Jonathan R. Eller & William F. Touponce, Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004)INTRODUCTION: Metaphors, Myths, and Masks--Origins of Authorship in the Texts of Ray Bradbury (pp. 1-50) [All Boldface Are Mine]
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...... Usually, he [Bradbury] is mentioned as a point of comparison with other "real" science fiction writers who are perceived as having the right stuff. Systematic genre criticism, when it discusses Bradbury at all, tends to drum him solemnly out of the science fiction corps for alleged inconsistencies of thought. From their point of view, Bradbury is the source of error, the one who goes wrong in the use of scientific and rationalistic science fiction conventions. ......p. 3
In terms of his early authorship, this is how Bradbury defined the genre: "Over and above everything the writer in this field has a sense of being confronted by dozens of paths that move among the thousand mirrors of a carnival maze, seeing his society imaged and re-imaged and distorted by the light thrown back at him." In this study, drawing on theoretical insights about the nature of genre as a dialogic interaction of voices, we argue that Bradbury sees his relationship to science fiction--and other genres a [sic] well--as a process of carnivalization. ...... The process of carnivalization by its very nature does not set up hierarchies and lasting canons of literature in a field of literary endeavor. On the contrary, it tends to undermine outworn conventions, introduce novelty, and thereby renew the field. Bradbury reminds us that a genre is a realm of possibilities, a potential with "dozen of paths" that move among thousands of mirrors. For Bradbury, science fiction could never be a closed monologic system of thought. For him, science fiction was the apotheosis of continuous change and intellectual freedom.p. 4
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...... Quite apart from generic concerns, Bradbury's works manifest a preoccupation with desire and the unconscious (Freud) as well as the modern crisis of values (Nietzsche) and provide critiques--through carnivalization--of those notions.
Historically, the central act of carnival was the ritual crowning-decrowning of the carnival king (......) [Baktin:] "...... Carnival is, so to speak, functional and not substantive. It absolutizes nothing, but rather proclaims the joyful relativity of everything." This statement neatly suggests carnival's ambivalent relationship to fixed ideas: ......p. 5
...... Authorship and thematics are thus two sides of the same coin.p. 6
......
...... [t]he Russian formalists, in particular Boris Tomashevsky, who coined the word "thematics," made the useful distinction that theme has at least two functions: to create interest and arouse sympathy in the reader and to lend the work coherence. ......
Beyond outlining the meaning of such terms as carnivalization and thematics, the main purpose of this introduction is to explore Bradbury's notion of authorship. (We will have more to say about the role of various cultural "gatekeepers"--publishers and editors--in Bradbury's career.) In doing so, one must study the Bradburyan process of authorship under the broad rubrics of metaphor, myth, and mask. Each helps us organize the many processes, both texual and thematic, involved in carnivalization and key them specifically to Bradbury's concerns as an author. ......p. 7
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...... Metaphor has many functions in his texts, but its primary aesthetic function is to establish a sense of intimacy with otherness. Shared with the reader, metaphor represents a kind of privileged glimpse into the workings of Bradbury's imgaination. Myth is, of course, a narrative category. Bradbury's myths are life-affirming fictions and represent the shaping of metaphors into a coherent story. ......
