Ray Bradbury
by David Seed.
Illinois University Press (Modern Masters of Science Fiction), 2015.
Paperback, 207 pages, $24.
Anything Martian is currently newsworthyâmade so by NASAâs announcement that liquid water exists on the surface of the Red Planet, by various plans and projects to take people to Mars, and in an ambitious item of cinema, The Martian, under the direction of Ridley Scott. Mars has maintained its newsworthiness in cycles for nearly 150 years since the Vatican-sponsored astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli published his discovery of canali on the fourth orb from the sun in 1877. David Seedâs fine study of Ray Bradbury (1920â2012), the essential book of whose authorship, The Martian Chronicles, appeared precisely at the midpoint of the last century, arrives just in time to ride the peak of the present phase of recurrent Mars-mania. Ray Bradbury is not, of course, a mere plank of a surfboard hitching a watery lift and Seed is no mere wave rider. On the contrary: Seed, working within the parameters of a formula book issued in a series by an academic publisher, has overcome any inherent limitations of the genre to appreciate in clear prose and tightly organized paragraphs a writer-fantasist whose large oeuvre (over forty novels, many hundreds of short stories, essays, journalism, screen-scenarios, and screenplays) eschews stylistic invention or affectation and every beckoning âismâ to comment plainly but trenchantlyâeven sometimes propheticallyâon the brutal fact of modernity. The fantasist was a realist, after all, and the modest style was, at last, a powerful style like none other. Seed knows this and the knowledge structures his presentation.
Referring to the radio-play Leviathan â99 (1966), Seed writes that for Bradbury space and space-travel have âa spiritual dimensionâ and that the cosmos constitutes a âmystery,â using that word in its religious meaning. That âspiritual dimensionâ is also the tragic dimensionâBradbury himself having used the terms tragedy and myth with regard to The Martian Chronicles. Seed understands Bradbury in both a genre-context and a capitally literary contextâand both contexts are necessary. He points out in the opening historical paragraphs of his chapter on the Chronicles, that Mars, which in the speculative accounts of Schiaparelli and his French protĂ©gĂ© Camille Flammarion was romantic and utopian, acquired its tragic and prophetic character in the solemn nonfiction books of the wealthy amateur astronomer from Boston, Percival Lowell. For Lowell, in such books as Mars and its Canals (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908), Mars stands a portent to the inevitable doom of âdesertismâ that must overtake any planet. Being smaller than Earth, Lowell reasons, Mars cooled faster and began its career of life and intelligence earlier than did Earth. As a planet ages, its most precious resource, its water, slowly seeps away into the vacuum of space. In the canals, Lowell saw a planet-wide effort by the Martians to hold to life by bringing the polar melt annually to the equatorial regions where civilization might continue agriculture and maintain itself. In prose partly Transcendentalist and partly Theosophical, Lowell described an immensely old race, having in wisdom outgrown the pettiness of nations to constitute a global utopia, knowing that even its supreme efforts could only postpone the desiccated climax.
On the authority of scattered autobiographical remarks, Seed notes that Bradbury read Lowell in youth at the same time he became a devoted readers of the Mars or âBarsoomâ books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who assumed Lowellâs planetology as the setting of his John Carter adventures. Yet the Burroughsian Mars is hardly tragic despite boasting a few melancholy moods. Understanding that the Burroughsian Mars was not a possibility for him, Bradbury wisely took a few cues from his Southern California mentor, pulp-writer Leigh Brackett. As in the case of Brackettâs Mars, Bradbury makes the Red Planet the scene of a collision between the technocratic corporatism of Earth, which resembles a puritan theocracy, and the laissez-faire Pagan aestheticism of Martian city-states. Of Bradburyâs earliest Martian story, âThe Piper,â Seed remarks that it âtakes its title from William Blakeâs introductory poem to Songs of Innocence, where the piper is a version of the poet projecting his songs onto an Arcadian landscape filled with responsive innocent children.â Often, in the Chronicles, Bradburyâs Martians are childlike, but they are just as often waspish and bigoted. Reading the Chronicles requires four categories: Earth and Mars, Innocence and Corruption; there are decent men and bigoted men on both worlds; otherwise it would not be a tragedy, but a comic book.
