By JACQUES CHAMBON*

Preface to the French edition, translated by Zenir Campos Reis.

“It has been five springs since we have missed Professor Zenir Campos Reis. His physical presence is missing. His intellectual presence is there, in the various writings that Zenir left us. This time, his friends and disciples bring to the conversation the Preface to the French translation of Fahrenheit 451. There, the thread that pursues the novel’s current relevance draws precise/precious reflections on the fate of books, of culture in capitalist society” (Cláudia Arrruda Campos)

Prefácio

Nowadays, books are not burned. Or rather, they are no longer burned. They are simply prohibited, and what is more, there are few Western countries in which censorship continues to be exercised over a work of the mind.

Nowadays, when a book is disturbing, assassins are sent after its author; a bounty is placed on the head of a Salman Rushdie, guilty of having written the books. Satanic verses, deemed incompatible with the respect due to Quran by those who consider themselves its true guardians and its true interpreters.

Or else they file a complaint against the publisher in the hope that the book will not be displayed in bookstores and that the publisher will receive heavy fines; articles L 227-24 and R 624-2 of the new Penal Code authorize any league of virtue to engage in this type of procedure. Or, in the event that a film is considered offensive, they exert pressure on the public authorities to have it removed from the theaters — and this pressure can reach the most extreme cases, that of The Last Temptation of Christ from Martin Scorcese, for example, to the burning down of a movie theater.

But the day when an organized service like Ray Bradbury's firefighters will be tasked with the systematic destruction of books in the name of the subversive character of all creative activity—writing as well as reading—seems to be a very distant, perhaps entirely improbable, future.

You mean that Fahrenheit 451 participate in these visions of the future that, because they were not confirmed by history, became obsolete? The answer is obviously no.

When Ray Bradbury’s novel first appeared in serial form in 1953, it belonged to contemporary literature — a Sartrean would say “engaged” — rather than to science fiction. Or rather, in accordance with a procedure dear to the genre, it projects into the future, radicalizing or thickening the features so as to give it the value of a cry of alarm, a particularly… burning situation.

1953 is the year in which the anti-communist psychosis generated by the Korean War and the first Soviet atomic explosions and fueled by several politicians culminates in the United States, the best known of whom, because he was the most paranoid and the most agitated, was Senator Joseph McCarthy: in June, the Rosenberg couple, sentenced to death since 1951 for allegedly having handed over atomic secrets to the Soviet consul in New York, are executed in the electric chair, another form of elimination by fire. But this is nothing more than the most spectacular episode — because of its international repercussions — of a “witch hunt” that existed long before it took the name of “McCarthyism”.

Since 1947, shortly after Harry Truman's accession to the presidency, commissions of inquiry have been in operation, soon helped by traditional whistleblowers to identify "internal enemies", communists, sympathizers and even liberals considered "excessively liberal" in all sectors of activity: government and administration, of course, but also in the press, education and entertainment industry.

Thus, to remain only in the cultural domain, which particularly affected Ray Bradbury, who was part of it and already included quite a few of his friends, for half a dozen years, roughly until McCarthy was disavowed by the Senate precisely because of his excesses, many artists — actors, screenwriters, directors — and intellectuals — writers, scientists, teachers — were deprived of work and sometimes of freedom (Edward Dmytryck, Dalton Trumbo), placed on the index (J.D. Sallinger, with Catcher in the Rye ), forced into exile (Charlie Chaplin settled in Switzerland in 1952) or at least ordered to take an oath of loyalty to their country.

Fahrenheit 451 is therefore no more “outdated” than 1984 under the pretext that the year 1984 as we know it did not confirm the vision that George Orwell had of it when he wrote his book in 1948. Or rather, Fahrenheit 451 It was written precisely so that the terrifying universe imagined there would never become reality. Paradox? If you want, if you insist on thinking that the function of anticipation is to predict the future.

But with some distance, it can be said that this book constituted a weighty score in the concert of those who denounced the fascist deviations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and, later, McCarthyism — because it is clear that not all of America feared the specter of communism. In other words, the story of fireman Montag is not only part of history, but contributed to constructing it or at least to diverting it from some of its most dangerous tendencies. And it still contributes to this.