...... Mask is the dimention of character and personality in the creative process. ......, but mask is the most important to him as the central theme of carnival and thus receives the most attention.On Metaphor:
Broadly speaking, Bradbury regards his fictions as (largely unconscious) interpretations of his life. Metaphor is the primary process constituting these interpretation.p. 8
For Bradbury, the unconscious must be approached with the "wise passiveness" of William Wordsworth or the Zen Buddhists. But although the sense of the theatricality of the unconscious is strong in his work, his conception of it is not, evidently, the Freudian theater of the return of the repressed. For Bradbury, the unconscious is not so much the place of repression or castration, or lack, but of flows of desire. The writer's conscious sense of self-identity comes much later in the process of desiring: "At last he [the writer] will begin to see himself. At night the very phosphorescence of his insides will throw shadows long on the wall. At last the surge, the agreeable blending of work, not thinking and relaxation will be like the blood in one's body, flowing because it has to flow, moving because it must move, from the heart."p. 11
...... In fact, his carnivalized use of metaphor is closer to masquerade and metamorphosis than to the illustration of philosophical ideas (though these can be found as well, to be sure). For Bradbury, to express oneself metaphorically is to become metamorphosed and transposed, thus becoming comparable to the other. For literary carnival to happen, the same must partake of the other. Through metaphor Bradbury explores the major thematic networks of the fantastic: themes of the self--including the metamorphosis--and themes of the other (......). ......On Myth:
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Anyone familiar with modern cultural criticism will have no difficulty in recognizing the thematic oppositions at play in these statements [in previous pages]. One cluster of ideas can be grouped around the idea of "culture-values-creativity," which Bradbury favors, and the other around "intellectual knowledge-morality-reason," which he considers a secondary role. Scientific reason and instrumental reason, while they clearly have an important part to play in our incresingly technological lives, are in themselves powerless to create new values. At best they can only transmit, routinize, and normalize values. In a worst-case scenario, such as that depictd in The Martian Chronicles, they have become agents of domination. Indeed, the "truth" revealed by scientific reason seems, when completely known, to lead only to madness and the negation of all values (nihilism). Myths are what animate a culture, and these are created by artists who are close to the abysses of non-meaning but who are strong enough to create saving fictions. Not only popular art such as the horror film but all art, then, is fundamentally discordant with the truth. Art exists to mask the intolerable facts of life, to reveal them in a manageable form.p. 15
...... Knowing that metaphors and myths are lies, however, makes no difference. The recognition of the falsity or error of dreams, the not taking them to be real, is constitutive of their importance. They leave the dreamer free; they give him free space for the upsurge of his power and cultural activity--building cities and raising children, as Bradbury phrases it.p. 16
Through the art of carnivalization, horror is transformed into the sublime and the absurd rendered comic (......). We are rescued by the essential theatricality of art, the torror and horror of existence having been "polarized" and filtered by art. What is more, in a beautifully resonant metaphor that is very much his own, Bradbury tells us that man forever encapsulates the natural symbol of the unpicturable abyss in his own skull, a "symbol to itself," thereby indicating the nonmimetic character of fantastic art. Bradbury's text aspires to be both an intellectual inquiry into the origins of fantastic art and a work of popular art itself. And the artist, we sense, is expected to wear many convincing masks while he entertains us--these are the signs of his vitality. Otherwise, we bypass the dream to capture and kill with facts, or things that appear as facts. (Bradbury is careful to add the qualification; perhaps there are no such things as facts, for Dionysian insight reveals the illusory nature of all "reality.") In Bradbury's philosophical thematics, the truth is something that has to be masked. Our very face are masks that hide the truth, and yet in those faces, however grotesque and frightening they may become, we sense something that is worth more than the truth.
Perhaps the most significant affinity that Bradbury shares with Nietzsche is the metaphorical and psychological manner in which he diagnoses the sickness and health of our present civilization, predicting that the next generation will scramble the sick bones of this one. We might say that for Bradbury literal truth is death. The way to cultural health and to the revitalization of worn-out ltierary conventions is not by being more literal but by creating metaphors of metaphors, new interpretations. Without the ability to fantasize in the name of life, culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity. Nietzsche would say that new myths have to be born continually out of the Dionysian womb. Myths give us the ability to name the abyss. Only a culture ringed and defined by such stories is complete and unified. Bradbury's use of the myth of the American frontier in his Martian stories is one major instance of this sort of rejuvenation of old myths. Thus, the task that Bradbury has set for the fantastic is very close to what Nietzsche said was his own in investigating tragic art: "to see science under the optics [perspective] of the artist, but art under the optics of life."p. 18
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...... Childhood itself is certainly among the most important personal myths, containing multiple variations. As others have noted, children are Bradbury's most interesting characters, for they frequently wear masks in front of adults that hide strange and even lethal worlds of fantasy. ...... We are inclined to think that Bradbury's children are at their best when they oppose adult norms and conventions in stories based on carnival. ......