Seed has intuited something quite essential to understanding fantastic sagas about Mars, not only Bradburyâs. âOne aspect of Mars fiction,â Seed writes, âthat has tended to be forgotten [is] the connection between the Red Planet and spiritualism.â His treatment of the uncanny tale âNight Meetingâ is illustrative of the contention. If generally speaking the Chronicles were about the tragic failure of cultural communionâas most critics characterize itâthen the pathos of âNight Meetingâ must be high indeed, for Bradbury gives his readers in this instance the extraordinary grace of communion briefly achieved. Tomas Gomez, a worker-immigrant to the new cheap Mars being built up by an Americanized world economy, is on his way to a beer-bust when he encounters a Martian, Muhe Ca, on a remote road. They encounter one another through a rift in time, and each seems a wraith to the otherâand yet finally they acknowledge one another perhaps because neither is a bug-eyed monster to the other. Seed writes: âThe synchronization of expression and the identity of paralinguistic features like facial expression and gesture undermine the otherness of the Martian so completely that it seems perfectly natural for the two men to continue conversing in a shared language ⊠that they can understandâ Nevertheless, the âseepage of consciousnessesâ between Earthman and Martian has occurred. Seed finds precedents for Bradburyâs ethereal and gracious Mars in surprising venues, not least in the Burroughsian âBarsoom.â
Seedâs analysis of an ambiguous chronicle, âThe Fire Balloons,â deepens the thesis that Bradburyâs Mars is the setting of a moral and theological tragedy. âThe Fire Balloonsâ is âambiguousâ in that it appears in some editions of the Chronicles but not in others. (Consistent with Seedâs construction, âThe Fire Balloonsâ would be a quasi-âun-chronicledâ Mars story.) A group of priests on Mars, having heard the rumor of disembodied Martians who freed themselves from somatic existence through intensity of prayer, seek out these rumored beings. As Seed indicates, Bradburyâs protagonist Father Peregrine, âwith his name suggesting both âalienâ and âpilgrim,â functions as the authorâs own âsurrogate.ââ In the story, Father Peregrine insists, despite the skepticism of his fellows, that the encountered globes of blue fire are human, no matter the difference in formâand that their spirituality must at least be an analogue of Christian spirituality. Seed describes Peregrineâs resolve as âhis open-minded conviction that God could take any form and location.â The definition of the human is not in an outward form but in an inward disposition and in the consciousness of a need for redemption. A drastic experiment proves Father Peregrine at least partly correct. Seed is nevertheless right when he adds that âthis is not to suggest that Peregrine is exempt from the main irony of travel to Mars, namely projective delusion.â As in âNight Meeting,â much in âThe Fire Balloonsâ remains ambiguous. Seedâs insistence on the irony implicit in the totality of the Chronicles reminds aficionados of Bradbury that, the apparent simplicity of his style aside, his approach was almost invariably indirect.
Bradbury was an eccentric, a decided individualist, who remains difficult to categorize under hackneyed labels. He was certainly not a liberal in the contemporary sense. He was a critic of progress and imperial schemes; he defended the legitimacy of the stubborn individual as long as the individual conformed himself, at the most profound depth, to the transcendent norms. Paradoxically, he judged that transcendent norms best articulated themselves through intensely local rather than through diffusely cosmopolitan institutions. A fine example, which Seed emphasizes, is the âun-chronicledâ Mars story âThe Concrete Mixer,â first published in 1949 and later collected in The Illustrated Man. As Seed remarks, this rather parabolic tale consists in a âreversal of the most obvious association of Mars with militarism,â as in the seminal War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells and in innumerable pulp-fictions. The main character is a young Martian, Ettil, who disdains to join the jihad against Earth. Seed writes: âThis puts him at odds with the social normâ; and when the jihad conscripts him, he experiences the âdehumanizationâ (Seedâs word) that befalls humanity as a whole in the âchronicledâ Chronicles. Ettilâs alienation only grows when the invasion fleet arrives at its destination. In Seedâs incisive comment, âThe story shifts around from an invasion narrative to an ironic account of 1940s American consumerism using the time-honored device of a visitor from another world.â
In Seedâs view, âthe majority of stories in The Martian Chronicles focus on charactersâ interrogation of their strange new experiences,â such that âtheir attempts at understanding become a central part of each storyâs subject.â As âNight Meetingâ suggests, however, Earthmen and Martians are partly interchangeable in Bradburyâs narrative scheme. A canard about the Chronicles is that it is a strict allegory of nasty Europeans arriving on the shores of the New World and brutally, vulgarly shouldering the indigenous innocents into oblivion. Bradbury is far more subtle. A careful reading of the early Chronicles reveals that EarthâBradburyâs Americanized, vulgarized, and politicized Earthâis by no means the only decadent world of the Solar System. Mars too, at the moment of the human advent, is a globally decadent society, having fallen far down from the spiritual integrity of its earlier, philosophically Pagan iteration. In respect of the story âThe Earth Men,â where astronauts attempt to announce their arrival to Martians and receive only a rude reception, Seed comments that âBradbury traces out a process of blocked verification where the very grounds for confirming the voyage are denied.â Seed attributes the storyâs horrifying conclusion to âpsychosis.â He points out that in their habit of wearing masks, the Martians âconceal the features of beings [themselves] who otherwise resemble human beings.â The American spacefarers are naĂŻfs, it is true, and not altogether individuated, but they mean no harm even when they blunder. The Martians, on the other hand, seem to be suffering from incontinent telepathy and contagious insanity, which would be symbols for the burgeoning mass media, most especially television, that were so prominent in the emerging postwar society against the background of which the Chronicles first appeared.
