Ray Bradbury Archives - James E Hartley

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Sometime in the early 2020s, humans managed to eradicate themselves in a giant nuclear conflagration.

Well, fortunately, “eradication” is not entirely correct. A few remnants of humanity were able to move off-world. Fortunately, between 1999 and 2005, humans colonized Mars. Well, fortunately for the humans; it was not quite so fortunate for the Martians.

It’s funny how science fiction written in the 1940s seems so wildly off in its forecasts of the future. As you may have noticed, Mars wasn’t colonized by 2005. We do still have time to have a giant nuclear conflagration before 2026, though, so maybe the book isn’t totally off. Oh, don’t worry. The international situation is so remarkably stable, there is no chance at all of a giant world war. The book is just wrong.

The book? Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

First question: is this a novel or a collection of short stories? I have no idea. It sits right in no man’s land. It is clearly a whole bunch of bits written as stand alone short stories which are organized temporally and interspersed with brief little bits of connecting tissue in the form of one page vignettes. So, there is an overall story line through the book, but each substantive chapter could be ripped out of the book and read with absolutely zero loss of ability to understand the story.

As a story, it definitely has some clever bits. The book is easily divided into thirds. At first humans start arriving on Mars, and shockingly the Martians don’t seem too happy to see the humans. Conflict ensues. The Humans win (yeah for the humans!). Then we get a bunch of stories in which Mars is an unknown territory far from earth and the human settlements have all sorts of problems. Then the people on earth manage to destroy themselves and so life on Mars becomes the last refuge of humanity.

Now Bradbury is a fine writer and some of the stories are clever and fun, but is there any reason to read a bunch of 1940s science fiction if you aren’t unnaturally obsessed with post war apocalyptic imaginations about other worlds?

Yes.

The always amazing Library of America recently published the first volume of Bradbury’s writings. At the end of this volume is a brief essay Bradbury wrote helpfully entitled “A Few Notes on The Martian Chronicles.” In it he relates how he came to write these stories. The idea started as Winesburg, Ohio set on Mars, which he fortunately abandoned because, well, Sherwood Anderson already wrote a book called Winesburg, Ohio, and it is really good and so why rewrite the same book?

What was he going to write instead?

It was going to be about people and they were going to be lonely people. They could not help being lonely, for they were double damned; once by a civilization that yanked the base out from under their God, and tried to take their mind off their loss with nylon toothbrushes and V-8 engines, and again by the impossible total miles between Earth and Mars.

That is exactly what The Martian Chronicles is all about. Every single story hammers home in one way or another, the unbearable problem of how to find a connection with another. The early explorers show up desperately hoping to be welcomed by the Martians and the tragedy is that the Martians have no interest in becoming companions of these lonely Earthmen. Eventually, humans take out their frustration at being so lonely so far from earth by asserting their control over Mars, hoping to build a place for humans to be in community, but once the Martians are gone, the loneliness remains. And then the humans on Earth use their new-found toys to destroy each other and the book ends with “The Million-Year Picnic” on Mars, where a few straggling remnants of humans trying desperately to build a community.

The Martian Chronicles is indeed a novel.

Who are these lonely people? This is the question which makes the novel truly fascinating. Also from “A Few Notes on The Martian Chronicles”:

[In] my home in Illinois there was a man who prowled the streets in the year 1928, who was known as “the lonely one.” I have never forgotten him. Some day his sons, or the sons of his sons, will go to Mars. Eliot calls them The Hollow Men. Call them what you will, but there they go, off to Mars, just for the ride, thinking they will find a planet like a seer’s crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they’ll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.

About whom are we reading when we read The Martian Chronicles? It is a mirror. Those lonely people? They are us, living in Eliot’s Wasteland, headpieces filled with straw. Alas.

The loneliness bred in the modern age is a subject which has been widely discussed. I teach at a college with a couple thousand students living in crowded dormitories, and yet, “lonely” is a pretty good adjective to describe most of my students. What happens when a bunch of lonely people are put together in a place? Well, all sorts of attempts to form deep bonds emerge, most of which do not actually generate such bonds, and thus the loneliness increases.

The Martian Chronicles is a taxonomy of failed means of trying to solve the problem of loneliness. Story after story, we just keep seeing yet one more way the quest to cure loneliness has failed. In the end, we destroy ourselves.

That sounds kinda depressing. And indeed, while the stories in Bradbury’s volume are entertaining, there is not a lot of hope here. I suppose that should be obvious in a book in which the most famous story (“There Will Be Soft Rains”), the penultimate chapter in the novel, is the tale of an automated house continuing to hum along making breakfast and so on for a family that is now just a shadow on a wall created by a nuclear explosion. And then the automation in the house breaks down, and even the house dies in a fire. The final chapter is the million year long picnic on Mars…maybe that will work out? Yeah, probably not.