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A related personal myth of childhood crops up in Bradbury's repeated insistence, to the total disbelief of just about everybody, that he has total recall from the moment of birth. ......
Another aspect of a personal myth in Bradbury may be that of religion, which, since the Apollo lunar missions, has coalesced as his insistent theme that mankind will only achieve immortality and defeat death when it reaches out for the stars and leaves Earth behind. ......p. 19
God in Bradbury's vision is radically immanent in creation but needs man to understand and see himself, to grow. Man is already half a god, the builder of rockets that will one day put an end to death by allowing him to inhabit other planets. On these new worlds we will be allowed "To birth ourselves anew / And love rebirth." In the conquest of space as myth, mankind's light and dark impulses will achieve a balanced tension in a life that knows no end. Ultimately, though, it is the mutual incitement of these two impulses that determines the origin as well a [sic] the goals of man, why "Apollo's missions move, and Christus seek."p. 21
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...... In Bradbury's religious myth God certainly masks himself but voices the lament "My universe needs seeing, / That's Man's eternal task: / What's the use of being / If God is but a mask?" It is the mask of mankind to "rise behind God's masking," to see through (literally) the masks of God. Being is perhaps the key word here, for it is not the being of God that Bradbury's myths ultimately affirm, but the radical becoming of man through the creation and shattering of masks.
Like religious myth, technology must be subordinated to a humanizing vision. In itself technology for Bradbury is merely the embodiment of technique, a decision procedure, what science has already thought, its ideas. Technological thinking is dangerous not when it creates some monstrous accident like a super plague or a reactor meltdown (which, if the experimenters were responsible, they should be technically competent to prevent) but when it becomes totalizing and forces humankind to confront existential problems with merely technical thinking. Bradbury argues that technique by itself cannot determine a philogosphy, and he is surely right. His overtly anti-technological stories are almost never of the type where science finds an answer to the problems it has created (the Isaac Asimov robot stories, for instance).p. 22
To survive in our science-fictional culture, humankind must build what Bradbury calls "empathy machines" (in "Cry the Cosmos") or "compensating machines" (in "I Sing the Body Electric!" see chap. 7). And the artist must play a central role in the designing of such machines. Bradbury regards Jules Verne as an example of this sort of artist and introduces him as one of his own precursors. He compares Melville's mad Captain Ahab to Verne's Captain Nemo. According to Bradbury, technology in Verne's fantasy allows Nemo to transcend Ahab's fate. By building his submarine, the captain "becomes" a whale and dwells in the very see that Ahab fears. ......On Masks:
We have characterized Bradbury above as a romantic because his authorship reflects (in varying degrees) the desperate attempt to overcome the problems that resulted from the nineteenth-century romantic crisis in Western culture. According to art historian Arnold Hauser, ever since the romantic period, art has become a quest for a home that the artist believes he possessed in his childhood and that assumes in his eyes the character of a paradise lost--he can only surmise--through his own fault. Romantic art is based, therefore, on a loss of reality and is produced as a substitute that tries both to deny and to replace that loss. What is more, the practice of art not only is a compensation for real life but also seems incompatible with its enjoyment, a realization that leads to "romantic disillusionment" and the problem of nihilism. Hauser summarizes succinctly the ambivalence of the romantic artist: "The romantic reaction to the artist's emancipation from reality is, however, ambivalent: it produces a feeling of triumph as well as of nostalgia, a sense of freedom and independence as well as a yearning after normal, natural, spontaneous life, a desire to live out life simply and directly. The artist's snese of guilt is, therefore, not the origin of his renunciation of life, as has been assumed, but rather a result of his flight from life." Hauser's essay also explores the romantic character of psychoanalytical theory. Indeed, he argues persuasively that psychoanalysis came into being as an answer to the problem of a civilization in which, "as a result of the romantic crisis, an individual's life and his work became two separate provinces, and in which a cleft has been opened between his private self and public performance." Hauser demonstrates that for Freud, art is linked to neurosis, for both art and neurosis equally reject reality, both are failures in adaptation to the social order. In Freudian theory as in romanticism, there is no artistic creation without the feeling of a loss or a wrong, without the experience of being tricked out of life.[see the analysis of the manuscripts of The Masks]
The romantic position on authorship--always teetering on the brink of disillusionment--can be seen in Bradbury's most ambitious fictional use of masks, a planned seventy-thousand-word novel that he began late in 1945 after a visit to Mexico to collect masks for the Los Angeles County Museum. ......