Second reason to see in Fahrenheit 451 which still and always speaks to us about ourselves: its purpose remains perfectly valid. It has become increasingly relevant over the years, to the point of giving the fiction it carries the status of one of those timeless fables in which History can regularly look without risk of serious distortions. Of course, the remote control, that common device in every modern home, does not appear in it.

The screen walls of Montag's house are turned on and off using a built-in switch. AIDS certainly does not bring its sinister contribution to the threats to the environment: we are projected into a world in which sex, and even more so love, seem like ancient and forgotten things. But the rest... There is the silent war between the great powers, the arms race, the fear of nuclear weapons, the rupture of man and his natural roots, violence as a derivative of the malaise of life, anonymous suburbs, delinquency, the problematic connection between progress and happiness, in other words, everything that matters among the great concerns of this end of the century.

It is also and above all about the imperialism of the mass media, the great “destruction of the brain” caused by advertising, games, soap operas, and television “information.” For, as Ray Bradbury says elsewhere, “there is more than one way to burn a book,” one of which, perhaps the most radical, is to make people incapable of reading due to atrophy of interest in literature, mental laziness, or simple misinformation.

From this point of view, nothing is more revealing than the comparison of Captain Beatty's “conference” at the end of the first part of Fahrenheit 451 with what Jean d'Ormesson wrote in Le Figaro, of December 10, 1992, the day after the suppression of Print, a literary program hosted by Bernard Rapp on the France 3 channel; with a small difference, the two speeches seem contemporary: “Books are no longer burned, but rather suffocated in silence. Censorship is repudiated by everyone today. And, in fact, it is not the books of opponents, nor seditious ideas that are condemned to the fire of oblivion: it is all books and all ideas. And why are they condemned? For the simplest reason: because they do not attract enough audiences, because they do not attract enough publicity, because they do not bring in enough money. The dictatorship of audience ratings is the dictatorship of money. It is money against culture (…) One could naively believe that public service had a cultural, educational, formative vocation, something perhaps resembling a mission. We would be completely mistaken. Public service is in line with general vulgarity. The Republic does not need writers.”

Fahrenheit 451 was written to remind the Republic (even if it is not the same at all) that it needs writers. And it is because this need is more vital and more neglected than ever that Ray Bradbury's fable is a text for today and tomorrow.

For this reason, the translation had to keep up. That is to say, it had to be updated. For if Henri Robillot’s work remains a model of the genre with its mixture of scrupulous fidelity and elegant fluidity, it is a work that dates back to 1954. A time when an entire vocabulary was about to be invented in the field of television (the vast majority in France only used it on the radio and knew only the “speaker”, but not yet the “presenter” and the “entertainer”), of transport (the word “cockroach” had not yet been invented to correctly translate “beetle-car”) and of science fiction in general.

In fact, although Ray Bradbury uses little technical vocabulary, he is still very precise in his descriptions and does not refuse to draw on a reservoir of expressions — and of course notions — that are familiar to English-language science fiction writers but a little enigmatic for those who have just discovered the genre — such as “glove hole” (“identifying glove”) where Montag inserts his hand to open the front door.

From another point of view, Ray Bradbury's style raised problems. Rich in metaphors (more than a dozen from the first paragraphs of the novel), ruptures in construction, rhythmic research, games of signifiers and various audacities, ran the risk of making even more disorienting a type of novelistic discourse that, for France, was still in the process of acclimatization. Hence the need for adaptations and Henri Robillot's great merit was to preserve the poetic value of the author, recognized on the other side of the Atlantic and which began to guarantee him a wider reception than that of simple lovers of futuristic adventures.

Today the situation is no longer the same; Fahrenheit 451 has become a classic, science fiction is no longer an OLNI (Unidentified Literary Object), and it would be appropriate to restore to Ray Bradbury's language the spontaneity, the freedom of movement even in its wildest flights. Another way to burn books is to make the obscure clear and simplify the complex.

Thus we believe we have applied the message of a novel that fights for freedom, truth and the plenitude of being and its relationship with the world. It is now time to savor it again, to let it penetrate us, to transform it into a living memory like the book-men that Montag encounters at the end of his investigation, that is, an internal flame, the best remedy against all forms of fire.

But this is up to the reader to do…

*Jacques Chambon is an actor, writer and translator.

Translation: Zenir Campos Reis

Reference

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. Translated by Jacques Chambon and Henri Robillot. Paris, Gallimard, 1999, 304 pages. [https://amzn.to/4dZsT8u]

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