the-expurgated-fahrenheit

In 1967 Ballantine prepared a version of Fahrenheit 451 for American high schools. The work was editorial rather than incendiary: some seventy-five passages softened across a novel of roughly a hundred and fifty pages, the damns and hells removed, a drunken man converted into a sick one, a body’s navel cleaned into an ear. Nothing was announced. The book still said Fahrenheit 451 on the cover, still contained Montag and the mechanical hound and the burning of the house, and still argued, in slightly fewer words, that a society which trims its books to avoid discomfort has already lost the thing books are for.

Bradbury did not find out for thirteen years. In his own account it was students — reading, in class, a novel about book-burning — who wrote to tell him what had been done to their copies. He demanded the original text back; the editor Judy-Lynn Del Rey had the book reset, and in 1979 he appended a coda that has outlived the incident: There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

The reversal is exact rather than approximate, which is what separates it from ordinary institutional embarrassment. Bradbury’s thesis is not that governments burn libraries; it is that censorship arrives as helpfulness, in small considerate edits made by people who mean well and think of themselves as protecting readers. His publisher then supplied the demonstration, in-house, on the demonstrating text, for over a decade, undetected — and the detection came from the audience the edits were meant to protect. A book warning that the danger is quiet found out how quiet by being the case study.

Threads

• Forms: Situational Irony · Meta-Irony & Post-Irony
• Rhymes with: The Streisand Effect (the handling that performs what it opposes), A Modest Proposal