What is the cure for loneliness? Bradbury doesn’t have an answer. He drives that point home by ending the last story in the book with an ellipsis; it just wanders off into the unknown. Bradbury is writing stories trying to convince you that there is a problem, that you are indeed lonely and that you don’t have a cure for your loneliness. Bradbury is silently whispering in your ear: This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

The Bradbury short stories are good, but here is a great example of the whole being better than the sum of the parts. I read his book decades ago and thought it was ho-hum. Some nice stories, no real cohesion. I was wrong. As a reflection on how humans try and fail to cure themselves of loneliness, it is rather amazing. Read this book, and then look around the world, and you suddenly see: it’s just The Martian Chronicles repeating itself here on Earth.

Related Posts
Bradbury, Ray Fahrenheit 451 “Burning Books”
Eliot, George Amos Barton “The Dull Lives We Lead”

“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work.”

Ray Bradbury wrote that in 1953 in Fahrenheit 451.

Fast forward 67 years. The same thing could be said today, which all by itself in incredibly curious. If Bradbury was right in 1953, then shouldn’t we be further along in the destruction of books and learning than we are? How have we spent nearly three-quarters of a century right on the verge of the book burning apocalypse?

Actually, it isn’t just the last seven decades. Plato complained about the same thing.

The importance of Fahrenheit 451 is thus not about banning and burning books or the death of reading. Books and reading (like cockroaches?) seem to keep finding a way to survive. But, what is obvious when pondering Bradbury is that reading has neither become more nor less widespread over the decades. There are still readers, to be sure. But, people who regularly read for pleasure day in and day out are, and seemingly always have been, a small percentage of the population.

I read this book in an independent study with a couple of ridiculously bookish students—I am pretty sure they both read more than I do. We ended up spending an incredible amount of time talking about Millie, the wife of the protagonist in the novel. She spends her days watching her interactive television; three full walls in the room are occupied by the television, and her fondest dream is to get the fourth wall also converted to a television. Truly immersive TV! She has friends over, and they all sit and immerse themselves in this all-consuming TV. (Don’t laugh; it would look just like four people sitting in the same room all looking at their phones.) Our protagonist pulls the plug on the TV and reads to them the last two stanzas of Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Millie is annoyed and frightened by this book thing, turns in our hero to the book burning authorities, and flees. She is one of those people who really see no need for books. Here is the question: what can we do to convince Millie that she will be happier or better off if she shuts off the TV and reads?

Truth be told, I was greatly disturbed by the end of my conversation with my students. I want to say I am absolutely certain that Millie would be much happier if she was a reader. But, how do I know that she would be? How do I know that Millie will be better off reading the poetry of Matthew Arnold than she is by watching the latest mindless TV show? As my students (who are too clever for me) were very quick to point out, the fact that I am better off as a reader than I would be if I just watched TV all day is not the question. I, as they love to tell me, am weird.

How about this: Books make you think. Is that a good thing? One of the book burners in the novel notes:

If you don’t want a man unhappy, politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none….We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.

So, what if someone doesn’t want to think? What if someone likes simply being entertained and knowing there is good and evil and so you always know the right answer to everything without having to think about it? (Cue a reference to the cable channel your political opponents like.) Then I come along and say: “Look, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy and you should read all these books and be endlessly tortured by never really knowing the ultimate answers to all of the multitude of ultimate questions.” Have I just made that person’s life better off?

Fahrenheit 451, the book, is a great example. We have here a book that says we should not burn books. Lots of people have read this book. It is popular in high school English classes; it isn’t hard to guess why English teachers like to assign it. Everyone loves the message that those evil people over there want to take away the books we good people should read and we should fight against them. (One of my kids had a unit on banned books in 9^th grade English; each student had to pick a banned book, read it, and then present it to the class. But, the teacher assured us at Parents Night, don’t worry. She would not let the kids choose any inappropriate books. As hard as it is to believe, the teacher said this with zero awareness of the irony.)

Quiz Time: How many people after reading Fahrenheit 451 and its message that reading all these great books is the most important thing in the world, have gone out and read “Dover Beach”? The novel has the excerpts quoted above; when the poem is read in the story, the characters are stunned and brought to tears. But, what percentage of the readers of Bradbury do you suppose set out to find the full poem and read it? And if they had, would they really be happier and better off?

OK, maybe it is because people don’t like poetry. But, Bradbury also makes use of the books of Ecclesiastes and Revelation. He argues they are so vital to the preservation of civilization that it is massively important that people have those books so cemented in the mind that they will survive nuclear war (or coronavirus?). Did the readers of Fahrenheit 451 find those books and read them?

I am, truth be told, a bit surprised how hard it was for any of us to come up with a compelling argument that Millie’s life would be better if she was a reader. I know it would be; deep down inside, I have no doubt about it. But, finding the articulation of that knowledge, finding the way to show that reading and books are important, vitally important, not just for the knowledge, but vital in and of themselves, finding the way to articulate that is difficult.

I keep coming back to Hamlet:

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused.

That is the reason we need books and reading; they are keys to unlocking the potential of that godlike reason. But, the argument that this is what we were created to be may not be not enough to persuade Millie that she should read.

Tag: Ray Bradbury

The Lonely Ones

Burning Books