaginative future. Censored very heavily, yes, but they were destroyed only if they contained subversive commentary. The authoritative government used books for training and propaganda purposes; books in 1984 may be manipulated for evil purposes, but they are not outright replaced by a disdain for the written word. (The language in 1984, however, takes a different beating.)
Maybe an anxiety toward the demise of the book is particular to American authors… Is this a strain more common to American literature than British or other literature? Can any of our savvy readers help me out here? Sci-fi fans, jump in!
We can take a tiny bit of solace in the fact that in both Fahrenheit 451 and Super Sad… books are not banned by authoritarian governments. What is worrisome is that the cultural saliency of books is made irrelevant by the masses. In Bradbury’s classic, the fire chief explains to the protagonist, Montag, the demise of books in society:
The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
In Fahrenheit 451, technology plays a significant—but not the only—role in the demise of books. Technology, however, is almost fully to blame in Super Sad…, where Americans are enthralled and even enslaved by a device called an “apparat.” Worn on the person, the apparat is a device that is the logical extension of today’s techno-pop-culture. Imagine a device that combines streaming of Twitter, Facebook, and every other social network, and in fact, the entire Internet, plus reality television, banking information, credit scores, and just about every other measurable statistic and tic of our professional and personal lives (including "fuckability" scores), and makes all of this available for everyone else to view. With this saturation of infotainment, what need (or time) do Shteyngart’s future American have for books? Recalls Lenny, the hero of Super Sad:
I went over to my Wall of Books and picked up Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, whose cover I had caught Eunice examining once before, tracing with her finger the depicted bowler hat flying over the Prague skyline. There were laudatory quotes for the author and his work on the first page of the book from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times (the real Times, not the Lifestyle Times), even something called Commonweal. What had happened to all these publications? I remember reading the Times in the subway, folding it awkwardly while leaning against the door, caught up in the words… even more afraid to lose the thread of the article in front of me, my spine banging against the train door, the clatter and drone of the massive machine around me, and me, with my words, brilliantly alone.
Despite the warnings of these two talented authors, their dire (and cautionary) predictions of the demise of the book is misplaced. Democracy, however troubling it looks at times in this country, still thrives. And a foundational element of a strong democracy is the written word. Despite the many distractions coming from the Internet and television, book sales in this country remain strong. It may eventually transition from paper to electronic devices (to holographic text?), but the book survives.
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