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...... Bradbury consistently claims that he is each and every one of his characters (......), but as author he had to find a way to overcome nihilism and make his art an affirmation of life. ......p. 28
At any rate, in The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury's acknowledged masterpiece, masks play an important role and function both psychologically and as social criticism. ...... Unlike the Earthmen who invade the planet, the Martians, although telepathic and prone to mental illness, are psychologically healthy enough to wear masks if they choose to and emotionally balanced enough not to become rigidly identified with them, to wear them as a form of play. They have embraced the Dionysian "joyful wisdom" about the nature of the ego-persona and can affirm their lives: ......p. 29
The Masks is also very important for understanding Bradbury's authorship in relation to the play of carnival masks that permeates his writings, especially his later novels. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose book on the role of medieval folk culture in the writings of Francois Rabelais has been so influential in cultural studies of modern forms of carnival, masks and unmasking are at the heart of the experience of carnival, "the most complex theme of folk culture." Originally an expression of "gay relativity," of the joy of change and rebirth, and a complete rejection of conformity to oneself (insofar as it is defined by one's role in serious, "official" culture), the play of masking and unmasking became limited in its romantic form: "In its Romantic form the mask is torn away from the oneness of the folk carnival concept. It is stripped of its original richness and acquires other meanings alien to its primitive nature: now the mask hides something, keeps a secret, deceives....The Romantic mask loses almost entirely its regenerating and renewing element and acquires a somber hue. A terrible vacuum, a nothingness lurks behind it. But an inexhaustible and many-colored life can always be described behind the mask of folk grotesque." Our argument is that Bradbury (re)discovered this source of inexhaustible life through his experimentp. 30
with The Masks, which is almost entirely late romantic in inspiration. But even in modern life, as Bakhtin observes, the romantic mask is never just an object among other objects, it retains "a particle of some other world." That other world, of course, found expression in The Martian Chronicles (......). ......
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Although we are not attempting to "biographize" Bradbury's fiction by reducing his works to events in his life--on the contrary, we are trying to show how Bradbury lived by his fictions--nonetheless, it is important to understand that the presence of so many forms of carnivalesque textuality in the body of his writings necessarily points to Bradbury's real experiences with carnival. ...... Here it is important to note that carnival seems to have had a determining influence on Bradbury's authorship and that he experienced carnival culture in a deeply ambivalent manner.p. 35
Early in his [Bradbury's] life (1931-32) he was inspired by magicians and characters he met in the traveling sideshows and carnivals that visited Waukegan, Illinois. This childhood experience was apparently quite transforming, and Bradbury has written about it in interviews and correspondence, ...... Indeed, in Bradbury's reminiscences two of these figures (Blackstone the Magician and Mr. Electrico) are credited as being responsible for awakening his desire to live forever by creating his own special magic. ...... Bradbury was not a spectator at this carnival but a participant, and this ambivalent participation--he was being told to live forever while being eletrocuted--is indeed at the heart of the carnival experience according
to Bahktin. The carnival is both death and life, it unmasks any pretensions to permanence while pointing the way toward rebirth. Birth is fraught with death, and death with new birth.p. 36
But during the 1945 trip to Mexico in which he experienced the Day of the Dead, Bradbury became terrified and wounded (he writes of it almost as a kind of trauma), especially after visiting the mummies in the catacombs of Guanajuato. This ambivalent relationship to carnival culture was clearly intolerable to the young author and needed to be worked out in The Masks and in a series of stories, beginning with "The Next in Line."
