The New Book Burning

A brave and bland world cometh from the ashes of the old one.

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

So begins Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” What follows is a vivid spectacle of destruction that introduces readers to Guy Montag, a “fireman” whose job it is to incinerate literature in the service of a regime that strictly prohibits and discourages the reading of books. Montag sleeps at night wearing a “fiery smile” in the dark, a smile that never fades from his face, a grin for the devastation left in his wake. But Bradbury stirs a change of heart in Montag, transforming him from a destroyer of literary and cultural works into a keeper of the word.

But our new book burners have not yet experienced a comparable conversion. Instead, they have devised more insidious forms of cultural despoilment than Montag’s “great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world.” I wrote about it in the August issue of Chronicles, one of the only magazines still worth reading—and I’m not just saying that because I’m a columnist there. How many periodicals still publish original poetry? How many of them are open to ideas outside the wire of orthodoxy? But I digress.

Arsonists are torching the classic works of Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and Roald Dahl in the name of diversity and inclusion. Benign phrases and whole paragraphs deemed insensitive, out of step with the dogmas of these dog days, are being edited and excised out of existence. Most people have no idea.

In 2020, HarperCollins started utilizing “sensitivity readers”—that is, censors—to sanitize Christie’s novels. The Telegraph reviewed digital versions of new editions, finding “scores of changes to texts written from 1920 to 1976, stripping them of numerous passages containing descriptions, insults or references to ethnicity, particularly for characters Christie’s protagonists encounter outside the UK.” Fleming’s James Bond novels and Dahl’s children’s books, from “James and the Giant Peach” to “Matilda,” have all received similar treatments from philistines lacking so much as an iota of the talent belonging to the authors whose treasures they plunder.

Here is your reminder to buy physical books and, if you can find them, older versions of the classics.

What sparks the change in Montag? That fire is kindled by an encounter with a young girl named Clarisse McClellan, who seems to harbor an inner glow that fascinates and frustrates him. She is curious, mindful, and probing; he is, at first, an athletic Myrmidon, “thinking little at all about nothing in particular.” Montag sees her as a mirror that throws back his “innermost trembling thought” and who on one autumn evening cracks his worldview by questioning the order of things, demonstrating that she, a child, knows what he does not about ordinary things he never even wondered about.

I think Clarisse is a lot like a book. Literature can refract your own light back to you by helping you see aspects of yourself and others in a different light. Sometimes the stories we read know us better than we know ourselves. They illuminate something in us and, thus, the world we inhabit. Once Clarisse’s innocent inquiry punctured the shroud of ignorance Montag had worn and a sliver of her candlelight peaked through, he realized that he was not happy, though he had never known that. I’m reminded of the scene from “Equilibrium” (2002) where the protagonist, John Preston (Christian Bale), off of his dystopia-mandated sedatives, awakens to the sound of his throbbing heart and notices the sunrise for the first time and aches with awe at the beauty which had always been around him but his eyes, like the eyes of Montag, could not see. The movie borrowed a lot from “Fahrenheit 451,” and I think it’s one of Bale’s best roles.

The crime of editing for sensitivity, then, is that it seeks to eliminate all difference and otherness to create a bland and docile sameness, a world without ugliness but also bereft of beauty, removed of sin but also of salvation.

P.S. If you enjoyed reading this, you should check out my column at Chronicles where I go into detail about what the censors are doing, and also my article on Retro Culture for Contra as well.

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