The Argument about Memory in Fahrenheit 451 Essays - Literature

The Argument about Memory in Fahrenheit 451 Anna McHugh Most readers of Fahrenheit 451 would agree that the idea of memory, both as a cognitive and ethical faculty and as a collective asset of the community, is important to the plot and politics of the novel. Montag's apotheosis in the final pages is a result of his willing, even joyful, integration with a memorized texthe becomes the Book of Ecclesiastes. The Book Men, who memorize the best of human wisdom and wait for the post-apocalypse when their memorized libraries will rebuild a new world, embody Bradbury's argument in favor of a return to a pre-modern memory praxis 1 and ethos. Integrating the Book of Revelations into its own textual structure, the novel ends with a gesture to the rich intertext which memory makes possible, and which Bradbury's novel exalts and enlarges. That the final part of the novel is rich in tropes, motifs, and metaphors of traditional memory praxis is no surprise. As a scaffold around which to build a post-apocalyptic world, and a remedy for the depleted, sceptical aesthetics and intellectual practice of the 1950s, the final part of Fahrenheit 451 draws deeply on a corpus of texts and thinking about the cultivation of memory. Part Three thus sketches a solution based on memory to the protagonist's problemour problem, too, if we think of literary dystopias as concentrations of the worst contemporary social trends and the protagonist's subjectivity as evidence of how they affect individuals. But if the last part offers a solution based on memory, it is because the problem is posed as one of memory, too. I suggest that issues of individual memory-work and the value placed on memory by the novel's social and cultural institutions significantly inform its dystopian character. Bradbury projects a future Ameri ca by drawing on contemporary trends which degraded the role of memory in individual and communal life. Memory-rich episodes show it being effaced as a formative power in an individual's ethical character and a neuropsychological faculty which stores and provides affectively-tagged information through which we make sense of our world. This essay will examine episodes from the novel's three parts to trace the argument about memory and to explore Bradbury's understanding of it.