Having spent most of this workday reading Ray Bradbury (way
to go, Evan) in a pathetic effort to cover my tracks and make sure I understood
his writing correctly, it occurs to me that Bradbury’s strengths and weaknesses
are still more complex than I gave him credit for being. As I’d thought before,
Bradbury’s stories are a spectacular torrent of ideas and spectacle, packing
more memorable incidents into a single page than many ‘literary’ writers find
in an entire career. In reading a large chunk of The Martian Chronicles, I
realize that he can also be funny and humanly moving – or at least he was in
the book’s first few stories before a germ conveniently wiped all out all the
martians – at which point the book reverts to Bradbury’s cool-headed moral
parables.
‘Cool-headed’ is an adjective I didn’t touch enough upon in
the last post. If you can measure writers by their emotional temperature, everybody
would fit on a spectrum – if perhaps Dostoevsky could be considered white hot
and Montaigne considered room temperature, then we could consider Ray Bradbury as
close to absolute zero as any famous writer. Bradbury is not interested in
humans and their predicaments; he’s interested in what humans do. In that
sense, I was absolutely wrong yesterday when I wrote that he venerated
technology as an absolute good, as anyone could tell you with stories like ‘The
Veldt,’ and ‘A Sound of Thunder’ fresh in their heads. Bradbury’s problem is not
that he’s overly optimistic about humans, it’s that he’s overly optimistic
about knowledge itself and the idea that knowledge can overcome all problems.
On the whole, he may be right, but the refusal to acknowledge all the
exceptions to that rule is a very serious misstep – is anything truly gained by
realizing that your family is actually a simulation created by Martians who
will murder you whether or not you try to stop them?
And this leads us one of the oddest problems of
sci-fi/fantasy, and of American fiction in general in our day. Millions of people
flock to sci/fi fantasy because they crave its largeness of vision, and they
(sometimes rightly) equate realist fiction with trivial subject matter about
which nobody much cares except for a very small group of literati. But in its own
way, the pure strands of science fiction/fantasy can be as limiting to fiction
as any realist fiction, and the result in both cases feels uncomfortably claustrophobic,
as though the focus is so single-minded on this one issue that we can never
feel really liberated by it. Realist fiction’s strength is that its methods are
battle-tested, a well built boat which can keep its writers and readers afloat;
conceptual fiction’s strength is that it provides a new way of thinking –
rather than examining our world, it examines how our world could be different.
In the process, conceptual fiction by and large dismisses human concerns;
realist fiction by and large dismisses all the others. It’s very difficult in
either way of writing to create a vision large enough to make either into great
fiction, but then again, that’s why artistic greatness is rare. The very best authors
have a largeness of vision that can combine the best of ideas, of spectacle,
and yes, of human character in a way that couldn’t possibly bore anyone willing
to read them – this is what Shakespeare and Cervantes did four-hundred years
ago, it’s what Amos Oz and Ian McEwan (among a number of others I could
name) do in our day, and this kind of total vision is ultimately what I think people
long for in what they read.
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