Seeing these features of the text, Seed might have put himself in a position to make an exceptionally subtle interpretation of the central chronicle of the Chronicles, ââAnd the Moon Be Still as Bright.â For some reason, Seed in this instance proves overly cautious, for which he should perhaps be gently chided. The storyâs main character is Spender, a kind of Holden Caulfield on steroids, who, reacting with paranoid extremity to the vulgarity of his crewmates as they swagger through the recently dead cities of the devastated planet, believes himself to have become a Martian, whereupon he begins exacting revenge on the invader-desecrators of the world. Spender is the case par excellence of what Seed earlier refers to as âprojective delusion.âSpender, in Seedâs phrase, experiences âRomantic Pathosâ over the planetary tragedy, using the term âRomanticâ to mean infatuated and uncritical. Spender is likely not âa clear surrogate for Bradbury,â as Seed declares. Captain Wilder would fill that role. In fact, Spender is an ideological maniac who forecasts the agents of the cultural âMoral Climatesâ police in another chronicle, âUsher II.â What Seed calls Spenderâs âsurge of violence ⊠in a quixotic attempt to stave off migration,â is actually a demented failure to discriminate between large categories of people from the same society and individual, witting perpetrators of an enormity. Spender is not only wrong in attributing guilt for the Martian die-off to the members of his expedition, no matter their vulgarity, but in misreading the state of Martian society at the moment of its demise. Spender is in no way a hero.
There is a connection between The Martian Chronicles and Bradburyâs second most-read book, Fahrenheit 451 (1951). The Chronicles story âUsher IIâ intimates the emergence of the Puritanical, politically correct totalitarian state on Earth, most especially in North America. It even mentions book-burnings. Seed does his readers the good service of putting Fahrenheit 451 in a detailed context. Everyone can see that Bradburyâs dystopia has a relation to Aldous Huxleyâs Brave New World (1932) and George Orwellâs Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). Seed lists some less-obvious companion-texts, most notably Richard Mathesonâs âWhen the Waker Sleepsâ (1950) and Arthur Koestlerâs Darkness at Noon (1944). Fahrenheit 451 is, of course, âaboutâ Senator Joe McCarthy, whom Bradbury and Matheson commonly loathed, but in his novel Bradbury indicts the Left as severely as he indicts the Right, supposing that the senator from Wisconsin embodied the Right. Seed remarks that Beatty, fireman-protagonist Montagâs fire chief-foil in Bradburyâs novel, has a model in Koestlerâs Communist Party interrogators in Darkness. Seedâs reference to Darkness underscores the point that Fahrenheit 451 is not a political novel; it is a Dostoyevsky-like anti-political novel by an author whose general thesis is that modernity has culminated in ideological regimes that require the dehumanization of humanity. Literacy belongs to the humanity of the individual, which is why it threatens regimes. Seed stresses the prescience of Bradburyâs imagined future. âGiven the subject of Fahrenheit 451,â he writes, âit is a supreme irony that in 1967, unbeknown to Bradbury, the editors at Ballantine bowdlerized the novel for a high-school edition, removing references to nudity and drinking, and also expletives.â
In a chapter dedicated to âBradbury on Space,â Seed examines numerous philosophical and programmatic statements by his subject on the topic of space explorationâof which Bradbury was an outspoken and lyrical exponent. For Bradbury, the move from the surface of Earth into the starry heavens was primarily a spiritual questâa search for freedom of thought, as much as freedom of action, in new worlds. Rather surprisingly, but quite plausibly, Seed sees Bradbury has taking a cue from George Bernard Shaw, whose contribution to the science fiction genre goes largely unnoticed. Nevertheless, Bradbury gives Shaw voice in the story âG.B.S.âMark Vâ (1976), in which an astronaut alienated from his crewmates engages in a dialogue with a robotic simulacrum of the author of Back to Methuselah. âThe Shaw character expounds a vision of the cosmos as a field of forces where shapes are formed and reformed.â In an act of censorious vindictiveness, one of the crewmates âkillsâ the robot by shutting it down in mid-sentence, quite as though he had come straight from the âMoral Climatesâ agency of âUsher IIâ in the Chronicles. Seed comments, âBradbury is clearly using Space-Age narrative as a parable of learning from a member of the older generation of writers.â Shaw was a follower of Henri Bergson and a believer in the French philosopherâs Ă©lan vital. Seed reports a conversation in 1978 on an ocean liner between Bradbury and Carl Sagan over the competing theories of evolution of Darwin and Lamarck: âWhere Sagan was insisting on the survival of the fittest largely by chance, Bradbury was more inclined to Lamarckâs theory, wished survival.â Bradbury was, Seed writes, a âspace visionary.â
Seedâs book should be read in a context of recent, related books. I refer, for example, to Robert Crossleyâs magnificent study of Imagining Mars: A Literary History (2011), K. Maria D. Laneâs Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet (2010), and Robert Marleyâs Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (2005)âall three of which discuss The Martian Chronicles at length. Seedâs study makes earlier studies obsolete, especially given his attention to Bradburyâs nonfiction prose as well as his fiction. Readers of Seedâs book will find themselves in a provocative dialogue with its author about one of the outstanding American authors of the mid-twentieth century.
Thomas F. Bertonneau is a long-time visiting professor on SUNY Oswego’s English faculty. He writes about literature, music, religion, politics, and culture.