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Bradbury's most recent novels are prolonged imaginative encounters with death and madness, limit concepts of romanticism, or indeed of psychoanalysis. Bradbury has fictionalized himself and the encounter with psychoanalysis in these two novels [Death Is a Lonely Business and A Graveyard for Lunatics] to such an extent that it is often difficult to know where fiction ends and reality begins. ......
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A conventional study of author and works, seeking the "truth" of the work in the author's life, would then find this doubled act of autobiography-fiction difficult to read. Is death (A. L. Shrank) literal or a metaphor for the death of the creative imagination (or in some uncanny way both)? ......
Because of his awareness of masks, Bradbury's texts are modern despite their evident nostalgia. ...... Bradbury's stories deal with such modern problems as the overcoming of nihilism (for example, Fahrenheit 451). His magic is to believe in his own fictions as such, and his power as an artist is to persuadeus to do the same. [Brian W. Aldiss:] "Bradbury is of the house of Poe. The sickness of which he writes takes the form of glowing rosy-cheeked health. It is when he makes functional use of this, contrasting sickness and health in one story, that he is at his most persuasive." Indeed, we shall argue later that this thematic interplay of sickness and health is at the heart of Bradbury's cultural criticism.p. 37
Although he is sometimes called an epigone of Poe by critics who have only read his early books, Bradbury is not of the house of Poe on his fantasy side, nor is heof Jules Verne on his science fiction side, since in reading these (self-chosen) precursors, he inevitably transforms their writings into masks of himself anyway. Furthermore, Bradbury continually revises his relationship to his influences at different stages of his career. For instance, the transformation of Verne into a benign precursor is manifest in an imaginary interview with him. Here Bradbury has Verne, ......, grant him a poetic license to romanticize the space age: "Lie to us, writers: we'll make it true." He also has Verne's voice make clear the connection between romanticism and science in Bradbury's writings: "All science begins with romance, dwindles naturally to facts, and when the facts turn brittle and dry, the process of refertilization, of re-romanticizing reality, begins, as it must always begin, since there is so much we do not, nor will ever, know." Similar things happen to Poe's influence. In Bradbury's early political fantasy, and most obviously in such stories as "Usher II" (The Martian Chronicles) and "The Exiles" (The Illustrated Man), Poe is very much a reactive figure full of rage against the forces of repression and censorship, one whom Bradbury needed to ward off the anxiety and frustration of being a fantasy writer in an America that was rejecting fantasy. But Death Is a Lonely Business completely transforms his earlier relationship with Poe and makes him appear to be, while still admired, a figure of pessimism and despondency who needs to be overcome.
It would seem that every great precursor of Bradbury needs a mask, an evasion of the direct communication of the horrible truth about the chaos of life. ......p. 38
Bradbury's affinities (we do not say influences, for Bradbury claims never to have read Nietzsche directly) with the thematics of Nietzsche's cultural criticism will engage us throught this study. It is important to note at the outset, however, that is many respects Bradbury differs from the atheist Nietzsche, who considered the will to power a force greater than the will to life. The philiosopher used this principle to explain not only man's domination and exploitation of other men but also his capacity to destroy himself. As he tells us at the end of The Genealogy of Morals, man would rather will the void than be will-less. It seems to us that, lacking this principle, Bradbury's moral view of the universe may seem "somewhat Teddy-bearish." As a writer of maral fables, he only occasionally looks at how much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all human ideals. Although he is clearly at odds with the notion of original sin and Christian guilt and wants to transvalue these notions, Bradbury does not seem to feel that Christianity as a whole is a consipiracy of the weak against the strong. Nor does Bradbury seem to share Nietzsche's radical relativism (which states that there are no facts, onlyp. 39
interpretations). He holds that science does uncover a world of facts, even if these facts are powerless to create new values.
