Is Ray Bradbury the new James Fenimore Cooper?
01/09/2007 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
Mark was recently in a discussion about Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. The book is a novel written in 1950 about the colonisation and subjugation of Mars by humans who had screwed things up on Earth pretty badly and were migrating to Mars. The conflicts with the native Martians in some ways reflect the coming of Europeans to the New World and the destruction of the native peoples. Buy Ray Bradbury in the USA - or Buy Ray Bradbury in the UK  It is not really a novel in the traditional sense but a collection of short stories Bradbury had written about the conquest of Mars in the 1940s. A local radio station found radio broadcasts of the individual stories in THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES. Most of these came from the programs DIMENSION X and X MINUS ONE.
What struck me as it had not before was that the individual stories were not of that high a quality. Most were on the level of TWILIGHT ZONE episodes or comic book stories. Now I generally like TWILIGHT ZONE episodes, but I do not consider them great literature.
The MARTIAN CHRONICLES stories are not very good. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. I think that later generations will wonder what we saw in Bradbury. Perhaps he will be remembered more for his novel FAHRENHEIT 451 about a future in which all reading including classics like OLIVER TWIST will be forbidden. It is a frightening vision of a possible future. I will, however, point out that that is not the future we are currently in.
If I want to read OLIVER TWIST, I can download it free to my palmtop with about five minute's effort. It was a lot harder and probably more expensive to get to get a copy in 1953 when Bradbury wrote FAHRENHEIT 451. For over fifty years this book has been interpreted as a warning against Soviet-style censorship.
Recently Bradbury has commented on the book and said it was not really about censorship. Now he says it was not about people not being able to get books but about their disinclination to read. Indeed, in our world the forces who want censorship are currently losing their battle and the Internet is more and more triumphant, but alliteracy, people who could read choosing not to, is indeed very much with us.
But for half a century Bradbury never commented on this claimed "misinterpretation" of his novel. I believe the novel is about censorship. Montag, his main character, really does want to read and is not allowed to possess literature. That is censorship; the book is not about his refusal to read.
FAHRENHEIT 451 is a good novel, but its prediction of universal censorship of literature is simply wrong. In my opinion THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES is not a very good novel. His science was absurd, even for its time. His writing style is lyrical and his writing is admired because of it.
Ray Bradbury is considered to be a literary giant. In April Bradbury was given a special recognition from the Pulitzer Prize Committee for "his distinguished, prolific and influential career as a science fiction and fantasy author." While this was not a Pulitzer Prize, it was a recognition of his life achievement.
I think Ray Bradbury is the James Fenimore Cooper of our age. Cooper was considered a great writer in his time. He had a great humanitarian agenda to create respect for the Native Americans. His stories were rather simplistic and often absurd. I remember one incident in which his hero Natty Bumppo escapes from hostile natives when he finds a bear skin, puts it on, and convinces his captors that he is actually a bear. Cooper was at one time considered one of America's greatest writers. Wilkie Collins said of him, "Cooper is the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction in America."
Then Mark Twain wrote an essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" and it was like the Emperor's New Clothes. People started looking at Cooper's writing and discovering his books were not that good. Today Cooper is remembered as a minor writer. (The essay can be found at http://ww3.telerama.com/~joseph/cooper/cooper.html.
Bradbury is a beloved figure. When I was in school he was the one science fiction writer who got some respect from English teachers. Unlike Twain with Cooper, I am not saying that he is not a reasonably good writer with a poetic strong style. But in a time when fewer of the young generation are reading at all-- Bradbury is right about that--the poetry of his word choice is becoming a dubious virtue.
I do not think the next generation will hold him in any special awe. I am just not sure that under the style his stories are more than just okay. His writing has been for his time, perhaps a time that is already passing.
Mark R. Leeper
(c) Mark R. Leeper 2007 |
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