Bradburys Coda essay and Fahrenheit 451
1. Usingthe ideas Bradbury wrote about in Coda, write an essay discussing whether ornot it is morally and ethically right or wrong to change words an author hasused so as to not offend someone in any way (race, ethnicity, culture,religion, etc.). Even though words andideas are hurtful and insulting sometimes, if we rewrite history, do we losesight of what is wrong and, if so, do we have the fear that society will nevermove forward?
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Coda by RayBradbury (1979)
(coda–a concluding passage of a piece,adding to the basic structure)
About two years ago, a letter arrivedfrom a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading myexperiment in space mythology, TheMartian Chronicles.
But, she added, wouldnt it be a goodidea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more womens charactersand roles?
A few years before that I got a certainamount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks inthe book were Uncle Toms and why didnt I do them over?
Along about then came a note from a Southernwhite suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entirestory should be dropped.
Two weeks ago my mountain of maildelivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishinghouse that wanted to reprint my story The Fog Horn in a high school reader.
In my story, I had described a lighthouseas having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was aGod-Light. Looking up at it from the view-point of any sea-creature one wouldhave felt that one was in the Presence.
The editors had deleted God-Light andin the Presence.
Some five years back, the editors of yetanother anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (countem) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving,Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?
Simplicity itself. Skin, debone,demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted,every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquitoout!Every simile that would have made a sub-morons mouth twitchgone! Any asidethat explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writerlost!
Every story, slenderized, starved,bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain readlike Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read likein thefinaleEdgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored.Every image that demanded so much as one instants attentionshot dead.
Do you begin to get the damned and incrediblepicture?
How did I react to all of the above?
By firing the whole lot.
By sending rejection slips to each andevery one. By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way toburn a book. And the world is full of people running about with litmatches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian /Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Womens Lib/Republican, Mattachine/ Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right,the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who seeshimself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavenedliterature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares tospeak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the bookswere burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from thisbook, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the mindsshut and the libraries closed forever.
Shut the door, theyre coming throughthe window, shut the window, theyre coming through the door, are the wordsto an old song. They fit my life-style with newly arriving butcher/censorsevery month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, somecubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young,had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students,reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning inthe future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, oneof the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republishedthis summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
A final test for old Job II here: I senta play, Leviathan 99, off to auniversity theater a month ago. My play is based on the Moby Dick mythology,dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captainwho venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer.My drama premieres as an opera in Paris this autumn.
But, for now, the university wrote backthat they hardly dared do my playit had no women in it! And the ERA ladies oncampus would descend with ball-bats if the drama department even tried!
Grinding my bicuspids into powder, Isuggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads,male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again,especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to themales!
I wrote back maybe they should do my playone week, and The Women the next.They probably thought I was joking, and Im not sure that I wasnt.
For it is a mad world and it will getmadder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan ordolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationist, pro-computerologist orNeo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world isthe playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But thetip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and myterritorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays,let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them renttype-writers. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreakersentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weaktea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish tore-cut my Wonderful Ice Cream Suit so it shapes Zoot, may the belt unraveland the pants fall.
For, lets face it, digression is thesoul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlets fathersghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions,incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them outand one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to thewriterhe steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in varietyand forbids the appetite to fail.
In sum, do not insult me with thebeheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-defiations you plan for my works. Ineed my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs toshout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to becomea non-book.
All you umpires, back to the bleachers.Referees, hit the showers. Its my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run thebases. At sunset Ive won or lost. At sunrise, Im out again, giving it the oldtry.
And no one can help me. Not even you.
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