Nonetheless, Bradbury seems to share with Nietzsche a high regard for artists as the creators of new values and a concern about overcoming the problems of modernity--nihilism and the crisis of values, in particular--through art and laughter. Like Nietzshe, he wants to overcome the spirit of revenge (in the form of a Gothic past of sin and guilt) and the spirit of gravity, which weighs down all things toward a center of meaning that negates thelife of this world. Beyond laughter, Bradbury has different, though related, philosophical and artistic answers to these problems. Where Nietzsche sought to overcome the crisis of modernity by preparing the way for a future culture based on the aristocratic superman (who is the meaning of the Earth) and the eternal return of things as they are, disdaining almost every libertarian and democratic ideal, Bradbury's heroes are often the commoners of the future. Faced with the collapse of religious faith, the death of God, and the vast distances of space, they too must rediscover in their own individual ways the value and the meaning of the world as a principle toward which to be loyal. Although critical of the leveling trands of mass democracies, Bradbury's writings are far from being elitist. On the contrary, they celebrate the popular life of the body in carnival,which is the undoing of all social hierarchies. It is important to remember that the finest wine Bradbury asks readers to imagine is dandelion wine, made from a common flower whose life-enhancing meanings are available to everyone.
On Authorship:
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...... The center of this [authorship] is his struggle with the internalized Gothic that Freud's inlfuence represents in our literary culture as well as his struggle with the modern crisis of values. An anthor is someone who constantly has to reinvent himself through his fiction, often in a struggle with influential precursors. In his introduction to Modern Fantasy Writers, Harold Bloom argues that the life of the author is itself a crucial act of living, offering us his conviction that "the life of the author is not merely a metaphor or a fiction, as is 'the Death of the Author,' but it always does contain metaphorical or fictive elements." ......p. 47
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Another compelling aspect of Bradbury's authorship is that, along this path of serious self-discovery, he seems often to have found amusing ways to carnivalize his story ideas for publishing outlets beyond the mainstream. ......
The hallmarks of Bradbury's creative genius in the carnivalization of genres is perhaps most evident in his relationships with those individuals in his life who most clearly understood and supported his sense of authorship. Frequently, he had some difficulty in placing his stories in the more formula-ridden genre-market magazines, which did not always understand how he used carnival themes in his writing. ......p. 48
......
Two abiding influences came into his life during the early postwar years.
Bradbury has often expressed in his personal as well as professional correspondence the significant influence of his wife, Marguerite McClure Bradbury, and Don Congdon, his agent since 1947. Maggie Bradbury's wide-ranging education in languages and literature always complemented Bradbury's own passion for reading, and Congdon's combination of business sense and discerning literary taste made him Bradbury's chief advisor and sounding board in all his various creative ventures. Carnival has no spectators--everyone participates--and Bradbury has always drawn his editors (as well as many of his publishers) into the process of launching and marketing his books. ......p. 49
...... Bradbury draws upon the essays of Lionel Trilling in order to show how fantasy disrupts the laws of the physical world (adhered to by science fiction) in order to bring change to the heart and mind. Citing Trilling's definition of romance, Bradbury defines fantasy as "a synonym for the will in its creative aspect, especially in its aspect of moral creativeness, as it subjects itself to criticism and conceives for itself new states ofp. 50
being." Fantasy must move beyond the physical facts of life to encounter new realities in "the beautiful circuit of thought and desire."
......
To Bradbury, awareness of the will in its beautiful circuit of thought and desire is the peculiar property of fantasy, which itself alternates wonder with carnivalesque criticism. Above all, fantasy shows us that intellectual structures themselves are not to be adhered to indefinitely: "Man should not live to keep any single political or philosophical archiecture, neat, clean, and impregnable; rather such frameworks should exist for use, to be razed and burnt, once their time is past [emphasis added]." Here is a kernel of knowledge about Bradbury's use of Nietzschean and carnivalesque philosophical themes: only what is necessary to affirm one's life--the life of fiction--must be kept and maintained, only to be further transformed.
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